Footsteps in the Sky (3 page)

“Take it easy,” the man said. He had a round, kind face, not quite handsome. His voice sounded nervous.

“Oh, shit,” Pela gasped. “Shit. The Kachina. …”

It was there, where she had seen it … this morning? A blackened cylinder resting on four legs. Nearby an enormous flag—a parachute, she supposed—lay flat on the ground, fluttering slightly in the awakening breeze.

“How did you get this mark on your arm, Isiwa?”

Younger sister, he called her. He was trying to be nice.

“It touched me,” she replied, staring at the bandage that the man must have put on her arm. The bandage and the soil near her were soaked with blood. “The Kachina touched me.”

“Oh. Stay here.”

The man strode off towards the other three, two men and a woman, all lowlanders by their dress. They were all wearing guns. Off to the north she could see their transportation, a bronze-colored hovercraft.

The man talked quietly with the others, who continued to cast glances in her direction. The he returned to her, just as she was groggily getting to her feet.

“This is a new model,” the man explained apologetically. “We don't know what went wrong or why it hurt you. Hoku—our mother-father over there—wants to take you back to Salt for an examination. Would that be okay?”

Pela was abruptly aware that she was wearing only her thin cotton shorts. She had just crawled out of her thermal bag to piss when she saw the Kachina. The man was doing his best to avert his eyes from her breasts and doing a progressively worse job.

“I need my clothes”, she mumbled.

“Of course. Where are they?”

Pela gestured vaguely towards the rising basalt behind her. He nodded and trotted off in that direction. He stopped after a few steps.

“My name is Jimmie,” he said.

“Pela,” she returned. “Thanks, Jimmie.” The sound of his boots on the cindery earth diminished behind her.

The Kachina, made by the lowlanders? That was possible, but she didn't think so. But they wanted her to think that, didn't they? So she would, for her own safety. But Pela knew truth, knew it in her heart. The Kachina were no longer lost among the stars. They had returned to the Fifth World, to see what the Hopitu-Shinumu had done with it.

She hoped they would be pleased.

Interim

2429 A.D.

Alvar Washington closed the gap between himself and the Vilmir complex in a series of jarring, painful steps. He regretted the previous night's excesses bitterly, but regretted even more missing his last medical exam. If he had that the little drunk-doctors in his bloodstream had died quietly sometime last month, he would have had them replaced, or had a little less of the cheap turpentine that passed for whisky here.

Would that that were his only regret. Alvar squinted off at the distance and tried to imagine that the ugly crinkled mountains there were the Sangre de Cristos, that the sky was the right color of blue rather than a purplish pastel, even that the awful taste in his mouth was that of a certain dark Santa Fe beer. A pleasure to be hung over on that.

Unfortunately his imagination had always been less than vivid. He supposed that if it had been more colorful he would have stayed on Earth, lived the outworld life vicariously rather than opting for the reality, a reality which consisted mostly of boredom, bad coffee, bad booze, and ugly surroundings. Maybe one day this planet would be a paradise—maybe even in the lifetime of the major stockholders. But he would never see it: unlike the executives, he did not have access to the medicines that could extend life well into the triple digits.

He had opted to walk to his meeting in the hopes that exercise would clear his head. It was helping, though sweat still seemed to ooze from his pores like syrup and his stomach threatened to expel an unconsumed breakfast.

He reached his destination, a building easily as ugly as the terrain. It was constructed of native stone—which meant basalt or some close cousin. It was grey-black, anyhow, polished smooth and slicked with a silicon compound in the optimistic hope that it would resemble marble. It did not. The architecture was equally ill-advised, a revival of that insipid style known as Neo-Meshika—the ugliest aspects of classical Greek architecture heavily ornamented with bas-relief feathered snakes, tlalocs, and Atlantean figures of Meso-American provenience. On Earth, it had flourished briefly in the last century and then been mercifully forgotten. Here, naturally, it was the acme of high design.

Shaking his head , Alvar stumbled past an otherwise Doric column from which peered stylized, grinning skulls. The door checked his I.D., odor, and retina prints before admitting him.

The inside of the building was as clean and modern as the outside was archaic and grotesque. Alvar made his way to the elevator terminals, where a young woman in a fashionably crumpled black-and-gold shirt and shorts motioned him on. She examined him appraisingly—his athletic meter and a half frame, sienna skin and broad, handsome features. When she met his bloodshot eyes, however, she registered what could only be disgust and perhaps a little pity.

She thinks I'm a plaguer, he realized. He tried to smile and correct her impression with a few coherent words, but at that moment his car arrived. With a mental shrug he stepped in. What did he care what she thought? If he was right about this meeting, he would never see her again.

The old man was indeed that; Alvar recognized this fact immediately. Though Vilmir's hair was still chestnut brown, though his skin was as smooth and perfect as a twenty year old's, the signs were obvious to the practiced eye. Re-grown skin always had a sort of papery look to it, and it was always uniform, without the slight color variations that marked the run of humanity. His teeth were too white and too short; he must have recently had new buds implanted, so that they weren't fully grown. Most of all there was the way Vilmir bore himself, the way he used his black eyes and smoothly tapered fingers. An insect clothed in human form could not have seemed more alien, precise, considered in its movements.

There were logical clues as well. No twenty-year old would hold such an important position as this man; there was no one on the Foundation board under the age of eighty, and Egypt Vilmir was the majority stockholder. He was two hundred if he was a zygote.

“Mr. Washington,” Vilmir acknowledged, and with a slight motion of his hand indicated that Alvar should sit upon one of the cushions that lay in a precise semicircle around his own raised couch. The room was furnished in a vaguely Arabic fashion. Muted earth tone carpets and tapestries patterned with abstract curvilinear motifs were illuminated by two shafts of greenish light falling through tinted skylights a hundred feet above them. Holographic birds filled that lofty space, distorting and changing form as they described complex patterns around one another. Truly, thought Alvar, a palace fit for a king.

But Vilmir was no mere king: he was chief executive of the Vilmir Foundation. That made him more akin to an emperor.

“Normally, Mr. Washington, I don't speak to my agents, but this is a special case. There is no time to lose, so I will be brief.” His voice was smooth and pleasant, not at all like Alvar imagined an emperor's should be.

“I would first like to state that I do not enjoy seeing my employees in your present state. When you leave here, you will go immediately to the clinic and have your shots updated. You will not miss them again.”

He paused for the barest instant to let that sink in, and Alvar nodded. The old man continued.

“As you may have surmised, you will soon be visiting one of our projects. This will not be a routine check, and it will not be for the purposes of renewing an agent. Something important, unexpected, and pressing has occurred that demands our immediate attention.”

Vilmir paused, and Alvar saw something very human flicker in his eyes, an eagerness—a hunger, even.

“Mr. Washington, you should be aware that terraforming is a long, arduous process. It takes several centuries to make even a prime planet into a self-sustaining environment for large numbers of people. And there are very few prime planets. If we had to terra­form Venus, for instance—that would take many thousands of years. We have been very fortunate to discover a number of planets which are already rather similar to Earth in atmospheric chemistry. This did not happen by chance, of course. None of these planets were actually habitable by human beings when we discovered them, and all of them had precisely the same things wrong with them. Can you comment on that?”

Alvar was taken aback. He nearly stuttered, in fact, something that he hadn't done since childhood.

“Ah … yes. The supposition is that some unknown race began forming those planets for their own reasons and then mysteriously stopped. Very fortunate for us.”

“Indeed. They had superior technology, these aliens, though we must infer that. They could change planets like Venus into worlds with free oxygen and life in under a thousand years. It would take us three times as long. What they left us can be suited to our chemistries with relatively little modification, although the expense is enormous and the payoff long in coming.”

What do you care? Alvar thought. However long it takes to pay off, you will probably live to benefit. While I decompose on some godforsaken colony.

“Mr. Washington, up until now, we have assumed that the original engineers who modified these planets somehow died off. We have been proven wrong. They have returned.”

Alvar did not expect the bolt of adrenaline that surged up through his queasy stomach and thudding headache. His mouth actually dropped open as Vilmir briefly described the three enormous ships that were currently in orbit around the colony known as “Fifth World”.

“At least they were seven years ago,” the old man amended. “When our agent sent the message. You will go there with a contingent of colonial peacekeepers and determine what to do. Are you listening, Mr. Washington?”

“Yes. Yes. But why me? I'm no expert on these matters.”

“In point of fact, you are no expert on anything. But we cannot know what will have occurred in the twenty years between the aliens' arrival and your own. The colonists may have come to some understanding with them. This cannot happen; either the aliens deal with us or they deal with no one. You, Sey'er Washington, were originally chosen to replace our current agent there, because with some training you can pass as a native. The colonists have accurate genetic records of all of their founding generation. A simple DNA check would show most outworlders to be just that. You, however, are descended from some of the same ancestors as the colonists, and the differing elements in your genetic makeup are not eclectic enough to be noticed. You can thus investigate upon the planet itself with some chance of success.”

“The Hopi?” Alvar blurted, before he thought better. The reference to the “Fifth World” had rung a little bell in his head, but his fascination with the idea of the alien ships had muted it.

“Exactly so. Though most of them had little “real” Hopi blood.”

Alvar remembered the Hopi. His mother had spoken of them mockingly. A bunch of crazy idealists who believed themselves to be the inheritors of an ancient Native North American religion. There had been a prophecy, made as early as the twentieth century, that the Hopi people would scatter and then become revitalized, establish a “Fifth World”. It was supposed to be on earth, but with the perfection of the Drigg's Interstellar Fusion Drive, that prophecy had been re-interpreted.

And he was supposed to impersonate one of these fanatics? Because he had some of the old pueblo blood?

“Sey'er, I don't know if I can live up to your expectations. I know nothing about the old pueblo lifestyle. I don't speak old English­, either. That was still the major language of West America when they left two hundred years ago.”

Vilmir smiled wanly. “They don't speak it either. They insisted on speaking Hopi. Revived it from the dead.”

“Even worse!”

“Mr. Washington, I have your contract, and you have no choice. There will be plenty of time to learn the native language shipboard. You have been very well paid up until now, and we have gotten no return for our money. This is where we get it. And, really, I think you will find our compensation reasonable. Hazard pay includes extended medical benefits.”

For “extended medical benefits” read “extended lifespan”, Alvar realized, suddenly more interested than ever. That he had considered only in his most optimistic dreams. He was a poor boy from the windowless, inner core of the Santa Fe Arcology. Only a series of lucky breaks had gotten him out of those rat holes and onto a starship. Was the Virgin about to smile on him again? Surprising, if so, considering his opinion of most virgins.

“Go down to the briefing tables,” the old man went on. “You will see Doctor Tembo. He will begin your course of training and introduce you to your co-commander and crew.” Vilmir motioned once again with his hand, a movement of less than a centimeter. It was the clearest dismissal Alvar had ever seen.

“Vilmir spoke to you himself. Very impressive.”

Jenemon Tembo was short and round. He had mild blue eyes, an impressive nose, and skin the color of coffee with cream.

“I was impressed.”

Tembo nodded, and his eyes took on a narrower focus, as if his mind had suddenly flipped to another topic. It had.

“Sey'er Washington, you are not carrying a plague, I trust?”

Alvar shook his head ruefully. “No. I'm hung over. I let my drunk doctors expire, probably for the same reason that taking a plague isn't my style. The idea of those little bugs in my blood isn't comfortable.”

“You're an anachronist,” Tembo observed, condescendingly. “Drunk doctors are perfectly safe. You're right about plagues, though. Since they are illicitly designed, they are often badly designed. And they mutate. I'm sure you heard about Singapore.”

“No. I just got off ship a few months ago. Missed twelve years of history, and I haven't even started catching up.”

“No? It seems that a bacteria tailored to carry hallucinogenic alkaloids mutated into something poisonous. Killed twenty million people.”

“Jesus! No, I missed that all right.”

Tembo didn't answer: he spread his hands flat on the fiberwood table and glanced up at the door. Alvar followed his gaze.

“Alvar Washington, this is Teng Shu, a captain in the colonial peacekeepers.”

“Good to meet you, Sey'er Washington,” said Teng Shu.

Teng stood fully a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, just below his own one-eighty-three. Her hair, bound in a tight queue, was black glass fiber. By contrast, her skin was the whitest he had ever seen. Brown but nearly yellow eyes bounded by slight epicanthic folds regarded him with the same unwavering severity. This austere strength was reflected in her clothing; a chocolate brown shirt and pants. The only unmuted item of her outfit was a silver belt buckle shaped like an ancient Chinese ideogram that Alvar did not recognize.

Teng's handshake was very strong. Her loose clothes concealed a fit figure, but Alvar guessed it was more than fit. The handshake revealed calluses as hard as hullmetal on her hands. He had heard of the peacekeepers and their reinforced physiologies. Was she one such?

Alvar did not doubt it in the least. Prickles ran along his spine. Teng could kill him with her bare hands in an instant. She probably had orders to do so, under the right circumstances.

“Very pleased to meet you, I'm sure,” he said, bowing.

This was one woman he would not even try to seduce.

Teng screeched and bared her teeth. She bent and nipped him lightly on the neck, then allowed her full lips to mold there. Then her harsh breath exploded against his carotid. She flung herself back with a wild cry, and they both whirled crazily across the cabin, joined by the frantic motion of their pelvises. Her heels dug painfully into his calves, legs clamping his thighs like steel bands. She caught his arms and held them hard against his sides as the two of them bumped with painful force into a bulkhead. Alvar was absolutely immobilized; pinned like a wrestler by a superior opponent. Though it scared him, the fear was melted, fused into the white heat building in him. When he exploded, she nearly crushed him, grinding her pelvis into him with manic force. Then, just as he was beginning to fear for his life, she released him. They drifted gradually apart, enormous beads of sweat forming on their bodies.