Footsteps in the Sky (5 page)

It took only instants for her chilled pores to open up. She rocked back and forth in the furnace heat, and sweat soon slicked her body completely. I am like my ancestors, the fish she hummed to herself, recalling her clan's version of the origin. Fire seemed to walk back and forth across her dark skin, searching for a way in.

And found its egress through her nostrils, as her lungs seemed to expand with live flame.

Sand opened up the bag and pulled forth a small swatch of green branches and a thick, resinous piñon cone. Reverently, she placed the juniper branches on the now-glowing red stones. She placed the piñon cone beside it. Both of these things were rare and precious; as sacred plants, both piñon and juniper had been brought from Earth, but required much care.

They began to smoke, and the thick resinous odor of them filled the sweatlodge. The smoke covered her and filled her up, and now she was a fish in the dark depths of a juniper sea. The smoke scrubbed her, lifting away the touch of her mother's corpse, the cold plastic feeling of it. The smoke was fragrant purity, and the breath of a ghost could not long withstand it.

Goodbye
, Sand told the smoke.
Goodbye, mother
.

She began to sing and did not stop until the cloth of the lodge was soaked with the earliest light of dawn.

Chapter Two

“Nu'qa nauti'ta sen tumala' taniqa'e,” Alvar Washington told himself for the third time, a look of intense concentration on his face. Teng had just entered. She glanced at him with a dour expression.

“You say the nicest things,” she observed, leaning against the bulkhead, arms folded loosely beneath her breasts.

“Don't I,” he acknowledged. “Shiau Shi: Teacher off.”

The image of himself across the table flickered out of existence.

“So that's who you've been spending all of your time with,” Teng murmured. “I should have known. You're the most natural narcissist I've ever met.”

Alvar grinned and brushed back his long, thick hair. “Facial expressions are language too,” he told her. “Might as well learn from the face I'll be using.”

“Might as well,” Teng agreed. “Wanna fuck?”

Alvar twisted in his seat to face her. “You could try seducing me,” he said. “You know, subtly?”

“I could,” she agreed. “On the other hand, I don't feel like bullshitting right now.”

“That's better,” Alvar returned. “Who can resist that kind of approach?”

Teng shot him a look wet with poison. She smiled without humor, her yellow eyes narrowed to slits.

“In two weeks, I'll being reviving some of the peacekeepers. Thank Durga.”

“In two weeks I'll be fucking women made out of skin,” Alvar shot back.

Teng took a step forward, and for the second time in his life, Alvar truly believed he was about to die. The first time, as a child, he had been playing in the desert outside of Santa Fe. He had fallen down and found himself eye-to-eye with a coiled rattlesnake. Then, as now, he kept absolutely still, waiting for the danger to pass, fearing that it would not.

But it did, as it had then. Teng took the step back, and the rattlesnake look melted briefly into something else before she turned on her heel and left him alone.

Alvar let out his breath, slowly. When he had met Teng, three years ago, he had guessed immediately that she was enhanced. But for three years he had been caressing that hard, slim body. He knew it better than any he had ever known, with the possible exception of his own. But contrary to what Teng had accused him of, Alvar was no narcissist. He like his body well enough, enjoyed pleasuring it with hot baths, good meals, fine whisky. But he loved Teng's body, even if he didn't love her. And so he knew, knew about the thick plates of plastimuscle that lay beneath her flat stomach, over her kidneys, beneath those high, sharp breasts. He had read everything he could about enhancement from the ship's library, about how they had engineered her own cells and created fibers that could stop bullets. Her vital organs were surrounded and cushioned by thick, spongy structures; her bones were very unlikely to break under anything approaching normal circumstances. She probably had extra organs, too—small, perfect backups for her primary systems.

She was all flesh, Teng was, but it was marvelous flesh. Flesh that had killed over a dozen soldiers in the Kenya massacre, maybe more elsewhere.

Alvar had watched her train, too, practice kicks and punches that were so fast and graceful they scarcely seemed deadly.

Just now, she had nearly killed him, he was certain of that.

Possibly, he deserved it. He had never made reference to her … state … before. He did not know what circumstances of her life had brought it about; the promise of distance she had made their first time together had been kept, for the most part.

But it was that most part that kept him guessing. They had talked, long and earnestly. They had played chess and riddle games. She outmatched him spectacularly in handball, usually lost when they played cards. And of course, there was lovemaking. In some ways, the latter was the least intimate thing they did together. And yet, Alvar reflected, one could not make love to the same person so many times without at least beginning to think you were in love with them.

Strike that. It was just him that had that problem.

He called his image back into existence.

“Hello,” he said, in the pseudo-Hopi he had been studying, consciously and unconsciously.

“Hello,” the image told him, in the same language. “What shall we talk about today?”

“Tell me about the Hopi. The real ones.”

His image shrugged, pursed its lips in the “Hopi” expression of thoughtfulness.

“They were a pueblo-dwelling people of the southwestern part of North America, now the Western States of America. They probably had a long unwritten history, suggested by various archaeological traditions that are known generally as Anasazi. They first became a part of written history when Spanish conquistadors entered the region in the sixteenth century. They retained a remarkably cohesive social structure in the face of European expansion and conquest, to a limited extent even to the present day. Their religion was complex and never fully understood at any one time by outsiders. With a few notable exceptions, it remained fundamentally an oral tradition to the Hopi themselves.”

“Right. Tell me about the most notable exception. The one the colonists of Fifth World predicated their society upon.”

“You tell me,” the image replied, with his own smug grin.

Alvar had learned things in a certain order. First the language and general cultural things like kinship; then the history of the colonists and their ideological foundations. This “conversation” was to be a sort of review, one that he badly needed. He nodded at himself.

“Fair enough. About 2025, four Hopi elders shared a vision about their people, one in which their culture and religion declined and vanished utterly. They therefore set out to record everything they remembered about the Hopi lifestyle.”

“Hold it,” his reflection told him. “They weren't all Hopi elders.”

“Oh. Right. One was Zuni and another was Tewa, from around my old home town. But the other two were Hopi elders.”

“And they were a minority in their community. Most of the Hopi believed that it was better for their culture to die than to record it on film, tape, or even paper.”

Alvar glared at his image. “True enough. But that part isn't in the stories they tell on the Fifth World, is it? In their version, it was those four who were truly Hopi, and their peers who were kahopi—the bad guys.”

Mirror-Alvar shrugged and motioned for him to continue. He did so.

“These four recorded all of the ceremonies, legends, and so on for posterity, and they agreed among themselves to call this lifestyle “Hopi”, despite its varied origins. Hopitu-Shinumu, really, which means “The Well-Behaved People”. I guess what they recorded was a sort of amalgam of pueblo lore, though, probably with some European and Asian stuff worked in.”

His double grinned thinly. “Now you've strayed off of the official version.”

“Fair enough. But that's about it, except for the prophecy. They predicted that one day the Hopi people would be reborn through the record that they had left, and that they would leave the Fourth World for the Fifth, a world created for them by the Kachina.”

“Which Kachina?”

“Ah … shit, there are hundreds of them. Ah … Blue Star?”

“Right. And a Kachina is. …”

“An ancestor-cloud spirit. They live in the mountains or the sky for half the year, but for the other half they live amongst the Hopi in human form. Special impersonators wear masks and outfits. Everybody thinks that whoever wears the mask is sort of possessed by the Kachina it represents.”

“Possessed,” said the image, frowning, “is a crude word. They know that the person in question is still who he always was—at least they do as adults. Children don't understand that the Kachina are being impersonated by human beings. In any event, the adults believe that the person is a conduit for the spiritual presence of the real Kachina.”

“I know all of that, smartass. Shiau Shi: Teacher off.” The other Alvar vanished quietly. The real one stood up abruptly.

“What a load of crap. Goddamit! And I have to live with these savages?”

Nobody answered his rhetorical question. He would have screamed at them if they had.

He found Teng working out. She was sheathed in sweat, almost literally, since their deceleration had dropped to just below half a gravity and the salty water had more viscous cling. When he stepped up to the door, she was finishing a perplexing series of low punches and twisty-looking blocks. She concluded with a lunging punch into her makiwara, a flexible fiberwood board a meter and a half high, its thickness tapering from three centimeters at the base to less than half a centimeter at the top. It was about twenty centimeters wide. When her fist struck it, the board snapped back with a sound like something breaking, but the makiwara remained where it was. The knuckles of both of Teng's hands were bloody, and that was quite a feat, considering the thick calluses on them.

She stepped away from the board and faced him, her feet a shoulder-width apart, hands limp at her side. Though she looked relaxed, Alvar knew that she was not, but could move in any direction, instantly.

She didn't say anything. She just looked at him, breathing a little harder than normal.

“I'm glad that wasn't me,” he said, and meant it.

“I don't have time for your shit, Alvar. Two weeks, and we come up against the first aliens anybody's ever seen, and a bunch of colonial freaks thrown into the bargain. I have a lot to do, and it starts with me getting back in top form.”

“You are in top form,” Alvar sighed. “And even if you weren't, it's not likely you'll be doing any hand-to-hand fighting. Most probably you'll be launching missiles. Even more likely, this is all the fucking hallucination of some fucking stupid agent whose been out here way to long. And even if those ships were ever here, they may not be now. It's been twenty years, Teng.”

Teng walked towards him in a peculiar, stiff-legged way. When she got reached him, she bowed low, bending at the waist, arms straight at her sides.

“Ah, battlemaster,” she said, slightly sing-song. “So good of you to impart your wisdom. But—” She straightened up, so that her eyes were straight in line with his. A few strands of her blacker-than-black hair had strayed from the confines of her queue. “But. I know what I am doing. Despite my … modifications … I require exercise and practice to keep my brain coordinated with my body. It doesn't matter whether I have to use my body to fight or not. My mind won't work fast enough if I get sloppy. Now. That said, I don't expect to have to see your fucking face around me until we need to make our course changes. Clear?”

Her thick lips were trembling, and her normally ivory face had a rosy tint. But her eyes, almond shaped, amber … they were sharp, steady glass.

Alvar raised his hand up cautiously.

“Teng, I'm going to do this very slowly, because I don't want you to kill me. Okay? Very slowly.”

He reached up with glacial slowness and touched her cheek with his thumb. He brushed her lips with it, stroked all of his fingers along her jaw. Her face did not change in expression. Alvar leaned forward, until their lips were just touching, and she did not move a millimeter. Her mouth was dry, hot, salty. He did not kiss her. Instead, he whispered, with the faintest sound his voice could command.

“I'm sorry, Teng,” he said. “I'm very, very sorry.”

An eon passed like that, their breath mingling. Then Teng withdrew her lips, tilting her chin down. She rested her forehead against his. Another eon passed before they even considered moving.

“Well there goes your theory, Sey'er Washington,” Teng called from the observatory station.

“How's that?”

“A week or so ago you predicted that there weren't any aliens. You were wrong, as usual.”

Alvar walked over to her side, carefully controlling each step. The engines were barely burning, now, and his weight was almost non-existent. Teng was pointing to a screen bearing a computer-enhanced composite built from various data. Optical, radar, gravitometric, neutrino. It revealed a planet, mostly blue, draped in a white lace lingerie of clouds. One small moon was indicated, perhaps a third the size of Luna. Besides this, there were two bright points in high orbit.

“Those are the ships,” she said. “Very hot. Fusion power of a very fine sort, much better than our own.”

“Ah. Their drives aren't pointed this way, are they?”

Teng gave him her best “just shut up, stupid,” look and continued.

“The other one is in a polar orbit past the horizon, so we can't see it. They are real, Alvar.”

Alvar let that sink in. He had been trying to avoid senseless speculation on the subject of non-human intelligence, but of course his mind had not cooperated. Nevertheless, despite long hours of supposition, he had never convinced himself that he, Alvar Washington, was going to meet aliens. There they were, though.

“How big, Teng?”

“
Shiau Shi
: increase enhancement and apparent size of the neutrino source in equatorial orbit.”

The computer complied, replacing the planetary view with a featureless cylinder, constricted in the middle so that it resembled an hourglass.

“That's pretty speculative,” Teng told him. “There might be any number of details missing. It could even be two discreet sections bound together by struts. But it's certainly more than a kilometer long.”

“And there are three. Let's hope they aren't warships.”

Teng nodded thoughtfully. “I can't even guess what weaponry they might have, but they would have to be pretty impressive to match ours.”

“Come on, Teng. I'm no tactician, as you've pointed out before, but even I know how hastily this expedition was cobbled together. Our armaments—whatever they are—must be makeshift, as well. In any case, a three-to-one advantage would be tough no matter what we're sporting. And if they have better fusion and Terraforming technology and than we do, what makes you think they don't have better weapons?”