Footsteps in the Sky (6 page)

“I don't think that. I assume they are better armed than we. Still, cobbled together or not, we could take any other three ships I can think of. We may not survive ourselves, but we would have a chance of taking them out.”

“That does not reassure me,” Alvar commented, dryly.

“I didn't expect it too, sailor. Don't worry; I'd rather not die myself. If they are warships, and if they are hostile, we'll probably cut and run, leaving everything that explodes, fizzes, or zaps in our wake.”

“And if they're not warships and not hostile?”

“We'll deal with that when the time comes.”

“What about the natives? Can they mount any appreciable resistance?”

“Nope. There isn't enough firepower on the planet to scratch us, even if they've been working at it for twenty years. Hopefully, too, they won't know we're coming. Our braking burn won't have been visible except to the most sophisticated telescopes until we were well into the system, and since we had to come in in a wide parabola anyway—one wide enough to turn into an orbit without fuss or muss—I've been trying to keep us on the other side of the sun from them. We weren't eclipsed the whole way, but damned near it, and it's just not likely that they saw us then. Now we've broken our fall, just moving in for the kill, so again, we aren't shining the flashlight in their face.”

“So much caution for a bunch of primitivist colonists?”

Teng snorted. “No. I don't want the aliens to know we're coming either.”

“We can see them,” Alvar pointed out.

“We are looking, and know where to look,” she rejoined. “The worst case scenario is that the aliens have developed strong ties with the colonists and that they are both watching for us.”

“Once we're in orbit, how can they miss?”

“You'd be surprised. Even the space around a planet is pretty big. I think we can hide behind that moon.”

Alvar nodded grimly.

“Ah well. ‘Today is a good day to die'.”

“What?” she turned away from the monitor, her heart shaped face bearing a puzzled expression.

Alvar smiled. “Right continent, wrong tribe. Some of the plains Indians of North America used to say that, not the Hopi. ‘Today is a good day to die'. They mostly did, too, poor fuckers. Did you know that there was a whole movement that believed they were immune to bullets? The Ghost Dancers.”

Teng had a fierce little grin on her face. “I like that. That's beautiful.”

Alvar glanced back at the speculative ship and shrugged. They sat in silence for awhile.

Teng broke it. “We go to free-fall soon, she whispered, reaching over to take his hand.

“We'd better make the best of it then,” Alvar answered, echoing her own words of three years ago. He reached with his other hand to massage her neck. The muscles were as hard as steel cords.

She nodded, and they left the station together.

Chapter Three

Morning opened up, a door into azure, gilt along its eastern frame. Sand let her voice sag back down into her chest, and her head went light as she rose stiffly from the rock she was sitting on. A wind stirred little dust devils across the vast flat that seemed to whirl out from around her, as if she stood in the center of a spinning disk that grew ever greater in circumference from the force of its rotation. Leaving­ her, smaller and smaller, in the middle. Her strength to defy was gone, but a strange flat calm had replaced it, a feeling of profound endurance, and for this reason, despite the deep chill in the air, she met the sun's gaze as naked as that first sun her mother had held her up to twenty years ago. But enough was enough, and when a few wet-looking­ clouds appeared in the middle distance, Sand slipped back into her cotton underclothes and densedren jumper. She sat back down and starting putting her hair up in braids, blinking her eyes against the gritty tickle of a night without sleep. Unbroken by dreams, the images of the last two days raced in her mind, fast runners who finished neck-and-neck in her present and then rushed back to begin again. The news over the radio, as she flew above the world streaming a thousand kilos of fire clover seed in her wake. Her mother's quiet, gaunt face, so unlike its living twin. The deep pit, Pela curled down there like an infant, cotton-clouded face nodding eastward. …

Sand thought that she should sleep, now. But first, she would look at her mother's book, see what words had been hidden out here for her to find. As she picked it up, Thunder cracked in the sky, cloth ripping far away.

Father Sun had given the book new life, even as he fed heat to the greedy black rocks beneath her. The night's cold was scrambling away from those rocks, seeking a home in the sky. It brushed the few, small clouds like fingers along a man's naked flank, and they trembled, just as lightly. Sand keyed the book on with the ring.

“My daughter. …”

Sand frowned and looked up. The thunder had not ceased; its distant crackle was sustaining, building. And there, high against the blue, was the lightning. Lightning like an arrow, straight, slim, bright. She had seen such lightning, once, when she was at school in the lowlands, and the Tech Society had sent a Kachina into polar orbit on a hydrogen torch.

And yet, this torch was coming down.

Mother?

Sand was immediately ashamed of the thought. Even if what everyone believed was true, her mother would be in the underworld with Masaw for four days before she went into the sky. No, this was something else. A starship from the Reed? They came every few decades, bringing luxuries and farm equipment. But a starship would land out near the sea, where fuel was plentiful. What then?

But she already knew. Sand had never believed her mother to be crazy. If her “Kachina” had been some sort of deluded mystical experience, she would have told everyone, not just her daughter. But she had kept the secret close, very close. Pela had believed that the thing that wounded her was from the stars, from the race that began transforming the Fifth World millennia ago. That she saw in them the distant Kachina of her people was the product of her own interpretation. Sand herself had always believed in the ancient aliens. Who did not? The evidence was too clear. They had touched her mother, and now they were returning.

And there were no coincidences under the roof of the Fifth World. Somehow, that streak in the sky had caused her mother's death.

Sand did not bother to pack up the sweat lodge. She left it there for the wind to have. She raced across the crunching stones, stopped only long enough to grab her boots. She popped open the windshield of the Dragonfly and tossed them into the back seat, bounded into the cockpit. She thumbed on the pre-starter and waited impatiently while the jacket around the engines warmed itself and began circulating the alcohol that was both fuel and coolant. She closed her eyes, willing the Dragonfly to settle into her, but for the first time in many months, it did not come instantly. With an angry snarl, she reached into the compartment below her seat and drew out the mask. Sand held it up for a moment, observed the square simplicity of it, the delicate wings etched below the semi-circular ears, the multifaceted eyes. Then she put it on.

For just an instant, she felt claustrophobic, trapped in the smoky smell of her own hair. Then the eyes of the mask seemed to open, and her human concerns thinned away.

Dragonfly, I am. Gift of the ancients, keeper of waters, bright wings in the sky.

Sand kicked on the underjets, heard a single ping of protest from the rear of the vehicle, and then the flat earth rushed away from her. The Dragonfly rocked and nearly rolled over before she stabilized it. She would not use the gyros, not now. That was for lowlanders, for the fearful. For flying when bored and half-asleep. She was none of those, and she would suffer no interference from such mechanisms. Sand lit the afterjets and tore a hole in the air. She put out her wings and pointed her nose at the dwindling light in the distance, now almost on the horizon.

Dragonfly ate the kilometers in great gulps, but the scenery beneath her hardly changed. This upland was immense, one of the largest on the planet. Once it had been a welling of molten stone puddled thickly like blood and then congealing that way, a scab on the planet's skin four hundred kilometers in diameter. Younger volcanoes had burrowed up through it since, leaving the columns of basalt like those at her mother's place: several such grew and retreated in her heightened vision. Acidic rains had etched it, here and there, worm tracks that sought their own, melded into serpents, carried water that tasted of iron down to the lowlands.

The fiery streak was gone, replaced by a tiny blue hemisphere. Sand could see it wobble a little in the mid-altitude winds. She could see, too, where it was going to come to earth.

Thumbprint of the Kachina, they called it, but Sand had another name for the immense crater. Mother's Prayer.

Invisible fingers twisted the Dragonfly about, and Sand's gut clenched at an empty, falling feeling. The sky flashed over her crazily, and then the earth, which no longer seemed to know its proper place. Sand grinned fiercely behind her mask and wagged the stick forward and then to the side. The world learned her lesson, became down with a vengeance, and the Dragonfly hurtled gleefully to pierce the dark plain with her silvery nose.

Sand yanked the stick back, and the semi-flexible wings popped as they caught the crest of a thermal. Sand opened the underjets for good measure. The plain was an impossibly swift river of stone ten meters below her when the Dragonfly began to climb again. Adrenaline sang in her blood, a tune of joy and fear.

This was why she was a member of the Dragonfly Society. This was why the threat of being cut off from her kiva was a thing she feared.

A single pass over Kachina's Thumbprint showed her the settled cloth hemisphere and the steel spore it had born softly to earth. Sand cut the afterjets, let the Dragonfly drop in a lazy spiral. Five meters from the ground she pulled up the nose, stalled out, and cut on the underjets. Dragonfly settled down, an insect in an immense bowl. Slowly, Sand took off her mask and confronted the mystery with her own naked face.

The “Kachina” was much as her mother had described it. A burnt steel cylinder four meters tall, nearly that in diameter. It squatted on four braced legs. A bundle of cables emerged from some unseen place on its top, and they trailed away to the parachute. Squinting, she noticed the bottom seemed clean and smooth, though of course the angle allowed her only a narrow glimpse of it. Did it have engines? If it did, they must be very small. That spear of light in the sky must have been a rocket of some sort. Why hadn't the Kachina landed on it?

Sand had a sudden awful thought. Perhaps its engines were nuclear. Then the Kachina might not have landed on them for fear of contaminating its touchdown point. But perhaps it was still too hot for human beings. …

The Dragonfly had an adequate radiation counter. Sand voice-activated it and was rewarded with a negative reading. She shrugged. Perhaps it had jettisoned its engine before deploying the parachute, never intending to return to the sky.

Lifting up the windshield, she stepped cautiously out onto the loose sand of the crater floor, dust blasted from solid stone thousands of years before. Most of the soil in the lowlands owed its origins to this crater and its sisters across the planet.

The spirit-like detachment of the Dragonfly was gone. Sand stood for endless moments, breathing in short gulps, just looking at the thing. It was nothing spectacular, really. Nothing about its outward appearance could not have been the result of Tech Society engineering. And yet her mother had been certain—absolutely certain—that no human being had made the one she had seen. Sand felt that same terrible certainty. This little craft was from very, very far away. Farther than old Earth, even, and that was far indeed.

“I'm not coming any closer!” she suddenly found herself shouting at the thing. “You won't sting me as you did my mother!”

In the following silence, she felt stupid, and more than stupid, embarrassed. This thing, whatever it was, was no Kachina, no ancestor-spirit of her people. It was a machine of some kind, no matter how far it had come. She had seen pictures of the Reed starships, and they were very large. They had to be to carry living things through the vast light-years of nothing. This thing could hold no living creature.

As she reached this conclusion, the cylinder reached another. An unseen seam parted, a section of the thing's outer hull slid away. This left a small doorway just over a meter in height. Sand scrambled back, banged into the Dragonfly. The only thought in her head was to fly, fly until the night swallowed her, until she reached the end of the world. But she could not, would not take her gaze away from that open doorway, and so her movements to raise up the windshield of the craft were fumbling and ineffective. Something blue bumped and rustled inside of the Kachina; she could hear each movement with perfect clarity, as if the crater were a huge mirror, focusing sound in upon her.

The blue thing stepped up and poked its head into the light.

Sand stopped fumbling at the windscreen. She was looking at her mother.

Chapter Four

Hoku tapped a well-groomed fingernail against the delicate porcelain cup, savored the essence of the steam that drifted up from it. He lifted the cup and sipped, inhaling at the same time, so that the combination of pungent halia and vinegary apple cider filled his entire head. Hoku closed his eyes, wishing he could drink it all. Halia, the ginger liqueur that so few could stomach, was a rare and precious thing, and the cider just less so. Still, he needed his head clear. The taste was enough to evoke a mood, to calm him. A walk by the sea or through the tamarisk grove near the river would have done the same, but he had time for neither at the moment, any more than he had time to become leisurely drunk. He set the cup back down, content to let it spend its flavor into the air of his office.

So much to do, and only moments to do it in.

“Kewalacheoma,” he said, speaking to the dark cube on his desk. It fluoresced and presented him with an image of the Biology chief of the Tech Society. She was a young woman with round features and eyes a little too close together for his taste. Her hair, normally black, had been rendered somehow dark red since he saw her last.

“Mother-Father,” she responded.

Hoku liked the sound of that. Ten years had brought him to the top of his world, ten years of pain, betrayal, and suspicion. Though he had abolished the use of kin terms like “ibaba” as modes of address and the use of “mother-father” for lesser command positions, he disagreed with his illustrious predecessor on this particular point. Reserving the honorific for himself stressed the new order of things, that he, Hoku, was the last word in all matters. The council, while still existent, had little power, with the heads of the troublesome clans and society leaders bent to his will or replaced by those who were. Besides, after all of these years, he deserved the title, especially considering the truth of it. His people were like children, cowering before the Ogre Kachina of tradition, and he was both their mother and their father, liberating them. Even as he thought this, he scowled at his own metaphor. Kachina.

Hoku realized that Kewalacheoma was still waiting expectantly. Hoku snapped his teeth together behind his sealed lips. He was getting old.

“Kewa, I request to see the alien. It's been fifteen years, and I need a briefing.”

The biologist nodded without expression and said something quietly to her computer. That would be the next thing, Hoku promised silently: to take the file autonomy from the societies and supply himself with direct and unquestioned access to all information. Not that he didn't have that now, but it still rankled him to have to ask for it. Still, there was already opposition to his reforms; best not go too far too fast.

The image of Kewa was replaced by a scene that he had no need to see, imprinted as it was on the cells of his brain. The cylinder craft as they cut it open; the thing that fell out.

There were few animals on the Fifth World, and Hoku had little reference for comparison. Curled in death, it had reminded Hoku most of some sea creature, a mangled crab or shrimp. Yet its thick grey skin bore no real resemblance to an exoskeleton. Perhaps it was the way its head, so narrow and pointed in the front, bulged and flared into a thick collar and then folded forwards, a structure that formed something like a shell surrounding a hole that funneled down into the skull. Or the rounded, dark bumps there that the biologists assured him were eyes—these also reminded Hoku of a crustacean. But none of the Earthlife in the seas of the Fifth World had three more eyes along their “backbones”. The head hid a mouth beneath it, a horrible hole replete with wormy cilia. The rest of the alien was also like a worm, save for the legs and arms which emerged from the precise center line of its dorsal side and then twisted out so that they could function in pairs. There were three rear sets of legs, shorter towards the back so that in life it would have stood sharply sloping, head up. Just beneath the head, a fourth pair of limbs emerged, triple jointed, and terminating in seven-digit monstrosities that looked horribly like human hands.

“Tell me about this thing,” he said, quietly.

Kewa's voice emerged, ghostly and unseen.

“There's a lot we don't know. It breathed oxygen, after a fashion, both through small nostrils above the mouth and through that funnel in its head. We think the funnel evolved from a sort of supercharger, designed to ingest atmospheric alcohol and create positive pressure in its circulatory system. The heart is a long, tubular muscle underneath the spine. It acted like a sort of linear accelerator, contracting in waves and forcing blood from one end to the other. It doesn't have lungs, as such; air was passed through successively smaller networks of vesicles and then injected into the heart.”

The cube showed him the dissected corpse, the long yellow muscle she was referring to.

“The heart was protected by a bony cylinder lying just above it, and we think this housed the brain. It's more like a very thick spinal cord, and there are various sense organs attached along it, though we aren't sure what they all do. The strange thing is that there was much more empty space in the casing than nerve material. That doesn't appear to be natural, but we can't explain it. Our guess is that this individual had an atypically small brain, but that doesn't make much sense.”

Hoku smirked sardonically. “That's because you aren't a politician. They obviously sent this thing down to see if the atmosphere was tenable. They sacrificed it. Would you volunteer for such a mission if in possession of all of your faculties?”

“Mother-Father, there is no evidence of surgery,” Kewa replied.

“Assuming you know what surgery would look like in such a beast. But perhaps you are right—perhaps it was grown or raised with only a minimal brain.”

There was a pause, and then Kewa stammered: “Th-that's horrible.”

Hoku shrugged. “Judge them if you wish. It is not my concern. What I want to know is this: how intelligent would a fully functioning alien be?”

Kewa answered quickly, with a hint of indignation. “Impossible to tell. We don't even know how its “neurons”—if that's what they are—functioned. No, I could not hazard even a guess.”

“Why are its limbs arranged so?” he asked, avoiding frustration by changing the topic.

“The backbone is its central functional support. We believe that this creature evolved from animals with simple linear symmetry. The appearance that it is bilateral in nature—like we are—is illusory. Each pair of limbs emerges from the backbone, one behind the other. Only their peculiar articulation allows them to function perpendicular to the creature's axis.”

“You're saying that its ancestors would have had eight limbs arranged one behind the other.”

“Yes. Much like the worms indigenous to this planet. The two are clearly related.”

“This creature could have lived on this planet as our ancestors found it.”

“Undoubtedly,” Kewa affirmed, for once very sure of herself.

Hoku tapped his cup again. He had, of course, suspected that for fifteen years, but the Tech Society had known for sure all along. Clearly, they were due a come-uppance. But not now, not now.

All of his assumptions had just been validated. The original masters of the planet had certainly come back to claim it. And yet, they had an odd sense of propriety. For twenty Standard Terran Years they had rested in their high orbits, uncommunicative and apparently inactive. Until now, at least.

“Kewa,” he said. “Copy this to my personal files, please.”

The monster dissolved and was replaced by Kewa's frowning features. “Mother-Father,” she began, “that is not in keeping with. …”

“Kewa,” Hoku interrupted softly. “This is very important. A short time ago, a craft of some sort emerged from one of the orbiting ships. Do you understand? Another one of them—perhaps more than one—is coming down here. Now I want you to make all information regarding this creature available to my personal staff. This does not represent a precedent, but a singular occurrence. Good?”

Kewa regarded him for a long moment.

“This could be rendered moot,” she finally suggested, “If I were a member of the immediate contact team.”

So. Hoku steepled his fingers before his face to hide his expression.

“Kewa, loyalty is my chief concern, now. Loyalty and security. As a member of the Tech Society, you have other allegiances.”

“Allegiance comes in layers, Mother-Father, each layer subordinate to the one above it. I can see my duties in this light quite clearly.”

Hoku uttered a calculated chuckle, devoid of any real humor. “You really want to meet one of these monsters, don't you?”

“That's very true.”

Hoku inclined his head. “Come up to my offices. And I still want those files. Don't try to barter with them; you've convinced me.”

“Thank you, Mother-Father.” Kewa vanished, leaving the cube a sullen, lightless brown.

Hoku shook his head in self-admiration. Let Kewa think this subversion of the biology chief was her victory rather than his own plan. People who thought they were making their own clever decisions were better help than those who felt coerced. That much he had learned from the Old Woman, when she was manipulating him so.

Hoku was still musing over this, planning his next, careful steps, when the cube pinged for his attention.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Mother-Father. The craft has entered the atmosphere and begun its descent. The flyers are on standby, ready to go.”

“Have you calculated its trajectory?”

“It will land on the plateau, not far from where the last one did, unless it deviates significantly.”

Hoku was already out of his chair, reaching for his coat.

“I'm on my way. Check the weapons once more and get me a sidearm. Also, Kewalacheoma Hoye will be joining us. See that she is properly outfitted but not armed.”

“Yes, Mother Father. Which craft should she ride in?”

“Put her in mine. And Kaya—keep an eye on the mesas. I don't want any of the traditionals nosing around. I have gone to great lengths to keep this from them.”

“Okay.”

Very great lengths indeed, he thought, and then put that out of his mind. For the second time in his life, Hoku went to greet the unknown. He reveled in it.