The Blackgod

by Greg Keyes

  “I—uh—I’ve wanted to do that for some time,” he admitted.

  “Then why did you wait until now?” she asked, unable to keep a little of the bitterness out of her voice.

  Perkar’s eyes lit with surprised chagrin. “I didn’t think…”

  “Oh, no, of course not. Of course you didn’t think.” She felt some heat rising in her voice. “You didn’t think that while your mother was planning my wedding to some cowherd I never met and everyone was busily discussing your marriage to some cattle princess and Tsem—” She choked off, bit her lip, and went on. “You didn’t think to give me any sign of what you were thinking or felt—for more than a year.” She snapped her mouth closed, feeling she had said too much.

  Perkar looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I thought it was clear.”

  “The only clear thing to me is that no one cares to see you and me together.”

  “I just kissed you.”

  “That could mean a lot of things,” Hezhi snapped.

  “And you kissed me.”

  “That could mean a lot of things, too,” she responded, but her voice wavered, because he was moving closer again.

  “What it means to me,” he said, his voice barely a breath, “is that I love you.”

  Hezhi wanted to retort sarcastically to that, too, to tell him it was too late, to hurt him just a little.

  But what she said was “Oh.”

  He shrugged. “Another reason for being this far out. I love my family, but I want none of their matchmaking. If there is anything that I’ve realized in all of this, it is that the most precious Piraku is that which you find. And despite everything, I was lucky to find you. It is the only thing I have to thank the Changeling for.”

  Hezhi clenched her eyelids, but the tears squirted out anyway. “This is a fine time to start this,” she murmured, “just when I had resigned myself to leaving.”

  “Leaving?” He gaped, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “To go where?”

  “Perhaps back to Nhol, perhaps to somewhere I’ve never been. I don’t know; just away.”

  “Back to Nhol?”

  “Yes, of course. What is there for me here?”

  “I’ve just told you.”

  “Yes, I guess you have. But I don’t know that I’m ready to become a wife. I know I’m fifteen, but for me there was never a childhood, Perkar. How can I become a woman when I was never a child?”

  Perkar reached and took her hand. “I haven’t asked you to marry me,” he replied. “I only told you I love you, something I thought you already knew. You did know, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, wiping her tears. “Yes, but you never said it.”

  “Well, we are two of a kind then,” Perkar rejoined mildly.

  “Oh,” she snapped, “of course I love you, you idiot.”

  “Then stay here, with Tsem and Ngangata and me. With your family.”

  Hezhi drew in a long breath and looked at him, this man she had first seen in dreams, and as she did so, she realized that her tears had stopped. “Well,” she said at last. “I do want to stay here, with you. I do. But I am not ready for marriage. I’m just not, despite my age. I want…” She drew her brows together and gazed defiantly up at him. “I want to be courted for a time. I want more stories about two-headed cows. I want to separate what we feel from what we went through together—just a little.”

  “I remind you that I didn’t ask for your hand—” Perkar started, but she shushed him with her finger.

  “But you will, Perkar Kar Barku. You will. And when you do, I want to give the right answer.”

  Perkar smiled then and took her hand. “Good enough, then. How do I go about this courting business?”

  Hezhi wiped what remained of her tears and felt an almost impish grin touch her lips. “Well,” she said. “I suppose you can kiss me once more, and then we should really find my chaperone.”

  Wind rustled the trees and dapples of sunlight streamed through the leaves above. It was a long kiss.

  Turn the page to begin reading from Footsteps in the Sky

  A Note from the Editor

  Greg Keyes was exposed at an early age to the cultures and stories of the Native Southwest when his father took a job on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. What he experienced there would continue to inform him for years to come. He studied anthropology in college and began writing fiction while pursuing his PhD. Footsteps in the Sky was his first novel, but it awaited publication for many years while Keyes wrote epic fantasy, alternate history, and other speculative fiction. Here is an excerpt from that novel, sure to excite Keyes’s fans with its glimpse into a very different future.

  One hundred years ago, Sand’s ancestors made the long, one-way trip to the Fifth World, ready to work ceaselessly to terraform the planet. Descendants of native peoples like the Hopi and Zuni, they wanted to return to the way of life of their forebears, who honored the Kachina spirits.

  Now, though, many of the planet’s inhabitants have begun to resent their grandparents’ decision to strand them in this harsh and forbidding place, and some have turned away from the customs of the Well-Behaved People. Sand has her doubts, but she longs to believe that the Kachina live on beyond the stars and have been readying a new domain for her people.

  She may be right. Humans have discovered nine habitable worlds, all with life that shares a genetic code entirely alien to any on Earth. Someone has been seeding planets, bringing life to them. But no other sign of the ancient farmers has ever been discovered—until one day they return to the Fifth World. They do not like what they find.

  Prologue

  2421 A.D.

  Kachina

  I. Farmer

  There is mercy only in sleep. The years splinter on our titanium spines, the tiny evils of hydrogen atoms chew at us gleefully. Within, capricious quanta betray us, take our minds and memories into chaos.

  Awake, we can feel this. Asleep—we just wake up a little less. Stupider.

  I felt my new stupidity as we fell towards the orange light. Already I could make out the inner system dross; gas giants useful only for fuel, the sparkling belt of hydrogen and water crystals we pulled out from them so long ago. I knew assorted spheres and chunks of atmosphereless slag spun lazily below as well, though they were still too small to see. Nor could I yet see the farm.

  I remembered it though. Even if I didn’t—if entropy had robbed me of that, too—I would have known it. The three of us have six farms to take care of, and they all look the same.

  The three of us. If I was stupid, how were the others?

  Not too well.

  Odatatek was beyond rational thought. Her spine still carried autonomic messages, and siblinged to us, she still functioned. She could even get through fairly simple logic problems, but cognition was lost to her.

  Would that it were beyond me.

  Hatedotik could still think, but what she thought worried me. She conceived of herself as a simple mechanical piston, in-and-out, ceaseless. There were no questions left in her, only a scorching certitude.

  I grieved for them both, and for myself. We were all mad.

  And, mad, we went to do our job.

  Deep inside—in a place where I fancy myself a living thing—I created a place of gaseous oxygen and liquid water and began growing a little brother. By the time we reached the farm, he would be adult.

  And down we went.

  II. Pela

  Pulverized stone crunched beneath Pela’s thick-soled boots as she wound her way up the steep, charcoal slope. She leaned into her footprints, intent on making every ounce of her fifty-four kilos somehow work for her, though physics and plain common sense insisted that leaning forward did not help one move up.

  Then again, if she leaned back, she would tumble down 200 meters of basalt rasp. She continued to lean.

  At the top, Pela took a grateful breath, felt the blood throbbing in her legs and arms. With a well-earned sigh, she gin
gerly sat down, rocking her butt back and forth in the dense dust at the bluff’s edge until her seat was comfortable. She eased out her canteen and savored a single mouthful of distilled water, still cool from the morning, felt the grit in her teeth from the climb. Her gaze walked out on yellow morning light, over the lazy, yawning valley below.

  The blue snake of the Palulukang River wound confidently through the belly of the land, as if he had done the work, carved through the layers of stone, opened a wide, fertile bottom from the highlands to the dark, distant sea. But the river was young. Stronger, harsher forces than water had shaped the land here, and water only sought downhill. Still, Palulukang looked like he belonged.

  Not so the misty green stain, darkest near the river but nevertheless filling the entire valley. Not from up here, at least, where it could be seen for what it was; a tiny oasis of verdure in a desert of black and red stone and the dark blue moss that dug so ferociously at it. But one day …

  One day, the whole Fifth World would grow green.

  The evidence was around her. Already the tenacious taproot dandelions were fighting the native plants for supremacy, here near the edge. Born up by thermals, the tough seeds found welcome in the nearly sterile soil, pushing their deep, spear-like roots into the rock below, drawing sustenance from the depths and exhaling oxygen into the earth. These were now in bloom, hand-sized yellow flowers bourn on thick, meaty stalks bigger around than her thumb. When they died they would quickly rot, courtesy of the specialized bacteria that lived symbiotically within them. They would add to the meager fund of organic matter on the plateau until organisms with richer appetites could supplant them.

  She noted absently that the fire clover she had sown last trip was making a good start as well.

  Yes, today the valley, tomorrow the plateau. Her plateau. She would live to see grass and trees up here, if Masaw so willed.

  Pela had mixed feelings about that. There was a reason she took these trips on foot. She loved to wander the outback, as austere and melancholy as it was. The black and red plain stretched level and far, blotched with the persistent cyan mosses, skirt trees, weirdness and—most of all—promise of mystery. Her people would kill one beauty to make another.

  She shouldered her pack, stood, put her back to the civilized world. Today she would go to the black giants she could see on the horizon, probably camp there tonight. The ancient volcanic cores were still home to many of the more complex native plants, including whiskyberry. It would be good to find some whiskyberry.

  And, maybe this time, some sign of the Kachina.

  That thought always brought an odd mixture of awe, betrayal, and skepticism. As a little girl, the Kachina spirits had been very real to her; they danced into town during the ceremonies, brought her presents, punished her when she was bad. They watched from overhead, too, warned the People when a fierce wind or rain was nigh, when the volcanoes to the south were belching. She adored them and feared them, the colorful dancers, the stars in the sky that moved faster than the wheel of night.

  She would never forget when she became a woman, and the truth stood naked before her. The fierce Whipping Kachina—the punisher who had made her burn with shame and fear—bereft of his horrific mask, he was her mother’s brother. As were the others, all of them. Cousins, grandparents—older friends. Lies on two legs, and everyone older than her was involved.

  The Kachina in the sky were lies, too. Made of metal and silicon, they were satellites that orbited the Fifth World unceasingly. But made by people, just like the masks.

  Oh, it had been explained to her that these people and these machines were merely the conduits for the real Kachina, powerful and distant amongst the stars. But the feeling of betrayed wonder had ruined them for Pela. The more she learned, the more she doubted, and when she went down into Salt to go to school, she met lowlanders who didn’t even pretend to believe in the powerful, beneficent spirits.

  Father Sun was quickening the horizon gold and purple before Pela reached the black columns. Hurrying, lest she be caught without light, she scrambled up a way she knew, gaining elevation over the darkling plain. Before the blazing in the sky quieted she had her view, renewed her faith. Savored belief again, though it was a meal flavored with the ash of skepticism.

  There, beyond the basalt titans, coming night filled a vast bowl with shadow. This crater had birthed the billion billion tons of ash and crushed rock that covered the plain, which even now choked the River during floods, fifty thousand years after her savage labor. A piece of the sky bigger than all of the mesa city had struck there, filled the heavens with dirt. And not just in this place; at school she had learned that there were sixty such impact craters on the planet’s surface, and evidence was good that they had all been made simultaneously.

  Pela unpacked her tent and began setting it up in the little cove she had used before. Her thick, hard hands worked quickly, surely, but her thoughts were on the stars.

  There was other evidence. For five billion years, the Fifth World had been a place unfit for human life. The atmosphere had been an oven of carbon dioxide, the surface a layer cake of lava flows and metamorphic rock. Then the monsters had fallen from space. Not much later—the geologists said a thousand years—there was oxygen and water. And life. Single celled at first, but within another thousand years a hundred species of plants and small animals to live in the newly-created soil.

  The universe did not work so, on its own. For fifty thousand years someone had labored to make the Fifth World ready for the Hopitu-Shinumu, the Well-Behaved People.

  Somewhere, beyond the masks, beyond the satellites, perhaps beyond the winking stars themselves, the Kachina lived. And some day they would return.

  And so, she thought, truth nested within truth, revealed as a lie only until one knew more.

  Shadow spilled from the bowl and fell in a swift sheet from the east. Pela set up her alcohol stove, for heat rather than to cook on. She was just considering whether to sleep or watch the stars when she remembered the whiskyberry bush that grew just beyond the jutting stone to her left. She flicked on her torch and walked over to find it.

  Whiskyberries were always in bloom and they always had fruit. She smiled at the stubborn plant, its barrel-body, flowers and fruit protruding like pink and black knobs. She pulled a handful of the nodules and bit one open. The taste was sharp, smoky, and its fire ran up her nose before her tongue was even aware of it.

  As she bit the second, the juice from the first quietly incandesced in her belly.

  Better not to eat too many, she considered. But she loved whiskyberries. Other of the native plants produced purer alcohol, but they had no flavor.

  Alcohol had been the main problem with the planet. Free oxygen was available, yes, but almost no nitrogen and alcohol fumes so thick that no mammal could live in it. The native animals—or the worms that passed as animals—metabolized the alcohol. There had even been little Dragonfly things that sucked in fumes like ramjets as they whirred along. Pela had never seen most of these. They had died early in the terraforming process, eliminated by soldier viruses built from their own cells. But a few—like the plants that produced fuel for bikes, cars, hovercraft, and heat—were saved. And a few that had more entertaining virtues.

  Like whiskyberry. Pela sucked two more and smiled a silly smile up at the heavens. The stars remained pretty but assumed the peculiar flatness that came with intoxication.

  Night painted her dark brush-strokes across the sky, and the flat stars brightened. Pela squinted once more, standing despite wobbly, uncooperative knees to see the landscape vanish. Her land, come to her from her mother and from her mother’s mother. Everything she could see was her responsibility, her charge. It wasn’t fertile and wet, like the river valley; no one envied her yet.

  But they would envy her daughter, if she ever had one. Oh, yes, Pela would see to that. Despite her qualms, this desert would bloom with grain, run lousy with rabbit, deer, and coyote. Cornbrakes would drink the thin streams that
stuttered down the slopes to the valley. Her daughter would have respect, not just as a member of the Sand clan, but as Pela’s daughter.

  If, of course, she ever had a daughter.

  And so Pela did just what she had been avoiding. She thought about Tuve.

  “Piss on you,” she muttered, and bit savagely into another whiskyberry. She knew she wasn’t the nicest looking woman on the mesa. But she wasn’t ugly. There were men who found her broad mouth and wide dark eyes sensuous. They told her so. And if her thick, strong body wasn’t that of a young girl, it was that of a woman who would not break—or even bend—in the throes of passion. Tuve knew that, first hand.

  Maybe he was playing games with her. Tuve was a child that way. Maybe he wanted to see how much she wanted him.

  Let him see. She could stay up here a long time before she cooled off. Long enough for him to realize that a little girl like Sia could not do much for him, not in the Fifth World.

  She caught a flare of light in the heavens. A meteor? It was big. It flashed brighter, seemed to fairly explode, and vanished, leaving a magenta and blue tracer in her eyeballs. Pela caught her breath, her drunken heart pounding madly in her chest. Her thought had been a jolt of pure terror. Another world shaker, like the one that made the great craters. … Her imagination painted the brilliant flash, the breath of wind that would engulf her like molten lead.

  Silly drunk, she thought, and bit into another berry.

  And so when the shadow blotted the stars, when four steel legs chuffed into the gravelly soil, Pela lay curled on her side, snoring faintly.

  Buy Footsteps in the Sky Now!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For Moral Support:

  John Keyes, Tim Keyes, Earl Ridout, Helen Ridout

  For Criticism:

  Ken Carleton, Veronica Chapman, Gene Crawford,