Footsteps in the Sky

by Greg Keyes

  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 histo
ry, 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.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said after a moment, surveying her languid white form.

  “You too,” she said, smiling a little sarcastically. She reached out for him, caught his ankle, began to explore his leg with her tongue. Alvar twisted around to her back—a contortion impossible under gravity—and began probing and stroking with the tips of his fingers.

  “We have to accelerate soon,” he said. “No more free-fall for a long time.”

  “We should make the best of it then,” she replied.

  They continued touching and kissing. The first time, there had been no time for learning: now he intended to absorb everything about her body he could. And thus he discovered a secret.

  The second time was gentler, though he felt a distance in her that he suspected sex would never close. She reveled in his body, but his eyes did not interest her. At climax she kept her own tightly shut. When they were done, he asked her about the small round scars on her buttocks and around her crotch.

  “Cigarette burns,” she said, and her face hardened up.

  “How?”

  “Not your business, sailor. Get that straight. You’re the only man awake on this trip, and you look pretty good. Furthermore, I like you. I’m going to fuck you. But we aren’t lovers in any greater sense than that.”

  Alvar nodded. He could accept that well enough. And they were going to be together a long time. No use in starting out arguing. Things were going fine.

  “You’re the boss,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, I am.”

  Chapter One

  2442 A.D.

  SandGreyGirl finished washing her mother’s hair, her narrow face clenched around the tears it hid.

  What killed you, Pela? She asked in the black shadow of her mind. What ended my mother’s life?

  She stepped back, relieved to let her cousins close in and do the rest. They tied prayer feathers to Pela’s hands and hair, gifts for the ancestors. No doubt some of the ancestors—the ones from the Fourth World, Earth—would be confused by the feathers. There were, as yet, no real birds other than turkeys on the Fifth World. The feathers were grown in sacred culture tanks.

  The white cotton mask they placed on Pela’s face was real. Pela had grown the cotton herself. Now it would be the cloud which hid her face when she came back to bring rain to her people.

  SandGreyGirl was beginning to feel sick. She stepped out of the little apartment she shared with her mother for some air, aware even as she did so that the others would talk, call her a bad daughter.

  But they already did that, didn’t they?

  She let her gaze drift across the box-hive of native stone dwellings and poured concrete facilities that were Tuwanasavi, the town of her birth. Of her mother’s death. Father Sun was resting in his noon-time house, and his light inked doorways and windows in sharp relief. Beyond the edge of the mesa, the land stretched off, hazy and unreal, a cloud tinted grey and green.

  “Sand.”

  She didn’t turn at the voice. Her father was the last person she wanted to see right now.

  “Sand, I’m sorry. There was nothing any of us could do.”

  Sand bit down on her lip, resisted the urge to spin around and howl at him, scream like the cyclone winds that rushed up the valley in spring. Instead, she slipped her words into him softly, each a tiny dagger.

  “You could have taken her to the lowlands. Whatever she had, they could have cured it.”

  “You know the elders wouldn’t have agreed to that.”

  “The elders can’t stop a Dragonfly from slipping off into the air. I could have taken her. If you had called me.”

  He had no answer for that, and she expected none. She heard his feet shuffle uncertainly.

  “She didn’t want you to see her die,” he said at last.

  Sand finally turned to face him, and she fixed her eyes on his own until he looked away. His round face, as always, bore that pitiful expression that she so despised. It was both apologetic and sneaky. Daughters and fathers were rarely close amongst the Hopitu-Shinumu, but her feelings for him were deep and fetid.

  “Why do you hate me so?” he asked.

  “You shouldn’t have to wonder that,” she replied.

  Under her hot stare he wilted further and finally retreated towards the room where his wife waited, dead.

  The sun moved on, rested for the moment. Sand paced across the roof of the main house, arguing bitterly with the image of her father that she kept in her mind. With her other relatives—with herself.

  After a time, the clan chief came to get her.

  “It’s nearly time,” he said.

  Yuyahoeva was an old man, at least fifty. His face was like the tortured, frozen rock of a lava flow. Sand gathered her resolve to confront him.

  “I want an autopsy, Ina’a.”

  Yuyahoeva’s stone face trembled, as if it were about to become live magma. But he mastered himself. Anger was an evil thing to show. And yet, as had she with her father, he made his feelings clear in whispered, stinging words.

  “You little two-heart. How can you suggest that? Your mother was a good woman. She will not be cut up by those lowland butchers.”

  “I want to know what killed her.”

  He regarded her as he might regard a clot of night soil on his shoe.

  “Don’t you know, after all this time, that what you want is not important? Your schooling
with the lowlanders has spoiled you.” The word he used for “spoiled” implied decay, corruption.

  “She was my mother.”

  He dismissed that with a sharp chop of his palm. “She did not belong to you. She would understand that. She belonged to all of us. And there will be no more talk of autopsy. If there is, you will be banned from your kiva. Do you understand?”

  Sand faced him for an instant longer, her breath harsh and salt threatening to sting her eyes. Then she turned away.

  “She was murdered, I think. Somebody killed her.” An unwanted note of pleading crept into her voice.

  “She was sick,” the old man replied, more softly.

  “Sick with no disease we have ever known. Diseases such as they can create in the lowlands.”

  “The lowlanders are all two-hearts,” he replied. “But they do not live here. They do not single out individual Hopi to torment.”

  “Some do,” she muttered, casting a meaningful glance at the room where her father was helping to dress her mother’s corpse in bridal finery.

  “Enough of this, I tell you,” Yuyahoeva snapped. “Come and help to carry your mother’s body.”

  Sand glared at him again, and then reluctantly nodded. The shadows were lengthening.

  Later, with her mother in the earth facing the sunrise, Sand became a Dragonfly and went to bury yet one more thing.

  She could make the change quickly now. When she first became a member of the Dragonfly Society—three years ago—it took half an hour of chanting, wearing the full garb and mask of the Dragonfly Kachina to unlock the inner space where her own Dragonfly slept. Now it took a mere moment; a breath of air, her mind sinking down, crystallizing, becoming simple and strong. When she mounted the Dragonfly itself, crouched behind the windshield at the fore of its long silver body, she was already a part of it. When the underjets popped and then roared to life, she saw the pathway in the air open before her like a rainbow.