Footsteps in the Sky

by Greg Keyes

  “What others?” Sand snapped, but even as she did so, she remembered the thing’s ship, howling through the atmosphere like ball lightning with thunder to match. She also recalled her mother’s story of the Tech Society people who had come so quickly to where her Kachina landed.

  “From the industrial settlements by the ocean,” Pela-thing said. “Several atmospheric jets started towards here when I was making my descent.”

  Sand bit her lip. She didn’t have much time, but her decision was already made. The Tech Society knew a lot more about this situation than anyone else, and they had been hiding that knowledge for twenty years. They wouldn’t do that unless there was power in that knowledge, in these things that came from space. And though she often sympathized with Tech Society aims, she wasn’t yet ready to let them have something powerful, not until she understood, really understood. And she would not give them her mother, or any facsimile thereof.

  There was one more, very selfish thing. Sand now knew, very broadly, why her mother had died. The coincidence was too great that the only mesa woman to have seen the earlier Kachina should die just before the second one landed. And any mesa trash—like herself—who ended up knowing too much for her own good was damn likely to be talking personally to Masaw themselves.

  Sand was sure she already qualified for that conversation.

  “Get in the Dragonfly,” she said, decision finally giving her control of her voice.

  “What?”

  “Those who are coming will kill you. We have no time for me to explain this. There are two seats in this craft. You sit in the back one.”

  “Why would they want to kill me?”

  “Come on!” Sand shrieked the last word, and the Pela-thing shrank back, almost like a little child, face pulled away in a parody of terror.

  “I didn’t like that,” it said, quietly.

  For a moment, Sand felt her heart catch and her eyes mist up. Her mother. … Shit, it was her mother, in a way.

  “I’m sorry,” Sand replied. “But you have to listen to me.”

  The woman nodded. “Show me where to sit.”

  Sand motioned towards the seat, which the woman tried to climb into clumsily. Sand had to guide her with a hand on her arm. The arm was warm, solid. Not a ghost, not a Kachina—and yet both, Sand began to believe. From the stars and her mother as well, spirit and ancestor made flesh.

  But this was the time to fly, not to get mystical. Sand jerked down the windshield and lit the jets, heard the woman behind her gasp as acceleration crushed them both back into their couches. She would fly low, mere meters off of the ground, that the horizon might swallow them more quickly. The Dragonfly took her with joy.

  For the second time I suffered the pain of acceleration. I, who fly with a barely tame star in my belly.

  I won’t dwell on this; my brethren cannot comprehend it and Makers and Human Beings understand it all too well. The word for “pain” has always been in my vocabulary—the Makers know fifty-nine varieties of pain. I have always assumed that the alarm and even fear I have felt when something was terribly wrong with some part of me is analogous. It is not. Pain is a watery thing that confuses rather than denotes its cause. It altered my consciousness in such a way that I will never be the same—or even similar—to the way I was. Corporeality was a sickness for me, full of mirage and confusion. Since the human structure began growing in my womb I had been altering it, guiding it, so that its brain would be a replica of my own. That was, of course, impossible. I would have had much more luck with a little brother, whose brain would sensibly lie in a clean column along its spine, so like the way I am built myself. It took much trial and error, much patience, to imprint my tohodanet, that frail essence of consciousness—on such an alien organ. I did not dare to disconnect the many glands which affect the brain, since I never really understood them. If only there had been a little more time—but I saw the burn of the starship coming, though it tried to hide behind the sun. I knew the time to act was come and perhaps even gone. Though I had learned a lot from the body itself, from living in it, and by being very clever I hid it all from my sisters. If I presented my evidence, and it was not enough, they would stop me from any further experimentation.

  I said I would not dwell on this, but glands are strange, stranger than the mere misfunctioning I am used to. They cause me to think in ways I despise. As we flew across the desert at what seemed a dangerously low altitude, they poked and prodded at my sanity, offered to relieve me of it.

  “Strap in,” she said, or at least I believe she said. Her language was the one I had studied for many turns of the planet around the sun, and still much of the process behind it was difficult to grasp. It was more like the language of the Makers than my own flitting thought and communication, but just barely so. Regardless, though I understood her words, the meaning of them together lacked sense.

  “That webbing,” she said, after I did not reply. “Pull it down across your chest and fasten it to those nodes on either side of you.”

  I did so, but I was puzzled. I said so.

  “In case we crash. The web will keep you from bouncing around in the cockpit.”

  “Why should we crash?” I inquired. “Surely this craft is built to fly efficiently.”

  As I said, their language is strange, and strangest are the many positions of the facial muscles, the meaning that they denote. But when she pulled her lips away from her teeth, I did not like it. Not at all.

  Chapter Six

  The Vilmir Foundation ship Mixcoatl peeked from behind the rugged face of the moon with disembodied eyes. Alvar and Teng scrunched over the terminal, intent on what it saw.

  “Do they know we’re here?” Alvar asked.

  Teng shrugged. “They haven’t responded to us in any way, whether you mean the colonists or the aliens.”

  Alvar nodded, wondering why he asked. Teng would alert him if something important were happening. He assumed.

  The image of the alien ship was the focus of Teng’s attention. It looked like a stylized dumbbell, without much in the way of detailed features. Either end of the dumbbell was pierced by a dark orifice. There were a number of other, much smaller apertures arranged around the rims of the flared sections as well, little black portholes.

  “Any guesses as to what we have here?” Alvar asked.

  Teng answered him dreamily, as if most of her mind were thinking of something else.

  “Only the obvious. One or both of those big holes indicates the drive. The little ones could be attitude jets, or gun ports, or both. I think the flared ends store fuel and I have some evidence that they may contain magnetic field generators.”

  “For …” Alvar began.

  “I don’t know. It could be a lot of things. Maybe they create a fusion bottle outside of the ship, though I’m not sure that can be done. I’m no engineer.”

  “Could it be a ramjet?”

  “I don’t see how. If you throw out a magnetic funnel big enough to collect sufficient interstellar hydrogen to fuel a ship, the resulting drag against those atoms is too great to allow you to build up much velocity.”

  “Maybe they have an improved design.”

  “Maybe,” she answered dubiously. “But if they could dispense with the inertia of hydrogen molecules, I don’t think they would need a fusion drive at all. But you may be right, in a way. They could use a ramscoop to slow down after turnaround and refuel in the bargain. Especially if they nudged close to some of the gas giants … hell, strike that. They probably came around the sun, like we did. They could really pack in the fuel there.”

  “If they intend to leave. If they don’t have some kind of drive we’ve never even thought of.”

  “True,” Teng deferred. “But for now we have to work from analogy. To guess at what potential threats we’re faced with.”

  “Go on.”

  “A ramsco
op generator is a formidable weapon, defensive or offensive. It could cripple our systems, disrupt any smart weapons and most dumb ones. It wouldn’t affect our laser, but it could sure as hell confuse our targeter. Could kill us, too.”

  “Oh, you just thought you’d throw that in, eh?” Alvar said. “It might kill us.”

  “It gets worse. If they use lasers to pump the fusion drive—and if the actual fusion takes place outside of the ship—then the lasers themselves have to be taken into account. And of course, the drive—a big nuclear blowtorch. All of that without even considering any specialized weapons systems we don’t know about.”

  “And the good news is, there are only three of them,” Alvar said, sarcastically.

  Teng pursed her lips. “Uh-huh.”

  “What about communication? Can we talk to them?”

  “We’ll try that eventually,” said Teng. “I don’t want to do that until we’ve separated the landing drum from the drive section. Until we’re on the planet, really. Then if they attack, we can work the weapons by remote, especially if the peacekeepers are killed.”

  “I didn’t think we were going to land yet.”

  “Plans have changed. I have some intelligence from the surface.”

  Alvar stepped back, scowling. “What? I thought you said no one had noticed us.”

  “I said the colonists weren’t behaving as if they had. But I have made contact with our agent. The one who sent the original communication twenty years ago.”

  “Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I just did.”

  “I mean earlier.”

  Teng smiled. “Need to know basis, my trusty steed.”

  “Do they know?” Alvar jerked his thumb at the bulkhead, vaguely indicating the awakened peacekeepers, wherever they were on the ship.

  “They will when I tell them. Are you jealous?”

  Alvar fumed silently, chewing and swallowing a number of unpleasant responses. He finally let the matter pass without further comment, though he vowed to remember—not out of pique, but because he should never forget that no matter how he felt about Teng—or she about him, for that matter—there would never be much trust between them.

  “When do we go down?” he asked, finally.

  “Don’t you want to know what the agent said?” Teng asked.

  Alvar stared, chagrined that his anger had overwhelmed his curiosity. And curiosity was a survival skill. “Okay. Please,” he muttered.

  “‘Barbell II”, over there just dropped a second probe down to the planet. Launched it several days ago, before we even got here.”

  “A second probe? Then they know we’re here.”

  “What?” Teng turned to stare at him dead on, her earlier vague look replaced by hawk-like intensity.

  “Where’s your natural paranoia, Teng? Two probes in twenty years? Shit yes they know we’re here. And they’re up to something.”

  Teng bit into her underlip and nodded.

  “I’m slipping.”

  “Maybe it’s the smell of testosterone,” Alvar suggested, as a footstep sifted in from the corridor behind them. He turned to see Jones Cortez enter the cabin. Jones was a big man, black as carbon, with glittering diamond eyes. Jones scared the hell out of Alvar, though no more so than Teng did. But Alvar knew Teng. Jones was an unknown quantity.

  “The landing drum is ready,” he remarked.

  Alvar marked that. Jones, at least, knew they were planning to land.

  “Fine,” Teng noted, avoiding Alvar’s troubled gaze. “You, Rafin, and Vraslav will go down with us. The rest will stay here, under Becka. Go see it done.”

  “Done,” said Jones, and padded off, catlike.

  Alvar took Teng roughly by the arm, something he would have never done in a saner moment.

  “What else aren’t you telling me?” He hissed.

  Teng looked down at his hand clutching her arm.

  “Move that,” she said, in the merest whisper. Alvar let go slowly, color draining from his face, but he repeated himself.

  “What else?”

  Teng’s face softened a fraction. She reached over and stroked his trembling hand.

  “There are two big factions on the planet. The traditionalists and the coastal people. Both are generally unfriendly towards the Vilmir Foundation, but the coast people play along with us to get their supplies every decade or two. The traditionals don’t even know that the ships are up here; only a few highly placed people among the progressives know. They snatched the last landing craft the aliens sent down, and they know about this one too. We have to get down there and beat them to it.”

  Alvar acknowledged that with a brief snap of his jaw. “Sounds simple enough.”

  “It’s not. First, we don’t know whether or not the progressives have managed to communicate with the aliens yet, although our agent has a good inside position and says they haven’t. Second. …

  “Yes?”

  “We’re already too late. It touched down hours ago.”

  “Shit.”

  “You bet,” Teng replied, sourly.

  Chapter Seven

  Hoku glanced around the crater floor in disgust.

  “Don’t anybody touch anything else,” he commanded dangerously. “Don’t even walk.”

  The rest of the party froze in place, acquiescent to his demand. Far away, a black horizon was sweeping towards them, bringing rain and probably tornadoes.

  “Check it out, Homikniwa.”

  The slender, dark man nodded fierce agreement and picked his way across the sand, studying the many marks upon it. Homikniwa had the way of the pueblos about him, in his gait, in his knowledge of the land, but no one dared to call him mesa trash or question his loyalty. Or his tracking skills.

  “There was a Dragonfly here, an old one from the pueblos. The underjets don’t burn evenly,” he indicated the blacker-than normal patch of sand.

  “A woman came in the Dragonfly, just one, but two got in when it left.” He looked up thoughtfully and added, “They were about the same size.”

  “There was a woman already here?” Hoku interjected.

  “I say women, but they could both be small men. Hard to say.”

  “Where did the other woman come from?”

  Kewa, the biologist, indicated a trail of footprints that came from the north. “Maybe she walked in?”

  The tracker shook his head. “No, two sets of tracks there, one going out one coming back. Same person, running like hell on the way out. See? she stepped on her own tracks on the way back. Anyway, this is the woman who came in the Dragonfly, not the mystery woman.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Pretty simple. The second woman came out of the lander. Something with a woman’s feet, anyway.”

  “Impossible!” Kewa snapped, oblivious to the fact that Hoku was opening his mouth to remark something similar. “Impossible that it was a human being.”

  “Nevertheless,” remarked Hoku, so dryly that it was clearly a reprimand, “The evidence speaks for itself. Even I can see that. What does your sniffer say?”

  “May I walk out there now?” asked Kewa, stiffly.

  “You may.”

  The biologist unhooked the flexible hose from the black box she wore on her belt. She walked around the clearing, eventually approached the lander itself. She hesitated at the opening, then seemed to steel herself and duck inside. She emerged, moments later, a look of profound dissonance on her face.

  “Human,” she muttered. “Human. And female, as Homikniwa says.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “Fuck if I know, Mother-Father.”

  Hoku frowned, as if plowing his brow with furrows could grow new ideas in his brain. He walked, slowly, over to the alien ship.

  It was very small inside. Ther
e was a sort of reclining chair that looked blown or cast from some foamy substance. There were a few plastic tubes extruded from the wall; one dripped what was undoubtedly water and the other was smeared with a sticky substance that smelled a little like honey. More or less identical to the earlier lander, the one back in the Tech Society labs. The central difference was the chair; the other had been nearly unrecognizable as such due to the alien’s queer shape. This one was suited to the contours of a human being.

  “What is going on here?” Hoku asked the ship.

  He stepped back out and found the team staring at him, lost. Expecting him to lead them. He must show no fear, no indecision.

  “Kachina,” he heard Kewa whisper, and that was too much.

  Hoku strode angrily forward, almost running. At the last instant, the blank look in Kewa’s eyes was washed with a film of panic, but by then Hoku had his whipper out. He tapped the thin, hard rod against her shoulder and she screamed, toppled over as her legs spasmed. Hoku regarded her writhing form for an instant, his breath harsh and rasping, before he turned to the others.

  “No one, No one is to say that. Are we superstitious mesa trash? No. There is an explanation for everything, and every explanation is in our hands if we handle the facts carefully enough. Do you hear me? I will not surround myself with mystics and fools!”

  They were watching him, each desperately trying not to watch Kewa thrashing on the crater floor. He held each of their gazes, let them drink from his strength, before he motioned to one of the warriors.

  “You may help her,” he said. The young woman stepped forward and bent down to the unfortunate biologist.

  Hoku paced out into the desert, motioning for Homikniwa to follow him. Fifty paces out they stopped. The approaching wall of rain and dust was nearer. Webs of lightning spun themselves and blew away, and a wet wind ran in front, bringing them the acrid, exciting scent of wet cinders.

  “The pueblos have her, whatever she is. A Dragonfly Society woman. Find out who.”

  “Why not just go take her?”

  “The time isn’t right. We can win a fight against the pueblos, but not easily, not quickly. We have our resources there. We will use them.”