Footsteps in the Sky

by Greg Keyes

  “What’s that?”

  “It would take a while to explain. It’s one of those concepts I was telling you about. But it is etadotetak that will save your people, if anything does.”

  Sand set the tumbler down, paced across the room.

  “Tuchvala, I need some time to think about this. Not much time. Meanwhile—stay in this room. Don’t leave and don’t open the door.”

  Tuchvala began to respond, but at that moment, the cube pinged and began to glow cedar-branch green.

  “Lay on the floor, Tuchvala. Now.”

  The woman did so, though with some hesitation. Sand clucked twice, her mother’s old signal for contact.

  Sand gritted her teeth in distaste as her father’s face appeared in the cube. His mostly-grey hair was disheveled, as if he had just awakened, his watery eyes bloodshot.

  “Sand. Sand, how are you doing?” The question was as strained as the man’s smile, clearly a rushed attempt at pleasantries.

  “I’m fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Ah … Sand, I know you don’t care much for me. I can’t really blame you, considering. I don’t want to beg you, but without Pela, you’re all I have left. Sand, I need you. And I need to talk to you.”

  Sand sighed, felt ready tears, but they did not come. Her power over the newly named Tuchvala was power over her own emotions, too, and she was in control. Had to be, or madness would slip up on her like a witch in the night.

  “We’ll talk, father. But not now.”

  “No! Sand, we have to talk now. This is important, really important. I’m coming over there. I just wanted to make sure you were back.”

  That wouldn’t do. “No. I don’t want you over here right now. I can’t stand it. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  “Come here then.”

  Sand heaved a vast sigh, and shot her father an ambiguous expression of rebellion and acquiescence.

  “I’m on my way. Just stay there.”

  “Hurry, Sand. This is important.”

  “Right.”

  The cube lost its cyan glow, left Sand chewing her lip.

  “Shit,” she remarked, turning to face Tuchvala. She panicked briefly until she remembered to look down. Tuchvala was lying there earnestly, face pressed flat against the stone as if the planet were under acceleration.

  “Tuchvala, you can get up now.”

  “Good,” Tuchvala said. She levered up to her knees and then rose rather gracefully. Despite her new-found confidence, Sand felt a tiny pang as she remembered Pela rising so, after morning exercises. The same unusual grace in a body that seemed unsuited for it. But this was Tuchvala, not her mother.

  “Tuchvala, I have to go out and meet someone. Right now, I don’t think anyone else should know of your existence. Don’t forget that you resemble a woman who died only yesterday. People will think that odd, to say the least. I’m going to code the door shut with the strongest commands I can, so you won’t be able to leave even if you want, and no one short of a sanctified council member will be able to enter without my permission. You saw me work the water tap, I assume, and I’ll bring us something to eat on the way back. Look in the pantry if you get hungry before that; there should be some bread in it.”

  Tuchvala nodded her head. She learned fast. She smiled, and that was not nearly as convincing.

  “What about elimination? Shitting, I think you call it?”

  Even under the circumstances, Sand felt a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. She crossed over to the kitchen and pressed a small turtle painted on the wall there. The narrow door sighed open. Sand pushed wider to reveal a small lavatory.

  “You sit on that,” she said, indicating the toilet. “When you’re done, pull the ribbon that dangles down in front. The toilet will—ah,—clean you. When it chimes, you can get up.”

  “That’s pretty complicated for simple elimination,” Tuchvala observed.

  Sand agreed and closed the door.

  “I’ll be back soon, she said. “Don’t answer the door, and if the cube pings or comes on, hide in the bathroom.”

  “The what?”

  “The room I just showed you,” Sand clarified.

  “Okay.”

  Sand nodded and went to the front door. She voiced her commands low, hoping that Tuchvala could not hear, and when it opened, she went on out, allowing it to close behind her. She checked it to make sure it was secure.

  Tawa, the sun, was looking at her from the west, and she realized her battle for sanity must have lasted longer than she thought. The crisp air and the warm bronze light made that contest seem far away, and an unaccountable happiness struggled to express itself within her. All of her life had seemed like Qoiyangyesva, the moment before creation, the faint grey before real light flooded the heavens with morning. The morning of her mother’s death, it had seemed that the real light would never come, that her life would never truly begin. But now a motion was expressing itself across the Fifth World, and she sensed that it would not soon end, but would gather force. The face of the Fifth World was changing, and she would be in the whirling nadir of the storm that changed it. It might kill her, it might change her. That was okay, as long as she was there.

  Chapter Nine

  Sand picked her way through the chaotic jumble of houses, winding through the narrow spaces between them, walking across the flat roofs of first-story buildings. Rooms and houses in the pueblo were added by accretion when they were needed, rarely from any well-considered­ plan. Once Sand had believed this to be sloppy, and when she went to school on the coast, she was impressed by the well-ordered streets that separated the modern, concrete structures. Homesickness had finally changed her mind, though, and when she returned it was to welcome the unstructured nature of her native city.

  She passed two little boys trying unsuccessfully to keep a home-made shuttle-cock in the air with their palms. They could exchange it between themselves for perhaps three blows before their youthful lack of coordination allowed the synthetic-feather and cork construction to fall onto the roof of their house. This didn’t seem to upset them, however; they picked the shuttle-cock up try after try. Sand flashed them a brief smile and they waved before starting their game again. Six rooftops away, her cousin Kayahongva waved from where he sat at his loom, having moved it outside to enjoy the sun.

  Soon she left the houses of her own immediate clan, and the pueblo took on a different texture. Sand had never been able to pinpoint precisely what it was that differed from one clan area to another. It couldn’t be the actual houses, all either built square from native stone or blown from concrete. The strings of red pepper, corn, and winter squash that hung drying on the rooftops were no different, and the smells of mingled tobacco, yeast from baking bread, and subtle human odors were the same in this or any pueblo. Perhaps it was just a different ordering of space, or her own knowledge of the clans and her relationship to the people in them. Where she walked now, men would see her as a potential lover or even a wife. Mothers would see her in terms of wealth—what could she provide their little boys with if she married them?

  To Sand, this was something of a nuisance. Sex was fun enough, if the man weren’t taking himself too seriously, but that was rare, and most had ulterior motives; her membership in the Dragonfly Society made her a good catch, and her lineage was pretty well connected. More often than not, Sand preferred woman both as friends and as occasional sexual partners. They were less cloying and possessive of her than men were—they couldn’t marry her and share her property—and they tended to be better at the kinds of things which gave her the most pleasure.

  Sand did not intend to marry, that was certain. What was hers was hers, and she would not share it with some man who was, as likely as not, apt to turn into a complete bastard in short order.

  She walked on past the last of the real clan houses and into the jumbled hodgepodge of si
ngle buildings that marked the western edge of the mesa. The stone here was broken and uneven, scarcely fit to build good houses on. For that reason, the houses there tended to be the ugliest sort of concrete blobs. Those who lived in them were as unfit for the rest of the pueblo as their homes. Kahopi lived there: Castoffs from the clans, foreigners from the coast, criminals, and of course, her father, Red Jimmie Tuvenga.

  He was sitting outside, waiting for her, smoking a cornhusk cigarette. When he saw her coming, he stood up from his stone stool, dropped the cigarette stub and squashed it with his foot. A thin blue wisp nevertheless continued to rise from the smudge, distinguishing it slightly from the thousand-or-so similar stains that dirtied the stone near Jimmie’s door. He smiled at her wanly, moved as if to hug her when she came near, but dropped his arms with an embarrassed flush when she stepped back.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Thank, you Sand. Thanks for coming.”

  “What was so important?”

  “Walk with me a little ways.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with talking right here.”

  “There is though. You have to believe me.”

  Now that she was closer, she could smell his sour stink, accompanied by the sharp odor of alcohol. This was no surprise; she had seen him drink fuel before, when more palatable stuff wasn’t available. Still, he claimed to have stopped drinking a year or so before. Pela, to Sand’s chagrin, had even been considering letting him move back in with them. Sand knew that her mother had begun sleeping with him again. What Pela saw in this wretch, despite all he had done, had never made sense to Sand in the slightest.

  “You’re drunk,” she growled.

  “Not drunk, just drinking. I stopped drinking for Pela, remember? Now. …”

  Silly drunk tears started from his eyes, and Sand suddenly wanted more than anything to leave this man, to get away from him. Her earlier elation had become a source of irritation—a bliss denied her by her present circumstances.

  “What did you want?” she repeated, firmly.

  “Walk,” he snuffled, and motioned for her to follow.

  They moved silently, out past the last of the outcast houses, down the broken frets of stone that led to the edge of the mesa. Sand found herself hoping that they would go very near, near enough to for her father to reel drunkenly out into space and put a man-shaped dent in the corn crop three hundred meters below. Yet her father’s steps seemed very sure, surer even than her own.

  “I wanted to get away from the house,” he muttered after awhile. “People can hear us there.”

  “What people?”

  “Just people,” he said. “Dangerous people.”

  A thin prickle of unease raced up Sand’s spine. What was this about? Jimmie occupied a strange position in the pueblos. He was originally from the coast, and thus clanless. He had renounced his old ties with the Tech Society twenty years before, when he married Pela and brought his much-needed skills to the mesas. Whatever Sand might think of her father, he was an adept mechanical designer. The traditionals had no real dislike of technology—as long as it was technology that they themselves could build and maintain. They would not become dependent on trade with the coast—and absolutely had no use for trade with offworlders. They saw the lowland reliance on such imported kahopi technology as a dangerous addiction. Red Jimmie had a skill for finding ways to simplify design so that machines like the Dragonfly—though less complex and “smart” than lowland vehicles—could nevertheless be built and maintained solely by Pueblo technology and hands. Over the years, this had made him influential in the council, even though he had no real clan outside of his marriage to Pela. He was a brilliant man, and people listened to him. Of course, this also meant he had enemies, including Sand herself, who spoke against him at each opportunity. So who did her father fear, right now?

  “You know,” Jimmie began, almost to himself, “I always wanted to be good for Pela. I always wanted to care for her like a husband should.”

  “You had a funny way of doing that.”

  Something flared in Jimmie’s eyes, something that Sand had never seen before. She had witnessed him raging mad, and she was all-too familiar with his more characteristic apologetic whining. Now she saw something unnamable, but hard—harder than she thought anything in her father’s soft body could be.

  “You don’t know me, girl. You don’t know much at all. I did the best I could, and your mother knew that. She was a person of great understanding—unlike her daughter.”

  “Well, we both know where my flawed genes came from,” Sand spat at him hotly.

  Jimmie snapped his teeth shut over some response and rolled his head loosely on his neck. He peered up at the gradually dimming sky, and fresh tears caught the darkness of it.

  “Sand, I’m trying to save your life. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, save my life?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong, old man. You have just ten seconds to tell me what’s going on.”

  Jimmie sat silently, hugging himself. Sand snorted in disgust.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  She had only gone a few steps when he called after her.

  “Wait,” he said, and it sounded like a command rather than a request. Sand turned angrily. Her father held a sinister-looking tube that Sand recognized as a wasp—the weapons lowland policemen used to subdue criminals.

  “What is this?” she demanded, more surprised than afraid.

  “Just sit down. In a few minutes, it’ll be over, and then we can figure out how to save your life. I really want to, you see.”

  “Then put down that pistol.”

  “This won’t kill you, but it will hurt very badly. I want to spare you that, too, but I’d rather see you hurt than dead. Now. Sit. Down.”

  Sand fought back a surge of panic and anger. She had no doubt that this involved Tuchvala; she did not believe in coincidence. She carefully squatted on the rotten sandstone.

  “Can’t you tell me what’s going on, father?”

  The gun barrel didn’t waver. Sand wondered what its range was. Wasps were like whipper sticks; they affected the pain center of the brain directly. Unlike whipper sticks, they could do this at a distance. But that distance couldn’t be too great.

  Jimmie pursed his lips. “I think you know. Who else but you would have been out over the plateau in a Dragonfly last night? I assume your mother must have somehow left you a message. I tried my best to clear anything like that from the information systems. Pela doomed herself, but she didn’t have to take you with her.”

  Sand surged to her feet. “So she was murdered. And you knew. Who did it, you bastard? Who killed my mother?”

  “Sand, you don’t want to know these things. You can’t know, not now. The less you know, the greater your chance of survival, do you understand? It’s going to be very hard keeping you alive as it is, but I’m determined to do my best. In a few months, a year … it won’t matter anymore. I have to take care of you until then.”

  “Like you took care of mom? Great. No thanks. I’m a big girl, Jimmie.”

  “So was Pela. I’m not losing you too.”

  “You never had me. And what does he want?”

  Remarkably, he looked, jerked the gun barrel around too, and Sand was instantly in motion. Her slim legs launched her up the stone shelves, and she hit the higher ground running. She heard a grunted exclamation behind her, took three, maybe four more steps before her skin, teeth, her very bones turned into magma, searing, awful pain that tore an inhuman scream from her lips. The pain stopped in the same instant as the scream, and though she faltered, she didn’t stop running. Vaguely she comprehended that this shouldn’t be so: she had seen a man shot with a Wasp, and he had folded up, twitching, couldn’t talk for an hour.
She was either nearly out of range or the pistol wasn’t very well charged. Or both. The adrenaline left in the wake of the pain was like an underjet, bearing her up over the stone like a Dragonfly. Behind her she heard her father’s anguished voice cry her name, but then she was too far ahead, her blood beating any sound out of her head like a drum in a small kiva. She ran towards home, hoping desperately that she wasn’t too late.

  Sand had no plan, was not even sure what the danger was. The shadow of pain still hung in her brain, and the confused but clear feeling of impending doom combined with it to cloud her reason. Her senses, too, because she was halfway back home before she realized that the pueblo was dead. The rooftop doors, normally open until nearly sundown, were closed and battened. Wash waved untended in the wind. Twice, she heard children screaming beneath her feet, so hysterical that their high-pitched voices cut through the roofs of the houses. With that shuddering realization came another perception, at the edge of hearing, barely overriding the cyclone of blood roaring in her head.

  Yu! Hoo! Yu! Yu!

  She was a little girl again, and she had been bad. The Whipper was coming for her, across the rooftops, across the mesa. He was coming through the air itself, the most feared of all Kachina. No wonder the children were screaming.

  Sand had been through too much for sheer panic to overwhelm her, but it crouched in her, a mantis ready to strike its claws into her forebrain. It took only instants to understand that the Whipper was moving, not towards her, but towards her own destination. Towards Tuchvala, of course.

  The Whipper; she imagined she could hear the rattles on his legs, the rasp of air behind his black-bearded mask, his dry chuckle of appreciation at terror. He would not be moving quickly. Who would run from the Whipper? Who could?