by Greg Keyes
“Wonderful. You have a brain. No, Tuchvala—the woman back with your friend—that’s who you want. She bluffed you out.”
“What will she do to Teng?”
“Nothing, I think. Pick up my cousin.”
The man looked rebellious for an instant longer, and then he shrugged and knelt to lift Chavo cradled in his arms.
They found Tuchvala and the woman named Teng where they had left them; Teng’s eyes had finally closed. The man put down Chavo’s dead body and knelt next to her, his face distorted by concern or fear.
“She needs help,” he snarled.
“She’ll get it. Bring her along.”
Sand walked ahead of him to the hoverjet. The door keyed open easily, and Sand was glad that it had no more sophisticated protection devices. Traditional Hopi distrust of technology they could not themselves maintain was responsible, and though in the past she had occasion to curse this cultural trait, for a fugitive it made life much easier. Sand located the first aid kit easily too; it was stashed in a small cabinet; the Whipper ship had a roomier cockpit than her own Dragonfly. It also had a detention compartment with static restraints. She directed the man to place Teng in it.
“Go get Chavo, now,” she said. “I’ll be looking after your friend.”
The stranger left sullenly. Sand nodded at Tuchvala, who followed him at a safe distance with her gun.
Sand turned her attention to the woman’s wounds. They looked bad; on the other hand, the blood on them had already congealed into a hard, rubbery mass. The woman was clearly augmented biologically. She was unconscious because she had lost a great deal of blood. What she needed, then, was fluid. A quick check in the kit turned up a half-liter bag of memory plasma. Sand detached the tube attached to it and placed the flared nozzle against the strange woman’s arm; when it was positioned correctly over a vein, the clear plastic glowed a pale blue. Sand pressed the nozzle down and released it when she saw the skin pucker slightly. The tube was now sealed against her arm; inside, a sterile needle plunged into the thirsty vein and the clear fluid began to measure itself into her. Once in her body, the organisms suspended in the fluid would contact and imitate Teng’s own red blood cells. For good measure, Sand also placed a patch of strong painkiller under her arm, both for her comfort and to prevent her from struggling should she regain consciousness. This Teng seemed like a very dangerous woman.
The man returned with Chavo’s corpse. Sand had him lay it in the detention area as well, and then climb in himself.
As he slumped against the wall, Sand felt a stab of pity for the man, relative of her father’s or not.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as gently as she could manage.
“Alvar,” he said. “Alvar Kyashnyam.”
“Well, Alvar Kyashnyam, we’ll talk later, you and I. We’ll have your friend to help soon enough.”
He just nodded, staring hard at his feet. Sand sealed up the door and went back to the cockpit, where Tuchvala was waiting. The Wings of the Whipper was large enough that it had four seats, arranged side by side. Tuchvala was already strapped into one of the front ones, waiting for her.
“Tuchvala, that was very good. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
Tuchvala smiled, and unlike most of her expressions until this point, it seemed natural.
“There are plenty of things in me,” she answered. “I’m a very old being, though I admit with a limited area of expertise. But I was patterned after some Maker’s tohodanet, so there’s a lot there that sleeps. My problem since coming here has been trying to know when and how to act; it has paralyzed me. But I think now that I’m beginning to trust you to do the right thing, to lead me where I need to go.”
“Tuchvala,” Sand sighed, as she cut on the underjets and gently lifted the craft up on them, “I have no idea where you need to go.”
“We’ll find out together,”: Tuchvala replied, confidently. “This brain is doing strange things with my knowledge, shuffling it around, trying to fill in the gaps where I have lost parts of me. I’m not sure what it is filling these gaps with; there are things in me—understandings—which seem new. It’s exciting.”
They were clearing the canyon, now. Smoke was still trailing at the sky, and Sand was chagrined to see a petroleum-dark stain spreading on the wind, a banner kilometers long thrust into the ground right below her feet.
The radar confirmed her fears; over twenty flyers were converging on her location from the coast.
“Those are ships?” Tuchvala asked, pointing at the enhanced indicator.
“Yes. It doesn’t matter, though.”
“What do you mean? There doesn’t seem to be any place left for us to go.”
“Oh, but there is. Those flyers are all coming up from the coast. We can still go back the way we came, if we hurry.”
“Back to the pueblo? Why there?”
“We were running from the Whipper. We are no longer doing that. Now I’m going to do what I should have done to start with. Introduce you to the clan councils, to the village chief. I don’t know if this is what you mean by taking you where you need to go, but that’s what we’re doing, okay? We can’t fight or elude the Reed, the lowlanders, and the pueblos; that’s everybody on the damned planet. I’m a Hopi, and though I tend to forget it, that means I’m part of something bigger than myself. Like Chavo was; like Mother was.”
The afterjets nearly crushed her flat when she opened them up. The Whipper’s ship had a lot more thrust than her little seed-spreading vessel had.
Goodbye, my Dragonfly, she thought down to her murdered ship.
Nose following the line of the Sun, they raced west, retracing their path.
Chapter Seventeen
“There!” Hoku said, his face drawn into its most ferocious scowl. The satellite revealed a small vehicle moving through the mountains. Below, doppler measurements spooled out information regarding the velocity of the jet.
“That’s not her. That’s not a Dragonfly,” Homikniwa said. “That thing must be from the Reed ship. They’ve sent someone out to meet her.”
Hoku nodded grimly. “Enough of this. I will not allow the Reed to have her. It’s as simple as that.”
“Hoku,” Homikniwa whispered, urgently. “You can’t start a war with the Reed. Not without the Tech society’s approval. Your control isn’t that strong; not yet.”
“Strength, Homikniwa? You and I know what strength is. Strength is what I have right now, right at this moment. If I lose it, let it slip away, that will be on my head. But if I let the Reed have what they want—there will be no strength on the Fifth World. No. I have to act while I can. Come with me, Homikniwa, and don’t let anyone interfere with what I do.”
Kewa had been eyeing him calmly from across the Kiva, sitting near the cube terminals that, in a more traditional kiva, would have been a shrine. Only the shape of the kiva resonated with its sacred ancestor; it was still rectangular with a small antechamber. The original Sipapuni—a small hole in the floor representing the place where the Hopi had come up from the lower worlds—had been covered with an instrument console, quite deliberately. Hoku approved of that: the Tech Society knew how to keep superstition in its place. Instead of ceremony and silly songs, they stressed another very ancient use of the kiva: it was a place for people to meet and work.
Kewa approached Hoku as he and Homikniwa exited the kiva; he waved her away.
“This does not concern the alien, Kewa. I don’t need your advice.”
Kewa returned a skeptical look but said nothing. She nodded and hesitantly edged back towards her seat as the two men left the kiva behind.
Outside of the kiva and its faint stink of tradition, Hoku felt a little better. Waiting, watching, wondering—Hoku was not suited to such things.
I am a verb, not a noun, he thought. A verb, carrying each sentence to its conclusion through acti
on, through motion. Nouns were self-contained, complacent, with all of the meaning they would ever have bound up within themselves. Not so, the verb: how many things could be built, burnt, or eaten? And in how many ways? A verb by itself was anything but complacent: it demanded that it be implemented. Now he, Hoku, had made the most important decision in the history of the Fifth World, and he would, by the false gods of his people, implement that decision, without hesitation.
Hoku thought this as he and Homikniwa boarded a small elevator and took it down, a hundred feet into the crumbly ridge that rose above the surrounding coastal plain. The same ridge twisted out into the ocean as a series of small islands, but in its heart was Hoku’s secret place. Not a kiva, not a place of song and ceremony, life and rebirth. No, it was more like a tomb, because it held death and the promise of death.
The car opened and the two men stepped into a small room with a set of monitor cubes and a primitive panel of key-activated controls, insurance against the failure of the computer’s voice-recognition capabilities. Hoku shared a little of that in common with the pueblos, who refused to use technology they could not maintain. In such an extreme form, Hoku fervently disagreed with such a policy; he would use any technology available to him, whatever its source. However, his one concession to that ancient prejudice of his ancestors was to provide less complex back-ups when possible.
Taya, of course, was already seated in front of the panel. A thin, almost emaciated woman with stringy black and grey hair, she was probably close to sixty, yet still wore her hair in the old-style coils to show that she was unmarried. Hoku would never trust someone with children, here in the belly of Masaw, the death god.
“Hello, Taya. Things have developed as I foresaw yesterday. Are these systems ready?”
“Of course, Mother-Father,” she said, her voice dry as old cornhusks. Through that brittleness, Hoku could sense her eagerness. She stood taut and ready, fingers flexing and grasping into fists by her side. She had been a friend of the old woman—possibly her lover, too. What Hoku saw as his reluctant duty, Taya saw as the culmination of her life. He knew this when he chose her, just as he knew she had no descendants.
Taya busied herself at the console, chopping out a number of cryptic voice commands. When she was done, she rubbed her hands together and traced a peculiar motion with them. The wall in front of her came to life, projecting the satellite image on the wall. It encompassed perhaps a hundred kilometers square; a good chunk of the mountains, but more importantly, the grey strip of ocean in which the landing drum from the Reed ship was floating.
Taya whispered something to herself in a satisfied tone.
“What was that?” Hoku asked.
The old woman shook her head as if to clear it of reverie. She turned clear black eyes on him. “I said that I never thought I would live long enough to get a chance at this,” she replied. “At the Reed. Those fuckers. Coming up from every other world, we pushed the reed down behind us, so the two-hearts could not follow. But this Reed just stays. … We let it stay, Hoku. Time to push it down.”
Something prickled along Hoku’s spine; it might have been fear. This was the Reed. Her metaphor was powerful, so powerful that even Hoku could not dismiss it as pure superstition. He was pushing down the Reed, and with it all of the aid and technology they supplied. At best, now, the Fifth World was on its own. At worst, they would be conquered. Hoku had always known that it was his fate to do this; he had never doubted it for an instant.
But he had hoped to be much more prepared.
Ah, well, it was just one ship. Surely they could destroy one ship. And then. … Well, that was the gamble wasn’t it? Then they would have time to win over the alien craft, if they could be won. If Hoku didn’t begin his war now, no matter how unprepared he was—that chance, that one real chance—would fly back down the Reed to the distant stars. To Earth, perhaps.
Hoku frowned at the monitor cube and its aerial projection the Cornbeetle Mountains; a streak of smoke trailed over them, tagged by the spectrometer as the result of burning hydrocarbons.
“What the hell is that?” He snapped at Taya.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “The smoke obscures any better optical.”
“Homikniwa, dispatch two cadres to that spot, now. It could be the Reed flyer, downed.”
“Okay,” the small man replied. “Does that mean you will delay this attack?”
Hoku frowned into the screen for a moment more before replying.
“No. This could be a ruse; in fact, it probably is. What could have taken down a Reed reconnaissance craft? Not a Dragonfly, certainly. This is just to confuse us; by now they have this Sand and the alien, too.
Homikniwa took that in silently, and then—rather reluctantly, Hoku thought—turned to a console. He spoke into it briefly.
Taya interrupted Hoku’s thoughts once again.
“The Prophets are targeted,” she said. “The computer needs your okay.”
Hoku stared at the tiny spot that was the landing drum. He narrowed his eyes, let that point become the whole world. He was Sotuknung, creation and destruction. His word would bring a rain of fire. He almost trembled with the enormity of it.
“Lavaihoya,” he whispered, naming the computer by his secret name. “Lavaihoya, dispatch the Prophets.”
Time trembled around them, a wind between molecules and substance. Hoku watched the spot on the screen. How long would it take for the slender rods of steel to plunge, nose first, towards their immobile enemy, winnow this way and that like so many silvery fish? Too quickly for the drum to move, that was certain, even if they saw their demise coming. Seconds.
The computer spoke into the hush.
“Prophets refuse to disengage. Lavaihoya command overridden.”
“What?” Hoku and Taya shrieked in near unison.
“Cause of malfunction?” Taya gasped at the machine, visibly struggling for composure.
“Overridden,” the computer repeated.
“Fuck,” Hoku cursed. “How could I have not seen this?” He gripped the back of a chair with both hands and leaned forward heavily, suddenly feeling very old.
“I don’t understand,” Taya wailed. Hoku wanted to tell her to shut up, to let him think, but there was no point in that.
“The goddamn Reed built our satellites,” he hissed at her, “They must be able to monitor and override any of our commands. We are completely crippled.”
In silent confirmation of this, the screen itself suddenly went blank.
“And now we are blind,” Homikniwa added, and the three of them stood staring at the flat surface of the wall.
I am a verb, Hoku insisted to himself. No regrets: move on. If he became mired in dismay, the whole Fifth World would suffer. Hoku closed his eyes, felt the grit in them, wished for a warm bottle of halia. He imagined himself on the sea, naked beneath a metallic dawn, young and strong. Invincible. Homikniwa was there, ready to stand at his side through anything.
The he opened his eyes again. Homikniwa was still there, confident, awaiting Hoku’s words. He was in control. He, Hoku, was in control.
“What about the land based missiles?” Taya was asking, voice tinged with desperation. “They couldn’t control them.”
“No,” Hoku replied, “but they could probably shoot them down with lasers. Even if they didn’t, I wouldn’t use nuclear weapons here on the Fifth World. Those missiles were designed to attack starships, if need be—though starships closer than the moon. I won’t turn them back on ourselves.”
“What about biotics?”
Hoku shrugged. “We have some plagues. But I’m willing to bet that the Reed’s bioengineering capabilities are a century ahead of ours, at least in non-terraforming areas. Our own techs still don’t understand a few of the subtler rock-decaying bacteria, for instance. Anything we concoct, they can probably deal with and repay us in bett
er than kind.”
“Then what are you going to do?” Asked Homikniwa. “You have effectively declared war, even if you didn’t hurt them. Certainly they know by now that you attempted to attack them.”
“Yes,” Hoku agreed. “If they care to confirm it. It seems to me that these Reed people are scurrying rather softly, however; coming in from behind the sun, hiding behind the moon, landing on a windbrake instead of with thrusters. Perhaps they will simply choose to ignore our little faux pas.”
“For the moment, perhaps,” Homikniwa allowed. “But in the long term, they now know we are rebellious at heart.”
“I’m sure they know that anyway. There have already been two such revolts that I know of, one on Dunstan’s World and the other on Serengeti. Putting down rebellious sodbusters must be a high science with the Reed, and I’m sure they recognize the warning signs by now. But in this situation, there is an unknown quantity that makes them nervous.”
“The alien ships,” Taya said.
“Exactly. They’ve been here for twenty standard years. How can they know what little progress we have made in communicating with them? Lavaihoya, replicate that last map from memory.”
The wall came back to life, resurrecting the scene as it had been moments before. Now, however, it was static, and Hoku would have to remember that.
“Homikniwa, have some ships settle in there along the coasts, and equip them with the most powerful weapons we have that will not leave contaminating radiation. If anything comes out of the mountains—anything at all—they are to bring it down if they can, annihilate it if they cannot.”
Homikniwa nodded briskly, then busied himself with the task. Hoku sat in the chair and hunched over his fist, eyes on the false and enigmatic map. There were solutions, and he would find them.
Chapter Eighteen
I know their legends. I stood in their sky—their sky—and sifted the streams of words down the long, damaged riddle of my brain. Trying to sort the data into sensible meanings. It would not sort, would not be broken down, and yet even then, I felt that there was meaning there; it just happened to be irreducible.
