by Greg Keyes
Hoku shrugged. “True. I don’t care about that. I don’t know what to do at all, SandGreyGirl. I’ve schemed and chased and killed to get this woman, this Tuchvala.”
He turned towards the woman. She was beautiful. Had Pela been so beautiful? Hoku had never met her. He never would.
“Tuchvala. I am Hoku, from the lowlands. You have been the prize in a game I thought that I understood. I have to know now; was it worth it? Do these deaths mean anything? Can you save us?”
The woman looked back at him with—sadness? Concern? She spoke slowly, as if making absolutely certain he would understand.
“I came here to save you,” she said. “I don’t know that I can. I understand what you fear from the Reed—now—but I did not come here to save you from them. I came here to save you from myself, from my sisters.”
And as Hoku listened, she told her story, a story of stars and time, of age and madness. And Hoku believed; this was no mystical vision, no religious nonsense. This was metal and energy and fact. He had seen those ships, through the telescopes.
“The pueblos revere you as a Kachina,” he whispered, when she was done. “I have never admitted belief in them, never given credence to such superstition, save perhaps when I was very young. It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Whatever I call you, whatever you are named, you are the same thing. Tuchvala, all of you. My life has always been lived for this world, the Fifth World—believe that or don’t. Tell me what to do now, and we will do it.”
In the distance, there was a sound like wind. The flyers were coming at last.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“There,” the man said. The binary code had been sent to my sisters, and a string of signals answered. They were listening. From now on, they would listen to me speak in the language of human beings; it was apparent that this was the easiest course, since I could no longer send or comprehend in our own language, and human speech organs could not produce the sounds of the language of the Makers.
The others sat around me, more quietly than I ever knew human beings could be. Despite the throbbing pain in my leg, the tension of what I was about to attempt, I felt at ease. These people comforted me in a way I had never been comforted, despite my short time amongst them, despite the fact that some of them had been intent upon my capture or demise since I came to be on the Fifth World. Perhaps—I had to consider this—perhaps something of Pela’s tohodanet still lived in me, mixed with mine. In many of my dreams, I am a mother, Sand is my child. Perhaps Pela is the only reason I never became insane, though it is clear tom me that I should have. Whatever the reason, live or die, I had found a place I never imagined existed before.
“Sister,” I began.
The voice that came back to me was one of the many voices of the Hopi computer, and still, when I heard it, it became the voice of my otherself, my mother and my sister. I knew it in an instant.
“Hello,” it said. “So you have accomplished this much, at least.”
“Yes.”
“I recognize your voice,” my sister said. Of course she did. She had listened to me learn to talk. I hoped that it would make things easier.
“How is the situation up there?” I asked, cautiously.
“Our sisters have not changed, though Hatedotik (The name sounded like sputtering to me, but I understood who she meant) has become more agitated, because the outsystem ship has been conducting odd maneuvers. She is also aware of you, now. I could not keep the information from her, and she had more sentience left than I thought.”
“She can hear us now, of course,” I said.
“Of course, as can Odatatek, for what that may be worth. You remember that what we speak of here is an analogue of the three of us, not merely “my” voice.”
“I understand that. I am you, remember?”
“Of course. Tell us what you have learned.”
I drew a breath. Could I be truthful? Maybe. And maybe they would not know if I lied.
“As we suspected,” I told her, “these people are intelligent, like the Makers.”
“But not the Makers,” she answered.
“No, of course not. But they have worked hard, made this planet a home. They are worthy to keep it.”
“You have yet to convince me of that.”
“They understand etadotetak,” I told her, carefully attempting to render the hissing clicks of the Maker’s language.
“You mean etadotetak?” my sister corrected me.
“Yes.”
“They understand it. But do they possess it?”
“They are willing to kill and die that others might survive.”
“There is more to etadotetak than that.”
“True,” I said, “But how to quantify such a thing?”
I recognized my emotion as fear, now. I had indeed changed. How much of what I said would my sisters even understand?
“Listen,” I continued, urgently. “I am you. You know that. There is no cause to re-seed this planet. It is already seeded. And the Makers are dead, anyway. They. …”
“What? From what evidence do you draw such a ridiculous conclusion?” There was, of course, no human inflection in the voice, but I suddenly recognized Hatedotik’s impatience. My sisters had drawn more tightly together. They saw the starship as a threat, and they were re-integrating. Combining their madnesses.
“The three of you, listen to me! The Makers must be extinct. These people have colonized many of the other farms, and never have the Makers returned to dispute or claim them. Never, in all of the millennia. We formed these worlds so that the Makers could live upon them, didn’t we? Where are they?”
My sisters think with great speed. There was no pause, no chance for me to marshal other arguments.
“This is not important, unless these creatures themselves killed the Makers, which we consider a distinct possibility.”
I had not thought of that, and the prospect appalled me. The humans in the room were shaking their heads violently, no—but I knew them by now, knew that they would deny such a thing even if it were true. Or they might not know what had occurred; there were so many factions among them, so much done secretly, by only a few. …
“That doesn’t make sense,” I decided. “As evinced from what we have experienced, these people do not have the technical power to destroy the Makers. Their weapons are too crude, their means too limited.”
“The Makers have etadotetak,” my sister said. “Perhaps they allowed these creatures to populate some of their worlds.”
“Listen to yourself!” I cried, seizing upon that. “Perhaps that is so! And if the Makers made such a decision, how can we do likewise?”
“But I think your first guess is more probable,” she answered. “I think the Makers are dead.”
“Then this world should belong to these people. They are sufficiently similar to the Makers.”
“We weren’t built to decide that. We were built to maintain these worlds in a particular way. Not so the Makers could settle them, as you claim. That was a secondary consideration. We were built to do this because the Makers had etadotetak.”
She had said it; what I had been unable to voice, what I had forgotten when I made this human body. Who had remembered it? Hatedotik? Odadatek?
“Sisters, listen. We are very, very, old. Older than our brains and systems were really meant to function. You know that: that’s why I was created. Because in this body, in this brain, I could become whole, undamaged, sane. I am that, or very nearly so. Of all of us, I am the most like a Maker. That is the truth. I am the only one capable of comprehending etadotetak. Consider your last statement, sisters, because it is crucial. We were designed to modify planets so that they bore life. Not just so that the Makers could have habitable worlds, but so that there would be more life. They had etadotetak, not just for their race, but for the universe. They would not object to a
modification of that life to suit the needs of another race. That is all that has happened here. The Makers’ plan had been fulfilled.”
“The Creator!” Croaked Yuyahoeva, from behind me, before even my sisters could react. “Elder sisters, listen to me! I am Yuyahoeva of the Sand clan, mother-father of the pueblo of Tawanasavi! We know that this world was created, not for us, but just so that it would be! But the creator—and Masaw, the caretaker of this world—he indulged our existence here. You have heard this! You sister tells me that you have heard our songs, our legends, our faith. We understand that this world is not ours, but that we have been allowed to live upon it. The hero twins were given leave to change it, to make it suitable for us. But every moment of every year, we send our thanks to you and your Makers. You know this, if you have listened to us.” The old man panted off into silence, but the other Hopis in the room—Hoku included—sounded gentle agreement to the words he had spoken.
This time, there was a silence, and in that silence, my sisters could exchange a hundred billion thoughts. They had ceased to reckon with us, I knew that, though my friends thought my sisters were merely mulling over a response. They had heard all they were going to hear. Our fate, I thought, was already decided.
“We consider that a convincing argument,” my sister said, finally. “But the human ship in orbit has just fired energy weapons at us. Apparently, their sense of etadotetak is not as finely tuned as you claim.”
Teng was a goddess again. The little man had hurt her, shaken her. How could she have known that there was a rogue peacekeeper on this miserable planet? But now her torn lung had a temporary inflation, and a half-liter of medical miracles had her feeling fine. With the help of her comrades’ covering fire, she had brushed aside the defenses around the drum as if they were flies. Nothing had impeded the drum’s assent into space, and the single pitiful nuclear weapon the Fifth-Worlders sent climbing after her had been easy to stop. Now the drum was back with its mother, and Teng sat poised behind some of the deadliest weapons known to humanity.
“Strap in.” she snapped, over the intercom, and ten seconds later she kindled the drive and opened it to a full gravity. Coiled compensators whined to cope with the stress as she increased the feed, and she sagged back in her couch as her weight doubled. One pass, that was all she would get; she would not float about while the alien ships marshaled themselves; she would whip by them, one at a time, and when she was past they would be debris. After that, who gave a shit?
Already the first one was within weapons range. She clenched her teeth, happier than she had been in some time. She targeted and cut on the particle beam, launched a half-score of her smartest missiles. She watched the beams punch out at the alien ship, checked the spectrometer when nothing dramatic happened. Nothing; no sign of vaporized metal, nothing.
Three of the hydrogen bombs detonated, but too far from their target. Nothing.
“Fuck!” She howled. In moments, she would be past this one, and she hadn’t scratched it. What could withstand the beam? Maybe some kind of charged field. Lasers, then.
She flicked on the forward x-ray lasers. Was her enemy responding at all? Seconds ticked by.
The cube crackled and lit of its own accord. Someone with a code.
Alvar, of course. His face was wild with fear—she had always loved that expression on him, the first few times they fucked, when he thought she might kill or cripple him.
“Teng! Teng! What the fuck are you doing? Teng! They’ll destroy this world!”
“Fuck you, Alvar.” Her attention was on the ship. It was spinning on its axis, faster than she imagined might be possible for a craft of such mass. It was pointing its drive at her! And, she noticed, the X-Ray lasers were having an effect. They had boiled perhaps a millimeter of her opponent’s hull into space.
“Teng, calm down.” Alvar was desperately trying to calm himself, she knew. She spared him a glance.
“I am, calm, Alvar. I’m not human, remember?” But his face made her ache, like she hadn’t since she was a child. Ache! That, she would not have. She adjusted her course a bit and launched two more bombs. Of course, at this acceleration (climbing now past four gravities) she would get to the ship long before the weapons did. And there was one other weapon, one which would almost certainly be effective.
“Teng. I love you, Teng.”
A sudden calm settled over Teng Shu, a calm such as she had never known in her entire life. It was sweet, sweeter than anything. It was like swimming in the cool waters of the Kelbab River, but it soaked all the way through. She could see the open mouth of the alien drive, a hole that nearly eclipsed the ship itself. It would not quite make it; she would reach the monster before it was fully turned. Her lung had collapsed again under the pressure of acceleration, and even her heart was reaching its limit, as the blood’s uphill climb to her brain became too steep. But she was lucid, sharp. She saw everything.
“It’s okay, Alvar,” she managed to whisper, through her skinned-back teeth.
“Today is a good day to die.”
And then she saw the brightest light she had ever seen.
There should be a sound, Alvar thought. There should be trumpets, drums, an explosion.
There wasn’t though. The telescope showed them very clearly, at a speed they could comprehend, the visual of what happened; but it happened in utter silence. There was the Mixcoatl, his home for three years. It was aimed dead on at the alien ship, which was turning with incredible speed to meet the attack. Teng and her crew were less than a hundred kilometers away when a perfect white light stabbed out from the alien craft. Actually, “stabbed” was wrong, because it wasn’t there, and then it was, even on this slow rendering. The Mixcoatl was not caught full; it just brushed the drive, or whatever it was. But it was suddenly gone, replaced by a white-hot tongue of flame.
Jimmie was shaking his head. “She got close enough. Son-of-a-bitch. At those speeds. …”
The molten jet of plasma that had been the Mixcoatl skinned up the side of the alien ship, which suddenly light up like a red candle, dull save for that one brilliant streak. The drive stayed on.
“Jesus!” Jimmie leapt to the telescope, and nobody stopped him; they were staring at the image, the column of light and its dull, glowing apex. It didn’t seem to be moving, despite the drive.
“Where the fuck is that thing going?” Jimmie asked no one, but then he began giving the computer pointed commands. A new display appeared some kind of gravitic map that made no sense to Alvar at all.
It’s not going anywhere! Alvar thought, and then: Teng!
But of course the ship was moving. Its drive was on. The Hopi telescope must have had orders to track it, wherever it went, so it didn’t appear to be moving. If the ship was coming down, into the planet’s gravity well. … then it would be here very, very soon.
But after a long moment, Jimmie visibly relaxed.
“Fucking drive is barely on. And it’s headed out.”
“What if it explodes?”
Tuchvala was blinking at tears like an owl. She was crying for the ship. What about Teng? Why wasn’t he crying?
“No,” she said. “The drive can’t explode. It would just go out. She must be … that would have killed her, but the drive is still on. …”
“What will they do?” Sand asked, softly, taking Tuchvala’s arm. Alvar thought they looked more like sisters than ever.
“What will the other two do?”
Tuchvala shook her head. I don’t know. She buried her face against Sand’s shoulder.
Alvar looked back at the image, which the tech had just had re-set for a wider angle. The wreath of gas that had been the Mixcoatl was barely visible, far behind the dead, fleeing ship.
“I do love you, Teng,” he murmured.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“The ships are moving,” Jimmie whispered. “The other two are mo
ving.”
“No. Oh, no.” Tuchvala gasped, disengaging herself from Sand. Sand let her go reluctantly. She felt unreal, as if in a fever. It seemed that everything had happened so long ago, so far away. Her mother, Tuchvala, the Whipper—and most of all, the terrible, slow dream that was unfolding before them on the cube. The battle of Kachina.
Unreal.
Hoku pounced from his chair. “We have some weapons. We may yet …”
Yuyahoeva waved him down. “No. What can we do that the Reed ship did not? Tuchvala, speak to your sisters.”
Hoku looked ready to dispute the old man, but the gleam in his eye wavered. He slowly nodded his head.
“But they will kill us, now,” he said. No one disagreed.
Tuchvala stepped a little closer to the cube.
“Sister? Sister?” Her voice seemed small.
“Tektakdek. Tektakdek.” The voice was as uninflected as before.
“Tektakdek is me,” Tuchvala told them, eyes wide. “Sisters.”
“You sound different, Tektakdek, now that you are dead.” No irony, no anger, just syllables.
“Listen to me,” Tuchvala began, but the voice cut over her.
“Tektakdek, tell us what to do.”
Tuchvala was silent then, her face changing with each instant, as if she were experimenting with her muscles to find the ones that would properly show her feelings.
“You two are moving,” Tuchvala said at last. “What are you going to do?”
“I think. …” the voice didn’t trail off; it just stopped, and then started an instant later.
“Don’t we have a planet to seed?”
“No,” Tuchvala said. “The time for planting is long past.”
“Tektakdek. There were human people on that ship, weren’t there? The one that killed you?”
“There were.”
“That was etadotetak, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sister, it was. That was sacrifice, one of the six legs of etadotetak.”
“You did this also. The humans on the ship, and you.”
