by Greg Keyes
“Possessed,” said the image, frowning, “is a crude word. They know that the person in question is still who he always was—at least they do as adults. Children don’t understand that the Kachina are being impersonated by human beings. In any event, the adults believe that the person is a conduit for the spiritual presence of the real Kachina.”
“I know all of that, smartass. Shiau Shi: Teacher off.” The other Alvar vanished quietly. The real one stood up abruptly.
“What a load of crap. Goddamit! And I have to live with these savages?”
Nobody answered his rhetorical question. He would have screamed at them if they had.
He found Teng working out. She was sheathed in sweat, almost literally, since their deceleration had dropped to just below half a gravity and the salty water had more viscous cling. When he stepped up to the door, she was finishing a perplexing series of low punches and twisty-looking blocks. She concluded with a lunging punch into her makiwara, a flexible fiberwood board a meter and a half high, its thickness tapering from three centimeters at the base to less than half a centimeter at the top. It was about twenty centimeters wide. When her fist struck it, the board snapped back with a sound like something breaking, but the makiwara remained where it was. The knuckles of both of Teng’s hands were bloody, and that was quite a feat, considering the thick calluses on them.
She stepped away from the board and faced him, her feet a shoulder-width apart, hands limp at her side. Though she looked relaxed, Alvar knew that she was not, but could move in any direction, instantly.
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him, breathing a little harder than normal.
“I’m glad that wasn’t me,” he said, and meant it.
“I don’t have time for your shit, Alvar. Two weeks, and we come up against the first aliens anybody’s ever seen, and a bunch of colonial freaks thrown into the bargain. I have a lot to do, and it starts with me getting back in top form.”
“You are in top form,” Alvar sighed. “And even if you weren’t, it’s not likely you’ll be doing any hand-to-hand fighting. Most probably you’ll be launching missiles. Even more likely, this is all the fucking hallucination of some fucking stupid agent whose been out here way to long. And even if those ships were ever here, they may not be now. It’s been twenty years, Teng.”
Teng walked towards him in a peculiar, stiff-legged way. When she got reached him, she bowed low, bending at the waist, arms straight at her sides.
“Ah, battlemaster,” she said, slightly sing-song. “So good of you to impart your wisdom. But—” She straightened up, so that her eyes were straight in line with his. A few strands of her blacker-than-black hair had strayed from the confines of her queue. “But. I know what I am doing. Despite my … modifications … I require exercise and practice to keep my brain coordinated with my body. It doesn’t matter whether I have to use my body to fight or not. My mind won’t work fast enough if I get sloppy. Now. That said, I don’t expect to have to see your fucking face around me until we need to make our course changes. Clear?”
Her thick lips were trembling, and her normally ivory face had a rosy tint. But her eyes, almond shaped, amber … they were sharp, steady glass.
Alvar raised his hand up cautiously.
“Teng, I’m going to do this very slowly, because I don’t want you to kill me. Okay? Very slowly.”
He reached up with glacial slowness and touched her cheek with his thumb. He brushed her lips with it, stroked all of his fingers along her jaw. Her face did not change in expression. Alvar leaned forward, until their lips were just touching, and she did not move a millimeter. Her mouth was dry, hot, salty. He did not kiss her. Instead, he whispered, with the faintest sound his voice could command.
“I’m sorry, Teng,” he said. “I’m very, very sorry.”
An eon passed like that, their breath mingling. Then Teng withdrew her lips, tilting her chin down. She rested her forehead against his. Another eon passed before they even considered moving.
“Well there goes your theory, Sey’er Washington,” Teng called from the observatory station.
“How’s that?”
“A week or so ago you predicted that there weren’t any aliens. You were wrong, as usual.”
Alvar walked over to her side, carefully controlling each step. The engines were barely burning, now, and his weight was almost non-existent. Teng was pointing to a screen bearing a computer-enhanced composite built from various data. Optical, radar, gravitometric, neutrino. It revealed a planet, mostly blue, draped in a white lace lingerie of clouds. One small moon was indicated, perhaps a third the size of Luna. Besides this, there were two bright points in high orbit.
“Those are the ships,” she said. “Very hot. Fusion power of a very fine sort, much better than our own.”
“Ah. Their drives aren’t pointed this way, are they?”
Teng gave him her best “just shut up, stupid,” look and continued.
“The other one is in a polar orbit past the horizon, so we can’t see it. They are real, Alvar.”
Alvar let that sink in. He had been trying to avoid senseless speculation on the subject of non-human intelligence, but of course his mind had not cooperated. Nevertheless, despite long hours of supposition, he had never convinced himself that he, Alvar Washington, was going to meet aliens. There they were, though.
“How big, Teng?”
“Shiau Shi: increase enhancement and apparent size of the neutrino source in equatorial orbit.”
The computer complied, replacing the planetary view with a featureless cylinder, constricted in the middle so that it resembled an hourglass.
“That’s pretty speculative,” Teng told him. “There might be any number of details missing. It could even be two discreet sections bound together by struts. But it’s certainly more than a kilometer long.”
“And there are three. Let’s hope they aren’t warships.”
Teng nodded thoughtfully. “I can’t even guess what weaponry they might have, but they would have to be pretty impressive to match ours.”
“Come on, Teng. I’m no tactician, as you’ve pointed out before, but even I know how hastily this expedition was cobbled together. Our armaments—whatever they are—must be makeshift, as well. In any case, a three-to-one advantage would be tough no matter what we’re sporting. And if they have better fusion and Terraforming technology and than we do, what makes you think they don’t have better weapons?”
“I don’t think that. I assume they are better armed than we. Still, cobbled together or not, we could take any other three ships I can think of. We may not survive ourselves, but we would have a chance of taking them out.”
“That does not reassure me,” Alvar commented, dryly.
“I didn’t expect it too, sailor. Don’t worry; I’d rather not die myself. If they are warships, and if they are hostile, we’ll probably cut and run, leaving everything that explodes, fizzes, or zaps in our wake.”
“And if they’re not warships and not hostile?”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
“What about the natives? Can they mount any appreciable resistance?”
“Nope. There isn’t enough firepower on the planet to scratch us, even if they’ve been working at it for twenty years. Hopefully, too, they won’t know we’re coming. Our braking burn won’t have been visible except to the most sophisticated telescopes until we were well into the system, and since we had to come in in a wide parabola anyway—one wide enough to turn into an orbit without fuss or muss—I’ve been trying to keep us on the other side of the sun from them. We weren’t eclipsed the whole way, but damned near it, and it’s just not likely that they saw us then. Now we’ve broken our fall, just moving in for the kill, so again, we aren’t shining the flashlight in their face.”
“So much caution for a bunch of primitivist colonists?
”
Teng snorted. “No. I don’t want the aliens to know we’re coming either.”
“We can see them,” Alvar pointed out.
“We are looking, and know where to look,” she rejoined. “The worst case scenario is that the aliens have developed strong ties with the colonists and that they are both watching for us.”
“Once we’re in orbit, how can they miss?”
“You’d be surprised. Even the space around a planet is pretty big. I think we can hide behind that moon.”
Alvar nodded grimly.
“Ah well. ‘Today is a good day to die’.”
“What?” she turned away from the monitor, her heart shaped face bearing a puzzled expression.
Alvar smiled. “Right continent, wrong tribe. Some of the plains Indians of North America used to say that, not the Hopi. ‘Today is a good day to die’. They mostly did, too, poor fuckers. Did you know that there was a whole movement that believed they were immune to bullets? The Ghost Dancers.”
Teng had a fierce little grin on her face. “I like that. That’s beautiful.”
Alvar glanced back at the speculative ship and shrugged. They sat in silence for awhile.
Teng broke it. “We go to free-fall soon, she whispered, reaching over to take his hand.
“We’d better make the best of it then,” Alvar answered, echoing her own words of three years ago. He reached with his other hand to massage her neck. The muscles were as hard as steel cords.
She nodded, and they left the station together.
Chapter Three
Morning opened up, a door into azure, gilt along its eastern frame. Sand let her voice sag back down into her chest, and her head went light as she rose stiffly from the rock she was sitting on. A wind stirred little dust devils across the vast flat that seemed to whirl out from around her, as if she stood in the center of a spinning disk that grew ever greater in circumference from the force of its rotation. Leaving her, smaller and smaller, in the middle. Her strength to defy was gone, but a strange flat calm had replaced it, a feeling of profound endurance, and for this reason, despite the deep chill in the air, she met the sun’s gaze as naked as that first sun her mother had held her up to twenty years ago. But enough was enough, and when a few wet-looking clouds appeared in the middle distance, Sand slipped back into her cotton underclothes and densedren jumper. She sat back down and starting putting her hair up in braids, blinking her eyes against the gritty tickle of a night without sleep. Unbroken by dreams, the images of the last two days raced in her mind, fast runners who finished neck-and-neck in her present and then rushed back to begin again. The news over the radio, as she flew above the world streaming a thousand kilos of fire clover seed in her wake. Her mother’s quiet, gaunt face, so unlike its living twin. The deep pit, Pela curled down there like an infant, cotton-clouded face nodding eastward. …
Sand thought that she should sleep, now. But first, she would look at her mother’s book, see what words had been hidden out here for her to find. As she picked it up, Thunder cracked in the sky, cloth ripping far away.
Father Sun had given the book new life, even as he fed heat to the greedy black rocks beneath her. The night’s cold was scrambling away from those rocks, seeking a home in the sky. It brushed the few, small clouds like fingers along a man’s naked flank, and they trembled, just as lightly. Sand keyed the book on with the ring.
“My daughter. …”
Sand frowned and looked up. The thunder had not ceased; its distant crackle was sustaining, building. And there, high against the blue, was the lightning. Lightning like an arrow, straight, slim, bright. She had seen such lightning, once, when she was at school in the lowlands, and the Tech Society had sent a Kachina into polar orbit on a hydrogen torch.
And yet, this torch was coming down.
Mother?
Sand was immediately ashamed of the thought. Even if what everyone believed was true, her mother would be in the underworld with Masaw for four days before she went into the sky. No, this was something else. A starship from the Reed? They came every few decades, bringing luxuries and farm equipment. But a starship would land out near the sea, where fuel was plentiful. What then?
But she already knew. Sand had never believed her mother to be crazy. If her “Kachina” had been some sort of deluded mystical experience, she would have told everyone, not just her daughter. But she had kept the secret close, very close. Pela had believed that the thing that wounded her was from the stars, from the race that began transforming the Fifth World millennia ago. That she saw in them the distant Kachina of her people was the product of her own interpretation. Sand herself had always believed in the ancient aliens. Who did not? The evidence was too clear. They had touched her mother, and now they were returning.
And there were no coincidences under the roof of the Fifth World. Somehow, that streak in the sky had caused her mother’s death.
Sand did not bother to pack up the sweat lodge. She left it there for the wind to have. She raced across the crunching stones, stopped only long enough to grab her boots. She popped open the windshield of the Dragonfly and tossed them into the back seat, bounded into the cockpit. She thumbed on the pre-starter and waited impatiently while the jacket around the engines warmed itself and began circulating the alcohol that was both fuel and coolant. She closed her eyes, willing the Dragonfly to settle into her, but for the first time in many months, it did not come instantly. With an angry snarl, she reached into the compartment below her seat and drew out the mask. Sand held it up for a moment, observed the square simplicity of it, the delicate wings etched below the semi-circular ears, the multifaceted eyes. Then she put it on.
For just an instant, she felt claustrophobic, trapped in the smoky smell of her own hair. Then the eyes of the mask seemed to open, and her human concerns thinned away.
Dragonfly, I am. Gift of the ancients, keeper of waters, bright wings in the sky.
Sand kicked on the underjets, heard a single ping of protest from the rear of the vehicle, and then the flat earth rushed away from her. The Dragonfly rocked and nearly rolled over before she stabilized it. She would not use the gyros, not now. That was for lowlanders, for the fearful. For flying when bored and half-asleep. She was none of those, and she would suffer no interference from such mechanisms. Sand lit the afterjets and tore a hole in the air. She put out her wings and pointed her nose at the dwindling light in the distance, now almost on the horizon.
Dragonfly ate the kilometers in great gulps, but the scenery beneath her hardly changed. This upland was immense, one of the largest on the planet. Once it had been a welling of molten stone puddled thickly like blood and then congealing that way, a scab on the planet’s skin four hundred kilometers in diameter. Younger volcanoes had burrowed up through it since, leaving the columns of basalt like those at her mother’s place: several such grew and retreated in her heightened vision. Acidic rains had etched it, here and there, worm tracks that sought their own, melded into serpents, carried water that tasted of iron down to the lowlands.
The fiery streak was gone, replaced by a tiny blue hemisphere. Sand could see it wobble a little in the mid-altitude winds. She could see, too, where it was going to come to earth.
Thumbprint of the Kachina, they called it, but Sand had another name for the immense crater. Mother’s Prayer.
Invisible fingers twisted the Dragonfly about, and Sand’s gut clenched at an empty, falling feeling. The sky flashed over her crazily, and then the earth, which no longer seemed to know its proper place. Sand grinned fiercely behind her mask and wagged the stick forward and then to the side. The world learned her lesson, became down with a vengeance, and the Dragonfly hurtled gleefully to pierce the dark plain with her silvery nose.
Sand yanked the stick back, and the semi-flexible wings popped as they caught the crest of a thermal. Sand opened the underjets for good measure. The plain was an impos
sibly swift river of stone ten meters below her when the Dragonfly began to climb again. Adrenaline sang in her blood, a tune of joy and fear.
This was why she was a member of the Dragonfly Society. This was why the threat of being cut off from her kiva was a thing she feared.
A single pass over Kachina’s Thumbprint showed her the settled cloth hemisphere and the steel spore it had born softly to earth. Sand cut the afterjets, let the Dragonfly drop in a lazy spiral. Five meters from the ground she pulled up the nose, stalled out, and cut on the underjets. Dragonfly settled down, an insect in an immense bowl. Slowly, Sand took off her mask and confronted the mystery with her own naked face.
The “Kachina” was much as her mother had described it. A burnt steel cylinder four meters tall, nearly that in diameter. It squatted on four braced legs. A bundle of cables emerged from some unseen place on its top, and they trailed away to the parachute. Squinting, she noticed the bottom seemed clean and smooth, though of course the angle allowed her only a narrow glimpse of it. Did it have engines? If it did, they must be very small. That spear of light in the sky must have been a rocket of some sort. Why hadn’t the Kachina landed on it?
Sand had a sudden awful thought. Perhaps its engines were nuclear. Then the Kachina might not have landed on them for fear of contaminating its touchdown point. But perhaps it was still too hot for human beings. …
The Dragonfly had an adequate radiation counter. Sand voice-activated it and was rewarded with a negative reading. She shrugged. Perhaps it had jettisoned its engine before deploying the parachute, never intending to return to the sky.
Lifting up the windshield, she stepped cautiously out onto the loose sand of the crater floor, dust blasted from solid stone thousands of years before. Most of the soil in the lowlands owed its origins to this crater and its sisters across the planet.
The spirit-like detachment of the Dragonfly was gone. Sand stood for endless moments, breathing in short gulps, just looking at the thing. It was nothing spectacular, really. Nothing about its outward appearance could not have been the result of Tech Society engineering. And yet her mother had been certain—absolutely certain—that no human being had made the one she had seen. Sand felt that same terrible certainty. This little craft was from very, very far away. Farther than old Earth, even, and that was far indeed.