Footsteps in the Sky

by Greg Keyes

  Homikniwa looked off into the coming maelstrom.

  “Perhaps the pueblos have their resources amongst us. Perhaps they have used them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The mesas are easily as far from here as the coast. How did a Dragonfly happen to be right here, at the proper time? The seeding projects are hundreds of kilometers away.”

  “They could not have known.”

  “But they did.” The tracker’s black eyes were narrow behind lids slitted against the wind, his beak of a nose already tasting the rain. “Mother-Father, you always underestimate the Old People. You don’t understand them.”

  “Are you confessing to something, my friend?”

  “You know better than that. My loyalties don’t lie with the pueblos or with the coast. They lie with you.”

  “I am the coast.”

  “Maybe.”

  Hoku clenched his hands into fists, a paroxysm of frustration threatening his control. In the end, he clapped Homikniwa on the shoulder.

  “Let’s get away from here,” he said, wearily. “We have things to do.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sand and the ghost of her mother settled onto the blackened stone with the grace of a feather. Around them, the pueblo swept out and away, cubic shapes bunched and crowded onto the natural crescent of the mesa-top. A few heads turned to look at them—people drying laundry on the roofs of their houses or shelling corn into five-liter buckets or doing any of a thousand small chores that consumed the lives of the People. The glances were brief and unexcited: people were used to the strange comings and goings of the Dragonfly Kachina and thus paid Sand and her companion little mind. Sand popped the windshield, and the two of them stepped out onto the landing pad—a natural formation, just a raised part of the same flat stone table that half of the pueblo was built upon, and that in turn one of many shelves of striated rock that made up the structure of the mesas.

  Of course the Hopi had chosen to live on the mesas, rather than in the fertile, rich lands along the coast. After more than a century, the pueblos were still at the edge of the terraformed world, though trees now grew even on the plateau. But on the coasts and in the lower river valley, there were forests, wetlands that chirped and buzzed with insect life, seas full of plankton, shrimp, and crabs. People lived down there, but they were not the traditional Hopitu-Shinumu.

  The Old People said the mesas had been chosen and modified by the Hero Twins as the dwellings for the Hopi. Otherwise, in a world that had only known liquid water for a few hundred millennia, how could there be cliffs of eroded sandstone? Cliffs that so resembled their old homes in the Fourth World. Sand knew better; that the layers reflected an ancient sea of vast sand dunes, deposited and shifted over millions of years by the brief, corrosive winds of a world without water or even free oxygen. The dunes, layered one upon the other, had become stone and then cracked here and there, when the restless earth beneath them moved, perhaps tired of their weight. New sandstorms armed with a billion corundum teeth channeled into those cracks, and then, finally, the rains came. They lasted for centuries. It was rain of a particularly acidic nature, since the atmosphere was relieving itself of the strata of sulfuric clouds that laced it. The wind-worn channels were exploited by the new water-spirits and widened into vast but shallow canyons. Further south, the shape of the rift-valley the dunes had originally filled was now virtually free of its sedimentary coat, for the stone was always crumbly and brittle. In the uplands, however, rain now seldom came, and for whatever reason, the stone here was better cemented, less susceptible to the ravages of a kinder water.

  At least, that was what the Tech Society people said. Sand had wondered about it more than once. Could a single flood, however great—even one that lasted for a hundred years—have wrought such changes on the land?

  Whatever, the stone was solid beneath her feet, and beneath those of the ghost who came behind her, wearing Sand’s own Kachina mask. The mesa cared little about her opinion of its origins.

  “Come on,” Sand hissed, and the ghost complied. Their feet rasped across the small, windswept court, past potted cacti, juniper, the sharp resin scent of sage. Her mother’s apartment door was closed but not locked. Sand ushered the ghost inside, followed, closed the door and locked it with a double code.

  “You can take off the mask now,” she said, secretly wishing it could stay on. How would this thing react to seeing her mother’s house? Sand’s house now.

  The house was immaculate. Pela had been a neat person, and her end had come quickly enough that the house hadn’t become disordered. Then, too, Sand’s cousins and aunts may have been here, after the funeral, cleaning up the place and perhaps “liberating” a few memorabilia.

  Pela’s face appeared as the woman lifted the mask from her head. She gazed curiously around the small, functional apartment. The floor was the same stone as that outside, but smoothed and polished, covered sparely with the mediocre rugs Sand’s father wove. A work area contained a small cube, several book wafers, a loom. Two futons lay on raised slabs—one of these had been where Pela had lain, just a day before, dressed in her funeral finery. Some cushions surrounded a small table. A dry goods pantry, water basin, and a small irradiant oven comprised the kitchen; Sand and Pela both did their cooking at the clan stove-house. In the kitchen a narrow door concealed a lavatory; otherwise the walls were covered by shelves filled with all kinds of knickknacks—pots, figurines, jars of tobacco, herbs. Dried corn and squash hung from the ceiling in netted baskets.

  Sand watched the ghost look around, registering no decipherable emotions.

  “Listen,” Sand began. “I will get us some water, and then you will tell me what you’re doing here.” Why you have my mother’s face.

  Sand walked to the tap by the microwave and measured out two tumblers of distilled water and carried them to where the ghost stood. She handed her one of them. Sand sat on the edge of one of the beds and motioned for the other woman to do the same. The water tasted good, tickling cool with a hint of copper tang.

  “Now, tell me, or I’ll call those who can make you talk.”

  The woman sipped the water carefully, imitating Sand. Nevertheless, she spilled some down her chin and brushed at it spasmodically.

  “So strange,” she said.

  Sand waited.

  “This body is not what I am, of course,” The ghost began, after a moment. “I am, really a … ‘farmer’ might be your best word. Somebody who makes things grow. I make planets grow.”

  “You create planets?”

  “No. I seed them. I work on them, and then I leave. When I come back, a work on them some more. Then I leave again.”

  “Why?”

  “So the people who created me will have planets where they can live.”

  Sand smiled a little sarcastically. “You must be very old.”

  The ghost cocked her head oddly, a jerking motion. It took Sand an instant to realize that the woman was trying to nod her head yes.

  “When I first came to this planet,” The ghost went on, “It had a dense reducing atmosphere. The only native life were single-cell organisms in the high clouds.”

  Sand set her tumbler down on the table. Why was she feeling sick? Was the room receding, the sound of her own voice becoming hollow and distant, like an echo? The ghost drank more of the water, spilled a little more.

  A two-heart, Sand thought, with chill calm. She will kill me, now, take my form, walk among the people. Two-hearts have been with us since the First World, so the legends say. We thought we left them on earth, back in the Fourth World, just as the ancients believed they had left them in the Third World. But we can’t escape them. They came up the Reed, just as we did. They are the part of the way things are.

  To her credit, Sand realized that she was going mad. Her mother was sitting there. A two-heart was sitting there. A Kachina was sitting there, th
e creator of the world. Sand felt something trickling on her chin and realized that it was the confluence of two salty streams, running down from each eye. Desperate, she sought escape in the Dragonfly, but it was no use; the calm of the insect would not fill her, and though the mask was just within reach, she would have to confront the thing to get it. Sand’s breath came in short gasps, and the world erupted with spots of fuzzy darkness.

  Thing, thing. Sand had a chance, one chance, and she took it, stepping out on a lame foot, but still capable of running.

  “I. …” she began, and realized that her voice was going to fail her. She sucked in air, but the breath broke in a shuddering sob. She had no center, no focus for her thoughts. Yet she had a plan, if she could only breathe.

  The breath came. “I’m going to give you a name. Something to call you by,” she said. The ghost squinted its eyes.

  “A name?” the ghost asked.

  “Your name is Tuchvala.”

  “Okay,” said the ghost. “When you call me this name, I know you mean me.”

  “Say it!” Sand hissed fiercely. “Say your name!”

  “My name is Tuchvala,” said the ghost, and was a ghost no more. The change was not visible to the naked eye, though Sand might have glimpsed a wavering, a subtle shift in its features. But as the ghost became Tuchvala, her power blew away like smoke from a dying flame. The stolen name of Sand’s mother vanished, never again to be a part of the body that sat in front of her. So, too, did the power of the two-heart, and perhaps even of the Kachina. Whatever power those names had were replaced by that of Tuchvala, the spittle that Spider Grandmother made the first people out of. This person was Tuchvala, the half-formed substance of life, a becoming-person. A thing from another star, perhaps, but human now.

  And that, Sand could deal with. Her breathing slowed. She had won. Her thoughts would stay straight now, unbent by otherworldly charms.

  Idiot, said a tiny part of her mind, the part that had taken a course in psychology at the lowland school. But Sand had learned what her mother had learned long years before, that reality and truth have many layers. She could sort it out later, the nonsense from the real. Now she had to learn what Tuchvala had come to tell her.

  “Tuchvala, how can you be so old?” She asked, this time with no trace of sarcasm.

  “I am a very complex device,” Tuchvala said. “A created thing. My thoughts are patterned on those of the Makers, a race not unlike your own. In turn I patterned the thoughts of this brain—the one in this body—on my own tohodanet.” The last word came out as a series of hisses and clicks.

  “Your soul? Is that what you mean?”

  “I don’t think so. Your people use two words that together come close to what I’m talking about. The tohodanet is the part of you that sees itself again and again. It is a pattern, an ambiance, rather than a single thing in the brain. It is very difficult to re-create, especially in an alien. To my knowledge, it has never been done before. Frankly, it is possible that I am insane. In the lander, I maintained contact with my original tohodanet—which orbits above—checked my response against hers, but it is still difficult to know. Do I seem strange to you?”

  “Strange?” Sand muttered. “I would say so. Crazy? I’m no judge. Can you prove what you are saying?”

  Tuchvala considered. “Are you aware of the three starships orbiting this planet?”

  “I think I would say no,” Sand replied, skeptically.

  “Then it will be difficult to prove anything to you. But they are there. I and my three sisters have been parked above this planet for twenty local years.”

  “Doing what? For what reason?”

  “I’ve been growing this body.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Tuchvala sighed, her first truly human mannerism, one she must have learned from Sand.

  “If you planted a million square kilometers of taproot dandelion at great expense. …”

  “How do you know so much about what we do?” Sand demanded.

  “I’ve been watching and listening to you for twenty years,” Tuchvala reminded her.

  “Go on, then.”

  “If you planted this crop and then returned to find that something had killed it all—say an ashfall from a volcano—what would you do?”

  Sand shrugged. “Re-plant somewhere else. There’s plenty of planet.”

  Tuchvala continued. “But suppose that there were only a few places to plant. Just a few small hectares on a barren, sterile world? And suppose that instead of a natural disaster, your crop was destroyed by vandals? What would you do then?”

  “I don’t like where this conversation is going,” Sand said. “You’re saying we spoiled your terraforming project.”

  “We weren’t terraforming. We had no intention of making this planet like Terra. That’s what you are doing.”

  “Semantics. You started this planet out and left it. We came along and thought it looked too good to be true and fucked everything up.”

  “From our point of view, yes.”

  “What will you do about this?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to decide,” Tuchvala replied.

  “What can you do?” Sand protested. “I mean, speaking for the human race, I apologize, but we’re already here.”

  Tuchvala nodded, this time with a little more ease. “True. But we could start over. Sterilize the planet and re-seed.”

  “Sterilize. …” Sand stood up, quite slowly. “I think I should kill you,” she said.

  “And I think that that would seal your fate,” Tuchvala replied. “I’m basically on your side. It’s one of my sisters you need to worry about. She would have sterilized you long ago, if given the chance. I’m doing this to try to prove that you are similar enough to the Makers to merit our losing this planet.”

  “You’re our judge.”

  “No. I’m an observer, a kind of scientist. But I’m biased. I want to convince my sisters to spare you.”

  “Why?”

  “That would take a long time to explain. It involves concepts that I have no way to frame for you yet. You have to be patient.”

  “Tuchvala, you’re asking me to accept an awful lot on your word. I saw you drop out of the sky, but that doesn’t prove you’re some ancient planet-farmer. The Tech Society could have cloned my mother pretty easily. This could be some bizarre stunt of theirs. I’ve never heard of these ships you’re talking about, and in twenty years I think somebody here would have noticed them. Even if everything else you say is true, I have no reason to trust that you have our welfare at heart—on the contrary, you’re right: if I’d been working on terraforming some planet for a hundred thousand years or so and some alien squatters messed it up, I’d be damned tempted to wipe them out and start over, or at least demand that they leave. Have I left anything out? Probably.”

  Tuchvala regarded her with an imitation of Sand’s own thoughtful gaze. “I can’t reassure you about most of that. But the ships are there, and your people know about them. They have been broadcasting messages at us for twenty years. They also came and took away the first landing craft, little brother and all.”

  “Little brother?”

  “I have stored all of the genetic information necessary to replicate most life forms from the Makers’ homeworld, including the Makers themselves. I grew a male of the species to test the atmosphere with. He died, and a number of your people came and took him away.”

  “My mother was there,” Sand whispered.

  “Your mother was the first being to approach the lander. I sampled and replicated her genetic pattern. It should not have harmed her.”

  “No, it shouldn’t have,” Sand replied. And it didn’t. But that was when she met my father. He was with those bastards from the coast. That eventually harmed her a lot.

  Maybe it even killed her.
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br />   “Well, Tuchvala,” Sand asked quietly. “What now? How do you go about proving to your sisters that we’re worthy of life?”

  “I … don’t know. I think I may have known when I started this out, but I have certain problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “I am very old, even by my standards. One of my sisters is nearly mindless, and the other is … malfunctioning at best. I think I flattered myself when I believed I was the sanest of them. Perhaps I thought that just being down here, living life the way you do, would furnish concrete evidence that you are sentient, worthy heirs to the Maker’s planet. Maybe I had a more specific agenda.”

  “You communicate with your—with the ships in orbit?”

  “No, not without the communications terminal in the lander. I can broadcast my findings to the ships from any form of laser or radio-wave transmitter, however. The proper code will reveal my identity.”

  Sand sank back into the cushion, picked up the half-empty tumbler and began turning it in her hands.

  “This is beautiful, Tuchvala. Even if I believe you, you have no idea what we should do. At least there’s no rush, I suppose. If we can hide you from the Tech Society for a while, and surely they aren’t expecting a human woman. Especially since they already know what your “Makers” look like.”

  “Will this be difficult?”

  “Shouldn’t be. They don’t dare come here and look; it would be a declaration of war. What will be harder to explain is why my dead mother is living with me. The council of elders will probably have something to say about that. So them we have to tell, at least if we’re going to hide you here.”

  Tuchvala nodded again, and seemed more or less human doing so. “I have to correct you on one thing, however,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You are wrong about there being no rush. I came down now, rather than later, because a starship entered this system.”

  “Another one of you?” Sand asked.

  “No. The drive is much less efficient than ours. I can only assume that it was one of yours. If it does anything—anything interpretable as an attack, all three of us will synchronize into a defensive mode. The decision regarding this planet will then become certain; hostile life can never be regarded with etadotetak.” Another hissing-spitting word.