Footsteps in the Sky (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

The night had begun to frighten me, by then. I was used to knowing where I was going, to peeling through layers of photons, neutrinos, through the very oscillating structure of space itself. I was used to being able to see.

Now I couldn't see anything, and I was denied what I most needed; myself. As much as I wished to help Sand and her people, I had additional motives for wanting to make the laser link with my sisters. I wanted to know who I was now. I feared vanishing—becoming hot water streaming on my back, Sand's fingers digging into my tight shoulders, the swirling vertigo of fatigue and sleep. I was becoming a series of events, a recording of moments. Losing the timeless clarity of real thought. I could feel that slipping away, more surly than ever I felt the mere erosion of my capacities as time decayed my hardware. And the pace was so much quicker, in this body. Images flashed and receded in my brain, masquerading as rational thought.

No wonder Sand's people valued dreams. Dreams were all they had.

The word for what I did then is sneeze. Sand taught it to me and sneezed again herself.

“Must be something in the air,” she told me. I wasn't sure what she meant.

Whatever had gone wrong, they seemed to blame it on Sand's father—on the man who had sent me away from him, back in the jail. I understand the consternation I cause, wearing this form.

But it was my form now.

I stumbled along wherever we were going, holding Sand's hand, afraid.

“What the fuck?” Teng groaned.

“Teng! Teng! It's me, Alvar!” Alvar crowded as close as he could to the wall. The lights in the jail cut off for a second time and then came back up, much dimmer.

“I know. I've been awake for awhile, Alvar. Long enough to hear you make a fool of yourself. Again.”

“Hey, soldier-woman!” It was Jimmie, a peculiar ring in his voice.

“I've heard your whining shit too, spy. What do you want?”

“You hear me say it was time to be ready?”

“I'm always as ready as I can be.”

“You better be real ready, now. I can help you, but you have to help me. You can't let them have me.”

“Who?”

“Any of them. You have to take me off of this stinking planet.”

Teng sighed. “It's in your fucking contract, okay? That was the plan all along.”

“Plans can be changed, especially by soldiers. They have a bad habit of cutting plans off at the quick.”

Alvar interrupted, his anger surprising even to him.

“What the fuck are you two talking about? Jesus, I still don't know what's going on. I'm sick of this shit. Teng, you talk to me. What's happening here?”

He heard Teng snort, but it was the old man who answered him.

“She doesn't know, you idiot. She may have guessed, though. There's about to be a full-blown war on this mesa. That should give us time to get away. If we're smart.”

“War?”

“He must have shut down the computer somehow, Alvar,” Teng interjected. “He probably knew he was going to get arrested.”

“So. …”

“The defenses are down. Those assholes from the coast will be coming up here to get the alien, won't they, spy?”

“They still pick you killers smart.”

“But not spies, it seems,” Alvar sneered. “We're still in jail, or hadn't you noticed?”

“Details,” hissed the old man, and a chill raced up Alvar's spine.

Alvar sneezed.

The old man chuckled. “There we go,” he said. “Right on time.”

Alvar meant to ask what the hell Jimmie meant by that, but he sneezed again, and then the door of the jail sighed open. Six people walked in: two men armed with some kind of black pistols, the old man from the mesa-top, a younger man he did not recognize, the woman Sand, and the alien, if alien she was.

“Leave the woman in,” the old man snapped. “Get Jimmie and this Parrot-Island boy.” He did not look pleased.

On of the gunmen went to Jimmie's cell and Alvar heard it hiss open. He swallowed and noticed that his throat seemed a little raw. Some goddamn colona virus? He had had his shots.

Jimmie was a lot like Alvar expected, but better looking. Dried blood was smeared across his lower face. He had busted his nose and made no attempt to wipe it off.

Then they opened Alvar's cell.

“Come on, boy. The two of you have some questions to answer. Now.” The old man's voice had none of the warmth in it that Alvar had come to associate with him, both on the mesa-top and in the kiva. It was terrible and cold, like the midwinter nights in the desert around Santa Fe. Alvar wanted desperately to say something, to deflect that malice from himself somehow. Instead he bowed his head and submitted without comment.

This time they weren't taken to any public kiva. In fact, they didn't go far at all. They left the jail and crossed ten meters of bare stone to another concrete building, which, like, the jail, was incongruously ugly when compared to the simple elegance of the rest of the pueblo.

Alvar noticed that Jimmie kept looking up at the sky. He was humming to himself.

The interrogation room was three meters square and supplied with straight-backed chairs. There was little else. Alvar had read medieval and early atomic romances in which torture figured prominently, but he saw no recognizable instruments of torture. Why bother when they had the ojo, as they called it here?

Jimmie went first, and there was no nonsense involved. The lights of the room were dimmed and a pair of goggles were strapped on Jimmie's face. The old man sat down in a chair facing him. He sneezed. As if by contagion, so did Sand and then the alien. Alvar felt his own nose itch.

“Red Jimmie,” the old man rasped. “Did you cause the computer to shut down?”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation on Jimmie's part.

The old man wrinkled his face in disgust. “Jimmie, why? She was our faithful companion from the time of our emergence here, even before. How could you do this to her?”

“She's not dead, you old fart. She's just asleep for awhile.”

If the old man was relieved, he didn't show it. Instead he leaned forward, eyes intense.

“Why Jimmie?”

“I think you know, don't you? You've known I was Hoku's man for a long time.”

“There's something more than Hoku in this business, Jimmie. Hoku is nothing compared to the Reed.”

“If you want to know about the Reed, ask the warrior.”

“I will, when she's well enough. But Jimmie, even the Reed wouldn't kill us all, wipe this planet clean. Those Kachina up there might. Do you understand that?”

The icy anger was gone from the old man's voice, thawed once more into warmth and concern.

“Spare me your superstition, old man.”

“It's not superstition, you asshole!” Sand broke in angrily. Alvar thought that she would go on, but a sudden sneeze—a violent one—dispersed whatever words she might have offered. In any event, the old man held up his hand to quiet her.

“Okay, Jimmie,” he said tiredly. “Let's not call them Kachina. Let's call them terraforming starships, whose job was to make this planet livable for life different from our own. Old, old ships who don't work as well as they once did. Jimmie, Tuchvala promises us that if we don't stop them, they will kill all of us, lay the Fifth World bare.”

Jimmie was staring at Tuchvala. His face was working, and Alvar thought he saw the old spy squinting back tears.

“Why did you have to come?” He whispered at last. “Why? This place is no longer yours. You cost me nearly everything. May cost me everything before it's over.”

Was this the same man? The self-confident smartass from the cell? Who was this Red Jimmie?

“You killed mother!” Sand screamed, a nearly incoherent screech. Her fists were balled into white-knuckled bludgeons, her lips skinned back from her teeth. “You, not Tuchvala. You!”

For a moment, Sand's voice seemed to recede from Alvar, wing up and become something different from sound. The entire world seemed to pulse with the explosive rush of her syllables.

“Jimmie. Explain it to us, Jimmie.” The old man reached over and took off the goggles. There were tears there.

“It's too late,” he whispered, looking at his daughter. “It's just too late.”

Alvar felt a hot wind, as if he were a kid standing outside in front of the huge exhaust fans of the arcology, flying a kite. He could almost see the kite, shimmering along the wall of the room. And a sudden, profound sadness swept through him.

The old man seemed to sway—or was that the room swaying? He leaned towards Jimmie.

“Bring her back, Jimmie. Bring the computer back for us, so we aren't helpless against the ships and Hoku. We can forgive a lot, here in the pueblos.”

“You can never make me one of you, though,” Jimmie replied.

“You were never one of us because you were always working against us. That can change.”

“No,” Alvar found himself saying. His own voice sounded weird, distorted. “He can't change what he is. He's from the Reed. Like me.” Mother of Jesus, what had he just said? They were all looking at him now, but their eyes were strange, as if her were a long way off and they were searching for him in some obscure place.

All but Jimmie.

Yuyahoeva sank slowly to the floor, his eyes still bright and uncomprehending. Sand sagged back too, the anger seeming to leak out of her as she bumped into the wall and slid her back against it, like a cat scratching. Alvar felt a sudden surge of emotion as he watched her, a spiraling, gut-wrenching need.

The guards were staring around, bewildered.

Someone spoke—Alvar wasn't sure who—and the words buzzed and rattled like an electrical short.

Mary! We've been 'fected!
Alvar realized, suddenly, as a wave of sound and color seemed to roar up from his feet. That was why they had all been sneezing. They had all been infected with some tailored plague, the kind that the most hopeless addicts on Earth kept in their systems all of the time. What was it carrying? What toxin was in their bodies? It could be anything. Alvar had plagued once, on something that made him happy, happy, happy. This wasn't that. This was more like the peyote he took one time, but at the same time it was more—emotional. He was not detached or godlike, noticing the little details in things. He was afraid, angry, remorseful—and he was in love with Sand. He wanted that soft woman's body—a real woman's body—crushed up against him.

Tuchvala was the one talking, some slurred dialogue that made no sense at all to Alvar anymore. Things were happening in the room, but the storm in his head made it impossible to pay attention. This could kill them, he knew. Some plagues did that, intentionally or not. Alvar did not want to die like this, flayed open to the universe, a bug with a pin through him as God and Mary thumbed through his lusts and fears.

Though his head was full of static, he did notice that Jimmie was gone.

So, apparently, did Sand. Alvar saw her go to the door, her legs jerking as she tried to control them. Alvar followed, discovered that walking felt a lot like standing on the deck of a ship in high seas—with cigarettes for legs. No wonder she was jerking. Jimmie had also engineered some kind of seismic disturbance. Yes, there was no doubt about it, the earth itself was bucking and heaving.

He saw that Sand stopped long enough to gently take a gun from one of the guards, and it suddenly occurred to him that he could do the same. That might restore some of Teng's confidence in him, if he walked in and liberated her, guns blazing. He staggered on to the door, but when he tried to repeat Sand's trick of taking a gun, the guard looked at him with a puzzled—but noticeably hostile expression. In fact, it seemed as if his mouth were expanding, his teeth grown immense, like those of a monstrous horse. Alvar had been bitten by a horse before; he retreated from the Hopi, waited until the guard's eyes spun elsewhere, and then fled out the door.

Sand hadn't gone all that far. She was standing beneath the night sky on the yellow mesa rock, swinging her head in all directions. It was mesmerizing; she just kept turning and turning. A wind ruffled the hem of her skirt, and the yellow of her body suit blazed like the most perfect color. As if the sun was out. Love at first sight. Of course he loved her.

But she had a gun, and now it was pointed at him, her fugue state broken by his presence.

“Where is he?” he thought she said. Her face was wonderful and terrible. Her grey eyes grew huge in his vision.

“I don't … I don't know. I'm sorry,” he said, and meant it, with all of his heart.

“Who are you?” She was coming closer. “What do you want?”

That was her breath he smelled.

Was he crying? He was. Why?

She was close enough to touch him now, and she did.

“What's wrong?” she asked. Her eyes were glassy, unfocused. Her hand touched him and lit fire along his cheek, fire that torched down through his skull, rushed to ignite other parts of him.

Alvar stumbled forward and kissed her. She seemed to respond almost reflexively, and the ground began to shake again. He was holding her arms, and his hands melted through the cotton bodysuit so that his fingers gripped down through her flesh to her very bones.

It was very confusing after that. Every brush of his skin against her ignited nerve cells in a way that Alvar never knew they could be fired. He had never wanted a woman so much in his life, ever, never loved one as deeply. Her face was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen, and each moment it glowed brighter. If only her expression weren't so puzzled, whenever she opened her eyes. But she didn't do that often.

At some point, he found a way to open her bodysuit at the crotch. He frantically entered her, and they were rolling and squirming on the mesa-top as lava rushed up from Alvar's feet, collecting and swelling in his groin with volcanic pressure.