Footsteps in the Sky Read Online Free Page A

here.”
    The man strode off towards the other three, two men and a woman, all lowlanders by their dress. They were all wearing guns. Off to the north she could see their transportation, a bronze-colored hovercraft.
    The man talked quietly with the others, who continued to cast glances in her direction. The he returned to her, just as she was groggily getting to her feet.
    â€œThis is a new model,” the man explained apologetically. “We don’t know what went wrong or why it hurt you. Hoku—our mother-father over there—wants to take you back to Salt for an examination. Would that be okay?”
    Pela was abruptly aware that she was wearing only her thin cotton shorts. She had just crawled out of her thermal bag to piss when she saw the Kachina. The man was doing his best to avert his eyes from her breasts and doing a progressively worse job.
    â€œI need my clothes”, she mumbled.
    â€œOf course. Where are they?”
    Pela gestured vaguely towards the rising basalt behind her. He nodded and trotted off in that direction. He stopped after a few steps.
    â€œMy name is Jimmie,” he said.
    â€œPela,” she returned. “Thanks, Jimmie.” The sound of his boots on the cindery earth diminished behind her.
    The Kachina, made by the lowlanders? That was possible, but she didn’t think so. But they wanted her to think that, didn’t they? So she would, for her own safety. But Pela knew truth, knew it in her heart. The Kachina were no longer lost among the stars. They had returned to the Fifth World, to see what the Hopitu-Shinumu had done with it.
    She hoped they would be pleased.

Interim
    2429 A.D.
    Alvar Washington closed the gap between himself and the Vilmir complex in a series of jarring, painful steps. He regretted the previous night’s excesses bitterly, but regretted even more missing his last medical exam. If he had that the little drunk-doctors in his bloodstream had died quietly sometime last month, he would have had them replaced, or had a little less of the cheap turpentine that passed for whisky here.
    Would that that were his only regret. Alvar squinted off at the distance and tried to imagine that the ugly crinkled mountains there were the Sangre de Cristos, that the sky was the right color of blue rather than a purplish pastel, even that the awful taste in his mouth was that of a certain dark Santa Fe beer. A pleasure to be hung over on that.
    Unfortunately his imagination had always been less than vivid. He supposed that if it had been more colorful he would have stayed on Earth, lived the outworld life vicariously rather than opting for the reality, a reality which consisted mostly of boredom, bad coffee, bad booze, and ugly surroundings. Maybe one day this planet would be a paradise—maybe even in the lifetime of the major stockholders. But he would never see it: unlike the executives, he did not have access to the medicines that could extend life well into the triple digits.
    He had opted to walk to his meeting in the hopes that exercise would clear his head. It was helping, though sweat still seemed to ooze from his pores like syrup and his stomach threatened to expel an unconsumed breakfast.
    He reached his destination, a building easily as ugly as the terrain. It was constructed of native stone—which meant basalt or some close cousin. It was grey-black, anyhow, polished smooth and slicked with a silicon compound in the optimistic hope that it would resemble marble. It did not. The architecture was equally ill-advised, a revival of that insipid style known as Neo-Meshika—the ugliest aspects of classical Greek architecture heavily ornamented with bas-relief feathered snakes, tlalocs, and Atlantean figures of Meso-American provenience. On Earth, it had flourished briefly in the last century and then been mercifully forgotten. Here, naturally, it was the acme of high design.
    Shaking his head , Alvar stumbled past an otherwise Doric column