Footsteps in the Sky - Softcover

Keyes, Greg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1497699916 ISBN 13: 9781497699915

Verlag: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The pueblo people who landed on the Fifth World found it Earthlike, empty, and ready for colonization . . . but a century later, they are about to meet the planet's owners One hundred years ago, Sand's ancestors made the long, one-way trip to the Fifth World, ready to work ceaselessly to terraform the planet. Descendants of native peoples like the Hopi and Zuni, they wanted to return to the way of life of their forebears, who honored the Kachina spirits. Now, though, many of the planet's inhabitants have begun to resent their grandparents' decision to strand them in this harsh and forbidding place, and some have turned away from the customs of the Well-Behaved People. Sand has her doubts, but she longs to believe that the Kachina live on beyond the stars and have been readying a new domain for her people. She may be right. Humans have discovered nine habitable worlds, all with life that shares a genetic code entirely alien to any on Earth. Someone has been seeding planets, bringing life to them. But no other sign of the ancient farmers has ever been discovered-until one day they return to the Fifth World. They do not like what they find. Originally written in 1994, Footsteps in the Sky is finally being released in digital form by Open Road Media.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Greg Keyes was born in 1963 in Meridian, Mississippi. When his father took a job on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, Keyes was exposed at an early age to the cultures and stories of the Native Southwest, which would continue to influence him for years to come. He earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree from the University of Georgia. While pursuing a PhD at UGA, he wrote several novels, including The Waterborn and its sequel, The Blackgod. He followed these with the Age of Unreason books, the epic fantasy series Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, and tie-in novels for numerous franchises, including Star Wars, Babylon 5, the Elder Scrolls, and Planet of the Apes. Keyes lives and works in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife, Nell; son, Archer; and daughter, Nellah.

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Footsteps in the Sky

By Greg Keyes

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2015 Greg Keyes
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4976-9991-5

CHAPTER 1

2442 A.D.

SandGreyGirl finished washing her mother's hair, her narrow face clenched around the tears it hid.

What killed you, Pela? She asked in the black shadow of her mind. What ended my mother's life?

She stepped back, relieved to let her cousins close in and do the rest. They tied prayer feathers to Pela's hands and hair, gifts for the ancestors. No doubt some of the ancestors—the ones from the Fourth World, Earth—would be confused by the feathers. There were, as yet, no real birds other than turkeys on the Fifth World. The feathers were grown in sacred culture tanks.

The white cotton mask they placed on Pela's face was real. Pela had grown the cotton herself. Now it would be the cloud which hid her face when she came back to bring rain to her people.

SandGreyGirl was beginning to feel sick. She stepped out of the little apartment she shared with her mother for some air, aware even as she did so that the others would talk, call her a bad daughter.

But they already did that, didn't they?

She let her gaze drift across the box-hive of native stone dwellings and poured concrete facilities that were Tuwanasavi, the town of her birth. Of her mother's death. Father Sun was resting in his noon-time house, and his light inked doorways and windows in sharp relief. Beyond the edge of the mesa, the land stretched off, hazy and unreal, a cloud tinted grey and green.

"Sand."

She didn't turn at the voice. Her father was the last person she wanted to see right now.

"Sand, I'm sorry. There was nothing any of us could do."

Sand bit down on her lip, resisted the urge to spin around and howl at him, scream like the cyclone winds that rushed up the valley in spring. Instead, she slipped her words into him softly, each a tiny dagger.

"You could have taken her to the lowlands. Whatever she had, they could have cured it."

"You know the elders wouldn't have agreed to that."

"The elders can't stop a Dragonfly from slipping off into the air. I could have taken her. If you had called me."

He had no answer for that, and she expected none. She heard his feet shuffle uncertainly.

"She didn't want you to see her die," he said at last.

Sand finally turned to face him, and she fixed her eyes on his own until he looked away. His round face, as always, bore that pitiful expression that she so despised. It was both apologetic and sneaky. Daughters and fathers were rarely close amongst the Hopitu-Shinumu, but her feelings for him were deep and fetid.

"Why do you hate me so?" he asked.

"You shouldn't have to wonder that," she replied.

Under her hot stare he wilted further and finally retreated towards the room where his wife waited, dead.

The sun moved on, rested for the moment. Sand paced across the roof of the main house, arguing bitterly with the image of her father that she kept in her mind. With her other relatives—with herself.

After a time, the clan chief came to get her.

"It's nearly time," he said.

Yuyahoeva was an old man, at least fifty. His face was like the tortured, frozen rock of a lava flow. Sand gathered her resolve to confront him.

"I want an autopsy, Ina'a."

Yuyahoeva's stone face trembled, as if it were about to become live magma. But he mastered himself. Anger was an evil thing to show. And yet, as had she with her father, he made his feelings clear in whispered, stinging words.

"You little two-heart. How can you suggest that? Your mother was a good woman. She will not be cut up by those lowland butchers."

"I want to know what killed her."

He regarded her as he might regard a clot of night soil on his shoe.

"Don't you know, after all this time, that what you want is not important? Your schooling with the lowlanders has spoiled you." The word he used for "spoiled" implied decay, corruption.

"She was my mother."

He dismissed that with a sharp chop of his palm. "She did not belong to you. She would understand that. She belonged to all of us. And there will be no more talk of autopsy. If there is, you will be banned from your kiva. Do you understand?"

Sand faced him for an instant longer, her breath harsh and salt threatening to sting her eyes. Then she turned away.

"She was murdered, I think. Somebody killed her." An unwanted note of pleading crept into her voice.

"She was sick," the old man replied, more softly.

"Sick with no disease we have ever known. Diseases such as they can create in the lowlands."

"The lowlanders are all two-hearts," he replied. "But they do not live here. They do not single out individual Hopi to torment."

"Some do," she muttered, casting a meaningful glance at the room where her father was helping to dress her mother's corpse in bridal finery.

"Enough of this, I tell you," Yuyahoeva snapped. "Come and help to carry your mother's body."

Sand glared at him again, and then reluctantly nodded. The shadows were lengthening.

Later, with her mother in the earth facing the sunrise, Sand became a Dragonfly and went to bury yet one more thing.

She could make the change quickly now. When she first became a member of the Dragonfly Society—three years ago—it took half an hour of chanting, wearing the full garb and mask of the Dragonfly Kachina to unlock the inner space where her own Dragonfly slept. Now it took a mere moment; a breath of air, her mind sinking down, crystallizing, becoming simple and strong. When she mounted the Dragonfly itself, crouched behind the windshield at the fore of its long silver body, she was already a part of it. When the underjets popped and then roared to life, she saw the pathway in the air open before her like a rainbow.

Airborne, she let the wings fold out, gossamer and unbreakable. She kicked on the afterjets and the world became a tunnel, wrapped around her. The mesa city was gone, melting into the shadows of fast-approaching night. Pela nosed east, and the quavering black shadow of the Dragonfly ran ahead of her, seemed to slide up the steep valley wall like a predacious jet amoeba, devouring meters and kilometers with unassuagable hunger. The lip of the canyon rushed down to meet the shadow, and Sand smiled as her afterjets brushed the black stone and gravel with clear heat, reveling in the absolute speed of her reflexes, the almost audible calculations in her head, the sense of seeing everything and nothing all at once.

"You will not see a stone or a tree or your own all-important thoughts," Her teacher had told her, in the quiet of the kiva. "You will hear and see and smell the world as a single thing. Or you will die."

Now the completeness that was the world was a thing of coal and rust, blood colored oil on a pool of night, the moon a cobalt blue marble rolling on the north-east horizon. Deep inside of SandGreyGirl, a skeleton sorrow danced, but it was a distant grief. As the Dragonfly Kachina she was above all human cares.

Black ridges pushed up through the skin of the earth like the sharp edges of broken bones. The basalt towers waxed in her vision, devouring the sky, the wholeness of the earth, so that the Dragonfly began to leave her. The machine she straddled became just that—a hovercraft, long and thin—large enough to carry two people but perfect for one. She retracted the wings and cut the underjets on full, to break her fall, and now Masaw came dancing out of her, the death god, filling the shadows with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1497699916
• ISBN 13: 9781497699915
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 298
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland