Footsteps in the Sky by Greg Keyes Read Free Book Online Page A

he said. “You know, subtly?”
    â€œI could,” she agreed. “On the other hand, I don’t feel like bullshitting right now.”
    â€œThat’s better,” Alvar returned. “Who can resist that kind of approach?”
    Teng shot him a look wet with poison. She smiled without humor, her yellow eyes narrowed to slits.
    â€œIn two weeks, I’ll being reviving some of the peacekeepers. Thank Durga.”
    â€œIn two weeks I’ll be fucking women made out of skin,” Alvar shot back.
    Teng took a step forward, and for the second time in his life, Alvar truly believed he was about to die. The first time, as a child, he had been playing in the desert outside of Santa Fe. He had fallen down and found himself eye-to-eye with a coiled rattlesnake. Then, as now, he kept absolutely still, waiting for the danger to pass, fearing that it would not.
    But it did, as it had then. Teng took the step back, and the rattlesnake look melted briefly into something else before she turned on her heel and left him alone.
    Alvar let out his breath, slowly. When he had met Teng, three years ago, he had guessed immediately that she was enhanced. But for three years he had been caressing that hard, slim body. He knew it better than any he had ever known, with the possible exception of his own. But contrary to what Teng had accused him of, Alvar was no narcissist. He like his body well enough, enjoyed pleasuring it with hot baths, good meals, fine whisky. But he loved Teng’s body, even if he didn’t love her. And so he knew, knew about the thick plates of plastimuscle that lay beneath her flat stomach, over her kidneys, beneath those high, sharp breasts. He had read everything he could about enhancement from the ship’s library, about how they had engineered her own cells and created fibers that could stop bullets. Her vital organs were surrounded and cushioned by thick, spongy structures; her bones were very unlikely to break under anything approaching normal circumstances. She probably had extra organs, too—small, perfect backups for her primary systems.
    She was all flesh, Teng was, but it was marvelous flesh. Flesh that had killed over a dozen soldiers in the Kenya massacre, maybe more elsewhere.
    Alvar had watched her train, too, practice kicks and punches that were so fast and graceful they scarcely seemed deadly.
    Just now, she had nearly killed him, he was certain of that.
    Possibly, he deserved it. He had never made reference to her … state … before. He did not know what circumstances of her life had brought it about; the promise of distance she had made their first time together had been kept, for the most part.
    But it was that most part that kept him guessing. They had talked, long and earnestly. They had played chess and riddle games. She outmatched him spectacularly in handball, usually lost when they played cards. And of course, there was lovemaking. In some ways, the latter was the least intimate thing they did together. And yet, Alvar reflected, one could not make love to the same person so many times without at least beginning to think you were in love with them.
    Strike that. It was just him that had that problem.
    He called his image back into existence.
    â€œHello,” he said, in the pseudo-Hopi he had been studying, consciously and unconsciously.
    â€œHello,” the image told him, in the same language. “What shall we talk about today?”
    â€œTell me about the Hopi. The real ones.”
    His image shrugged, pursed its lips in the “Hopi” expression of thoughtfulness.
    â€œThey were a pueblo-dwelling people of the southwestern part of North America, now the Western States of America. They probably had a long unwritten history, suggested by various archaeological traditions that are known generally as Anasazi. They first became a part of written history when Spanish conquistadors entered the region in the sixteenth century. They