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

retained a remarkably cohesive social structure in the face of European expansion and conquest, to a limited extent even to the present day. Their religion was complex and never fully understood at any one time by outsiders. With a few notable exceptions, it remained fundamentally an oral tradition to the Hopi themselves.”
    â€œRight. Tell me about the most notable exception. The one the colonists of Fifth World predicated their society upon.”
    â€œYou tell me,” the image replied, with his own smug grin.
    Alvar had learned things in a certain order. First the language and general cultural things like kinship; then the history of the colonists and their ideological foundations. This “conversation” was to be a sort of review, one that he badly needed. He nodded at himself.
    â€œFair enough. About 2025, four Hopi elders shared a vision about their people, one in which their culture and religion declined and vanished utterly. They therefore set out to record everything they remembered about the Hopi lifestyle.”
    â€œHold it,” his reflection told him. “They weren’t all Hopi elders.”
    â€œOh. Right. One was Zuni and another was Tewa, from around my old home town. But the other two were Hopi elders.”
    â€œAnd they were a minority in their community. Most of the Hopi believed that it was better for their culture to die than to record it on film, tape, or even paper.”
    Alvar glared at his image. “True enough. But that part isn’t in the stories they tell on the Fifth World, is it? In their version, it was those four who were truly Hopi, and their peers who were kahopi—the bad guys.”
    Mirror-Alvar shrugged and motioned for him to continue. He did so.
    â€œThese four recorded all of the ceremonies, legends, and so on for posterity, and they agreed among themselves to call this lifestyle “Hopi”, despite its varied origins. Hopitu-Shinumu, really, which means “The Well-Behaved People”. I guess what they recorded was a sort of amalgam of pueblo lore, though, probably with some European and Asian stuff worked in.”
    His double grinned thinly. “Now you’ve strayed off of the official version.”
    â€œFair enough. But that’s about it, except for the prophecy. They predicted that one day the Hopi people would be reborn through the record that they had left, and that they would leave the Fourth World for the Fifth, a world created for them by the Kachina.”
    â€œWhich Kachina?”
    â€œAh … shit, there are hundreds of them. Ah … Blue Star?”
    â€œRight. And a Kachina is. …”
    â€œAn ancestor-cloud spirit. They live in the mountains or the sky for half the year, but for the other half they live amongst the Hopi in human form. Special impersonators wear masks and outfits. Everybody thinks that whoever wears the mask is sort of possessed by the Kachina it represents.”
    â€œPossessed,” said the image, frowning, “is a crude word. They know that the person in question is still who he always was—at least they do as adults. Children don’t understand that the Kachina are being impersonated by human beings. In any event, the adults believe that the person is a conduit for the spiritual presence of the real Kachina.”
    â€œI know all of that, smartass. Shiau Shi: Teacher off.” The other Alvar vanished quietly. The real one stood up abruptly.
    â€œWhat a load of crap. Goddamit! And I have to live with these savages?”
    Nobody answered his rhetorical question. He would have screamed at them if they had.
    He found Teng working out. She was sheathed in sweat, almost literally, since their deceleration had dropped to just below half a gravity and the salty water had more viscous cling. When he stepped up to the door, she was finishing a perplexing series of low punches and twisty-looking blocks. She concluded with a lunging punch into her makiwara,