Back | Next
Contents

BLUE KACHINA


star


T.C. McCarthy



There is a time of purification.

Mars was long gone by the time that memory flashed into my thoughts, and by now we’d begun our descent toward AJ-3458. Everyone just called it the gravel pile. Space enveloped us in darkness, and while part of me concentrated on control panels, to read out numbers while Jim Mockta piloted us down, another part stared into infinite blackness as if the stars had all winked out; they knew when to leave, I figured. The stars had smelled something bad and decided that they’d better get going before the foxes came for the chickens. Our craft landed with a soft thud, and Jim’s hands flashed over the controls, shutting off both engines at just the right moment—to prevent us from bouncing off in low gravity.

“Why’d they need us to check this out?” I asked.

“Why not us?”

“Always the dirty work. Always.”

Jim chuckled and began releasing his seat harness. “Exactly. We’re from the government . . .”

“ . . .and we’re here to help,” I finished. “When’d they lose contact with the Chinese?”

“Nobody said.”

Microgravity barely grabbed at me, and we collided while squeezing into vacuum environmental suits. Mockta grunted. By the time he’d sealed his helmet and helped me with mine, the engines had cooled, and distant sounds of pinging metal had silenced to match the emptiness I’d seen while touching down.

“You’re the fucking captain, Mockta. I thought maybe they’d told you more.”

“You remember when they first sent us to Mars—to colonize?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember what they told us then?”

“That the Hopi and Arabs were perfect colonists. White guys had psychological issues with the loneliness and colors over long periods of time. Something about the environment and distance from Earth messing with them, so twenty percent of the first colonists went nuts.”

“They didn’t tell me anything more than that back then. Why would they tell me more now?”

Send in the damn Indians.

Mockta slammed his fist on a button to open the inner airlock door. The hiss of air being sucked away reminded me of something. At first the memory blinked on the fringes of my thoughts, evading attempts to grab it and teasing me with a glimpse of home—of Earth and its deserts. Old man Mase, grandfather. He pointed at a rock covered with scratch marks that formed a picture, and I struggled to see it, closing my eyes to help concentrate, only to hear sizzling sand because the desert wind blew up and whipped my coat with a flapping noise at the same time tiny grains stung my eyes.

The desert had its own idea of who could come and who could leave. It was a serpent—an empty expanse, an endless rolling scene of solid tan with dots of green vegetation where we used to race in the barefoot 10K, Hopi kids with tenuous links to the past and its meaning. Wind always made the serpent hiss, its noise sometimes a comforting message that we belonged and were a part of the snake’s family, at other times a warning of storms to come. Old man Mase was part of the snake. He had transformed into a desert thing someone had assembled from sand itself. The old man shook his finger at me and screamed but his words refused to come.

“Bro!” Mockta shouted. “You there?”

“What?”

“We’re at the Chinese ship. You can’t daydream like that and expect to stay alive, cornmeal. We’re a long way from Mars. You screw up on an asteroid, and the next thing you know you’re flying off into space.”

Cornmeal. It was the nickname I’d earned as a kid—a good luck charm, something sacred.

“What were the Chinese thinking, anyway? This portion of the asteroid belt is US territory. They want to start another war?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out. You didn’t even read the mission briefing, did you?”

“Too boring,” I admitted.

The strange ship towered over us, a massive rectangular monolith on eight thick landing legs that clawed into the asteroid’s gravelly surface, securing it. So far away, the sun barely illuminated us. The Chinese liked to paint their ships matte black, so picking out external details was almost impossible, except for a red star that stretched above, thirty feet across. Mockta moved up the ramp to their airlock, and when we got to the door, he pointed. A screen in the middle of the main door flashed on and off with a single picture, three partial circles joined around a central circle, black against an orange background.

You left Earth, our mother, and you must come back before it’s too late, the old man said. He held up a yellow gourd that had been dried for use in holding water and then uncorked it before turning it over. I expected water to splash. Instead, a pile of glowing sparks piled up on the old man’s hard-packed dirt floor before their heat extinguished to leave behind ashes that blew and covered his toes with black. They have used the gourd of ashes, he whispered. So we are near the end. You left Earth, our mother, and you must come back before it’s too late . . .

Mockta slapped the back of my helmet. “Wake the hell up, cornmeal!”

“Sorry, man.”

“You OK?”

“Are you seeing anything out here? Like, is the old man talking to you or anything, telling you to come back to Earth?”

“Old man Mase? You seeing him?” I nodded and Mockta whistled inside his helmet before changing the subject. He pointed at the flashing screen. “What’s this mean? Is that Chinese or something?”

“No, it’s universal. It’s a symbol that means biohazard. We should try radioing them again, Mockta. I don’t like this, got a bad vibe.”

“Man, they didn’t respond to any of our calls on the way in; why would they now?”

“Maybe they got some disease. I don’t want to go in if we can avoid it; just try one more time.”

“You’ve got the comms suit so your radio is more powerful, cornmeal.”

My fingers played over the keypad on the suit’s forearm, its narrow screen covered with a thin layer of ice. “Nothing.”

“Yeah, cornmeal. I’m getting a bad vibe too.”

Mockta opened a panel near the airlock’s side and began working on it. As soon as he disengaged an inner panel, a forest of wires and circuit boards sprang out so that Mockta cursed with the complexity. Something crackled over my speakers. At first it sounded like a transmission from nearby, but Mockta assured me that he had muted his system to curse at the mess; the signal hadn’t come from him. When I turned back to face the Chinese ship, it murmured again, this time the message clear: The time for purification is near; come inside to meet us, then get back to Earth.

Sand and rock, in browns and reds and tans that stretched away and to the horizon, Mase emerged from it in swirls of color and dust, his figure coalescing in front of me before it shifted into something else. Something different. A moment later, Mary Makya appeared in his place; she smiled and whispered one question after another, none of them loud enough to hear, but all of them suggesting I’d made a terrible mistake in leaving her—in leaving my home. Mary’s eyes sparkled in the desert sun, her irises the color of dark rocks.

“That is one fucked up Chinaman,” Mockta said.

His voice brought me back to reality, and I blinked several times to make sure that this wasn’t another vision and wasn’t about to disappear like Mary had. A woman’s body lay on the floor in front of us. Her suit had ruptured down the front, from her groin to her chin where the helmet’s faceplate had shattered to send its glass throughout the inner airlock. The only reason I recognized it as a woman was because not all of her face had burned, leaving mascara around a single untouched eye.

“They’ve charred everything into nothing,” I said. “Her suit, the inner airlock, everything. Even the walls are all blackened.”

“But with what? A flamethrower? That’s a Chinese military vacuum suit, not a standard one; they’ve sent soldiers to our section of the asteroid belt and killed at least one of their own. Why?”

“This is messed up, Mock. We looking at war?”

Mockta started working on the inner airlock door, his voice loud in my helmet speakers. “We won’t know until we get inside, bro. The readings say there’s air, but I’m not taking this helmet off for anything, especially if there’s a biohazard.”

A few minutes later the inner door opened. Mockta and I crept forward, our suits puffing small clouds of gas to keep us pushed down onto the deck with each step. Corpses had stacked up in the corridor. All of them had been charred black like the first one. I wove my way through, doing my best to avoid touching any of them until we finally arrived at the bridge. Mockta moved toward a bank of computers near the back while I waited, half expecting the ghosts of dead Chinese soldiers to rise through the deck or materialize from thin air. Mockta finally whistled.

“They were going to take the asteroid itself,” he said.

“What?”

“Unless the translator is broken, it says they were here to assay the interior and then set up engines for a slow push, back to Earth orbit.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why risk war? Did they think we wouldn’t notice that one of our asteroids had gone missing? What did the assay show?”

Mockta whistled again. “Sapphire. Iron and titanium. So it’s a deep blue, worth a fortune. The gravel and rocks on its surface are just a thin crust. They were about to recover the drill bit when something happened. The last entry is just a couple of words: fungus or lichen.”

“OK. That’s enough. I’m done; let’s get the hell off this rock.”

“We will as soon as I get one thing.”

“What, Mockta? What could you possibly have to get? All of them are dead, and the guy who killed them may still be running around here for all we know. At the same time the air could be filled with some kind of germ. I’m not getting paid enough to play detective, Mock. Are you?”

“They knew the Chinese were drilling. I’m to bring back a sample.”

“Nobody told me that. On whose order?”

Mockta pushed past, heading back to the ship’s main corridor. “Chief scientist. Kumar.”

“That guy isn’t just a scientist. He’s CIA. They know, Mock. They know something isn’t right and they sent us to be guinea pigs.”

“Shut up. The drilling bay is at the bottom of the ship. This way.”

It was easier just to float through the ship. Mockta and I turned off our suits’ gas systems and pulled our way through the narrow corridors until we reached a shaft that went toward the ship’s guts. The asteroid’s gravity gently pulled us down. Eventually we reached the drilling bay, a high-ceilinged chamber filled with pipe sections and worn drill bits, and even without taking my helmet off I knew how it’d smell: like oil and metal mixed with the odor of heated rock dust. Mockta gestured me over, toward the main shaft; when I got closer, he pointed at a corpse.

“That’s the one. The guy that burned them all.”

The sight made me feel like vomiting. “He just took his helmet off. Popped it. Death by vacuum, there have to be better ways to go.”

“Yeah,” said Mockta. “But what’s that blue stuff all over him—and his suit?”

“Sapphire dust?”

I drifted down into the drilling pit, where my boots crunched on dust, a thin film over deep blue sapphire within which I swore there was a faint glow that faded the moment I noticed it. The man had frozen solid. A crust of white ice had formed over his eyebrows and on his lips, which curved into a wide grin that made my skin crawl with the strangeness of it all. I reached down. My finger swiped across the dead man’s cheek, raising a cloud of fluorescent blue material that glowed faintly for just a moment, the tip of my glove now covered with an aqua-colored film. I half expected the guy’s eyes to pop open and for him to shout boo.

“Not sapphire dust,” I said. “Something else. It reminds me of ground-up glowworms.”

Mockta handed me a plastic bag. “Put a bit of sapphire dust in there, bro. Maybe a little of the glow-worm stuff too.”

“Got it.” When I finished I climbed from the pit. “Now can we go, Mockta? This is all making me feel sick; my fingertips are numb.”

“Where are you going? The shaft up is this way, bro.”

Mockta’s voice sounded distant. The sense of numbness started in my fingertips then spread up through my wrists and to my shoulders, my entire torso soon turning cold with a tingling sensation. It shifted to a burning. The desert sun baked me in a layer of thick air trapped inside a rock canyon, and Mary laughed as she moved away, in the direction of a brilliant blue river. Its turquoise water twinkled, and without bothering to take her clothes off, Mary dove in and I followed, filling my throat and nose with frigid liquid that made me feel as though I was about to suffocate. Mary’s voice didn’t help. It came from all sides and pressed against my chest with a weight of whispers and hisses, forcing the air from my lungs until the blue water went black.

Come home. Come home now, for the purification.

“Bro!” Mockta shook me, both of us floating upward as he used his feet to occasionally push off against ladder rungs in the walls. “Wake up! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m awake. Something might be wrong with my mix; I can’t breathe.”

We reached the shaft’s top and moved into the main corridor, where Mockta stopped to shine a light through my faceplate. He backed away.

“You’ve got that blue shit on you. It’s inside your suit, bro, all over your face.”

“I never took my suit off, not once since we’ve been in this ship.”

“You’ve got whatever they had, bro. It’s why the one in the mining pit burned everything before killing himself; they all got infected by something.”

I reached out to grab Mockta’s shoulder, but he kicked off the wall, rocketing away. “Don’t touch me!”

“Jim. I’ve got to get home. Back to Earth.”

Mockta pushed off again, this time through the corridor, and I followed, the pair of us bouncing off walls as I chased him with a sense of urgency that pressed in from all sides at the same time my sense of the present faded. A humming filled my ears. Somewhere in the distance, a voice called me by name, and the view from my suit faceplate faded into black-and-white static, which then shifted into images of an alien planet, of landscapes filled with black rock. You don’t ever have to be alone again, Mary said, her voice barely a whisper. I’m here, waiting. Nobody needs to face the darkness. Come home.

My vision blurred, then formed a view of Mockta trying to escape me, but from thousands of eyes and perspectives that fused into one crystalline image that allowed part of my mind to follow after him. Another part of me continued drifting over the alien planet. Veins of glowing blue material filled every crack, and moisture-covered rocks shimmered to reflect distant starlight, and a sense of calm and peace flowed through me at the same time a realization formed: The rock wasn’t black at all. It was solid sapphire, a crust so thick and the light so dim that no sense of color could escape.

Come home to me, Mary said. Don’t let him keep you away.

Mockta had reached the airlock, where he fumbled with the controls. “Stay back, bro. You’re sick. You’ll have to stay here on the Chinese ship until I can get help.”

“I need to go home, Jim. Mary needs me.”

“Mary died, bro. She’s not there. And if you take that stuff back to Earth . . .”

Blood now filled the corridor in a cloud of droplets, all of them different and of various sizes, undulating in forms that shifted from spherical to oblong while smaller ones collided with others to form large globes. My muscles had never felt strong like this, gorilla-wild. It happened so quickly that it ended before it began, Mockta’s suit shredded and my gloved hands deep inside his chest where they ripped his body open. Where had the rage come from? An echo of it still rang through me, a sense that nothing else mattered except Earth and that anything in my way had to be destroyed.

Us, Mary whispered. We are with you.

After processing through the airlock, I stopped. It took a few minutes of digging on the asteroid’s surface, the sounds of scraping transmitted through my suit gloves and filling my helmet with the noise of gravel against rock. Finally I reached it—a smooth glassy face of deep blue, what remained of my home. Tears came then. Some fraction of my mind, a small speck deep inside that retained the capability for independent thought, wondered why I should care about this rock, why it should feel like home when Earth was so far away. What had I done to Mockta?

I love you, said Mary. We will always love you.

“You’re not real.”

I’m as real as you need me to be.

“Mary is dead.”

How can I be dead when I’m right here?

I did my best to slow down, to try and stop myself from getting back to my vessel, but every effort to resist met a welcome of warmth and acceptance, of pure happiness or its promise. Mary held my hand, her long black hair floating in low gravity, and I wondered how she could survive without a suit. She was real and not real. Mary squeezed my hand and refused to let go, running her other hand from my shoulder and down my arm. As real as anything.

Let’s go home.

“You don’t know how to fly this thing,” I said. Somehow we’d processed through the airlock and my suit was gone, replaced by coveralls, so the ship’s cold air blew across my forehead. The controls looked foreign and familiar at the same time.

Mary sat next to me. I know everything you do. And you never have to worry again. Rest now, Michael Chakwaina, and I promise that you’ll never have to wake up again.

Michael, I thought. That was my name. The realization that I’d forgotten created a flash of terror. “What are you?”

Vibrations shook the chair beneath me, and my hands moved over the controls to plot a course, one that would put us in Earth orbit. A moment later, we lifted. The ship turned until the distant sun shone through a tiny window and blinded me before I looked away.

We are everything and nothing. There will be a purification, and your kind will be cleansed of pain and suffering, used for a time, and times, and half a time until our creation is complete.

Mary smiled. Her face reflected sunlight off dark skin, and when she reached for my hand, it filled me again with warmth and memory. Part of me felt the acceleration yank, forcing me back into the seat at the same time Mary climbed into my lap and melted against my chest.

We will make everything feel this way, Michael. Warm and perfect. Now eat, for it is a long way to Earth, and we need you in working order, we will need you to introduce us to others so that we can spread our warmth over the world.

“This isn’t so bad,” I whispered. “This isn’t bad at all.”


Back | Next
Framed