'I should have brought a couple of coats,' Al muttered. He was in a worn old denim jacket and jeans.
'It’s okay. The sun’s warming things up.'
The sky was cloudless blue. Big dollops of wet snow were melting out of the ponderosas and pinons, dropping like scoops of ice cream to splatter on the gravel trail. Jamie’s high-tech Reeboks were getting soaked. Al wore his usual boots, tough and comfortable. And his drooping, broad-brimmed hat protected his head from the falling snow. Jamie, bareheaded, had to keep an eye on the trees and dodge the falls.
The air was thin up this high. Jamie heard his grandfather wheezing. He had seen the Anasazi ruins before, of course, but for some reason Al wanted him to see them once again before he took off for another world.
They reached the crest of the high ridge, walked along the edge for a few silent, puffing minutes, then stepped out from behind a stand of pine.
Across a bend in the ridge, a hundred feet down, the old ruins huddled in a cleft of the ancient solid stone. Even to this day the adobe brick dwellings were protected from the wind and snow by the overhanging rock. Reddish brown sandstone, Jamie knew. Almost the same color as Mars.
'Your ancestors built that village five hundred years before Columbus was born,' Al said quietly.
'I know,' said Jamie.
'Son, when you go to Mars, you’ll be taking them with you. The Old Ones. They’re in your blood.'
Jamie smiled at his grandfather. 'By god, Al, you are going mystical.'
His grandfather’s face was entirely serious. 'It’s important for a man to know who he is. You can’t be in balance without that. You can’t know where you’re heading for if you don’t know where you’ve come from.'
'I understand, Grandfather.'
'Your father…' Al hesitated. The old man had never called him his son as long as Jamie could remember. 'Your father turned his back on all this. He wanted to be accepted by the whites so badly! He turned himself into an Anglo. I don’t blame him. It’s my own fault, I guess. I didn’t teach him half of what I’ve taught you, Jamie. I was too busy then, with the store and all. I didn’t take the time to raise him like I should have.'
'It’s not your fault, Al.'
'I think it is. I wasn’t as good a father to him as I’ve been a grandfather to you. I can see why he felt he had to take the path he did. But I want you to remember who you are, son. You’ll be traveling where no one has gone before. You’ll be facing dangers no one’s ever dealt with. It’ll go better for you if you remember all this, keep it in your mind always.'
Looking out on the ancient adobe village, the square dwellings with their empty windows, the brick-walled circles of kivas where the men held their religious ceremonies in the heady smoke of precious tobacco, Jamie nodded to his grandfather.
'I knew you would go to Mars,' Al said, his voice almost cracking. 'Never had the slightest doubt that you’d go.'
'I’ll remember this,' Jamie said. 'I’ll keep it in my heart.'
Al reached into the pocket of his denim jacket. 'Here,' he said. 'A reminder.'
Jamie saw that his grandfather was offering him a carved piece of jet-black obsidian in the totem shape of a crouching bear. A tiny turquoise arrowhead was tied to its back with a leather thong, with a wisp of a white feather tucked atop it.
A fetish, Jamie realized. A protective piece of Navaho magic.
'That’s an eagle feather,' Al said, unable to suppress his shopkeeper’s pride.
Jamie took the fetish. It was small in his palm, but weighty, solid, strong.
'I’ll keep this with me every minute, Grandfather.'
Al grinned, almost embarrassed. 'Go with beauty, son.'
4
Jamie made it back to Houston Sunday night and crawled into his apartment bed emotionally exhausted. While he slept his future was decided, more than ten thousand kilometers away, in Star City.
Alberto Brumado dozed in the limousine that had met his plane on its arrival in Moscow. Alone in the spacious backseat, jet-lagged by his supersonic flight from Washington, Brumado paid no attention to the lines of tall apartment blocks and low gray clouds that stretched eastward toward the true steppe country of Russia. For more than an hour the car sped along the wide concrete highway; traffic thinned away until there was little more than the occasional massive tractor-trailer rig, diesel engine belching sooty exhaust plumes into the air.
Past Kaliningrad they drove, past woods and lakes and over a railroad crossing, heading toward Star City.
The actual name of the community is Zvyozdniy Gorodok: literally, 'Starry Town.' But ever since the first cooperative Soviet-American space venture, the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, a slight misinterpretation by a NASA translator turned it into Star City, and so it has been called by the western media ever since.
Once it had been a town, nothing more than a handful of apartment blocks and a dozen big concrete buildings that housed the cosmonaut training center, deliberately placed in the barren emptiness between a thick pine forest and a scattering of small lakes. Now, as Alberto Brumado’s car drove past the guard post at the perimeter fence, it had grown into a sizable city. Scientists and astronauts from all over the world trained here for Mars. The world’s media focused their attention here. A true city had grown around the clear blue lakes, homes for workers who served the training center, shops and open-air markets and entertainment complexes. Close by the main gate of the training center itself stood the Space Museum, a gracefully sweeping concrete form that captured the spirit of flight.
Brumado had learned the traveler’s secret years earlier: sleep whenever you can. Now, as the limousine pulled up to the main office building at the training center, he roused himself from his nap, ready to step out and face his responsibilities, alert if not actually refreshed.
Dr. Li Chengdu came almost loping down the front steps of the building on his long legs to greet Brumado and guide him to the office that the Russians had set aside for his use. Dr. Li was wearing an expensive-looking running suit of maroon and slate gray. The white pinstripe down the legs made him look even taller and leaner than usual. His face seemed strained, grayish, almost ill. Perhaps it’s that maroon top, Brumado thought. It’s not good for his coloring. He himself was still in his Washington clothes: a dark blue business suit. He had removed the tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket hours earlier. The shirt was limp and wrinkled from his long trip.
The office to which Li escorted him was big enough to contain a broad polished conference table, Brumado saw. Good. And its own lavatory. Even better. The second rule of the inveterate traveler: never pass a toilet without using it.
Three minutes later, his bladder emptied, his face washed, and his hair freshly combed, Brumado pulled out a chair from the middle of the conference table, ignoring the massive desk and the high-backed swivel chair behind it. Brumado felt he was here to help solve a sudden problem, not to impress others with the trappings of power.
Besides, he told himself, I have no real power here, no authority over these men and women. My strength lies in moral persuasion, nothing more.
Dr. Li was pacing the office from the draped windows to the head of the conference table and back again, more nervous than Brumado had ever seen him.
'Please sit here next to me,' Brumado said mildly. 'It hurts my neck to look up at you.'
Li’s thin ascetic face looked startled momentarily, then apologetic. He took the chair next to Brumado’s.
'You seem very upset,' Brumado said. 'What is wrong?'
Li drummed his long fingers on the tabletop before answering. 'We seem to have a virtual mutiny on our hands. And your daughter, sir, is apparently the ringleader.'
'Joanna?'
'Once it became clear that DiNardo could not make the mission, your daughter — and others — demanded that Professor Hoffman be replaced as well.'
