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.