Catherine Asaro has a doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard and claims she is a walking definition of the word absent-minded, managing to spill coffee in every room of her house.
You wouldn't know it by her sharp, telling fiction. She's been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and has won a bunch of others, including the Analog Readers Poll and the National Readers Choice Award. Her most recent books were The Quantam Rose and a near-future suspense novel, The Phoenix Code.
For Redshift she's written something that can only be described as, well, sharp and telling.

Ave de Paso
Catherine Asaro

My cousin Manuel walked alone in the twilight, out of sight, while I sat in the back of the pickup truck. We each needed privacy for our grief. The hillside under our truck hunched out of the desert like the shoulder of a giant. Perhaps that shoulder belonged to one of the Four-Corner Gods who carried the cube of the world on his back. When too many of the Zinacantec Maya existed, the gods grew tired and shifted the weight of their burden, stirring an earthquake.
I slipped my hand into my pocket, where I had hidden my offerings: white candles, pine needles, rum. They weren't enough. I had no copal incense to burn, no resin balls and wood chips to appease the ancestral gods for the improper manner of my mother's burial.
Manuel and I were far now from Zinacant-n, our home in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Years ago my mother had brought us here, to New Mexico. Later we had moved to Los Angeles, the city of fallen angels. But for this one night, Manuel and I had returned to New Mexico, a desert named after the country of our birth, yet not of that country.
An in-between place.
Dusk feathered across the land, brushing away a pepper-red sunset. Eventually I stirred myself enough to set out our sleeping bags in the bed of the truck. It wouldn't be as comfortable as if we slept on the ground, but we wouldn't wake up with bandolero scorpions or rattlesnakes in our bags either.
"Akushtina?" Manuel's voice drifted through the dry evening like a hawk.
I sat down against the wall of the pickup and pulled my denim jacket tight against the night's chill.
Manuel walked into view from around the front of the truck. "Tina, why didn't you answer?" "It didn't feel right."
He climbed into the truck and dropped his Uzi at my feet. "You okay?"
I shuddered. "Take it away."
Sitting next to me, he folded his arms against the cold. "Take what away?"
I pushed the Uzi with my toe. "That."
"You see a rattler, you yell for me, what am I going to do? Spit at it?" "You don't need a submachine gun to protect us from snakes." He withdrew from me then, not with his body but with his spirit, into the shrouded places of his mind. I had hoped that coming here, away from the cold angles and broken lines of Los Angeles, would bring back the closeness we had shared as children. Though many people still considered us children.
"I don't want to fight," I said. His look softened. 
"I know, hija." 
"I miss her."
He put his arms around me and I leaned into him, this cousin of mine who at nineteen, three years older than me, was the only guardian I had now. Sliding my arms under his leather jacket, I laid my head against the rough cloth of his flannel shirt. And I cried, slight sounds that blended into the night. The crickets stopped chirping, filling the twilight with their silence.
Manuel murmured in Tzotzil Mayan, our first language, the only one he had ever felt was his, far more than the English we spoke now, or the Spanish we had learned as a second language. But he would never show his tears: not to me; not to the social workers in L.A. who had tried to reach him when he was younger and now feared they had failed; not to Los Halcones, the gang the Anglos called The Falcons, the barrio warriors Manuel considered the only family we had left.
Eventually I stopped crying. Crickets began to saw the night again, and an owl hooted, its call wavering like a ghost. Sounds came from the edge of the world: a truck growling on the horizon, the whispering rumble of pronghorn antelope as they loped across the land, the howl of a coyote. No city groans muddied the night.
I pulled away from Manuel, wiping my cheek with my hand. Then I got up and went to stand at the cab of the truck, leaning with my arms folded on its roof. We had parked on the top of a flat hill. The desert rolled out in all directions, from here to the horizon, an endless plain darkening with shadows beneath a forever sky. This land belonged less to humans than to the giant furry tarantulas that crept across the parched soil; or to the tarantula hawks, those huge wasps that dived out of the air to grab their eight-legged prey; or to the javelinas, the wild, grunting pigs.
We had come here from the Chiapas village called Naben Chauk, the Lake of the Lightning. My mother had been outcast there, an unmarried woman with a child and almost no clan. After the death of Manuel's parents, my aunt and uncle, she had no one. So eight years ago she brought Manuel and me here, to New Mexico, where a friend had a job for her. But she dreamed of the City of Angels, convinced it could give us a better life. So later we had moved to Los Angeles, a sprawling giant that could swallow this hill like a snake swallowing a mouse.
"The city killed her," I said. "If we had stayed in Naben Chauk she would still be alive." 
Manuel's jeans rustled when he stood up. His boots thudded as he crossed the truck bed. He leaned on the cab next to me. "I wish it. You wish it. But Los Angeles didn't give her cancer. That sickness, it would have eaten her no matter where we went."
"The city sucked out pieces of her soul."
He drew me closer, until I was standing between him and the cab, my back against his front, his arms around me, his hands resting on the cab. "You got to let go, Tina. You got to say good-bye."
"I can't." It was like giving up, just like we had given up our home. I missed the limestone hills of the Chiapas highlands, where clouds hid the peaks and mist cloaked the sweet stands of pine. As a small girl, I had herded our sheep there, our only wealth, woolly animals we sheared with scissors bought in San Cristobal de las Casas. Until an earthquake killed the flock.
As it had killed Manuel's parents.
I wished I could see my mother one last time, cooking over a fire at dawn, smoke rising around her, spiraling up and around until it escaped out the spaces where the roof met the walls. She would kneel in front of her comal, a round metal plate propped up on two pots and a rock, patting her maize dough back and forth, making tortillas.
"It's good we came here to tell her good-bye," I said. "It was wrong the way she died, in that hospital. In L.A."
"We did the best we could." Manuel kissed the top of my head. "She couldn't have gotten medicine in Naben Chauk, not what she needed."
"Her spirit won't rest now."
"Tina, you got to stop all this, about spirits and things." Manuel let go of me. I turned around in time to see him pick up the Uzi. He held it like a staff. "This is how you 'protect your spirit.' By making sure no one takes what's yours."
"How can you come to mourn her and bring this." I jerked the gun out of his hand and threw it over the side of the truck. "She would hate it. Hate it."
"Goddamn it, Tina." Holding the side of the pickup, he vaulted over it to the ground. He picked up the Uzi, his anger hanging around him like smoke. Had I been anyone else, grabbing his gun that way could have gotten me shot.
I climbed out of the truck and jumped down next to him. He towered over me, tall by any standard, huge for a man of the Zinacantec Maya, over six feet. His hook-nosed profile was silhouetted against the stars like an ancient Maya king, a warrior out of place and time, his face much like those carved into the stellae, the stones standing in the ruins of our ancestors. Proud. He was so proud. And in so much pain.
Faint music rippled out of the night, drifting on the air like a bird, strange and yet familiar, the sweet notes of a Chiapas guitar. "Someone is here," I said.
Manuel lifted his gun as he scanned the area. "You see someone?" 
"Hear someone." The music came closer now, stinging, bittersweet. "A guitar. On the other side of the hill."
He lowered the gun. "I don't hear squat."
"It's there." I hesitated. "Let's not stay here tonight. If we went back into town, they would probably let us stay at the house—"
"No! We didn't come all this way to stay where she was a maid." Manuel motioned at the desert. "This is what she loved. The land."
I knew he was right. But the night made me uneasy. "Something is wrong."

"Oh, hell, Tina." He took my arm. "I'll show you. No one is here."
I pulled away. "Don't go."
"Why not?" Manuel walked away, to the edge of the hilltop. He stood there, a tall figure in the ghosting moonlight. Then he disappeared, gone down the other side, vanished into the whispering night.
"Manuel, wait." I started after him.
The guitar kept playing, its notes wavering, receding, coming closer. Then it stopped, and the desert waited in silence. No music, no crickets, no coyotes.
Nothing.
"Manuel?" I called. "Did you find anyone?"
Gunshots cracked, splintering the night into pieces.
"No!" I broke into a run, sprinting to the edge where he had disappeared. Then I stopped. The slope fell away from my feet, mottled by mesquite and spidery ocotillo bushes, until it met the desert floor several hundred yards below.
"Manuel!" My shout winged over the desert.
No answer. I slid in a stumbling run down the hill, thorny mesquite grabbing at my jeans. About halfway down reason came back and I slowed down, moving with more caution.
I reached the bottom without seeing anyone. Yet a tendril of smoke wafted in the air. How? No fire burned anywhere.
Music started again, behind me. Turning, I faced the shadowed hill. My feet took me forward, toward the drifting notes, toward the hill, toward the music in the hill. Yet as long as I walked, as many steps as I took, I came no closer to that dusky slope. It stayed in front of me, humped in the moonlight.
With no warning, I was on the edge of a campfire. What I had thought was the hill, it was smoke, hanging in layers and curtains. I walked through the ashy mist, trying to reach the campfire that flickered red and orange, vague in the smoke-laden air.
Someone was sitting on the ground by the fire.
"Manuel? "I asked.
He didn't stir. I continued to walk, but came no closer to him.
It wasn't my cousin. The stranger gave no indication he knew I had come to his fire. He stared into the flames, a heavy man with rolls of flesh packed around his body. The ground began to move under my feet, bringing him toward me, while I walked in place.
Guitar notes drifted in the smoke, joined now by drums, a Chamula violin, and a reed pipe. They keened for my mother. The melody hit discords, as if offended that it had to play for itself when I should have brought the music in her honor. But where in Los Angeles could I have found Zinacantec instruments or musicians to play them?
I had so little of what I needed to give my mother a proper burial. She lay in an unmarked grave in California. But I would do my best in this in-between place. Manuel should have been the one to perform the ceremony, as head of the family, but I knew what he would say if I asked him. He trusted his Uzi far more than the ways of our lost home.
The ground continued to bring the stranger to me. He stopped only a few paces away. With a slow, sure motion, he turned his head and smiled, a dark smile, a possessive smile.
"Akushtina." He pressed his hands together and lifted his arms. When he opened his hands, a whippoorwill lay in the cup of his palms.
"No!" I stepped forward. "Let her go!"
He clapped his hands and the bird screamed, turning into smoke when his palms smacked together. "She's gone."
I knew then that he had trapped my mother's spirit when she died catching it before she could return home to the mountains around the Lake of the Lightning. She hadn't been buried with the proper rituals after a mourner's meal at dawn, her head toward the west. It had let this unnamed stranger steal her soul, just as he stole the spirit of the whip-poorwill, her companion among the wild creatures that lived in the spirit world.
Wait.
The whippoorwill wasn't my mother's spirit companion. An ocelot walked with her. In her youth, she had met it in her dreams, as it prowled the dream corrals on the Senior Large Mountain. If the ancestral gods had been angry when she died, it was the ocelot they would have freed from its corral, leaving it to wander unprotected in the Chiapas highlands.
A whippoorwill made no sense. It came from this place, here, in the desert. During the year we lived in New Mexico, in the ranch house where my mother worked, she and I had often sat outside in the warm nights and listened to the eerie bird voices call though the dry air. So I thought of the whippoorwill when I thought of her. But if this stranger had truly captured her spirit companion, he would have shown me the ocelot.
Why a whippoorwill? I had no answer. All I could do was make the offerings I had brought. I pulled out the bag of pine needles and sprinkled them on the ground. The smoke around us smelled of copal incense, this stranger doing for himself what should have come from me. I fumbled in my pocket for the rum bottle. It wasn't true posh, a drink distilled from brown sugar and made in Chamula. This came from a store in L.A. But it was the best I could do.
The man snorted, giving his opinion of my offerings. He motioned at the rum. "You drink it."
Flushing, I tipped the bottle to my lips. The rum went down in a jolt and I coughed, spluttering drops everywhere. The rattle of the stranger's laugh made haze whirl around us, smoke curling and uncurling, hiding the desert, revealing it, hiding it again in veils of gray on gray.
Then I remembered the candles. Candles, tortillas for the gods. Taking them out of my pocket, I knelt down and set them in the dirt. They were ordinary, each made from white wax, with a white wick. When I lit them, they should have burned with a simple flame. Instead they sparked like tiny sky rockets straining to break free of the earth.
The man rose to his feet, ponderous and heavy. "This is all you have for me?"
I looked up, trying to understand what he wanted. A shape formed behind him, hazy in the smoke. It stepped closer and showed itself as a deer, a great stag with a king's rack of antlers. Two iguanas rode on its head, their bodies curving down to make blinders for its eyes, their tails curled tight around its antlers. They watched me with lizard gazes. The stranger had a whip in his hand now, not leather, but a living snake, its tongue flicking out from its mouth, its body supple and undulating, its tail stiffened into a handle.
I scrambled to my feet. "I know you," I rasped, my throat raw from the drifting smoke. "Yahval Balamil."
He stood before me and laughed, Yahval Balamil, the Earth Lord, the god of caves and water holes, he who could give riches or death, who could buy the pieces of your inner soul from a witch who took the shape of a goat, or trap your feet in iron sandals and make you work beneath the earth until the iron wore out.
Greed saturated his big-toothed smile. "You're mine now."
The smoke in the air curled thick around us. I tried to back away from him, but I was walking in place, my feet stepping and stepping, taking me nowhere.
"Mine," he said. "Both you and the boy."
"No! Leave us alone."
He cracked his whip, and it snapped around my body in coils, growing longer with each turn, pinning my arms. The head stopped inches from my face and the snake hissed, its tongue flicking out to touch my cheek. I tried to scream, but no sound came out.
"Mine," the Earth Lord whispered.
"Tina?" a voice asked behind me.
"Manuel!" I spun around. "Where have you been? Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm all right." He stood with the gun dangling at his side. "What's wrong?"
"Can't you see it?"
"See what?"
I glanced around. We were halfway up the hill, just the two of us. No snake, no spirits, no gods. The fire had vanished, and the smoke had solidified into the mountain.
Turning back to Manuel, I said, "He's gone."
"He?" My cousin scowled. "Why do you smell like liquor?"
"I drank some rum."
"When did you start messing with that shit?" He stepped closer. "I told you never to touch it. You know what happens when men see a pretty girl like you drunk? It makes them think to do what they shouldn't be doing."
"It was part of the ceremony."\
"Ceremony?" He looked around, taking in the candle stubs and pine needles scattered on the ground. Then he sighed, the fist-tight knot of his anger easing. In a gentler voice he said, "There isn't no one here. I checked the whole area."
"Then why did you shoot?"
"It was a deer. I missed it."
I stared at him. "You shot at a deer with an Uzi?"
"It surprised me. I've never seen deer here before."
"What if it had been me who surprised you?"
He touched my cheek. "You know I would never hurt you."
"You didn't shoot at a deer. It was Yahval Balamil."
His smile flashed in the darkness. "Did I hit him?"
"Don't make fun of me."
"You're mine," the Earth Lord whispered.
With a cry, I jerked back and lost my balance. I fell to the ground and rolled down the hill like a log, with mesquite ripping at my clothes. When my head struck a rock, I jolted to a stop and my sight went black. A ringing note rose in the air like a bird taking flight, then faded into faint guitar music.
"Tina!" Manuel shouted, far away.
"Mine," the Earth Lord said. "Both of you." A snake hissed near my ear.
"Stop it!" I struck at the dark air.
"Oiga!" Now Manuel sounded as if he was right above me. "I won't hurt you."
My sight was coming back, enough so I could see my cousin's head silhouetted against the stars. He was kneeling over me, his legs on either side of my hips. "Are you okay?" he asked. "Why did you scream?"
"Mine," the Earth Lord murmured.
"No!" I said.
Manuel brushed a lock of hair off my face. "I didn't mean to scare you."
Smoke was forming behind him, tendrils coming together in the outline of a stag.
"Leave him alone!" I sat up, almost knocking Manuel over, and batted at the air, as if that could defeat the smoke and protect my cousin.
"What's wrong?" Manuel stayed where he was, his knees straddling my hips, his thighs pressing on mine. He grabbed my hands, pulling them against his chest. He held them in his large grip while he caught me around the waist with his other arm. "Tu eres bueno, Tinita. It's okay."
The smoke settled onto him, a dark cloud soaking into his body, smelling of incense. Curls of smoke brushed my hands where Manuel held them, my legs where his thighs pressed mine, my breasts where his chest touched mine. The invading darkness seeped into him.
Manuel jerked as if caught by the smoke. Then he pulled me hard against himself, his breath warm on my cheek, his body musky with the scent of his jacket, his shirt, his sweat. He murmured in Tzotzil, bending his head as if searching for something. I turned my face up—and he kissed me, pressing his lips hard against my mouth.
I twisted my head to the side. "No."
"Shhh . . .," he murmured. "It's all right." He lay me back down on the ground, his body heavy on mine, like the weight of the dead.
"Manuel, stop!" I tried to roll away, but he kept me in place.
"Mine," the Earth Lord said. "Both of you."
"No. Go away!" A breeze wafted across my face, bringing the smell of sagebrush—?
And candles?
Manuel kissed me again and pulled open my jacket with his free hand. "Akushtina," he whispered. "Te amo, hija."
"Not like this." My voice shook as I struggled. "You don't mean it like this."
"Soon," the Earth Lord promised. The snake hissed again.
Panic fluttered across my thoughts. I still smelled candles. That scent, I knew it from when we had lived here. Luminarios. On Christmas Eve my mother had filled brown bags with dirt, enough in each to hold one candle. She lined the paths and walls of the front yard with the glowing beige lanterns. My mother's love in a paper bag, warming the darkness while distant whippoorwills whistled in the night.
"We can go together." Manuel moved his hand over my breast. "Together."
"Manuel, listen." I was talking too fast, but I couldn't slow down. "Do you remember the luminaries?"
His searching hand stopped as it reached my hip. "Why?"
"Remember what we swore when we were watching them? About family? How we would protect each other?"
He lifted his head to look at me, his memory of that time etched on his face. The smoke that had funneled into his body seeped out again. It swirled around him, as if trying to go inside and finding its way blocked by the power of a memory. Finally it drifted away, into the night. Somewhere an owl hooted.
Manuel made a noise, a strangled gasp he sucked into his throat. He jumped to his feet and backed up one step, still watching me. Then he spun around and strode away. Within seconds the shadows of the hill had taken him.
I got up to my knees and bent over, my arms folded across my stomach, my whole body shaking. A wave of nausea surged over me, then receded. What if he had gone through with what he started? It would have destroyed us both.
What had he meant by We can go together? Go where?
Then I knew. Under the earth. Forever.
I scrambled to my feet and ran up the hill. It wasn't until I came over the top that I saw him, a dark shadow by the truck. My hiking boots crunched on the rocks as I walked. I stopped in front of him and looked up at his face.
Once I had seen a vaquero forced to shoot his horse after a truck hit it on Interstate 10. The dying animal had lain on its side, dismay in its gaze until the cowboy ended its pain. Manuel had that same look now.
He gave me the keys to the truck. "Go back to town."
"Not unless you come."
He shifted the Uzi in his hands. "I'm staying here."
I struggled to stay calm. "When people hurt, sometimes they do things they shouldn't. But you stopped. You stopped." I pushed at the Uzi. "Manuel, put it away."
"You're all I got left." His voice cracked. "And now I made that dirty, too."
I thought of his words: Te amo. "You said you loved me."
"You don't know nothing about how I meant it."
"I'm not stupid. I know." I shook my head. "It was him, making you act that way."
He stared at me, his stark face hooded by shadows. "It was me. It's always been there."
"But you didn't do it." I tried to find the words to reach him. "Everyone has darkness inside of him. You turned away from yours. That says how strong you are."
He snorted. "You got this seeing problem, Tina, like you look at me with mirror shades. They reflect away the truth about me, so you see what you want, this good that isn't there."
"It's there." For all that Manuel denied it, the good lived in him. The changes we had weathered in our lives had worn him down, eroding him like the wind and thunderstorms on the desert, in part because he was older, more set in his life, and had lost both his parents as well as my mother. But also because his height, strength, deep voice, and brooding anger frightened people. He looked like the warrior he would have been in another time, and in his frustration with a world that had no place for him, he had begun to live out that expectation.
"It's still there," I repeated, as if saying it enough would make him believe it.
He just shook his head.
"Mine," the Earth Lord whispered. "Both of you."
This time I gave no hint I heard. I kept watching my cousin.
"Take the truck," Manuel said. "Go back to town. Back to L.A."
"Why?" Everything that mattered to me was slipping away. I knew what he would do if he stayed alone here in the desert. "So you can take away the only family I have left?"
"You'll do better without me."
"No!"
A shadow moved on the cab of the truck, a small one, barely bigger than my hand. Whippoorwill. With a soft flapping of wings, it rose into the air and circled above us, then flew away over the hill, into the endless open spaces of the night.
"Mine," the Earth Lord rasped. His voice had an edge now, no longer gloating, more like a protest.
Then, finally, I understood. My mother's spirit had never been the one in danger. It was the two of us here, Manuel and me. We couldn't accept what we had lost, our home, our lives, our parents. That was why we had come to this in-between place. Our grief had made us vulnerable.
"I was wrong," I said. "The bird that Yahval Balamil was holding, it wasn't Mama. It was me."
Manuel clenched his fist around the Uzi. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The Earth Lord," I told him. "He's come for us. He knows we're hurting now. It makes us easy prey. He's come to take the pieces of our souls."
"Stop it." Manuel's voice cracked. "We're the only ones here. Not dead people or fat gods. Just us. No one else. No-fucking-one else." He flipped over the Uzi, holding it by the barrel, and swung it like a club, smashing it into the door of the truck, denting the weathered chrome. As I jumped back, he flipped the gun back over and aimed it at himself.
"Manuel, no!"
He didn't move, just stood like a statue, the Uzi pressed against his chest. I was afraid to breathe, to look away, even to blink.
Slowly, so slowly, he turned, and pointed the gun away from his heart, out over the desert—
And he fired.

Bullets punctured the night like rivets ramming metal. Shadow clouds of dirt flew into the air and rocks broke in explosions. He kept on firing, his long legs planted wide, his hands clenched on the gun, shattering the night, until I thought he would crack the land wide open and fall into the fissure.
After an eternity, the bullets stopped. Manuel sank to his knees and bowed his head, holding the gun like a pole in front of him. He made no sound. After a span of heartbeats I realized he was crying for the first time in years, in silence, even now unable to give voice to the grief that had torn apart his life, as he lost almost everything and everyone that had ever mattered to him.
I went to him and murmured in Tzotzil, nonsense words meant for comfort. He drew in a choked breath. Standing up, he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. We stood with space between us, a space that would always be there now.
I gave him the keys. "Will you drive?"
He stood watching my face. Then, finally, he said, "We can stay in town tonight. Leave for L.A. in the morning."
"Okay." My voice caught. "That sounds good."
I knew that our surviving this one night wouldn't solve the problems we faced in L.A. It wouldn't take away the inner demons Manuel wrestled or bring back my mother. We still had a long way to go.
But it was a start.
We had finally begun to ride the healing path.
So we drove away, through a land haunted with moonlight, leaving behind the bone-desert of our grief.