Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  PRESIDENT: Thank you. I’d like to make a brief statement, and then I’ll take your questions. If there’s one value that has shaped our country, it’s freedom. For nearly 250 years we have guaranteed our citizens unprecedented freedom of thought, of religion, of privacy, of movement, of actions within the law. These freedoms have yielded for the American people unparalleled social richness, unparalleled peace within our borders, and unparalleled contacts with other nations. During the last three years, my administration has made every effort to protect and defend these individual freedoms. For this reason, I firmly believe that allowing United States citizens to choose to accompany the Atoners to the moon, and beyond, is their right and our legacy. We must wish the twenty-one “Witnesses,” both those who are our fellow countrymen and those from other nations, Godspeed. And we must hope that the knowledge they bring back from their journeys will enrich us all. Okay . . . Sandy?

  SANFORD GARDNER, CNN: Ma’am, how would you answer those critics who say that you are risking having these so-called “Witnesses” converted to some strange philosophy or hostile military intention and so returning to the United States as brainwashed or otherwise altered spies?

  PRESIDENT: You mean they might want to ask intrusive questions of the White House? [laughter] Seriously, as I just said, the United States does not limit the thoughts of its citizens. We of course limit actions, for the good of us all. But those Americans who have volunteered to travel with the Atoners are as free as the rest of us to be exposed to, consider, and adopt any thought they choose. If, however, they return and perform actions that in any way endanger this country, of course that will be appropriately addressed at the appropriate time. But the Atoners have approached us in peace, as friends, and as friends we accept their overtures, which, I’d like to remind you, are part of the most stupendous event to affect mankind in centuries. Centuries.

  [MANY VOICES]: Ma’am! Ma’am! Madam President!

  PRESIDENT: Yes, Kyle?

  KYLE YOUMANS, NBC NEWS: You’ve been praised and condemned both for mobilizing the National Guard the moment that the anti-Atoner riots began in four separate American cities. Sixteen people are dead as a result of either those riots or subsequent Guard actions. Do you now consider that mobilization premature or in any other way a mistake?

  PRESIDENT: I do not. Most of us are not going to the stars, at least not just yet. We barely have a human presence on the moon, even with Selene City and China’s Village of Heaven and the commercial base of Farrington Tours. Most of humanity lives here, on Earth, and here where we live, order and law must be preserved. Jenna?

  JENNA JOHNSON, FOX NEWS: Madam President, your handling of the entire Atoner crisis has resulted in low—lower—approval ratings for your administration and for you personally. Do you think this reflects an understanding on the part of the American people that their leader has sold out to aliens?

  PRESIDENT: I do not. Chris?

  CHRIS DEFAZIO, THE NEW YORK TIMES: What sort of knowledge do you expect that the Witnesses will bring back to us?

  PRESIDENT: How can we know yet? Let me tell you a story. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria summoned the scientist Michael Faraday to Buckingham Palace. Mr. Faraday had just formulated important laws related to electricity, and the queen was curious. She watched his various demonstrations and listened to his explanations and finally asked, “But Mr. Faraday, what use is this ‘electricity’?” Do you know what Faraday answered his monarch? He said, “Ma’am, what use is a baby?”

  We don’t know what knowledge will come to us from beyond the stars. But like a baby, it should be nourished and watched as it grows and develops.

  CHRIS DEFAZIO: Follow-up question, please! Ma’am . . . If you weren’t the president of the United States, were young enough, and had a chance to become a Witness for the Atoners and visit another planet—Would you have gone?

  PRESIDENT: [long pause] In a heartbeat.

  13: LUCCA

  IT SNOWED HEAVILY FOR THREE DAYS and three nights. Village and steppes piled with white. The Kularians, laughing, dug paths and tunnels from huts to community lodge to store house to privies. The winter didn’t seem to change their mood at all; they were no more affected by cold and monotony and boredom than were rabbits or badgers on Earth.

  Nor was Lucca any longer bored. He set about cautiously, trying to arouse no suspicion, to investigate Kularian telepathy. From the day he’d landed, twenty-eight days ago, the natives had assumed that he was just like them. Lucca didn’t want to disturb this notion. He wasn’t sure what they would do if they discovered he was not telepathic.

  How did it work for them?

  He feigned sleep until long after Hytrowembireliaz and his family had left for the lodge and another day of communal cooking, dancing, gossiping. Then he sat up and concentrated on an image that Chewithoztarel could never have seen: the rich Tuscany vineyards of Vino Maduro in Cortona, where Lucca had grown up. In loving detail he pictured the vines heavy with purple Sangiovese grapes, the pale fields dreaming in the sun, the tall, thin cypresses spiking the blue sky. He went back to the sights and sounds and even the smells of childhood, before Oxford and London and Gianna. As he concentrated on the images, he thought over and over the Italian word vigna. After at least fifteen minutes of this, he fought his way through the snow to the community lodge.

  It was more subdued than usual. No one was dancing, and the adults sat in small groups, talking quietly. Those children not outside played a betting game with stones or wove ribbons on their small handheld looms, a current fad. Chewithoztarel, however, sat alone in a corner, staring at her fingers, uncharacteristically silent.

  “Chewithoztarel?” Lucca said, sitting beside her on the usual pile of smelly rugs. “Are you ill?”

  “No.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You look sad.”

  “I am.”

  He waited. Often, saying nothing prompted people to talk—although not usually Kularians. Was this sadness somehow connected to his images of gorgeous scenery the little girl would never see? That seemed a pretty sophisticated concept for Chewithoztarel, but Lucca didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know anything for sure anymore. His heart thumped and he had to make himself breathe normally.

  Chewithoztarel, maddening as always, said nothing.

  Lucca thought hard about the vigna. Maybe one had to be physically closer to a receiving telepath in order to get through . . . but then how had Chewithoztarel “heard” what he’d been saying to Soledad far out on the plain?

  Chewithoztarel said nothing, staring down at her own fingers.

  Hytrowembireliaz approached, crouched beside his daughter, and said sharply, “Small heart, stop this.”

  Lucca blinked. It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone in the village speak harshly to a child, or in fact to anyone. Hytrowembireliaz looked at Lucca. “I apologize for my child. She is young, and they were good fellow-travelers-on-the-first-road.”

  “Friends, yes,” Lucca managed. Who were good friends?

  Someone must have died. As Hytrowembireliaz moved away, Lucca surreptitiously counted the villagers. All adults were present. How many children were out in the snow? He had to know. Laboriously he arose and walked outside.

  It took him a while to count the kids because they were playing some game that involved hiding in a sprawling acre-wide tree, behind huts, and in snow holes, but eventually they tired of this and trooped inside to eat. All the children were accounted for. And when Lucca went back inside, Chewithoztarel had joined a group of girls giggling in one corner. Clearly there were no vineyards in her exasperating mind.

  He sat beside Blanbilitwan, the child’s mother, who smiled at him with the same impartial, low-key good humor she offered everyone else. Her red front tooth was slightly chipped, yellowed enamel showing through. Tentatively Lucca said, “Chewithoztarel will miss her fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road.”

  Blanbilitwan’s smile didn�
�t waver. “Yes. But she will learn.”

  Learn what? Before he could think of what to say next, Blanbilitwan added, “I remember when my sister started down the third road. I cried, too. So silly! But it was past time. If Ragjuptrilpent hadn’t been so young herself, she would not have stayed here so long.”

  Ragjuptrilpent. Chewithoztarel’s imaginary friend: a real girl who had died. Yes, it did make sense for a child to pretend her friend was still alive. But—

  Ragjuptrilpent told me you were here.

  She said you washed in the shed and pissed in the corner.

  I saw you coming back from way over the hill! And Ragjuptrilpent saw you, too!

  Cold slid along Lucca’s spine. He said to Blanbilitwan, “When . . . when did Ragjuptrilpent start on . . . on the second road?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “I must think . . . yes, in Trem. You had not yet come to us.”

  “Trem” meant nothing to the translator. “How many days ago?”

  “Oh, many. At least five tens. She was always late, that girl.” Someone called to Blanbilitwan and she moved away.

  Before he arrived here. Ragjuptrilpent had died, and then . . . what? Hung around as a ghost, lingering on “the second road,” to spy on Lucca and giggle with Chewithoztarel over Lucca’s activities? Ridiculous. Lucca didn’t believe in ghosts. There was another explanation for all this, and he would have to find it. This was, must be, what the Atoners had sent him here to witness. There was an explanation.

  He made his way to the door, smiling at everyone he passed, and went back out into the cold. In Hytrowembireliaz’s hut, he crawled under blankets, his own plus a few of other people, and commlinked Soledad. To hell with discretion and tact and not contaminating the two-planet double-blind experiment. He had to know if Cam was encountering anything like this, and what she and Soledad made of it. Anything to help make sense of the unthinkable. Anything at all, from anyone, anywhere.

  14: CAM

  IF THE BASTARDS would only stop rushing at her!

  Cam took another step down the palace stairwell. In ten minutes, she had advanced six steps down the straight staircase squeezed into a passage so narrow that only one person could descend at a time. Or two, if the second was Aveo, clinging to her back like a humiliated monkey. For each step, she had to wait until no soldiers were trying to stab or spear or punch either of them, so that she could press the manual override on her shield control, which briefly stopped whatever forces rooted the shield to the ground. If she didn’t stop the rooting, she couldn’t move forward; if she did, the fucking soldiers might push her down the stairs and Aveo might come loose from the protection of the shield.

  But it was the shouting that was the worst, constant hoarse war cries like this was Little Big Horn or something. “Shut up!” she screamed in English, which only added to the clamor. She could feel Aveo tremble on her back, but he said nothing. Brave old man! She’d be damned if she’d let him make her look bad.

  They came at Cam in a steady stream from both above and below, until finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and shoved at the one standing in front of her, who was trying futilely to slice open her belly with a knife the length of his forearm. He staggered and tumbled backward, knocking over the man behind him, and on down the rest of the stairwell they fell like a line of dominos. Cam laughed out loud, from nerves and relief and fear, and was appalled when the laugh became a sob.

  Aveo breathed in her ear, “Turn left at the bottom of the stairs, through the curtain.”

  She did, and what had been a rough stone passage abruptly became a wide gallery open on her left to a garden lush with alien flowers. And they were alien, the first truly alien thing she’d seen on Kular. Not that she could spare attention to examine them closely! But she was aware of the plants’ weird shapes, pungent scents, and above all that some of them emitted a constant rumbling, very low and somehow unsettling—Were they plants? Animals of some type? Dangerous?

  “Straight ahead,” Aveo said, as more soldiers rushed them and Cam was forced to stand still, rooted. The wall to her right was set with thousands of tiny colored stones, but the patterns looked odd to her, somehow off, like that modern art she’d never liked at home. Home . . .

  Not now.

  “Last door on the right,” Aveo said, and all at once that sounded to her so much like directions to a bathroom that she laughed again, not a sob this time, and felt her confidence return. She could do this. She was doing this. Only . . .

  I don’t want to have to kill anyone else.

  “That may happen, ostiu,” Aveo said dryly, and Cam realized she had subvocalized and then repeated what the translator gave her, without knowing she’d done either.

  All at once the unholy shouting and attacking stopped.

  A man had appeared in the doorway that Aveo had indicated, striding through another of the curtains that seemed to be doors here, and given an order. The soldiers dropped back behind Cam. The man was very tall, his bare breast painted nearly entirely blue, a blue helmet on his head. Cam said, “Uldunu?”

  “No!” Aveo said, scandalized. “Chief of the Royal Guard.” And then, “Let me.”

  Not that she had any choice, until the translator could handle this language. But already it had picked up a few phrases and Cam’s implant whispered, “King . . . was sent . . . woman from the sky . . .”

  Aveo said to her in Pularit, “Follow him.”

  “Will he take us to Uldunu? No, they’ll protect the king, right? I won’t get to see him?”

  “Of course you will see him! Kulith!”

  Cam scowled. Couldn’t these people tell the difference between some stupid game and real life? Was this what the Atoners wanted her to witness—that the Kularians couldn’t tell the difference? What the fuck was she here for, anyway?

  I don’t know. But I don’t want to have to kill anyone else.

  On the other side of the curtain was a huge room, maybe as large as a football field, with people massed at the other end. The ceiling soared high above, the walls and floor were covered with the tiny glittering colored stones in the weird patterns, and plants grew in big triangular beds set into the floor. The plants groaned at her with their unmusical rumbling, sounding for all the world like something in minor pain. Cam approached Uldunu on his raised throne, surrounded by bare-chested men—no women—who all wore skirts and whose chests were painted red or blue.

  The king was a small, muscular man in a silky green skirt with fantastic green designs covering his chest and face and legs and arms, and with green-painted toenails in golden sandals. He looked to her like a leprechaun, or maybe something from a drag show, but she kept her face stern and was proud of herself for this. The king glared at her. Amazed whispering ran over everybody else like wind in blue-and-red corn.

  Aveo said, “He is angry that you do not kneel.”

  “And I’m not going to, either!”

  “But I must.”

  “Don’t you dare, Aveo! They’ll kill you!”

  “Let’s hope not.” He leaned slightly forward and over her shoulder began a long speech to the king. Somewhere near the end the translator started up in Cam’s implant. “. . . and so to honor Uldunu Four, the (unknown) of the Goddess of All Green on (unknown) with gifts of invisible armor.”

  Gifts? Invisible armor, plural? This wasn’t what she and Aveo had discussed! She was supposed to be a trader, with things to sell to the king. What was Aveo playing at?

  The king went on glaring at her. No one in the vast room seemed to so much as breathe, and the only noise was the low, agitated, incredibly irritating drone from the plants. Then Aveo moved away from Cam, sank to his knees, and crossed his arms over his breast. She saw his eyes.

  “No!” Cam cried as the Chief of the Guard strode forward. Before his long knife was even out of its sheath, Cam fired.

  Everything slowed. The soldier fell with excruciating leisure. Cam saw her arm inch out to grab Aveo, who resisted with surprising strength and remai
ned kneeling, his head lowered. Men in red skirts shifted with the speed of continental drift and spoke so slowly that the words were elongated and below hearing, like the moaning of the infernal plants. Blue-painted soldiers stretched languorously toward their weapons. The dead man lay on the floor, smelling of burnt flesh, as if motionlessly asleep.

  Then Uldunu said something that Cam heard clearly, and the horror turned to horrible farce. Soldiers replaced their weapons, red-skirted men scurried to obey, Aveo raised his head and stood. A small table, its contents, and two large cushions woven with gold were set before Cam. The king descended his throne. Aveo, inexplicably left alive, tugged on Cam’s hand to pull her to one of the cushions; he sat on the floor beside her. The king sat on the other cushion.

  Cam stared at the kulith board and game pieces before her.

  SHE LOST, OF COURSE. Despite Aveo’s tutelage, she could barely remember how the pieces moved, let alone the insanely complicated rules for trading, stealing, or destroying pieces, hers and his, that represented land and cities and crops and people. Or maybe they didn’t, since which pieces represented what seemed to change throughout the game. Aveo sat silent and still, not helping her. When she had no pieces left and her stomach rumbled from hunger, the king waved his hand. Naked slaves, who had not been in the huge room earlier, sprang forward, knelt, and then led Cam and Aveo out.

  “You did well,” he said to her in Pularit.

  “I lost!”

  “I should hope so!”

  So the game had been some sort of ritual, and she was supposed to lose. All those hours wasted in something predetermined . . . She remembered the conversation between the king and Aveo. Aveo said she was bringing gifts of invisible armor, which she most certainly was not. They had discussed invisible armor, but as trade, not gifts. But if she accused Aveo, he would know she now understood the language of this city, whatever it was. It might be an advantage to her if Aveo didn’t know this—wasn’t he already lying to and about her? She was no longer sure she could trust him.