Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  They were led to a luxurious room with two wide couches—beds, she supposed—massive polished stone tables, and more swaths of the groaning plants. One whole wall opened into yet another noisy garden. Never had Cam seen such a public or unsecured bedroom. Food and drink sat on one table, and Aveo looked at it longingly. He whispered, “Eat or drink nothing.”

  “Poison?” This place grew worse and worse.

  “It is not inconceivable.”

  “I’m starving! And why are you whispering?”

  He came closer and took her in his arms, like a lover. Cam recoiled, but he held on tighter. “There will be spyholes, and by now they will have found someone who speaks Pularit.” He kissed her.

  A ruse. But she found herself clinging to him like a child to a father. His kiss was dry, cool, without passion, which was good because anything else would have snapped her nerves like guitar strings.

  He called, in his own language, “Slave!” and a naked girl appeared, shaking. Cam remembered Obu, shut up in the supply cabinet of the shuttle on the roof. Another complication. Aveo said, “Take us to the kitchens.” She did, and amid startled and terrified slaves and a bedlam of cooking, Cam and Aveo loaded themselves with waterskins and porridge intended for slaves. Back in their room, Cam ate eagerly.

  Darkness fell, the swift plunging sunset of the equator. Kular B rose huge in the sky, one half blue and white and the other in shadow. Aveo took Cam’s hand and led her to one of the wide beds. He pulled it away from the hectically colored wall to the middle of the room and lay on it behind her, curled around her body and within the shield that she turned off and then on to take him in. “Take him in”—even the wording was sexual. She didn’t want Aveo, although she felt his cock rise against her ass. Well, probably the poor coot couldn’t help that, he was old but not ancient and Cam knew quite well the effect her body always had on men. But his embrace was respectful and he didn’t push. Instead he whispered in her ear, so soft that even if they had been near a wall no spyhole could have caught it, “Have you found it?”

  “Found what?”

  “Whatever your masters sent you here to ‘witness.’ ”

  “Shut up,” Cam said in English, and was not even surprised when Aveo laughed, a low sound without mirth, eerily like the groaning of the alien plants.

  15: LETTER FROM A WITNESS

  Translated from Hindi by Anjor Khatri

  My dear parents,

  I write you to try to explain, better than I could on the telephone, why I have accepted this assignment as “Witness” for the Atoners. I know and respect your disapproval, and you are of course correct that it is a dangerous unknown. Also, I respect your concern that I am leaving my good position at the university so soon after I have been hired there. For all your sacrifices to send me to university both in India and in the United States, I will be grateful for the rest of my days on Earth. I can never repay you for all you have done for me.

  But your sacrifices and support have made me a historian, and as a historian, I cannot refuse this unprecedented opportunity. Think of it, my dear parents! Ten thousand years ago humans were taken from some primitive civilization or civilizations on Earth, transported to other planets, and left to flourish as they might. At the same time, the transporters of those humans, the first aliens to ever contact Earth, committed some crime against humanity, which was not the transportation itself. How could anyone interested in the history of the human race not wish to investigate all this? How could anyone of intellectual curiosity not wish to become part of the new bridges among Earth, these lost human colonies on alien worlds, and the aliens themselves?

  I so deeply regret that you are angry with me, and that you fear I may never return. You may be correct. But you raised me to use my mind as well as to honor our traditions. Never will I have a greater or more significant chance to do the former, and I will never abandon the latter. Please try to understand why I do this, and that I am still, no matter where in the universe I go, your loving daughter.

  Amira Gupta

  16: LUCCA

  “TELL ME AGAIN,” Soledad said.

  Lucca tried to restrain his impatience. He sat alone in Hytrowembireliaz’s cold hut, half-buried under a pile of stinking blankets, which had obviously been someone else’s blankets before Lucca and still smelled of him or her. Possibly the blankets smelled of several other people. The hut certainly did, including baby feces from Hytrowembireliaz’s youngest. Lucca hadn’t lit a lamp and so sat in darkness relieved only by the snow falling steadily outside the one small window. He clutched the commlink so hard that his fingers ached.

  He said, “You reviewed the translator uploads. I think the Kularians are telepathic. Chewithoztarel—the child informant I told you about—knew things I had said when I was far out on the plain, with absolutely no one within hearing. She knew I called you amica! You know I’d never done that before. Soledad, this must be what we were sent here to witness. Does Cam report anything like this?”

  “No, at least not yet. She linked last night and she— Lucca, are you sure? One instance doesn’t seem to me enough evidence. Has this child heard—sensed, received, I don’t know what word to use—anything besides amica?”

  “Yes. She saw me piss in a corner when I was alone and . . .” He couldn’t think of any other instance. Chewithoztarel had also repeated “Soledad,” but he might have called that out in his sleep.

  “One or two instances, both doubtful,” Soledad said, and he could hear the skepticism in her voice. “There might be some other explanation.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. What do the Kularians say is the explanation?”

  “Religious. They say they can see souls or ghosts or something, people who have recently died, until the dead set out ‘on the third road.’ It’s just another form of the afterlife myth. But the telepathy is—could be—real.” He could see her, sitting at the commlink console in the Atoner ship, her intelligent gray eyes weighing the evidence, finding it insufficient.

  “You need to run more experiments, Lucca.”

  “Yes, of course. But Cam—she hasn’t reported anything like this?” Although Lucca wasn’t sure Cam would even notice any covert telepathic communication. She didn’t have a very subtle mind.

  “Cam just survived a firefight with an entire army of soldiers, she’s practically a prisoner in a palace, and her informant may or may not be lying to her. She’s got her hands full.”

  Lucca felt a brief stab of envy. All that action, and of course it was the unseeing American who got it. Lucca knew himself to handle activity far better than inactivity. Then he was ashamed of his envy. After all, it was he who had witnessed the telepathy . . . unless he hadn’t. “You’re right, Soledad, I need to do more experiments. I can—” He stopped cold.

  “Lucca?”

  Something had changed, something significant. He peered around the dim hut and then it came to him.

  “Lucca!”

  “I can’t smell anything.”

  “What?” Soledad said.

  “It smells really bad here, hygiene isn’t big with this village, and now all at once I can’t smell any of the reek.”

  “Maybe you’re getting a cold.”

  “All at once like that? I feel fine, whatever the Atoners put into our bodies has warded off all germs, but now all at once I can smell nothing at all.”

  “Maybe the Atoners did that for you, too. After a certain number of days, just cut off smell so you’d be more comfortable.”

  Lucca considered this. “No, I don’t think so. Smell has too much survival value, especially in primitive cultures. Bad food, for instance. I don’t know what this could be.”

  “So watch it and link to me when there’s something else I should know. About the telepathy or the smells.”

  “And you should ask Cam to be alert for telepathy.”

  “Yes,” Soledad said, but he heard the disbelief in her voice, and resented it.

  When the l
ink was broken, Lucca drew a deep breath. No odors. Steeling himself, he went back outside and walked toward the pen where the shaggy, malodorous, elephant-like shen huddled placidly. Certo, if he could smell anything, it would be these beasts.

  Nothing.

  In the lodge, he hobbled from one group to another, smiling, sniffing, brushing the stomping dancers in their warm clothing that would not be washed until spring. No scents.

  His entire olfactory sense had just vanished, between one second and the next.

  “CHEWITHOZTAREL, DO YOU WANT TO PLAY a game?”

  “Yes,” she said eagerly. “What game?”

  The two of them sat in the snow house that, under Lucca’s direction, they had spent all morning constructing. A few other children had helped but then had gone back inside the lodge, saying they wanted to warm up. Chewithoztarel never had to warm up; she seemed to have the metabolism of Mt. Etna. Lucca had to brace himself against the snow walls to stop from shivering. He wondered briefly about parents who would let a grown man linger alone and unseen with a young girl on the cusp of adolescence, but then decided that the damn cold made child molestation unlikely—or at least unenjoyable.

  “It’s a game where I think of something very hard and you tell me what I’m thinking about.”

  She looked puzzled. “How can I do that?”

  “Let’s try.” He brought up an image of her father, picturing the long mustache and red tooth and sun-seamed face in every detail, thinking clearly the word “Hytrowembireliaz.”

  Chewithoztarel said doubtfully, “Snow?”

  “No. Try again.”

  She failed to guess—or pretended to fail—three of Lucca’s thoughts and then said, “This is a stupid game. I’m going inside.”

  “No, wait a minute! Tell me . . . Tell me who left for the second road in the summer and fall.”

  “Oh . . . Ragjuptrilpent. Don’t scold me!”

  “I promise I won’t. Who else?”

  “Chytfouriswelpim. I thought you were there.”

  The man whose throat had been slit right after Lucca’s rescue. “Yes, I was. Who else?”

  “Nobody. Oh—Ninborthecam. But she was very, very old.”

  “Did she stay long on the second road?”

  “No. Not even a minute! It was so funny!”

  “Where does the third road go?” Lucca held his breath.

  “How should I know? Are you teasing me?”

  “No, I’m not. I just wondered where you think it goes.” He gave her his warmest smile, or the warmest smile he could, considering that his teeth had started to chatter.

  “Someplace nice. Maybe with summer all the time. I don’t know.” The child looked baffled but not uncomfortable. “You don’t get to find out until you finish the first and second roads, but you should be very good because maybe on the third road you’ll have to answer for what you’ve done here.” This was said in a singsong tone, clearly parroted from adults. Then she reverted to her own voice. “Lucca, who do you know that left for the second road? Where you live?”

  The question smacked him hard, although there was no reason it should. He should even have foreseen it. Everything in him revolted from telling this dirty snow-urchin about Gianna. So he choked out, “Well, my grandmother.”

  She looked at him keenly and said, “You’re not telling me true.”

  How had she known that? Telepathy or just good observation? Suddenly he was sick of this. She wasn’t going to tell him anything useful. A discovery important enough for aliens to have sent him halfway across the galaxy, and he was forced to rely for information on an irritating and ignorant child.

  He snapped, “I am not lying. My grandmother died.”

  “Was she old?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did she stay on the second road?”

  Lucca covered his cold face with his cold mittens, pulled away from their odorless scratchiness, and said, “Let’s go inside.”

  “All right. This game was stupid.”

  “Yes,” Lucca agreed. “It was.”

  HE WAS GOING to have to use an adult as an informant. He was going to have to devise a more sophisticated telepathic experiment. He was going to have to wait for someone else to die.

  Before any of these things could happen, Lucca’s sense of smell returned. He was seated on a cushion in a dim corner of the lodge, eating a porridge made of soaked and boiled wild grain and dried meat, when all at once odors rushed in on him: the steaming food, the unwashed people, the sour fermented ale in his mug, the smoky peat fire. It was a rich, redolent, repulsive mixture, so strong after the total absence of smell that he almost cried out. He looked around, trying to identify something—anything—that might have caused his nose to work again. Nothing looked different.

  The next moment, he went blind.

  17: WWW.URGENTALIENCRISIS.ORG

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  HUMAN ABDUCTIONS!!

  If you are outraged that “aliens” would waltz in and demand human sacrifices for some “experiment” in “witnessing” . . .

  If you are rightly suspicious of their vague motives . . .

  If you think our spineless government has just bent over and let this first step toward Atoner domination happen . . .

  If you believe they have—as they themselves admit!—abducted humans before and are doing so now . . .

  THEN DO SOMETHING

  ABOUT IT!!

  No, we can’t reach their so-called “base” on the moon (if it really even exists), but we can organize massive protests on Earth—OUR planet!!!

  HELP STOP HUMAN EXPLOITATION NOW

  18: AVEO

  TO WEAVE A BLANKET, you carefully intertwined warp and woof, pulling on each with just the right amount of tension. To polish a gemstone, you turned it evenly to each facet, neither neglecting nor favoring any one. To create a strategy, in either kulith or life, you both wove and turned, and if you failed with one thread or one facet, you died.

  Aveo looked at Cam, eating her breakfast of incredibly rare and costly delicacies as if they were so much ber bread, and knew he could never explain any of this to her. She was not capable of understanding it. Her heart, he had come to believe, was good, but her mind was that of a child, simple and straightforward and easily distracted. She could have studied kulith for years and the roughest fisherman on the Niol Sea would have beaten her. Never would she understand that life mixed reality and illusion, and that in most people’s minds these two were warp and woof. Including hers.

  She drank off her wine, wiped her mouth, and said, “Aveo, the first thing we have to do is go back up to the roof to the shuttle. Obu’s been in the supply cabinet all night! And I have to talk to my friend on the . . . the commlink.”

  That last word was meaningless, but no more so than the rest of her speech. He said with the patience one would use when talking to a child, “You can’t do that, ostiu. You can’t leave these apartments until the king says you may.”

  “The hell I can’t.” She stood. “I’m not a prisoner, and neither are you. Nobody even tried to bother you last night, all night. I can’t leave that poor girl in the cabinet any longer. . . . How could you even think of such a thing? She’ll starve to death or die of thirst or something! And anyway, surely we should establish right now with Uldunu that I’m an emissary, an equal, not his subject?”

  Aveo groaned. She had just said aloud that she was the equal of the king. She had called him Uldunu, not Uldunu Four. She had set up her will against his. She had also forgotten what Aveo had said last night about the spyholes, and even as he searched for the right words— critical words, all would be reported to the king almost before he finished uttering them—she jumped up and clutched at something inside her tunic.<
br />
  “Sorry, Aveo, I have to—” She pulled out a small black box. He tensed, thinking it might be the mysterious weapon that had killed Cul Escio and the Chief of the Royal Guard, but it was not. Cam put it to her lips and said, “Soledad?”

  The rest of her words made no sense, being in her own language. Her eyes grew wide. Her voice rose in pitch.

  Had he underestimated her? If this was a performance for their unseen watchers, it was a good choice. Talking to demons through a magic box . . . Had she somehow discerned how superstitious Uldunu Four was? Nothing else could have been so calculated to impress him, or to make him cautious in the face of her gross insults. Perhaps she even understood that Aveo did not believe in demons or magic and thus her performance was a signal to him, too—a signal that she could weave the threads of deception if necessary, could play kulith like a master. Perhaps even her dismal kulith performance so far had been part of the deception.

  Aveo caught the word “Lucca” several times. Cam paced the room, expressions chasing each other across her face, urgency in her voice. She presented this urgency from every possible angle, catching all spyholes. No one rushed in to arrest her, to kill her. Aveo was impressed.

  Eventually she put the box back in her tunic and said, “Sorry. A friend is . . . is ill. In his nose.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, looking as if he knew this imaginary friend with the ill nose, as if he had had as much converse with “demons” as she did, and so was as dangerous. But the false conversation had accomplished one thing; she had accumulated enough kulith points to ascend unmolested to her egg on the roof.