Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  She had thought, once, that Lucca might understand. He had witnessed violence on Kular A. But it turned out that those murders were voluntary, that Lucca had not killed anybody, and that he didn’t want to talk to Cam, anyway. Every time she phoned him, they argued. He just hadn’t been able to accept the truth about the Atoners’ message. Now he wouldn’t take Cam’s calls at all.

  She heaved herself out of bed, padded into the hotel bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. God. She looked like a crazy woman, with wild hair and wilder eyes. Like one of those bag ladies that she’d never seen back in Nebraska and that scared her in New York.

  How many men, exactly, had she killed on Kular? And of them all, why was it Aveo who most terrorized her dreams?

  Taking a deep breath and letting it out very slowly—one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand—she gripped the edge of the sink. She had a show to do. It was the most important show in the world. She could do this.

  Aveo—

  She picked up a comb and began untangling her hair.

  36: SOLEDAD

  CAM’S LECTURE WAS BEING HELD not in the main arena, which seated nineteen thousand, but in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, which seated only fifty-five hundred. Soledad shuffled through the expansive lobby, had her purse turned inside out, and wondered if the venue meant that not as many people were as interested in the afterlife as Cam’s promoter had hoped. But if Cam really had a book and movie deal . . . On the other hand, the theater was packed, and Cam was booked for two additional nights.

  As soon as Soledad reached her seat, at the front of the 201 section about twenty feet from the stage, she had the answer. A transparent shimmer spanned the entire front of the stage. For a wild moment she thought it was a huge version of the Atoner personal shield, but of course it was not. The Atoners had, so far, kept all their technology to themselves, which must really be frustrating Washington. What Soledad was seeing was no more than a huge expanse of bulletproof plastic. Cam had, of course, received death threats. They all had—but undoubtedly not as many as Cam. The smaller theater made security easier.

  Music started, generic-sounding usher-them-in tunes that were neither soothing nor energetic. Soledad had lost sight of Carl Lewis, although he probably had not lost her. Fengmo, studiously ignoring Soledad, sat two rows directly behind her. Soledad took her seat. Fifteen minutes later, the show started.

  Frantic music and then—Good God, what was Cam thinking?—fireworks behind the screen. Gunshots couldn’t have been more alarming. Half the crowd leaped to its feet. But the fireworks gave way to sweeping laser lights and a man bounded onto the stage. Some of the people standing began to cheer and whistle, while the other half shouted, “Sit down, you morons!” The man was Tam Blair, a Hollywood star who had just won an Academy Award for a stupid remake of Siddhartha. Soledad could imagine how Fengmo, who had hated the movie’s cheap sentimentalizing of Buddhism, felt about Blair’s presence.

  “Good evening!” Blair called. He wore a purple tuxedo and ruffled silver shirt. His auburn hair gleamed under the lights. “How are you all tonight?”

  A roar from the crowd. Was he going to work them like some evangelist at a tent revival? Evidently so, because all through Blair’s meandering introduction of Cam, much of which concerned his own “search to believe,” he punched the air and pranced around the huge stage. The laser lights swept in syncopated arcs, changing colors. The elderly man beside Soledad, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat and carrying an expensive leather briefcase, looked quietly disgusted.

  But then the mood changed abruptly. Blair finished with, “And now, Camilla O’Kane, witness to eternity!” and swept into the wings. The music died, the lights went to a low and steady blue, and the crowd quieted.

  She made them wait a long time. Just as the murmuring began, she walked onto the stage, dressed in a simple full-length black gown that showcased her spectacular figure but didn’t shout about it. Her wild black curls had been pulled into a chignon, and her only ornament was a white rose in her hair. Cam held up her hand to still the applause, and gazed outward solemnly.

  “Hello. I’m here to tell you a story, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d listen quietly to what I have to say. It deserves attention because it’s not my story—it’s much bigger than that. I’m only a small part of it. I am, in fact, exactly what the aliens who visited our star system called me: a Witness. I witnessed things of enormous moment for all of us, and I’m grateful for the opportunity tonight to do what witnesses do, to the best of their ability. They speak the truth.”

  Someone had written this speech for Cam; it was nothing like her flamboyant personality. And yet it was brilliant because that flamboyance nonetheless shone through the quiet words, illuminated them with energy and passion. The combination was mesmerizing, and Soledad silently congratulated the unknown speechwriter.

  “But before I begin to witness to that truth,” Cam said, “I want to ask a moment of silence for all the young people who have tragically misinterpreted it, and especially for Emma Jane Taymor, the daughter of the vice president of the United States. The truth of the Atoners is about life, not death. Please observe our shared moment of silence in whatever way best, for you, honors that truth.”

  Cam bowed her head. So did several people around Soledad. Even those who did not remained quiet. Cam had them in exactly the mood she wanted. She was a natural.

  She continued to speak simply and well, starting with the Atoners’ arrival on the moon. The segue from what was known as fact to what the Atoners alleged as fact was so seamless that even Soledad nearly missed it. To Cam it was all fact: the website call for “applications,” the kidnapping ten thousand years ago of humans from Earth, the radio conversations with SETI and the UN and NASA, the altering of genes in “our most recent common ancestors,” the shuttles, the events on Kular A and B and the other “double-blind” planets, the Atoners’ current silence.

  “And why are they so silent now? Why have they answered no communications from Earth for the entire six months since the twenty Witnesses returned?” She leaned closer to the audience. “We can’t know for sure, of course—”

  Why not? Soledad thought meanly. Cam seemed so sure of everything else.

  “—but one possibility is that the Atoners are waiting. They need more time to observe us, to decide what should be done next. After all, their very name indicates that they wish to atone to us! So far, they have admitted their crime, and sent us to observe it—to be, in fact, friends of the court, amici curiae—”

  And that was a term that Cam O’Kane had not come up with herself.

  “—but they have done nothing to set it right. And so, my friends, we come to the two big questions that all of this poses for humanity. Two questions absolutely without parallel in our history. First—”

  The elderly man beside Soledad leaned forward; she could see that he was interested despite himself.

  “—what will the Atoners do to atone for their crime against us? They can, and will, do something—but what? And second . . .”

  She paused. Long, theatrically long, too long. Soledad, disliking melodrama, felt embarrassed for Cam, but the crowd ate it up.

  “Second, what lies beyond that second road? Beyond the golden ladder? Beyond the spirit door? What we Witnesses saw was just the start of what happens after the essence of a person leaves the body at death. But what lies beyond that, beyond—”

  “Hellfire for you!” someone shouted, and then it all happened at once.

  The shout had come from Soledad’s left. But somewhere on her right she heard gunfire—how had guns gotten past the metal detectors? Semiautomatic—rat-a-tat-tat-tat—and the crowd was screaming and pushing. Something whistled past Soledad’s ear—a bullet, ricocheting off the clear plastic stretched across the stage. They were firing at Cam.

  Soledad tried to duck and crawl under the seats, but the elderly man was already ther
e. A woman screamed, a high anguished cry of pure pain. People scrambled and cried out even as a loudspeaker urged calm and order. Whirling wildly around, frantically looking for Fengmo, Soledad saw him climbing over the seats toward her, shouting something she couldn’t distinguish in the unholy clamor.

  A movement in the corner of her eye. A man standing at the end of her row of seats, a big man utterly still, watching, a rooted bulwark that forced the panicking crowd to flow around him. He stared at Fengmo, then at Soledad, and he raised a plastic gun in his left hand.

  She saw the gun clearly, with the preternatural clarity of crisis. The man fired at her. A moment before he did, she was tackled and thrown across two seats, the arms of the seats cutting sharply into her back, and Fengmo screamed.

  It wasn’t he who had tackled her. Someone else, someone large and blond, and then she was under him with Fengmo on top of them both, and Fengmo’s blood dripped onto her face and into her mouth, tasting of salt like tears.

  37: A STATEMENT FROM

  CONGRESSMAN HARRY MELSON (R-GA)

  “THANK YOU FOR COMING THIS MORNING, ladies and gentlemen of the press. I’d like to read a prepared statement and then take your questions.

  “The American people have always been prepared to defend our borders. Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center, the Las Cruces Invasion—we have never hesitated to say in terms that anyone else can understand: ‘This is ours.’ And I think that history shows that the same is true for other sovereign nations, at all times and all places. This is a human trait: defense of our own.

  “The moon is our own. It belongs to humanity as it circles our globe, our God-given home. Yet for six months, just as we begin to establish our own human outpost on the moon, it has been invaded by beings that admit to having kidnapped our human ancestors, meddled with our gene pool, carted off twenty-one of our youth too immature to understand the implications of those actions—and told us that one of those precious youngsters died under very mysterious circumstances. Now those same invaders sit up there on our moon, within fifty miles of Selene City, and they refuse to talk to us. It’s arrogant, it’s invasive, and it’s just plain wrong.

  “Yet the current administration does nothing.

  “So I’m calling, right here and right now, for action. We need to demand that these aliens account for themselves and communicate with us like civilized beings. And if they don’t, then we should do whatever is necessary—up to and including military force—to remove them from our territory. The American people—and all the rest of humanity—deserve nothing less than sovereignty over, and control of, what is indubitably ours.

  “Now I’ll take your questions.”

  38: SOLEDAD

  “LET ME UP!” Her own voice but not her own: full of terror and outrage and frantic concern for Fengmo.

  “Okay—he’s dead,” the man on top of her said, and for a terrible moment she thought he meant Fengmo. But Fengmo still breathed. Soledad scrambled out from under both of them and grabbed for Fengmo before that slight body could slip onto the floor. Blood poured out of Fengmo’s head. She barely noted—and yet she saw, saw it all, her mind seemed to have become multiple cameras—the shooter slumped across three seats at the end of the row, and the NYPD cop who had been hired as security for the event standing over him with a gun in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

  “An ambulance!” Soledad heard herself cry, as if from a great distance. “An ambulance—oh God, Fengmo, don’t die don’t die—”

  “Push on this,” the man said and a wadded-up scarf appeared, as if conjured, on Fengmo’s head. Soledad shook her head to clear it. Focus, focus. . . . She pushed hard on the cloth over Fengmo’s wound. So much blood on his head, his face . . .

  “We have to get him outside,” the man said. “Can you press on him if I carry him? . . . Good.”

  They forced their way up the aisle, now packed with fewer people, the man with Fengmo in his arms a plow all by himself. The huge lobby was bedlam. Crying patrons, security guards, NYPD, medics, the press, a nightmare kaleidoscope. Then Soledad was kneeling in a semi-sheltered corner beside Fengmo, whose eyes rolled back in his head like unmoored planets. A moment or an hour later, the stranger had commandeered EMTs and two of them carried Fengmo out to an ambulance, Soledad sticking to the stretcher like a leech. As she climbed in beside Fengmo, ignoring the medics’ forceful statements that she must ride up front, she turned and blurted, “Thank you!” to the rescuer and looked at him for the first time.

  It was the handsome blond who had offered her the glove while they stood in line. He said, “I’ll see you at St. Vincent’s, then,” just before the medics gave up on dislodging her and slammed shut the ambulance door.

  At the hospital, doctors grabbed Fengmo and rushed him into an OR. Other casualties were coming in as well; it was another chaos, this time overlaid with the peculiar antiseptic grimness of all hospitals. Soledad found the OR waiting room and sank down, trembling, on a green plastic chair.

  If Fengmo died . . .

  Her life, just barely manageable now, would be impossible without him. Fengmo. Whom she’d known since she was five, who had been her escape and solace as a child and her closest friend—only close friend—as an adult. Fengmo of the sharp mind and sweet heart and tranquil Taoist belief that had so balanced Soledad’s perpetual doubt . . . Fengmo . . .

  “Drink this,” a voice said beside her. The blond man, holding out black coffee in a paper cup. Soledad grabbed it, drank it off, burned her mouth, and was glad of it. The pain helped her to focus.

  “It’ll be a while, it always is,” the blond said.

  “Cam . . . the others . . .”

  “Cam O’Kane is fine. Not hit. Three other people were, ricochets or bad shots. There were two shooters, both dead now. One was after O’Kane, the one with the semi, and the other one, I think, was after you. Why is that, pretty lady? Who are you?”

  He stared at her steadily from his bright blue eyes. Soledad searched that gaze, trying to see who he was, what he might want. She saw only kindness—but did she see accurately? But he had saved her life, had maybe saved Fengmo’s life . . . and she was so tired of hiding. Of everything. To her own horror, tears formed in her eyes. She scowled them away.

  “Hey, you don’t have to say anything you don’t want to,” he said gently. “It’s okay. But those shooters—the newscasts are already saying they were CCAD. So you—”

  CCAD. She struggled to remember what that was, and then she had it—Fengmo at dinner at Leonard’s: There are a lot of borderline types out there who are interpreting this for their own advantage. Have you heard about Anna Romany? Or the CCAD? . . . They’re the Christian Coalition Against the Devil, a cross-denominational fundamentalist group that’s decided there is only one Atoner . . . and that he’s really the Anti-Christ. . . . The language on their website is pretty violent.

  “—were their target. Are you one of the Witnesses?”

  “I—”

  “You are, aren’t you? You’re Soledad Arellano. Different nose and hair, but . . . yeah, you’re her.”

  She stared at him helplessly. He caught the look, smiled, and took her hand.

  “You’re afraid now that I’ll blow your cover. Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m a very trustworthy guy, you’ll see. James Hinton.”

  “I’m not—”

  “It’s okay. Just say, ‘Hello, James.’ Come on, you can do that, a bright star-traveling girl like you.”

  Despite herself, she smiled. “Hello, James.”

  “Good. Perfect. Now I’m going to wait with you until you have news about your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. But he’s my best friend.”

  “Better yet.” James still held her hand. Soledad, a strange warmth creeping through her, didn’t pull it away.

  FENGMO WAS IN SURGERY for two hours, then taken to Recovery. A doctor in bloody scrubs came out to talk to Soledad, who said she was Fengmo’s sister. This was ethnically unlikely, but t
he doctor, harried and weary, didn’t care. She told Soledad that Fengmo would be taken to the ICU and Soledad should wait outside that unit until she could see him.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  “Third floor, C Wing.” The doctor disappeared.

  James said, “Soledad, listen. By now the press will have Fengmo’s name and they’ll have found out that he’s a longtime friend of yours. If you go to the ICU, they’ll be on you like cold on space. I’m surprised they haven’t found you here. If you wait somewhere—maybe in the cafeteria—I’ll go wait by the ICU and bring you word.”

  “Why are you taking all this trouble for me?” It came out much sharper than she’d intended.

  He said, “I like you.”

  Her gaze flew to his. Men didn’t use that tone to Soledad, at least not men who looked like James. She’d had lovers, sure—but not . . . not like James Hinton.

  “Go to the cafeteria,” he said gently.

  She went, feeling the warmth slide along her chest, her arms, her neck, warring with the dread she felt for Fengmo.

  HE WAS IN A COMA, the doctors said. He might or might not come out of it, but there was considerable trauma to the head and there would probably be some brain damage. James told her this in a deserted corridor by Diagnostic Imaging, the cafeteria having closed hours ago. He held tightly on to her hand. She didn’t cry, just looked at him numbly.

  “I can drive you home, if you like. But if you don’t want me to know where you live, I can get you a cab, or . . . whatever you like.”

  It was four in the morning. The maglevs to upstate had stopped running hours ago. A cab would cost a huge amount. She couldn’t think. Finally she said, “A hotel . . . if there’s a cheap hotel around here. . . .”