Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  She wanted to be again the person she’d been before she went to Kular. Which wasn’t possible. You must play kulith better than that, ostiu, or else . . .

  She had to talk to somebody or she really was going to lose it. Hotel phones, Angie had told her over and over, were not secure, and of course a cell or handheld was out of the question. But she had to talk to somebody. Had to.

  Cam slipped out of bed, pulled a coat over her pajamas and a cap low on her forehead. Angie lay asleep on the sofa and, tonight, Jen in the small bedroom. If either of them woke, that would be it. But neither did, and Cam crept down the stairwell to the phones in the lobby.

  Who? Frank was mad about having to take her to the moon, and anyway, Frank was religious and an ex-cop and about as warm as ice. Lucca didn’t believe in the second or third roads, and also it was awkward with him because he wished he hadn’t slept with her. And Soledad was . . . Soledad. Uptight and disapproving of Cam. Still, Soledad was the most likely to understand. Cam suspected that Soledad had demons of her own, although of course Soledad would never say so to her.

  An avatar of the phone company said that Soledad’s number had been disconnected.

  Fear licked at Cam. Had something happened to Soledad that Cam hadn’t yet heard about? She shivered, even though the lobby was warm. Somewhere outside a siren, police or ambulance, rose in pitch and volume and then fell again, racing to somebody else’s disaster.

  “Lucca? Cam. I’m sorry to wake you at this hour but I— No, it’s a landline but not— Listen, will you? Soledad’s number is disconnected and I got worried, do you know anything about it? . . . Oh, well as long as you spoke to her and she’s all right, you don’t have to tell me any— Yes. . . .”

  Lucca called Soledad, apparently, but not Cam. Somehow, it was the final straw. Aveo’s ghost, rotting and leering, shimmered in front of her, beside the door to the ladies’ room. She was so scared and so lonely. . . .

  “Lucca, listen— No, fuck it all, can’t you just listen?” It came out a muted howl. And then everything else came out after it and she was sobbing into the phone, the men she’d killed, Escio and all the others, and the child spitted on a sword and the nightmares and what if she wasn’t doing the right thing, how could the Atoners not tell her anything to just show her she was doing the right thing, at least fucking that. . . . Sometimes the words didn’t even come out right because she was crying so hard. She told Lucca everything, except about Frank’s hair packet on the moon. Something in her held enough to keep that to herself.

  Lucca changed. He became sweet, the Lucca she remembered from the first time they slept together, before it all went sour. He said soothing things and called her cara and didn’t even argue about Aveo. Cam talked to him until her knees went numb and the words ran out.

  Finally she said, “I have to go now, but thank you, Lucca, thank you. . . . When can I see you? Can I come up to Canada to visit? I could maybe rearrange my performance schedule and—”

  “No, don’t do that,” he said, and the distance was back. Like a palace gate shutting her out. “But I’ll talk to you again soon.”

  “Promise?” she said, hating that she sounded like a child.

  “Promise,” he said, and she heard the weariness, and hated him as well as herself.

  But at least she had talked it out. At least, now, maybe she could sleep enough to be able to do justice to the Atoners’ message tomorrow.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Cam sat eating breakfast in San Francisco. Outside her hotel window, shining in the spring sunlight, the Golden Gate Bridge soared as if it went straight to Heaven. No wonder one of the Witness planets—Metan?—called the second road the bridge to far.

  Bruce, her tour bodyguard, opened the hotel door after checking the retina-scan box. Angie entered, carrying a rolled-up flimsy, which she threw onto the table.

  Cam said, “What’s wrong?” But the flimsy had unrolled, flopping over a discarded orange peel. A tabloid, with Cam’s picture taking up half the front page, sobbing into a pay phone.

  CAM O’KANE GOES TO PIECES,

  DOUBTS ATONERS’ MESSAGE

  Shocking Midnight Call to Lucca Maduro!

  Revelations by Eyewitness Hotel Clerk!

  WORST OF ALL—

  SAYS THE DEAD REALLY HAUNT DREAMS!!!

  “What night was this, Cam?” Angie demanded. “How could you be so careless! It’s online, on TV. . . . You actually went down to the lobby and made a call to Maduro in the presence of a clerk?”

  “I didn’t see any clerk!”

  “Worse fool you! He photographed you and sold this story for God knows how much, and by now he’s undoubtedly on a plane out of the country. Why didn’t you come to me?”

  Cam grew still. Her voice came out deadly calm. “Go to you? You mean because the government, unlike that clerk, has no ulterior motives for being around me? Is that what you mean, Angie?”

  Angie didn’t answer.

  Cam turned and went into the bedroom, leaving the tabloid beside her half-eaten breakfast, under the window with the glorious view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  51: FROM THE NEW YORKER

  Post-Atonement-Interference Angst

  “Larry, you’re doing that wrong. I’ve always said you

  aren’t mechanically gifted enough to— Larry? Larry?”

  52: SOLEDAD

  DIANE ARRIVED AT SOLEDAD’S PLACE in less than an hour, on a motorcycle with a man riding behind her. Soledad waited as Diane had told her to do, away from windows and with the door locked. She suspected that these precautions were designed more to reassure her than for any actual effectiveness against anyone who wanted to come in, and she resented the patronization implied. But this was not the time to focus on that.

  Soledad heard the bike roar to a stop and cautiously peered outside. Diane was pulling off her helmet and goggles. Both she and the man were dressed in jeans, boots, parkas—just two more crazy kids joy-riding on a warm March afternoon in the Catskills. The man wore a backpack. Soledad let them in.

  “Are you all right?” Diane said.

  Looking at Diane’s pretty, windblown face, short hair mussed by the helmet, Soledad didn’t know whether to trust her, castigate her, fear her. “How did you get here so fast?”

  “Helicopter. Let me see it, Soledad.”

  She kept the dark metal box in her pocket. “I didn’t hear a helicopter.”

  Diane searched her face. Finally she said, “I rush-requisitioned an Agency copter in New York and we landed in a field a few miles from here. The copter carries the bike as standard equipment. This is Jerry Torres, one of our surveillance experts. Soledad, whatever you found isn’t ours. I told you right at the beginning that we would honor your request to not install any surveillance on you that you weren’t aware of, and we haven’t.”

  Soledad wanted to believe her. Jerry Torres, a tall man in his twenties with a body so thin that he looked like a war refugee, was unpacking the backpack on Soledad’s kitchen table. He began a methodical sweep for bugs.

  Diane continued, “I’ve been honest with you—more honest, I think, than you’ve been with me. You agreed to tell me if you revealed your identity and whereabouts to anyone.”

  “What makes you think I have?” But she felt herself flushing.

  “James. . . .”

  “How do you even know about James if you haven’t been surveilling me?” Soledad flared.

  Diane kept her calm tone. Jerry went about his tasks as if no one else were present. “Of course you were followed, Soledad, when you started changing the times you called in. Some days you didn’t call until afternoon, and that was a change in well-established patterns. We check up on well-established patterns. But I told you we wouldn’t put in electronics unless we told you about them, and we kept our word. Now, may I please see it?”

  Soledad handed her the small box, and she immediately handed it to Jerry. “James is my business, Diane.”

  “Yes. But we had an agreement.”

&nbs
p; “He’s the one who took Fengmo and me to St. Vincent’s the night of the shooting.” Soledad saw that Diane already had this information. And how much more?

  Diane said, “Jerry?”

  He shook his head and vanished into the bedroom.

  Diane said, “Did you call him today when you called me?”

  “Yes.” She’d reached James before he left his office for his off-site meeting, which he’d immediately canceled, but it would be nearly two hours more before he could arrive here. All at once Soledad longed for him. To lean against him, breathe in his James-scent, feel his smile on her—it would make everything easier.

  Jerry appeared in the kitchen doorway, shook his head, and disappeared again. Soledad wondered if he was mute.

  Diane said, “We have to leave here, Soledad. Now. Jerry has the rest of his team on the way with equipment to really sweep the woods. He says there’s nothing in the house, but this location has been compromised. Take this—” She handed Soledad Jerry’s now-empty backpack. “—and pack what you need for a few days, plus your laptop. The rest of your stuff will be sent to you in your new location. Also, since they’ve undoubtedly seen your face—”

  “Who? Who’s seen my face?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Diane said patiently. “It may be necessary to relocate you to another part of the country.”

  “And James? James has a job here!”

  “He hasn’t had it very long.”

  “You had him investigated,” Soledad said, and realized she should have already guessed this. A small fountain of curiosity bubbled up through her outrage.

  “Of course we did. He has a clean record, a truthful résumé, never married, a mother and sister in Oakland, no known questionable associates. Have you ever called him on a cell phone or allowed him to call you on one?”

  “No. I know better than that. I used my encrypted landline or e-mail.”

  “Nonetheless, I’m sure ‘they’ know who he is. Come on, Soledad, the longer we stay here the more unsafe you are. Start packing.”

  “I’m not going without James.”

  The two women stared at each other across the kitchen table. Diane said, almost tentatively, as if performing an experiment, “Jerry can tell him you’ve gone and the team can bring him to you later.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure that after he’s told about all this, James will still think it’s a good idea for the two of you to be together?”

  “Completely sure.”

  “It will mean leaving his job.”

  “You said yourself he hasn’t had it very long. He can find another.”

  “Do you realize you’ll be putting him in danger, not just yourself?”

  “Don’t do that,” Soledad said sharply. “Don’t try to play on guilt with me. James is an adult, he’ll make his own choice.”

  “All right.” Diane said it as a sigh, somehow giving the words sibilants they didn’t have. “We wait here for James. But one more thing you should know, Soledad. It definitely wasn’t the CCAD that murdered Sara Dziwalski, but that doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared. They’re still there, well organized and very well funded, and the fact that they’ve gone quiet since that night at Cam O’Kane’s lecture is ominous. They could have killed her any number of times since then—she’s a wild woman and we can’t control her at all. They could have killed Christina Harden or Frank Olenik or Andy DuBois, all of whom insist on living as if they’d never gone into space. It wouldn’t even be that hard to get to Jack Jones in England, not to mention the Witnesses who, like you, aren’t among The Six. So why haven’t they? Why have the CCAD gone so quiet?”

  “How should I know?” And how had Diane, her ally, become this verbal adversary?

  “We don’t know, either. But any change in behavior is significant. The best guesstimate is that the CCAD is planning something really big and staying out of sight until then. I don’t know if this surveillance was put there by them or by some weirdo who admires your bod, but until I do know, I think it’s a good idea for you and James to be invisible.”

  “Yes,” Soledad said.

  Diane opened her jacket. Soledad saw the gun in its shoulder holster. “And now I have to ask you the daily question, because that’s the drill. Have you contacted or been contacted by any Atoner, or agent for the Atoners, since we last spoke?”

  Suddenly Soledad felt enormously weary. “No, Diane. I haven’t. I think the Atoners are done with us. I really do.”

  Done, and without taking steps to atone for anything at all.

  WHEN JAMES ARRIVED, later than the rest of the Agency team, he and Diane eyed each other like Rottweilers squaring off. But their words were outwardly courteous.

  “Of course I’m going with Soledad, wherever that is,” James said. “Can I get another job?”

  “If we give you a new identity, Social Security number, and credit references. All of it.”

  “And will you? What about medical records and retina scan?”

  Diane said coolly, “You sound very practiced at changing identity, Mr. Hinton.”

  “I can read, Agent Lovett.”

  “Of course. I think we can arrange those things, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.” He put his arm around Soledad. Jerry Torres came back into the house, tramping in mud on his boots. He carried three more of the dark metal boxes, one encrusted with pine needles. He wasn’t mute, after all.

  “Russian black-market running military-grade encrypted software piggybacking on E.U. satellites,” he said, and his voice was as deep and musical as an opera star’s.

  53: FRANK

  SO HE HAD TO TAKE CAM with him to the moon, having been unable to think of any way out of it. He’d rather take a rattlesnake into his mother’s kitchen. Judy Olenik would dispatch any serpent intruder in thirty seconds, while Frank was going to be stuck with Cam O’Kane for eleven long, unbearable days.

  “Please, God, let her at least keep her mouth shut so I can do Your work. In the name of Your blessed son Christ Jesus, amen.” He kissed the rosary, rose from his knees in the barren little dorm room, and stopped at the doorway for one last hurried prayer. In less than an hour, Cam was due at the stupidly named “Earth Base Alpha” of Farrington Tours. Frank figured he needed all the heavenly support he could get.

  At least her entourage and all the media jackals weren’t allowed inside the gates. Farrington Tours had been very clear about that. Only their own people would take pictures and movies and holos and recordings: great publicity. But despite all the froufrou of advertising, this was still a serious spaceport, training people for serious trips beyond the Earth, and Frank expected—

  “Hello, Frankie Spacefarer!”

  Standing in the corridor, wearing a pair of green antennae on his bald head, was Charlie Spiro. Frank gaped at the famous comic, known for his deliberately stupid rendition of retro humor. Spiro said, “How many Atoners does it take to change a lightbulb? . . . None, because they kidnapped all the lamps.”

  “Are you going up to the moon?”

  “You know it, kid. Two Atoners walk into a Las Vegas casino and say to a slot machine, ‘Take me to your leader.’ The bartender says, ‘Hey, fellas, that thing isn’t human.’ The Atoners say, “Yeah, but at least it’s familiar with the living dead.’ ”

  Frank walked out of the dormitory into the blazing New Mexico sunshine. Spiro followed him. “Sure I’m going to the moon. You think funny men don’t have a sense of adventure? I’ll be the trip’s comic relief. Hey, do you know how to restore to the human genome all the DNA that the Atoners cut out?”

  Frank, a few steps ahead of Spiro, froze.

  “You advertise. ‘Lonely ATGC looking for TACG for insertion.’ ”

  Frank didn’t get the joke. Did Farrington Tours let in just anybody? Anybody with two million dollars, it looked like. He walked faster, outdistancing Spiro, toward the Orientation Center.

  A motorcade pulled up to the front gate, which the guard op
ened. One car drove inside and people erupted from the other vehicles, shouting questions through the fence, aiming cameras, even launching a minirobocam, which immediately fell to the ground as soon as it passed over the fence and hit the jammer. Thank Heavens for small miracles, as Frank’s mother often said.

  The one car that had been admitted stopped beside Frank. Before the chauffeur could spring out, Cam climbed from the backseat. “Hello, Frank.”

  “Cam.”

  “Good to see you.”

  He couldn’t honestly say the same, so he said nothing. But Cam looked different from a month ago—thinner, and very tired. She wore no makeup and her hair was shoved into a careless ponytail. Her low-cut pink top showed her breasts, but even so, the whole getup made her look younger and somehow vulnerable. Frank wasn’t falling for that. She was a barracuda.

  She was also his meal ticket. “That’s the dorm,” he said, pointing stiffly, “and that’s the Orientation Center. You have to check in. They’ll want to—”

  “Cam O’Kane!” Charlie Spiro said, walking toward them sort of sidewise so he could both wave at the paparazzi beyond the fence and leer at Cam. “Delighted to meet you, Moon Lady. When is an Atoner hungry?”

  “Hi,” Cam said, and walked away toward the Orientation Center. Frank followed, surprised. But then Cam looked back over her shoulder, grinned, and said, “At launch time!”

  She hadn’t changed that much, after all.

  Halfway across the compound he said, very close to her ear, “You didn’t say anything to anybody at all when you had your breakdown? About our project?”

  “It wasn’t a breakdown!”

  The hell it wasn’t. She was about as solid as cotton candy. But he didn’t want to anger her, so he didn’t ask what she thought her little meltdown had been. “You didn’t say anything?”

  “No, Frank, I didn’t say anything. God!”

  “Then don’t say anything here, not even to me. Anywhere could be bugged.”