Beneath the Gated Sky

by Robert Reed

  She embraced Alvarez, and in soothing colors, she told him to relax and trust her. Everything was fine, she promised. Then with eyes larger than windows, she studied their surroundings.

  Meaning to distract him, she asked, “Have you ever seen the stars?”

  In a thin dribble of light, Alvarez whispered, “Not really…I was born…after the Change…”

  “Well then,” she told him, her voice emerald and gold, “you should look up…look up now…go on…”

  5

  From across the water, a voice shouted a word never seen before on that world.

  It was the image of an extinct sports car, bright and sloppily rendered, and immediately recognizable. “Porsche,” the voice cried out. Then in native words, “Are you there? Are you all right?”

  “Here I am. I’m fine,” she replied.

  With white light, she simply spelled Cornell.

  The intrusion was spitting out souls by the dozen. The quiet sea was cluttered suddenly with big gelatinous bodies, the Masters outnumbering everyone and most of them still unconscious, black and motionless, still mercifully estivating.

  A hundred tendrils grasped Porsche, and she said, “Lover,” with fond colors, accidentally stinging Cornell with the wrong type of tendrils.

  He flinched, laughing.

  Porsche apologized, then pulled away, spelling the word Latrobe.

  Latrobe was nearby, watching in stunned amazement as his entire convoy crossed over to this nothing world. She approached the battered man, and again she offered to deal, adding the inarguable observation:

  “You’re beaten. Utterly.”

  “How did you…do it?” Latrobe asked. “How did you know where…where we would go?”

  “We could guess,” she admitted. “Plus my uncle was to contact the jarrtees, then coax their support in exchange for their Masters being released. Their troops left that route open, which helped—”

  Latrobe exploded in colors, anguish mixed with rage.

  Porsche began to scan the crowd for her cousin, and when the tantrum was ebbing, she repeated her terms. “The Masters will be returned to the City. You’ll release my family and the other hostages. Plus I get Trinidad. Or else.”

  Brimming with anger, Latrobe asked, “And what do I get?”

  “Your life, and freedom. And the solar system.”

  “Guaranteed?”

  Cornell drifted closer, saying, “Ka-ceen struck a deal with the City. Just as Porsche had hoped he would.”

  “But if the jarrtees decide to throw all of us in prison?”

  “Unthinkable,” Porsche responded. “There’s still several hundred heavily armed soldiers in the nearby mountains, and they’re loyal to you.”

  “And how could I give them marching orders?” Latrobe asked.

  “If he’s given any reason, my uncle tells them to fight.” She waited for a moment, hoping for the logic to sink home. “Besides, I think at this point, the City is unwilling to risk losing any more of its scientists. Which means that the only one that you have to trust is my uncle, and he wants nothing now but Trinidad.”

  Latrobe said nothing.

  Cornell spoke. In calm colors, he warned, “Don’t think about betraying us. Once we’re back on the earth, we go free. Immediately. My father goes free. I do. Everyone.”

  Latrobe waited for a moment, then said, “Or what?”

  “Our program about the agency is broadcast today, and not just on one network. It will be on every network worldwide.”

  It was a bluff, but a good one. For added punch, Porsche assured Latrobe, “The Few have it in their possession. If they don’t get my family back again, the agency is going to be dragged out from under its rock.”

  Latrobe said nothing for a long moment.

  A new voice reached across the water, tinged with the unfamiliar and delightful fear common to the doomed.

  Trinidad said, “Latrobe,” in trembling letters. “Are you going to let that woman push you around?”

  In the end, it was Latrobe who had the sweet pleasure of beating Trinidad.

  With stinging tendrils, he flooded her cousin’s flesh with toxins, and with muscular tendrils, he tried to squeeze the life out of him.

  Cornell, then Porsche, finally pulled Latrobe off his victim.

  Gazing up at a thin dust of stars, the beaten man asked, “How soon can I be home? If I agree to your terms, that is.”

  “Right away,” promised Porsche.

  “All right,” Latrobe replied, sounding as if he were impaled on a great hook. “Fuck you, and all right…”

  Little had changed on Jarrtee, and everything was different.

  The first people emerged from the intrusion to find mud and drying timber. The jarrtees had diverted the temporary river with a bombardment. The forest was drenched in night, an innate excitement swirling with the fear. Uncle Ka-ceen appeared, and with a voice both calm and massive, he asked his niece for good news.

  Porsche gave it to him, adding, “The Masters are just beginning to wake. I’ve told Latrobe and his men to bring them over.”

  “We’ll leave them here. Safe. Then we’ll walk up to our intrusion.” In the darkness, the man was in his element. “I’ve convinced Latrobe’s reinforcements that he’s still in command and they should begin slowly withdrawing toward home. Which puts us back on the earth before them.”

  Good.

  The man approached. His birth pouch was bleeding, but otherwise he seemed unharmed, inquiring with a chilling calm, “Where’s my son?”

  “Here.”

  Cornell was holding the criminal; walking out of the intrusion, they looked like dancing partners in desperate need of practice.

  Ka-ceen approached, then hesitated.

  He asked, “Why?”

  The smirk came easily, the jarrtee face twisting itself into a human sneer. “Because,” Trinidad replied, without shame. “Because I could.”

  Porsche expected her uncle to beat him, or worse.

  But the older man simply nodded, a look of understanding washing away every other emotion, and with a gesture, he said to Porsche, “See to everything. Will you, please? I’ve got to confirm details with these various god-awful parties.”

  The base camp was nearly deserted. A handful of soldiers had been left behind, standing guard over Porsche’s family and Nathan, and for a tense few moments, they seemed ready to injure their hostages. Latrobe’s intervention kept Ka-ceen from stunning the lot of them, and it was Latrobe who gave final orders to his people, telling the guards to help move the hostages to the intrusion, and telling the distant soldiers to retreat to the intrusion as fast as possible. “The mission is over,” he declared with a tight, small voice. “Things didn’t work out, but I’m proud of every one of you. Now let’s get out of here.”

  Porsche recognized the old twanya tree at a distance.

  Walking beside her uncle and behind Trinidad, she apologized for a tiny crime from the past. “I’m sorry that I knocked you down like I did. When you stepped out from behind that tree trunk—”

  “When was that?” asked Ka-ceen, honestly puzzled.

  She explained, then thought to ask, “Don’t you remember?”

  “I do,” Trinidad volunteered.

  “Quiet,” she warned.

  Her uncle admitted, “I don’t remember it, no.”

  Then as if it really mattered, he took his niece under his arm, assuring her, “It really wasn’t that important, all things considered.”

  Just as they had years ago, they passed from Jarrtee into the middle of a New Mexican night.

  The mountain camp was nearly deserted, and again, with a smoldering sure-handedness, Latrobe greased their journey through unfriendly country. Still naked, he confronted a sputtering, off-balanced Farrah Smith, laying out the terms of the agreement. At his insistence, the estivating hostages were carried back to their tent. Dressed in human physiologies, they woke while en route or shortly afterwards. Nathan demanded to know what had hap
pened. He demanded to be given his clothes. He told everyone in earshot, “This is a travesty…a great injustice!” And when Cornell explained the truth, in brief, the old man took Porsche by the hand, shaking it as he said, “See? The truth perseveres!”

  She considered arguing with him, then thought better of it.

  Her uncle said something to Latrobe, and moments later, a phone was delivered to him. He called three nonexistent people in succession, then dialed a fourth number, telling the person at the other end, “It’s done, and we’ve had a nominal resolution.” He hesitated, listening to the voice on the other end. Then he lifted his free hand, adding, “I need you to do a favor for me. My wife. Find Kay, and keep her. Until I get there.”

  Porsche couldn’t imagine a more terrible curse than foisting too much truth upon the world.

  Again, her uncle made a request of Latrobe.

  “Helicopters. Enough for my people, plus pilots. No one else.”

  Latrobe gave the appropriate orders, then, perhaps thinking he could salvage some good from a lousy situation, he mentioned, “It is possible, you know. That your people and mine have areas of common interest.”

  Her uncle didn’t seem interested in responding.

  It was Porsche who pointed out, “That’s exactly what we’ve been telling you. Or didn’t you hear us?”

  Latrobe glowered at her.

  But he had enough presence to shrug his shoulders, forcing himself to say, “I guess I didn’t. Sorry.”

  Porsche was set to leave in the first helicopter.

  Dressed in gray and black, she was walking through the tent, talking happily to her parents and the others, and a familiar voice said, “Aunt Porsche! Come here please!”

  “You’re awake,” she told Clare. “How do you feel?”

  “Tired,” the little girl confessed. Then with a delicious joy, she added, “I just had a dream about you.”

  “Did you?”

  “We were on another world. Everyone was. And it was very strange, but nice, too. You know? Fun.”

  “Other worlds usually are nice,” Porsche promised.

  The girl waved her closer, then with a conspirator’s whisper, admitted, “It might have been a real place. I think.”

  “Maybe it was, Clare.”

  “But I won’t tell anyone about it. All right?”

  It was a golden moment, and chilling. Porsche could think of nothing to say but, “For now, it’s a secret. It has to be.”

  Then she kissed her niece on her clean and damp, newly made forehead, and she rose again, her uncle and Cornell waiting for her, and her cousin standing between them, hands bound together, his stance and the unrepentant expression on his face making him look like a hero statue ready to be set at a public crossroads.

  The forest fire had barely abated in their absence.

  Porsche was riding inside a small attack helicopter, gazing down at the tangerine flames and thinking about everything. About nothing. Out of the blackness, over the thrumming of the rotors, her uncle screamed out the central question:

  “What do you people want?”

  Trinidad sat motionless beneath a weak yellow bulb, offering not so much as a glance in his father’s direction.

  But he kept smirking, knowing it drove the man crazy.

  Porsche offered her interpretation, repeating the fable of matter and antimatter and their imperfect annihilation of each other. “The Others, or whatever they call themselves…they can conquer worlds by similar tricks,” she said. “Where the Few work to coexist, the Others depopulate and destroy!”

  She hoped for a reaction.

  For anything.

  What she got was a sturdy slow voice directed at the cabin’s ceiling. “You think you understand,” Trinidad growled. “You think you’re clever, Po-lee-een. But you got lucky, that’s all. You pieced together some clues and came up with a useful, wrong answer. That’s it. That’s all. So don’t congratulate yourself too much, please.”

  She watched Trinidad, trying to decide if this was the truth.

  Whatever that meant.

  Her cousin seemed to be concentrating—an observation that would haunt her for a long, long time—and in those last moments, he barely seemed aware of what was happening around him. His father rose and walked toward him, a carefully cultured menace in his stance. He didn’t have any Few-made tools; every device had been erased in his trip through the intrusion. But he had a military knife—another gift from Latrobe—and he acted as if he would use it, standing over his own son as he said something too soft for Porsche to make out.

  Cornell was sitting closer to the father and son. He heard enough to glance at Porsche, and he was alarmed enough to start rising to his feet.

  Porsche moved, but too late.

  In a loud voice, Trinidad screamed, “Nothing’s finished!”

  His hands were bound before him. Knotted into one fist, he drove them into his father’s belly. The knife fell, and Porsche moved. Too slowly. She thought that the knife was the target, and she dove and cut herself on the blade, retrieving it first. Then she looked up in time to see Trinidad opening an emergency hatch. Trinidad’s father was doubled up on the floor. Cornell had chased her cousin, grappling with him as he fought to climb through the hatch. For a horrible endless moment, Cornell clinging to him, pulled out into the roaring smoky air with Trinidad…and she grabbed Cornell, not her cousin, pulling him back even as Cornell screamed:

  “Get his hand…his hand!”

  The hand, and everything else, had already vanished.

  Porsche stuck her head out of the hatch, her long unkempt hair flying in the wind, and she looked below, at a great red wall of light and heat, a piece of her trying to see Trinidad’s tiny impact, while the rest kept recalling the look on his face.

  The Few weren’t the only people to take precautions.

  She told herself.

  Against all odds, he had escaped.

  I-35

  1

  Sometime before dawn, one hundred miles due of Seattle, Kay Vortune pulled into an all-night truck stop-chapel and filled her tank with high-test alcohol. Less than a day later, the clerk remembered her as a good-looking woman—for being grandmother-old, that is—and she was both pleasant and in no particular hurry. Surveillance cameras confirmed his assessment, at least about her mood. Lingering in front of the refrigerators, Kay seemed to wrack her brain before deciding on a protein-enriched sports drink. Standing in line at the counter, she added a piece of smoked salmon to her purchases, and she spoke to the clerk for ninety seconds, discussing the gentle rain and the ungentle traffic, then giving him an extra two-dollar coin. “For your smile,” she explained, offering her own smile with her tip. Then she returned to her car and pulled away without incident, no one seeing her again.

  There was a man riding with Kay, the clerk claimed. He didn’t actually see the rider, and perhaps it was a woman instead of a man. But he was certain that someone was in the passenger seat. Someone good-sized. Shown a photograph of Trinidad, the clerk said, “Not him,” and then, “Maybe not him. I don’t know.”

  The outdoor surveillance cameras had no record of Kay’s visit.

  Each camera had failed five minutes before her arrival, then came back on line five minutes after she had departed—an easy enough trick, if there was indeed someone whose identity was to remain secret.

  The state patrol found the Chinese-made sedan parked at a beach in Oregon, empty and locked. The Few stole the vehicle, and using forensic skills borrowed from a multitude of worlds, learned absolutely nothing of consequence.

  Jack Vortune was present at every portion of the investigation, though he wasn’t allowed any genuine powers.

  Officially, he was enjoying what the Few euphemistically labeled an opportunity for regeneration.

  Standing before the refrigerators, in exactly the spot where his wife of forty years had stood, he realized what she had been doing. Under the fluorescent lights, a person could see her face reflected
in the glass doors and the polished aluminum frames, each face distorted but recognizable. Kay had been taking a last long look at herself. Her life as she knew it was over, and wherever she was going, she wouldn’t likely see this face again.

  The nature of the foe was hotly debated among the Few.

  Kay and her oldest son could have been acting in tandem, without the help of any shadowy Others. What little evidence there was pointed to that comforting answer. Yet as a precaution, teams of security people were brought from neighboring worlds, given temporary identities, the best tools, and the authority necessary to chase every credible lead, and then, every slippery rumor.

  Working unofficially, Jack Vortune handled his own investigation.

  He searched the burnt forest in New Mexico, finding no trace of his son among the ashes. He interrogated his other children—interrogate was the only word for it—and after a lot of tearful nights and hard words, he learned that his wife had been a good if somewhat distant mother, and that her favorite child was her first-born. Finally, in despair, Jack borrowed a single intrusion key and searched the Oregon coast for his wife’s escape route. But after visiting fifty wilderness worlds, he conceded that Kay was too smart to leave her car at a meaningful place. It even occurred to him that she might never have even left the earth, and today she was thoroughly human, hiding from him in plain view.

  About the existence of the Others, Jack was of one mind. And in the company of his peers, he advocated a policy of relentless, aggressive vigilance.

  Most found that attitude distasteful.

  But he was tenacious, following his logic with the single-mindedness of a man who had lost hope and every shred of romantic love, and who could now look upon those qualities as being frailties. Nothing but the truth mattered, and the truth was—like it or not—going to win out in the end.

  2

  A promise brought Porsche back to Jarrtee.

  The preliminary work was difficult, but the networks of Few-made tools left behind by her cousin and uncle were an immense help. There was a timetable that she barely met. Then at the appropriate time, she strolled down the familiar alleyway, entering the weedy and vacant courtyard as two men emerged from the intrusion. “So this is the famous Jarrtee night,” said one of the men. Then he helped his companion walk to an overgrown stone bench, and he made him sit, asking, “Do you know who you are?”