Steal Across the Sky (10 page)

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 remained 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.

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.

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

“
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 link 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?”