Steal Across the Sky (11 page)

“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.

ORGANIZE TO PROTEST
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

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.

“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.

Aveo made the
belon
to her, the gesture of acknowledgment of a
masterly game move. She pretended to ignore his gesture—which was also masterly.

His hopes for survival rose.

THE HOPES WERE DASHED AGAIN
inside her ship.

Cam closed the door of the tiny space and flung open the cabinet door. Aveo had already caught the stench of Obu’s night soil, but the girl was in a better way than he’d dared to expect. She was not dead, not unconscious, not mad. Released from her prison, she again huddled in a terrified ball in a corner, but Cam cleaned her with water from the egg and fed her as tenderly as if she were her own babe and not a slave. It was a stupid kulith move, but there was nobody but Aveo to see. What kind of city had she come from, where slaves were treated as
rem
and kulith was not played and the king would send such a confusing emissary across the wide sea?

Cam said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do.”

“Isn’t that for me to say?” Aveo said, as mildly as he could. He outranked her in kulith so much it was laughable.

“You? Well, if you have anything to add— Of course, I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, and then you tell me. I think I should offer Uldunu some other trade goods—from Pular, if you want to say that—in exchange for letting me sort of hang around with him for a few days. As an observer. That way, I stand a better chance of seeing whatever the . . . the people who sent me here want me to witness. Look, here’s what I can offer him.”

She opened another metal cabinet and took out three or four boxes. Aveo, despite himself, gasped.

Jewels in colors never found anywhere on this side of the world. Cloth so soft and bright that it must have been woven by spiders he could not imagine. Small bottles of thin colored glass, or something like glass. She unstoppered one and waved it in the air. The scent of strange and unknown flowers drifted on the air, rousing even Obu. But then she opened the fourth box, and Aveo forgot all else.

Daggers. Short and mid-length, curved and straight, some with decorated hilts and some plain, and all with a wicked, sharp, thin blade. Cam said, “Not bronze. Steel, so they won’t break so easily.”

“Steel.” Another strange word. He picked up one of the shortest and plainest of the knives. It was forbidden for a scholar, painted in red and wearing the red skirt, to touch a weapon. But by Uldunu Four’s decree, Aveo was a scholar no longer. That reality was gone.

“Yes, good idea,” Cam said. “Arm yourself—I really should have thought of that last night. But do you think that if we gave him these, the king might let me follow him around the court until I see whatever I’m supposed to witness?”

“Ostiu Cam, you cannot just offer him these . . . these treasures. You must not!”

“Why?”

If her innocence was feigned, it was a wonderful act. But Aveo was losing faith that it was feigned. Another illusion gone. “It would be the grossest insult. You must lose these things to him in kulith, carefully, and with the
feft
move and no other.”

“With the what? Aveo, if I have to arrange this through kulith, it’ll never happen! Can’t you play for me?”

He pretended to consider. “Perhaps.”

“Oh, good. Which stuff should we bring downstairs? Will he play now, or at least soon?”

She gazed at him from those dark eyes that were Pulari and not Pulari, and Aveo suddenly saw that he would never understand her. Not if he studied her for a thousand years. He would never follow her thinking or penetrate her illusions, because even though she was not a goddess but a woman, she was so foreign, so strange, that she lay completely outside any reality he could ever grasp. She was her own reality, and she and all of the known world were not playing the same game. The best Aveo could do, he thought despairingly, was try to steer her away from disaster, and perhaps survive until she went back to wherever she had come from.