Steal Across the Sky (19 page)

DR. ROMAN-CRUZ:
What it means is that Y-chromosomal Adam impregnated more than one woman. Of course, none of this implies that these were the only two people on Earth when they each lived. The other genetic lines just died out.

OPRAH:
But that was thousands of years before the Atoners’ alleged kidnapping.

DR. ROMAN-CRUZ:
Yes. The second relevant area of study here is work done using non-genetic models of migration patterns and population densities. Studies done as early as 2004 have been refined in just the last few years, using improved simulation software. They show that yes, there could have been as few as a dozen most recent common ancestors of all humanity as recently as ten thousand years ago. Which fits with the Atoners’ claim—without, of course, proving it.

OPRAH:
Now for those literal believers of the Bible who say that the Earth itself is only four thousand years—

DR. ROMAN-CRUZ:
Excuse me, Oprah, I have no intention of discussing religious beliefs. Of any kind.

OPRAH:
Fair enough. Then let me ask you one last scientific question. Lucca Maduro claimed, in his public statements before he retreated into silence, that on one of the alien planets he went blind for twenty-four hours. Then his sight returned, but he couldn’t smell anything for twenty-four hours, and so on. I’m sure there’s nobody here that hasn’t heard the story! Is that possible—that genes can just be switched on and off like that inside his body to produce that effect?

DR. ROMAN-CRUZ:
Theoretically it’s very possible. In fact, two American scientists won a Nobel Prize over a decade ago for just that. Drs. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello demonstrated a technique called “RNA interference” for silencing genes.

OPRAH:
So from a genetic viewpoint, Lucca Maduro may have been telling the truth.

DR. ROMAN-CRUZ:
He may have, yes.

OPRAH:
Thank you, Doctor. Now, not everybody is willing to trust what the media have taken to calling “The Six”—including my next guest. Back in a moment.

FRANK OLENIK WANTED HIS LIFE BACK
. How long should a man have to pay for a single mistake?

He finished his morning exercises in his bedroom: a hundred sit-ups, fifty push-ups, weight work. The bedroom, his since he was six years old, was painted light gray, with a single window looking out on the little yard enclosed by its chain-link fence. Frank’s dresser held only the statue of Our Blessed Lady that his sponsor had given him at his Confirmation a decade ago. Frank liked the Virgin’s expression: modest but no-nonsense as she crushed the serpent of evil under her heel. The blue of her painted gown matched the spread on his single bed, neatly made with tight hospital corners. Downstairs Ma moved around the kitchen, and the good smell of frying bacon wafted up the stairs. Frank showered, put on a button-down shirt and jeans, and combed his short brown hair.

Paul Olenik, dressed in his blues, sat at the kitchen table, finishing his coffee. Darla played with a bowl of cereal, fishing individual chocolate puffs out of the milk and lining them up wetly on the table. Frank’s mother put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him.

“Thanks, Ma. Morning, Dad. Darla.”

“Morning, Son.” Olenik smiled fleetingly. At fifty, he was still handsome and strong, a silver-haired version of what Frank would look like someday. “Got a job interview?”

“Not today.” Frank never lied to his father.

“Then how come you’re dressed up?” Darla said.

“I’m not. I’m wearing jeans.”

“You have on a good shirt. Are you gonna put on a tie? Where are you going?”

“Stop asking so many questions,” Ma said, “and stop playing with your food. You have exactly four minutes until the school bus gets here.”

“But I just—”

“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Paul said mildly, and Darla immediately replied, “Yes, sir.” She shoveled a spoonful of cereal into her mouth.

Frank said to his little sister, “I’m going to church.”

His mother smiled at him. Paul nodded, finished his coffee, and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Gotta go.”

She held on to him a moment, the same clutching that Frank had watched his entire life. But it was brief; Judy DiPario had known when she married Paul Olenik that a cop’s life could be dangerous. For years she’d hoped he would make detective because she believed her husband would be safer that way. That he never had gotten that promotion, despite working for it, was just due to the stupidity of his captain, the same stupidity that had gotten Frank removed from the force before his probation period was even over. Paul had come close to quitting over the injustice done his son; his father’s belief in him was what had gotten Frank through the hearings, the lawyers, the enmity of cops who should have been his backups. But some of those cops had been dirty, which was why Frank had been on the verge of turning them in when somebody planted in Frank’s locker a bag of drugs stolen from the evidence room. After that, nobody believed anything Frank had to say.

Judy Olenik had talked her husband out of quitting. Paul served in a different precinct than Frank; he was so close to retirement; they needed his full pension. Frank had understood. He admired his father, always had.

But the injustice of the charges against himself had sent Frank around the bend for a while. It was the media, partly—they had tried him in the newspapers, on televison, and on the Internet. It all got blown up into a big thing, and every time Frank saw his dirty ex-partner’s smirking face yapping about “police integrity” his anger had deepened. He hadn’t known what to do with himself; a cop was all he’d ever wanted to be. And he’d been shocked and impulsive and out of control then. He admitted it. Otherwise he never would have filled out that application to be a Witness. After that, everything all just sort of snowballed. That could happen. And
now here he was with the first problem of his life that he couldn’t take to his father.

Judy said, “Darla, get your backpack and get out to that school bus.
Now
. Frank, if you wait until the ten o’clock Mass, I’ll go with you.”

“I’m not going to Mass.”

She stopped fussing over Darla to gaze at him. “Confession?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad,” she said simply, and said no more. Ma didn’t nag, he had to give her that. She’d been deeply disturbed when Frank started questioning his faith a few years ago, but she’d left it up to him to find his own way back. And he had, although probably not in the way his mother believed. When it came to Catholic doctrine, Judy was stricter than the Pope.

Darla, in her St. Catherine’s uniform and a Scooby-Doo jacket, scuttled out the door. Frank finished his breakfast, kissed his mother, and stood. “They out there?”

“Just him.” Judy shoved Frank’s plate into the dishwasher. “Jackal.”

“You know it.” Frank left the kitchen, with its ruffled pink curtains and wall calendar of martyred saints, to peer through the slats of the venetian blinds in the living room. No TV vans. Just the one kid reporter who was there every day, still hoping for the interview Frank was never going to give. He’d said everything he was going to say to the media, and all the other reporters had eventually given up. But his mother had called it right: They were all jackals, trying to feed on the sorry scraps of his story.

All at once there rose in his mind the city on Susban A, the lovely cream-and-pink buildings laid out in graceful circles, the heathen temples, the women with intricately bound hair and pants that flowed when they moved. A gracious city, slow moving. Corrupt, of course, and on way too many drugs, and shut out from the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. Frank wouldn’t have wanted to stay there. In fact, he tried not to think about Susban too much, because it confused him. Not seeing the dead— he’d had proof that they could do that, but what was the big deal? So the dead lingered a bit before God sent them to Heaven or Hell. If that was God’s plan, Frank Olenik wasn’t going to question it. Everybody still got their just desserts, eventually.

No, what confused Frank about his memories of Susban was his dislike of those memories. They didn’t belong in the life he wanted. He never should have volunteered to be a Witness for the Atoners, never should have gone into space like that, never should have shuttled down to Susban A. He actually envied Amira Gupta, the snobby Indian professor who’d gotten to stay in orbit around A and B. By the time the alien ship had arrived at Susban, Frank had recovered his senses and would have preferred to at least stay in orbit. But he hadn’t, and now he had to make a serious confession to Father Pfender. Although in one sense it was the Atoners, not Frank Olenik, who had screwed up so royally. Had let everyone down, including him.

He went back through the kitchen and out the back door. The Ohio spring had already started, even though it was only February. When Frank had been small, snow would have still been piled everywhere; one year it had reached the second-story windows. Now the air smelled of rich earth and soft breezes, and crocuses grew by the garage. Shielded by the house, he reached the back fence of chain link, scaled it easily, and cut through the Murchisons’ yard. Prince, the huge German shepherd chained to the Murchison house, wagged his tail and Frank patted him on the head. On Sycamore Street Frank cut through the Blaine yard—no dog, and Ned Blaine hardly stirred outside since old Mrs. Blaine died—to the parking lot of Our Lady of Divine Mercy.

The old stone church was dim and cold. No one noticed Frank as he slid into a side pew. On a Wednesday morning, the world was at school or work and most of the other confessors were elderly, ferried from St. Ursula’s Nursing Home on the bus parked out back. Scattered among the old people were a few mothers carrying infants or toddlers in wool hats with pom-poms. If anyone even recognized Frank, they had the good manners not to say so. A confession should remain private. A lot of things should remain private. He had picked Wednesday-morning confession because Father Jonathan DiPario, who was also Frank’s uncle Jack, wasn’t on duty then.

When it was Frank’s turn, he drew the curtain on the confessional, knelt at the grill—none of that face-to-face stuff for him or, even worse, communal confession with mass absolution. His mother could rant on that particular practice for hours.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

The papery old voice of Father Pfender said, “Tell me your sins, my son.”

In the gloom Frank’s fingers tightened into a fist. This was it. “Father, I told a serious lie, with serious consequences.”

“Consequences to who?”

“To the United States government. Under oath. I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but since then . . . things just snowballed. It wasn’t all my fault, and if . . . if others had done what they promised, I might have been justified. It wasn’t so much a sin of commission as of omission. Or maybe not, I’m no lawyer. But as it is . . . I think . . .”

“Yes?” The old voice had sharpened.

“I think I may have committed treason.”

SOLEDAD WALKED CALMLY
past the man in the dilapidated lobby of her sister’s building. Ice chips slithered in her abdomen. “I told you—I’m not Soledad Arellano. Please let me pass.”

He followed her from the building and fell into step with her on the sidewalk. “My name is Carl Lewis. I’m a freelance journalist who’s written for every major outlet in New York. I don’t want to compromise your anonymity, Ms. Arellano, really I don’t. I don’t even want an interview with you. What I do want is for you to get me in to see Lucca Maduro, and I’m prepared to offer you a hundred thousand dollars if you do.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes. You do.”

Soledad glared at him. Three little girls on a stoop stopped fussing with their Bratz dolls to watch interestedly. “I’m not who you say I am. And if you don’t stop harassing me, I’m calling the cops on my cell. Now.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

She took her cell from her pocket. Carl Lewis smiled tightly and said, “I can out you, Soledad. I can tell people who you are. At first just your neighbors or maybe friends of your neighbors, and you’ll never be able to prove it was me. The government provides you with minimal protection and the cops can’t do anything until you’re actually threatened. How long do you think that will take if, say, one of the anti-Atoner fringe groups decides to go after you, or some grief-stricken papa of a teenage suicide fingers you as part of the alien conspiracy that made Junior kill himself?”

Lewis was slime. Soledad kept her face impassive, but he had touched on her worst dread. Not the vengeful fringe groups, although God knew they were out there. Not even the danger from a grieving father gone
amok, also real. What she dreaded was that the father would be right: that she and the other Witnesses had harmed the world rather than helped it. That she was guilty of promoting death over life.

Come view the amazing totally rigid conscience!
Fengmo had teased her.
Stronger than diamond carbon filaments! Larger than galaxies! Ladybliss, you are not responsible for every consequence of every act you ever thought of committing. The world unfolds in its own way and you are a participant, not the designer
.

But Soledad rejected that Taoist thinking. In her view, not enough people accepted responsibility for anything. She hit 911 on her cell. By the time she’d reached the second 1, Carl Lewis was running away.

“He go behind that building,” one of the little girls called helpfully. “There be a alley to the next street.”

“Thank you,” Soledad said. She hoped he got mugged. If he really did out her . . .

Two hundred thousand dollars. Freelance journalists didn’t have that kind of up-front money. He must already have an editor lined up for an exclusive interview with Lucca. Soledad was almost tempted to try to set it up; nobody would learn anything new from Lucca. Ever since Lucca stepped onto the return shuttle on Kular A, and all through his subsequent brooding and self-imposed seclusion, he had only one note that he hit over and over: telepathy, telepathy, telepathy. No one on Kular had actually seen the dead. There were no dead to see, because there was no existence beyond the physical body. What had been observed on Kular A—on Susban A and Londu A and three other planets—was stress-induced latent telepathy activated by images, and maybe hormones, of death.