Steal Across the Sky (33 page)

CAM HATED LUNA STATION.

She had hated the shuttle trip up, too, although not because of the weightlessness or anything bodily like that. No, she hadn’t realized how spoiled she’d become, how used to large open rooms and—despite her entourage and Angie Bernelli—to privacy when she wanted it. On the shuttle, there was no place to
move
. Cam, an active person by nature, seemed to feel her muscles crumple and thin. Eight people were crammed into the space of a minibus for three days, listening to each other snore and talk and fart. No escape except in the tiny bathroom that smelled even worse than the rest of the shuttle as the days crawled on.

Not that the other passengers were offensive people. Nice enough, they were nonetheless middle-aged people who had nothing in common with her. They talked about things she didn’t understand, “quantum evolution” and “the imperative to go stellar” and “the Higgs ocean.” Atlantic, Pacific, Indian—Cam didn’t remember any Higgs Ocean. These people, except Frank, were all a lot smarter and more educated than she was, and Frank, who might have helped her, went the entire three days without saying anything at all. How could a person even do that? Cam couldn’t wait to land on the moon.

Which was even worse.

Farrington Tours’ Luna Station consisted of six trailers on stilts plus a few towering metal silos described as “air and power plants.” That was it. The trailers were connected by narrow inflated plastic tunnels, so that nobody had to go outside. The lander that came down from the shuttle, carrying four people each time, turned into a rover on the surface. It drove into a tiny inflated “garage” with an air lock at one end and a door to the largest trailer at the other. Two of the trailers housed
tourists, two held Farrington people, one stored supplies, and one, bigger than the others, was a kind of living/dining room/lecture hall. All of them were crammed with things Cam couldn’t name.

“I’m so grateful I’ve lived to see this,” said Jane Kingwell, in what for her passed for an excited voice. Jane, Cam’s roommate in the teeny space allotted them in Module #2, was fifty-five and motherly. Cam didn’t need a mother; she needed to grab Frank’s hair packet and go home. “This is much nicer than the pictures we saw of the station.”

Had they seen pictures? No, Cam had not—she’d been posing for the four million publicity photographs that were the price of getting her and Frank up here. For all of them, she’d had to look smiling and thrilled. The only time she could be sure of a robocam not snapping away was when she was asleep—but then came the dreams of Kular and Aveo.

“Cam, are you all right?” Jane asked. “You look pale.”

Pale, my ass
. She looked like shit and smelled worse. Didn’t Jane ever say what she really meant?

“I’m fine, thanks. What’s supposed to happen now?”

“A lecture in the Clarke Module about Shackleton Crater.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re in it,” Jane said gently. “Remember? Both Luna Station and Selene City are here because it has sunlight seventy percent of the time and the deep shadows make ice—”

“Oh, yeah, now I remember,” said Cam, who didn’t. More lectures, more photos. “The Atoner base is near here, too, then.”

“Yes. Fifty miles away.” Jane got the look she always got when anything connected with the Atoners came up in conversation around Cam or Frank:
Tell me more, please please please, but I’m too polite to ask directly
.

“Then let’s get over to Clarke,” Cam said.

AVEO STOOD BARE CHESTED
in his brown skirt, flesh drooping in gobbets from his bones and the bones gleaming like knives. He smiled at her with blackened lips over rotted teeth, a smile like Satan himself. He held something out to her, and rasped, “You must play kulith better than that, ostiu, or else . . .”

“Cam! Cam dear, wake up, you’re dreaming!”

She clawed up from sleep, gasping, tears on her cheeks, and looked wildly around. Where was Aveo? Where was
she
? Luna Station . . .

“You had a nightmare,” Jane said, one kindly hand on Cam’s shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No!”

The hand withdrew. “I didn’t mean to pry, truly. I’m just concerned. You seem to be under so much stress. . . .”

You don’t know a tenth of it, lady.
“No, I’m— It’s okay.” Jane had read about Cam’s “breakdown,” of course—the entire world had read about that hotel clerk’s lies. Or were they lies? Cam couldn’t tell anymore. “I’m fine. I’m going back to sleep. See, this is me, fast asleep.”

If only.

THE NEXT DAY
Cam’s subgroup left in the rover for their sightseeing trip to Selene City and the Atoner base. The rover held four: Cam and Frank, who had insisted on going together, Jane, and the Farrington Tours escort-plus-rover-driver, Terry Siekert. Slight and pale, Terry was finishing his 180-day shift at Luna Station and apparently none the worse for it. Cam saw Frank studying Terry intently. She knew why, and her stomach tightened.

She almost cried out with relief when she saw Selene City. It had a big dome! People walked around inside it! True, the whole thing was no more than the size of half a football field and much of it was taken up with more of the trailer-modules, but after the shuttle and the station this seemed as spacious as Uldunu’s palace on Kular.

The rover drove in and out of an air lock, and Cam bolted from the rover into the dome. Frank gave her an odd look. Cam laughed wildly. Her feet were finally again on ground— Well, no, it was some kind of hard plastic floor, but it would do. She could adapt. She had adapted on Kular, hadn’t she? She could do this.

Frank said, “Calm down, Cam. Don’t have another meltdown.”

“Fuck you, Olenik,” she said, almost amiably, and followed Terry Siekert inside a trailer for dinner with the scientists of Selene City. However, once they were seated at a long table with three men and two women, things again turned sour.

It was obvious that the moon tourists were barely tolerated here. The
governments that funded Selene might welcome Farrington’s hefty donations, but the scientists living and working on the moon considered the visitors to be overprivileged and intrusive nuisances. Their mood worsened when Terry posed Cam again and again with each scientist, had her make inquiries she didn’t understand about each piece of equipment, videoed and photographed and holoed her from every possible angle.

“I think that’s enough pictures,” said Dr. Alyssa Frantz, senior something-or-other. She was about Jane’s age but cold-looking and snotty. Cam had disliked her immediately, and one or two remarks she’d made since only deepened that dislike. “Surely by now you have enough pixels showcasing the glory of Camilla O’Kane back on the moon.”

“Allie,” a bald man said warningly.

“No, go ahead,” Cam said. All at once her fidgety, half-hysterical nerves hardened and focused. She could feel it happening. This woman with a stick up her ass was everything Cam hated, everything that had kept her down back in Nebraska, everything that had driven her to volunteer to become a Witness in the first place. “What about the glory of Camilla O’Kane back on the moon?”

“I think I’ve said all I want to say on that topic,” Dr. Frantz said, but her gaze flickered over Cam.
I know you
, that gaze said,
and you’re nothing.

And I know you
. “You imagine that I’m here for glory and publicity for myself,” Cam said, “while you’re here for serious science work.”

“I really don’t want to discuss this, Ms. O’Kane. Can we please eat our dinners in peace?”

“No. We can’t. Tell me, Dr. Frantz, what strikes you as more ‘serious work’ than spreading the truth about humanity having an afterlife? With all the hope and comfort that gives people?”

“Allie . . . ,” repeated the bald man, but not as if he expected to be listened to.

“Nothing would be more important if it were true, instead of a pack of wish-fulfillment lies. Tell me, Ms. O’Kane, are you familiar with the recent work by Gilbert and Schumaker at Harvard and by Murakami at RIKEN? No? I didn’t think so. They’ve had some rather astonishing breakthroughs concerning the electrical field that surrounds the human head from brain activity, including how that field might potentially carry information via electromagnetic fluctuations.”

Cam struggled to follow this. The bald man said to her, “What Alyssa means—”

“I’m not stupid,” Cam snapped, and now the entire table had fallen silent, listening. “I know ‘what Alyssa means.’ She’s talking about Lucca’s idea that what happened on Kular was telepathy, not seeing the dead.”

“Bingo,” someone murmured, while the bald man smiled timidly and tried again. “Yes, you see, Ms. O’Kane, most of us find it a bit easier to—”

“To reject a hard truth in favor of an explanation that fits with the science you already believe. Even if you’re wrong.”

“Until we have any real evidence that—”

“And what I saw doesn’t count as evidence?” Cam was shouting now, and Jane put a hand on her arm. Cam shook it off. “My eyewitness account doesn’t mean anything? And not Frank’s and not Jack’s and not Andy’s and not Christina’s and—”

“None of you is a trained observer, are you?” Dr. Frantz said. Cam knew her type through and through—not the kind to back down from a fight, and always sure she was right. Always! Dismissing somebody like Cam even when Cam was the one who was right. . . . God, was she right what were the Atoners doing why hadn’t they spoken to her since—

Frank, expressionless, said, “Dr. Frantz, Lucca Maduro is just one untrained observer, too.”

“True,” Dr. Frantz said, “and his theory is certainly unproven as yet, as well. But at least it has the merit of—”

“You mean at least it comes from somebody with college degrees and not a stupid trashy PR flack like me!” Cam shouted. “Why don’t you just say that? God, don’t any of you people ever say what you mean?”

“Cam, dear, you’re overwrought,” said Jane Kingwell, whom suddenly Cam despised as much as the rest of them.

Dr. Frantz said, “I really don’t descend to name-calling, Ms. O’Kane. And, of course, you’ve already done it for me.”

Cam launched herself across the table. It was done before her brain registered what her muscles were doing. She leaped with fist raised and caught Alyssa Frantz on the side of her arrogant, patronizing head. The scientist went down like a stone, like the stones Frank had hidden the genes under, the precious DNA this woman wasn’t going to let her have, she stood with gobbets of flesh hanging from her bones. . . .

Then Frank had Cam pinned against the wall while the others scrambled and exclaimed like ants in a disturbed hive and everything—all the noises and actions and explanations—seemed to be happening a long distance away, or to somebody else. The only thing real wasn’t actually real at all:
Aveo, standing in his brown skirt, shaking his cadaverous skull and saying, “You must play kulith better than that
, ostiu.
You simply must.
”

Cam started to cry.

Posted: April 27, 2021

By: questiongirl614

Subject: Web Testament

My real name is Chiara Joy Donaldson. I’m 16. I can post this infermation here now becuse by the time you read it, I will be dead. I’m writing this becuse the world needs to understand something and I feel that Ive been chosen to explain it. Thats a big honur and I want to live up to it.

What you shoud know: THIS LIFE IS ONLY THE BEGINING!!!

It’s like a tree. First its just a little stick with maybe two leaves and people step on you or animals eat you or you get run over by the mow-bot. Then when the tree gets bigger, everything gets better until finally your a huge beautiful oak or maple and your all you can be. Well in this life we are just sticks and that’s why its so hard with people hurt and wars and starving to deth. But in the next life it won’t be like that so why wait? Like the sussiety says. You can skip the bad stuff in this life so why woodnt you??????

I’m not really dead. I’m on the second road. You can come to. See ya there!

Chiara

SOLEDAD BRACED HER FEET
, held the Beretta steady, and fired. The aluminum can leaped into the air. Lucca said, “Very nice,
cara
. You are a natural at what you should not be doing at all.”

“
You
do it.” She lowered the pistol. “How did you learn to shoot, anyway? Doesn’t Italy have strict gun-control laws? You couldn’t have grown up doing this.”

He shrugged. “Laws never apply equally to all families.”

Of course not; that was a thing she already knew. Her family had not been one of those to which laws did not apply. Soledad braced herself again, fired, and hit the second can propped on the outcropping of rock. The report echoed off the mountains and a flock of crows took noisy wing. Silence floated back through the soft April air. A breeze brushed her cheek, smelling of spring.

They stood in the small clearing behind Anna Parker’s cabin, where patches of very small pink and purple wildflowers bloomed in the sunny spots. Gray trees wore unfurled leaves of tender yellow-green like curlers on old ladies’ heads. It was one of the most peaceful scenes that Soledad had ever witnessed. She didn’t care.

She and Lucca had been here a week, waiting for his contacts to call him. And not once had Soledad taken off James’s sweater. There was bottled water to drink but very little to wash in beyond the necessities, and Soledad could smell her own reek. She didn’t care about that, either. She shot the third can off the rock and Lucca said quietly, “You should see your face as you do that.”

“Why?” she said without interest.

“You look exactly as you have been behaving.”

She didn’t ask further; she knew what Lucca meant. She looked cold, contained, unfeeling. Did Lucca sense the hell of emotion underneath or what it cost her to contain it? Probably, but it didn’t matter. All this week he had been perfect: respectful, distant, impersonal. At night he slept in the bunk above her as if they were brother and sister, and if he heard her sleepless thrashing in the bed, if he noticed that she wore James’s sweater day and night, if he was concerned that she ate almost nothing, he didn’t say so. He was uniformly calm and attentive. He was playing a role, and so was she. This was the first time he’d remarked on her behavior.