Steal Across the Sky (5 page)

So no one believed the website was real. Come on, now—a classified ad for human “Witnesses” to some colossal alien crime? The site didn’t even look very inventive: just sixty-seven dry words, unadorned by even basic clip art:

We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to
[email protected].

But after the aliens made radio contact with SETI and then proceeded to talk freely—if circumspectly—with anyone whose communication equipment could reach the moon, everything changed. The Atoners mentioned the website. Within minutes, it took millions of hits, and everything—panicking, rejoicing, attacking, joking—ramped
up exponentially. Suddenly the B movies and the old comic books and the paperbacks with tacky covers were all
real
.

And, in retrospect, the Internet was the perfect way for bona fide aliens to recruit humanity for the stars, for at least five reasons:

1. A website is accessible by anyone with a computer. If you want to reach a whole lot of people simultaneously, 24/7, this is the way to do it. Radio and TV broadcasts must change frequencies across borders, adjust to time differences, pre-empt Monday night football. The Internet is always there, always ready, everywhere at once.

2. A website bypasses the filters of government censorship, spin, posturing, and rhetoric. Instead of being told what aliens said, we can see for ourselves.

3. This website demonstrates formidable technology. It apparently joined the Web without human agency and has resisted all attempts to remove, block, modify, or hack into it—and trust me on this, the best computer minds on Earth have tried. We
know
.

4. A website reaches those people who are most computer-literate—the young—whom the Atoners apparently wanted to reach. Everyone “accepted” so far has been under thirty. Space is usually considered a game for the young, educated, and intelligent. Nothing like knowing your target audience.

5. The website
works
. Millions of “applications” have been filled out and sent.

As the entire planet waits to see who else is accepted—and whether any means really is provided to take them to the moon, let alone to other planets and back—one fact emerges about the Atoners: Madison Avenue could take lessons from them. Their sales approach is logical, attention getting, and effective.

Except, perhaps, for one thing—we still don’t have any idea what they’re selling.

CAM CHECKED ON THE SHUTTLE
displays to be sure that no soldiers lurked just outside, ready to rush in the second she opened the door. They couldn’t hurt her, of course, but they might have done all sorts of damage to the inside of the shuttle. Or maybe not—this was Atoner property, after all. And a rush by some soldiers would at least liven things up. Cam was really sick of twenty-three-hour shifts in a six-foot-diameter round box with nothing to do but talk to Soledad, whom she’d never gotten along with all that well in the first place. Lucca didn’t know how lucky he was, broken leg and euthanasia whackos and all.

Who would have guessed witnessing for aliens, on an alien planet, could be so
boring
?

Well, maybe today would be the day. Cam checked her equipment, activated her personal shield, and opened the shuttle door, blinking in the bright hot sunlight. Two men walked toward her from the dirt walls that circled the shuttle a hundred yards away.

Well, this was more like it!

One was a soldier, deeply sunburned like all of them, in short blue skirt, breastplate, and helmet. For an insane moment Cam wondered, not for the first time, what they wore under those skirts. Then she snapped herself into Witness mode, relaxing her body posture to look unthreatening, smiling so hard that her face felt like it might crack, trying to note everything at once.

The soldier had short dark brown hair and, like most of the Kularians she’d seen, light-colored eyes. Muscular arms, swirls of blue paint on forearms and cheeks, the same height as she, neither young nor old. The other wore a longer skirt of coarse brown cloth with very worn sandals.
No body paint. He was much older, with straggling untended gray hair and deeply lined face. He stank and he limped. Clearly not another soldier, so what was he? He seemed too poorly dressed to be an official ambassador or a ruler or anything like that.

The translator needed samples of native language, so Cam couldn’t respond to whatever he was calling to her. But when the two reached her and stopped, she was startled by the old man’s eyes. Deep blue, they were speckled with silver, like muted stars in an evening sky. Cam knew she wasn’t particularly sensitive to other people’s moods; she’d been told it often enough by friends and family. But
these
eyes—although they watched her with sharp intelligence, they struck her as the bleakest things she had ever seen.

The old man, getting no response, sensibly stopped his torrent of words. He touched his chest and said, “Rem Aveo.”

Cam repeated it, touched herself, and said, “Cam O’Kane.” How could she keep him talking? Maybe by asking for more words. She reached out to pluck at his tunic and ask for its name; immediately the soldier stepped between them, a wicked dagger in his hand, and scowled. A bodyguard?

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt him. Is this your leader? No, of course not. Look, I need you to
talk
.”

The old man watched her intently. All at once he began a flow of words. How had he known? It went on for a few minutes while the guard, expressionless, watched. People also watched from the ramparts, a circle of silent and wary eyes. It spooked Cam a little. But then the translator began to whisper fragments into her ear: “Come from . . . sky . . . peace . . . soldier . . . you . . . Are you a soldier come from Pular?
Cooz
.”

“Cooz,”
Cam said aloud, parroting the translator and assuming the word meant “no.”

“From where? . . . Sky . . . where?”

“From the sky, yes,” she subvocalized and then repeated the sounds in her implant. “I’m not from here.” She watched those navy-blue-and-speckled-silver eyes sharpen even more. Complete incomprehension on the soldier’s face, although he didn’t look stupid.

Rem Aveo was speaking a language the soldier didn’t know.

She let him ask several more questions but didn’t answer, letting the translator process vocabulary and grammar. Then Cam pointed to things, encouraging him to name them, to offer her sentences about them. She tried to look as if she understood but simply chose not to say anything herself, but it was clear he wasn’t fooled. Finally the soldier spoke sharply. The old man turned to him and spoke, and Cam’s implant translated, “She is Pulari. She doesn’t speak our language.”

The tricky old son of a gun.

But what should she do? She didn’t even know if the translator could handle two separate languages; the Atoners hadn’t said. Fuck! Why hadn’t they prepared her better? Well, she would just have to do the best she could.

She said to Rem Aveo, “I am not Pulari. But you want this soldier to believe I am Pulari.”

If he was startled, he didn’t show it. “Yes,” he said. “It is kulith.”

The translator offered her nothing.

He said quietly, “You don’t know kulith.”

No, but the soldier did. He had the look of a man who finally recognized one word in a sea of incomprehensibility. Aveo said more words, many more, and the translator finally offered, “Strategy. Life or death strategy.”

“Whose death?” Cam said.

“Mine,” Aveo said. He looked at her with those sad, shrewd eyes, and all at once Cam realized he was younger than she’d first thought. The sadness and boniness and gray hair had misled her. But there was strength in his gaze, his stance, his natural authority. Middle-aged maybe, but no more.

She said, “If I am not Pulari, you will die?”

“It is not that simple.”

She smiled. “It never is,” she said, all at once feeling wise and powerful. This poor man. Why not play along, until she had the situation better figured out? She had to pretend to be from somewhere; pretending to be Pulari could save a life. And if the translator could handle both languages, then maybe the ones not speaking “Pulari” would talk more freely in front of her, and who knew what she might learn that way?

“Pulari,” she said to the soldier, and pointed to her own chest. Then, in English, “Hello.”

CAM WALKED THROUGH A WOODEN GATE
and out of the shuttle enclosure. The pale-eyed soldier must be more than just a bodyguard, might even be some sort of commander; he said something and more soldiers fell in behind them in perfect rows, perfectly quiet. As they moved through neat, cleanly raked dirt streets between straight rows of tents, the silence began to unnerve her. She glimpsed nonmilitary people, men and women and even a few children, but none of them made any noise, either. All were bare chested, even the women. Most wore skirts of various colors and lengths, but some were completely naked. Nobody looked happy. Because of her?

Then a child threw a rock.

Cam just happened to look up as the small brown arm let fly. The boy—or maybe it was a girl, she couldn’t tell—perched on top of an earthen wall. The throw was awkward, without force, and the stone landed several feet in front of Cam, plopping into the dust. It was no bigger than a pebble.

Immediately a soldier leaped onto the wall, grabbed the child by the neck, and thrust his short sword into the little belly.

The child screamed, a high inhuman shriek like an animal caught in a trap. The soldier tossed the body, gushing blood as soon as the sword was withdrawn, from the wall. The child continued to scream, but the woman who darted from behind a wagon to snatch him to her made no noise. To Cam, staring in horror, that was the most terrible part: The mother didn’t dare yell or wail or cry. She huddled over her child in complete silence, both of them covered with blood, until through the inadequate shield of her arms Cam saw the little body stop twitching and the solitary scream stopped.

Cam trembled. She tried to stop the movement in her legs and arms but she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, it went on and on. Then Rem Aveo’s arm came around her shoulders, she was clamped to his side, and his hand gripped her wrist and held it steady.

Everyone watched her.

Rem Aveo spoke and the translator said in her ear, “Do not fall over.”

“I’m okay,” she gasped. After a moment she pulled away from him. Her trembling stopped. The procession moved forward, through the dusty streets, and she, Rem Aveo, and the commander entered a large tent, where the trembling began again.

Cam swore. She hated herself for this, it was stupid, she was supposed to be an impartial Witness no matter what happened, it was what she’d been sent here for . . . that child, no more than a toddler, really, spitted like a chicken and that poor mother too afraid to even cry out . . .

Cam was sitting on a stool, holding a metal goblet. Rem Aveo had one, too—yes, that was right, the soldier had poured them both from a leather bag. Rem Aveo drank his.

The commander stared at her frankly, speculation in his pale eyes.

Rem Aveo said quietly in Pularit, “You come from a place where such killing does not happen.”

“Yes,” Cam choked out, even as part of her mind thought,
No
. Such killing happened all the time on Earth, she read about it in the flimsies, saw it on the newscasts. Soldiers casually murdered children all the time in Africa, in Asia, in South America. But not in Nebraska, not on Cam’s small-town street, not in her sight.

“Where,” Rem Aveo said skeptically, “can such a place be, if people live there?” And she stared at him over the rim of her goblet, not knowing how to answer. Wondering for the first time if she really could do this, or if the Atoners had not made a terrible mistake in choosing her, so shaken by a single death, to witness whatever incomprehensible thing it was that they needed to know.

“WHAT IS SHE?”
Cul Escio said in a low voice to Aveo.

Aveo said, “I don’t know.” It was the truth, although he saw that Escio didn’t believe him. Also that Escio didn’t not believe him. But the man was a soldier, a commander; he liked certainty. A scholar’s ambiguity was distasteful to him. And yet—Escio had read Aveo’s treatise on reality and kulith.

“Tell me,
rem
, what you think she is.”

The two men stood at the doorway of Escio’s tent. The woman from the sky sat on a stool, holding a goblet of wine. The tent darkened with the sky, but no slave came to light the lamps. The camp lay as if deserted, deathly silent.

Aveo said carefully, “She speaks Pularit and says she is Pulari.”

“So you have said.” Again, belief and disbelief mingled. “The Pulari play kulith. They do not have such sky eggs. And the Pulari can be killed. She must be a Pulari goddess.”

“It is possible. I will need to talk to her further.”

“Do so. Did you see that,
rem
?”

Aveo had been watching Escio, not the woman. “See what?”

“She reached inside her tunic for a moment, drank some wine, then reached inside again. What could that mean?”

“I don’t know.” He should stop saying that; Uldunu Four was not keeping him alive in order to profess ignorance. “Perhaps it is a Pulari drinking ritual.”

“You don’t know. Yet you lived among the Pulari.”

Aveo stared levelly at the commander. “But not with one like this. Let me talk to her alone, please.”

Escio left. Aveo brazenly took the only other stool in the tent, the
commander’s own, and pulled it close to “Cam.” What a name—it sounded like an animal, or a vegetable. The names of people began and ended with open sounds. Even Pulari people.