Steal Across the Sky (9 page)

She had called him crazy. Aveo thought Uldunu Four to be crazy. But no one—no one—could be crazier than this woman, unless it might be those masters she claimed to have never seen but who had sent her here on this craziest of all journeys.

They reached the stairwell and began to descend.

PRESS SECRETARY MATTHEW STEYART
:
Ladies and Gentlemen, the President. [sounds of shuffling as reporters rise]

PRESIDENT
:
Thank you. I’d like to make a brief statement, and then I’ll take your questions. If there’s one value that has shaped our country, it’s freedom. For nearly 250 years we have guaranteed our citizens unprecedented freedom of thought, of religion, of privacy, of movement, of actions within the law. These freedoms have yielded for the American people unparalleled social richness, unparalleled peace within our borders, and unparalleled contacts with other nations. During the last three years, my administration has made every effort to protect and defend these individual freedoms. For this reason, I firmly believe that allowing United States citizens to
choose
to accompany the Atoners to the moon, and beyond, is their right and our legacy. We must wish the twenty-one “Witnesses,” both those who are our fellow countrymen and those from other nations, Godspeed. And we must hope that the knowledge they bring back from their journeys will enrich us all. Okay . . . Sandy?

SANFORD GARDNER, CNN
:
Ma’am, how would you answer those critics who say that you are risking having these so-called “Witnesses” converted to some strange philosophy or hostile military intention and so returning to the United States as brainwashed or otherwise altered spies?

PRESIDENT
:
You mean they might want to ask intrusive questions of the White House? [laughter] Seriously, as I just said, the United States does not limit the thoughts of its citizens. We of course limit
actions, for the good of us all. But those Americans who have volunteered to travel with the Atoners are as free as the rest of us to be exposed to, consider, and adopt any thought they choose. If, however, they return and perform actions that in any way endanger this country, of course that will be appropriately addressed at the appropriate time. But the Atoners have approached us in peace, as friends, and as friends we accept their overtures, which, I’d like to remind you, are part of the most stupendous event to affect mankind in centuries.
Centuries
.

[
MANY VOICES
]:
Ma’am! Ma’am! Madam President!

PRESIDENT
:
Yes, Kyle?

KYLE YOUMANS, NBC NEWS
:
You’ve been praised and condemned both for mobilizing the National Guard the moment that the anti-Atoner riots began in four separate American cities. Sixteen people are dead as a result of either those riots or subsequent Guard actions. Do you now consider that mobilization premature or in any other way a mistake?

PRESIDENT
:
I do not. Most of us are not going to the stars, at least not just yet. We barely have a human presence on the moon, even with Selene City and China’s Village of Heaven and the commercial base of Farrington Tours. Most of humanity lives
here
, on Earth, and here where we live, order and law must be preserved. Jenna?

JENNA JOHNSON, FOX NEWS
:
Madam President, your handling of the entire Atoner crisis has resulted in low—lower—approval ratings for your administration and for you personally. Do you think this reflects an understanding on the part of the American people that their leader has sold out to aliens?

PRESIDENT
:
I do not. Chris?

CHRIS DEFAZIO,
THE NEW YORK TIMES
:
What sort of knowledge do you expect that the Witnesses will bring back to us?

PRESIDENT
:
How can we know yet? Let me tell you a story. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria summoned the scientist Michael Faraday to Buckingham Palace. Mr. Faraday had just formulated important laws related to electricity, and the queen was curious. She watched his various demonstrations and listened to his explanations and finally asked, “But Mr. Faraday, what use is this ‘electricity’?” Do
you know what Faraday answered his monarch? He said, “Ma’am, what use is a baby?”
    We don’t know what knowledge will come to us from beyond the stars. But like a baby, it should be nourished and watched as it grows and develops.

CHRIS DEFAZIO
:
Follow-up question, please! Ma’am . . . If you weren’t the president of the United States, were young enough, and had a chance to become a Witness for the Atoners and visit another planet—Would you have gone?

PRESIDENT
:
[long pause] In a heartbeat.

IT SNOWED HEAVILY FOR THREE DAYS
and three nights. Village and steppes piled with white. The Kularians, laughing, dug paths and tunnels from huts to community lodge to store house to privies. The winter didn’t seem to change their mood at all; they were no more affected by cold and monotony and boredom than were rabbits or badgers on Earth.

Nor was Lucca any longer bored. He set about cautiously, trying to arouse no suspicion, to investigate Kularian telepathy. From the day he’d landed, twenty-eight days ago, the natives had assumed that he was just like them. Lucca didn’t want to disturb this notion. He wasn’t sure what they would do if they discovered he was not telepathic.

How did it work for them?

He feigned sleep until long after Hytrowembireliaz and his family had left for the lodge and another day of communal cooking, dancing, gossiping. Then he sat up and concentrated on an image that Chewithoztarel could never have seen: the rich Tuscany vineyards of Vino Maduro in Cortona, where Lucca had grown up. In loving detail he pictured the vines heavy with purple Sangiovese grapes, the pale fields dreaming in the sun, the tall, thin cypresses spiking the blue sky. He went back to the sights and sounds and even the smells of childhood, before Oxford and London and Gianna. As he concentrated on the images, he thought over and over the Italian word
vigna
. After at least fifteen minutes of this, he fought his way through the snow to the community lodge.

It was more subdued than usual. No one was dancing, and the adults sat in small groups, talking quietly. Those children not outside played a betting game with stones or wove ribbons on their small handheld looms,
a current fad. Chewithoztarel, however, sat alone in a corner, staring at her fingers, uncharacteristically silent.

“Chewithoztarel?” Lucca said, sitting beside her on the usual pile of smelly rugs. “Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“You look sad.”

“I am.”

He waited. Often, saying nothing prompted people to talk—although not usually Kularians. Was this sadness somehow connected to his images of gorgeous scenery the little girl would never see? That seemed a pretty sophisticated concept for Chewithoztarel, but Lucca didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know anything for sure anymore. His heart thumped and he had to make himself breathe normally.

Chewithoztarel, maddening as always, said nothing.

Lucca thought hard about the
vigna
. Maybe one had to be physically closer to a receiving telepath in order to get through . . . but then how had Chewithoztarel “heard” what he’d been saying to Soledad far out on the plain?

Chewithoztarel said nothing, staring down at her own fingers.

Hytrowembireliaz approached, crouched beside his daughter, and said sharply, “Small heart, stop this.”

Lucca blinked. It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone in the village speak harshly to a child, or in fact to anyone. Hytrowembireliaz looked at Lucca. “I apologize for my child. She is young, and they were good fellow-travelers-on-the-first-road.”

“Friends, yes,” Lucca managed. Who were good friends?

Someone must have died. As Hytrowembireliaz moved away, Lucca surreptitiously counted the villagers. All adults were present. How many children were out in the snow? He had to know. Laboriously he arose and walked outside.

It took him a while to count the kids because they were playing some game that involved hiding in a sprawling acre-wide tree, behind huts, and in snow holes, but eventually they tired of this and trooped inside to
eat. All the children were accounted for. And when Lucca went back inside, Chewithoztarel had joined a group of girls giggling in one corner. Clearly there were no vineyards in her exasperating mind.

He sat beside Blanbilitwan, the child’s mother, who smiled at him with the same impartial, low-key good humor she offered everyone else. Her red front tooth was slightly chipped, yellowed enamel showing through. Tentatively Lucca said, “Chewithoztarel will miss her fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road.”

Blanbilitwan’s smile didn’t waver. “Yes. But she will learn.”

Learn what? Before he could think of what to say next, Blanbilitwan added, “I remember when my sister started down the third road. I cried, too. So silly! But it was past time. If Ragjuptrilpent hadn’t been so young herself, she would not have stayed here so long.”

Ragjuptrilpent. Chewithoztarel’s imaginary friend: a real girl who had died. Yes, it did make sense for a child to pretend her friend was still alive. But—

Ragjuptrilpent told me you were here
.

She said you washed in the shed and pissed in the corner
.

I saw you coming back from way over the hill! And Ragjuptrilpent saw you, too!

Cold slid along Lucca’s spine. He said to Blanbilitwan, “When . . . when did Ragjuptrilpent start on . . . on the second road?”

She wrinkled her forehead. “I must think . . . yes, in Trem. You had not yet come to us.”

“Trem” meant nothing to the translator. “How many days ago?”

“Oh, many. At least five tens. She was always late, that girl.” Someone called to Blanbilitwan and she moved away.

Before he arrived here. Ragjuptrilpent had died, and then . . . what? Hung around as a ghost, lingering on “the second road,” to spy on Lucca and giggle with Chewithoztarel over Lucca’s activities? Ridiculous. Lucca didn’t believe in ghosts. There was another explanation for all this, and he would have to find it. This was, must be, what the Atoners had sent him here to witness. There was an explanation.

He made his way to the door, smiling at everyone he passed, and went back out into the cold. In Hytrowembireliaz’s hut, he crawled
under blankets, his own plus a few of other people, and commlinked Soledad. To hell with discretion and tact and not contaminating the two-planet double-blind experiment. He had to know if Cam was encountering anything like this, and what she and Soledad made of it. Anything to help make sense of the unthinkable. Anything at all, from anyone, anywhere.

IF THE BASTARDS
would only stop rushing at her!

Cam took another step down the palace stairwell. In ten minutes, she had advanced six steps down the straight staircase squeezed into a passage so narrow that only one person could descend at a time. Or two, if the second was Aveo, clinging to her back like a humiliated monkey. For each step, she had to wait until no soldiers were trying to stab or spear or punch either of them, so that she could press the manual override on her shield control, which briefly stopped whatever forces rooted the shield to the ground. If she didn’t stop the rooting, she couldn’t move forward; if she did, the fucking soldiers might push her down the stairs and Aveo might come loose from the protection of the shield.

But it was the shouting that was the worst, constant hoarse war cries like this was Little Big Horn or something. “Shut up!” she screamed in English, which only added to the clamor. She could feel Aveo tremble on her back, but he said nothing. Brave old man! She’d be damned if she’d let him make her look bad.

They came at Cam in a steady stream from both above and below, until finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and shoved at the one standing in front of her, who was trying futilely to slice open her belly with a knife the length of his forearm. He staggered and tumbled backward, knocking over the man behind him, and on down the rest of the stairwell they fell like a line of dominos. Cam laughed out loud, from nerves and relief and fear, and was appalled when the laugh became a sob.

Aveo breathed in her ear, “Turn left at the bottom of the stairs, through the curtain.”

She did, and what had been a rough stone passage abruptly became a wide gallery open on her left to a garden lush with alien flowers. And
they
were
alien, the first truly alien thing she’d seen on Kular. Not that she could spare attention to examine them closely! But she was aware of the plants’ weird shapes, pungent scents, and above all that some of them emitted a constant rumbling, very low and somehow unsettling—Were they plants? Animals of some type? Dangerous?

“Straight ahead,” Aveo said, as more soldiers rushed them and Cam was forced to stand still, rooted. The wall to her right was set with thousands of tiny colored stones, but the patterns looked odd to her, somehow
off
, like that modern art she’d never liked at home. Home . . .

Not now
.

“Last door on the right,” Aveo said, and all at once that sounded to her so much like directions to a bathroom that she laughed again, not a sob this time, and felt her confidence return. She could do this. She was doing this. Only . . .

I don’t want to have to kill anyone else
.

“That may happen,
ostiu
,” Aveo said dryly, and Cam realized she had subvocalized and then repeated what the translator gave her, without knowing she’d done either.