Steal Across the Sky

  He made a frustrated gesture, raising one hand and letting it drop, something between a plea and a blow.

  She thought quickly, grateful for something to replace the images in her mind. “Listen, Soledad told me that you already had blindness and—” She stopped. He couldn’t hear her. Cam pointed to the sun and held up her chilly hands, flashing all ten fingers twice and then just four fingers on one hand. Twenty-four: Your previous afflictions lasted just twenty-four hours. Never mind that she had no idea how many hours were in a day on Kular A or if they even had hours. She tried to nod and smile, then pantomimed sleeping and waking up: You’ll be all right tomorrow.

  He nodded and flipped both palms angrily upward: But why?

  She shrugged. Why? She had no idea. But it gave her something else to think about as they walked. Why would the Atoners do this to him— but not to her?

  Soledad called again on the commlink. “Cam, when you get to the village—”

  “What? I can’t talk, we’re almost there.”

  “Good. But leave the commlink open so I can hear, too. Just stick it in a fold of your clothes or something, okay?”

  “Okay.” Lucca watched mutely as Cam arranged the open link in her furs. Of course, she thought bitterly, he didn’t object to Soledad sharing his natives—no, not at all. Only to her.

  They trudged through the snow into the village. Kular B had palaces, cities, massive gates, brilliantly colored tiles, and fine-spun curtains . . . but of course that had been near the equator. This was a northern hamlet with rough stone huts and one large stone building sending smoke curling lazily against a blue sky. A pathetic excuse for a village, and now the most important place in the galaxy.

  The door of the one big building opened and some children dashed out, bundled like piles of laundry. They saw Lucca, whooped, and dashed over. A little girl with very red cheeks and black eyes threw her arms around Lucca’s legs. He stiffened.

  “Hi,” Cam subvocalized, and the translator gave her something guttural that she repeated awkwardly.

  The girl turned to Cam. The other children, shyer, hung back. The red-cheeked child, clearly puzzled, said, “Where did Lucca get you from?”

  How to answer that? Instead, Cam pointed at Lucca and said, “He’s sick, in his mouth. He can’t talk right now.”

  The kid didn’t answer. She, and all the others, turned as one to gaze at something to Cam’s right. For a long moment, everyone was still, like those dioramas of primitive life in the museums Cam had been taken to for school field trips. The children all had their eyes raised to the height of Cam’s head. Cam felt the world splinter, an ice castle cracking to reveal treasures hidden inside. She turned to look at empty air.

  “Aveo,” the child said. “Did Lucca bring you, too? Are you long on the second road?”

  A noise came from Cam’s clothing. She barely heard it. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Then Soledad was talking and still Cam didn’t answer. The children inched away, confused. Cam began to cry.

  Soledad, for once breaking the rules, shouted, “Cam! I know what the Atoners did! I know!”

  But Cam couldn’t stop crying, the tears freezing on her face as adults began to stream out of the large stone building, as Lucca stared at her in disgust and anger and fear, as the terrible truth penetrated her bones and she understood that, in some form these filthy children could communicate with and she could not, Aveo stood beside her, dead and yet continuing, and so in some sense not dead, not dead, not dead after all.

  27: SOLEDAD

  IT WAS THE GENES. It had always been the genes. The Atoners had manipulated them. Ten thousand years ago, and now in Lucca.

  Soledad sat in front of her commlink, frustrated beyond bearing because she couldn’t explain this to the only two people within hundreds of light-years who had the vocabulary to understand. Lucca had gone deaf and Cam was crying, characteristically more involved with her own emotions than with anything else. Soledad struck her fist uselessly on the console and broke the link.

  The biggest discovery in all of human history, and no one to tell!

  She paced the short corridor of the deserted ship, past the three sleeping bunks and the bathroom and back to the main room, the only other area except for Storage. Deliberately she made herself sit quietly in her padded chair, its flight straps dangling to the floor, and make sure the recorder was on. Which was dumb—it was always on. Still—for this.

  “Here is what I think,” Soledad said, heard the quaver in her voice, and decided to ignore it. She needed to work this out aloud, to hear the words take shape in the empty, stale air. “Ten thousand years ago the Atoners came to Earth. They gathered up humanity somehow, or part of humanity—” If so, what had happened to the rest? “—and they experimented on us. Like lab rats. They can . . . can turn off sensory genes. That’s how they made Lucca lose his smell, then his sight, then taste, then hearing. That’s also how they made all his senses come back. They programmed the meds in him to do that, but not the meds in Cam or me. Because it was only Lucca they were sending down to Kular A.

  “And ten thousand years ago the Atoners permanently turned off another sense. The one that lets us see the . . . the essence of people that leaves their body after it dies. That essence that apparently lingers a little while, and before the Atoners came humans could see it. But not after. And the change was hereditary, like . . . like color blindness. We’re blind to the dead among us. Only this blindness is dominant, not recessive like color blindness. Once before, ten thousand years ago, we had—”

  We had evidence of an afterlife.

  Soledad got up, paced some more, beat her fists on the wall. It was so much to take in. She sat down and babbled again.

  “Some small subsets of humanity must have been taken to various planets. To binary planet systems, to create double-blind experiments. One group was allowed to keep the ability to see the afterlife, like Kular A. One planet was not, like Kular B. It was— Oh, you bastards, why?”

  “Yes,” a voice said, and Soledad screamed and looked wildly around. No one was there, and the wall screen didn’t brighten. But the voice continued, the deep and vaguely mechanical voice of an Atoner.

  “This is a recording. It has been triggered by the content of something said aboard this ship. You are correct in your assumptions.

  “Ten millennia ago we robbed humanity of one of its senses. Our civilization was very different then, and we experimented on many races besides your own, but we know this is no excuse.

  “Your science calls them your ‘most recent common ancestor.’ They were the most recent individuals who were the progenitors of every existing member of your species. They are also the only humans we left fertile after our visit to your planet. There were a hundred and three of them, left among various sterilized populations around the Earth. We left them fertile but with altered genetic makeup.

  “Those with unaltered genomes we took to Kular A, to Susban A, to Londu A, to Fumnet A, to Lirtel A, to Junut A, to Prelbin A. All planets where humans now witness.

  “There are two things you must know, and that you must tell all peoples on Earth as part of your witness. First, that the genes to sense your dead were not merely kept from expression, as were some Witnesses’ other senses, in demonstration. The genes to see your dead were destroyed. They no longer exist in any genome on Earth.

  “Second: We are profoundly sorry for what our race has done to yours.

  “Bring any Witnesses that remain planetside back up to the ship for the voyage home.”

  The voice fell silent.

  Dazed, Soledad thought all at once of her father, dead in a construction accident when she was six. Did she believe, then, that something of him continued somewhere, on the Kularians’ “third road”? No, she did not. Death was the end. But . . . the Kularian child saying, Aveo . . .

  Lucca attributed it to a form of stress-induced telepathy, pulling the name from Cam’s mind. Telepathy was a sense, too—the Atoners could have mea
nt that—

  That’s not what the Atoner recording had just said—

  Soledad put her head in her hands. She didn’t know what she believed, what had been seen or not seen on Kular A. Everything that had just happened went contrary to the rationality she’d embraced her entire life. But she could see now, sitting in this alien ship, what her “witness” was going to cause back on Earth. Her witness, and Cam’s, and Lucca’s, and, presumably, the other six teams’ sent around the galaxy. The Witnesses were going to cause upheavals of faith, all faiths, all ways of life, among all peoples. It was a bomb the Atoners were sending back with these twenty-one young people, a bomb that would hit all continents at once, igniting controversies hot enough to scorch them all.

  And Soledad, whose life had so far been ordinary, was going to be a detonator for all the rest of her days.

  PART II

  AMICUS CURIAE

  28: SOLEDAD

  SOLEDAD PADDED FROM HER BEDROOM into the tiny dark kitchen, turned on the light, and, all in the same fluid motion, hit the switches for the coffeepot and the wall screen.

  “—five thirty A.M. on what promises to be a gorgeous winter morning,” chirped the news avatar. She had light blue skin, black hair drawn in lines sharp enough to cut diamonds, and huge purple eyes. Her body against the constantly changing simulated background was as ridiculous as all the female news avatars’, and her patter was inane. But that was what Soledad wanted when she couldn’t sleep: Scorn banished anxiety. And if anything important happened, an actual person would break into the netcast.

  “Temperature at forty-two degrees on its way up to fifty-six by mid-afternoon. Let’s all say a big thank-you to global warming!”

  Oh, right. Just what all those people flooded out and droughted out and hurricaned out by climate change were dying to do: say a big thank-you to global warming.

  “And another reason to say thank you—once again it’s Friday! So all you sparklies just waiting to strike the pleasure gong all weekend long can—”

  Soledad let the stupid chatter fade into a soothing background, took her coffee to the living room window, and watched the first headlights start the long daily commute to New York. She had moved to this small Catskill Mountains town as soon after her return from Kular as she could, as soon as the endless government debriefings and semi-welcome protection had ended. A child of Manhattan’s alphabet avenues, after months in the country Soledad still wasn’t used to this silence, to the dark woods at dawn and dusk, to the steep fields without broken glass or used syringes. Sometimes an owl hooted in the branches of a huge maple, a soft alien sound Soledad had never heard before. Occasionally the gentle quiet of her three-room rented house spooked her, but usually she liked it. Her neighbors, none of whom knew her identity, were distantly polite. The good thing, made possible by her sale of the three rocks that the Atoners had permitted her to bring back from the moon, was all the time that she now had to think. The bad thing was all the time that she now had to think.

  You, she thought at the swoosh of car lights hurtling past, do you believe what The Six are saying? Do you care?

  It always amazed her that people could not care. How could anyone not be affected by— The phone rang. She glanced at the ID in a corner of the screen.

  “Soledad?”

  “Good morning, Fengmo.”

  “I knew you’d be awake. You’re the only person I can call at this hour.”

  “And the only one who calls me.” Of the five people who had her number, only Fengmo and Lucca were welcome to call, and Lucca seldom called. She was the one who called him.

  “Turn on visual,” Fengmo said.

  “No. I look a mess.”

  He laughed. “Are you going to Cam’s lecture in New York?”

  Soledad took a sip of coffee, thinking how to answer. Fengmo would wait. He was superb at waiting because, he said, he already had everything he wanted. Bullshit, Cam always replied, but Fengmo just smiled. His statement might even be true.

  Finally she said, “I can’t decide.”

  “Not like you, Ladybliss.”

  Ladybliss. No one else had ever called Soledad—sensible, reserved, stocky Soledad—by pet names. Certainly not the family to which, when they had been children, Fengmo had been the antidote, the escape, the life raft she clung to when drama was surging at home. And drama was always surging. Love for Fengmo welled up in Soledad and she thought, for perhaps the ten thousandth time, Damn you, Fengmo, for being gay.

  “If I go, Fengie, then Cam will only say the same overly definite things she always does and I’ll be irritated all over again. But if I don’t go—”

  “If you don’t go, what? She’ll say something new that will resolve your existential dilemma for you?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Sweetie, I have to make fun of you because no one else ever does. They take one look at all that judicious reserve and they never open their poor little intimidated mouths. And if they do, you give them a look that could chill glaciers.”

  “There aren’t any glaciers left.”

  “Not true. I’m sure we still have two or three, melting quietly someplace. Soledad, she-love, you know you’re going to go to the lecture, so meet me first for dinner and I’ll go with you to the Garden. A bodyguard.”

  Soledad laughed. Fengmo stood five foot four and weighed forty pounds less than she did. “What will you do, hit them over the head with the Te Ching?”

  “ ‘Nobody can protect / A house full of gold and jade.’ Six thirty at Leonard’s. Bye, sweetie.”

  Cheered—Fengmo could always cheer her—Soledad rinsed her coffee cup in the kitchen sink. A gay Taoist Chinese-American runt as her best friend—what were the odds? But then she, more than most, knew that odds meant nothing when you were the one who drew the short straw. Or hit the jackpot. Or couldn’t tell which. The phone rang again.

  Soledad stared at the ID. Juana. Oh God.

  No one knew where Soledad was living except Lucca, Fengmo, and Soledad’s government contact, Diane Lovett. The facial surgery that Diane’s federal Agency had paid for ensured that nobody recognized Soledad at the grocery store, the town’s one cinema, the train station. Soledad wanted it that way. But unless she wanted to lose her family entirely, she’d had to give a phone number to Juana, the sanest of her sisters. Which wasn’t saying much.

  “Hello, Juana.”

  “You have to fly into New York. Today!”

  Juana didn’t know that Soledad lived two hours from Manhattan by maglev. The number for her encrypted phone line appeared, on all records, to belong to a warehouse in St. Louis. Barely far enough away from Juana and their mother, who lived with Juana when she wasn’t on the streets.

  “Fly to New York? Why should I—”

  “It’s Mama! She’s dying!”

  Soledad’s stomach heaved. She had hated her mother, pitied her, tried to help her, realized that Mama didn’t want help, hated her again— all the stages you go through when you live with a drunk. The teenage Soledad had screamed at her mother that she wished Mama used junk instead of liquor so that Soledad could get her sent to jail. Mama had vomited on the carpet, drunk the rent money, attacked a cop, gone missing for days at a time. But throughout she’d remained strong as a mule. She was only forty-five. Cirrhosis already? Or had she finally moved on to street drugs and OD’d?

  But Soledad’s voice stayed calm as she said, “What happened, Juana?”

  “Listen to you! You don’t even care! She fell down the stairs and broke every bone in her body and now she’s dying!”

  “What hospital is she in?”

  “She’s at home! She wants to die at home and so I’m taking care of her, Ms. Too-Proud-to-See-Her-Family! But she wants to see the great star traveler before she goes, so you better come soon!”

  “All right. All right. I’ll be there this afternoon.”

  “Good.” Juana banged down the phone.

  Something wasn’t right here, Soledad thoug
ht. Would a hospital really send home a woman who had broken “every bone in her body”? Maybe they would, if the woman insisted on dying at home and her daughters made huge scenes and the Universal Health facility was overcrowded and inadequate, as they all were.

  Dying. Her mother. Setting out on the second road, the last door, the golden ladder, the eternal sea, the bridge to far, the deep cave. Each of The Six had brought back a different description of the afterlife as perceived by the natives on an Atoner planet. And each of them was—

  “APC interrupts your morning avatar with breaking news,” said the wall screen, much louder than before. The blue-skinned avatar, whom Soledad had forgotten, was displaced by a middle-aged man with the deep facial lining of serious news.

  “Emma Jane Taymor, the daughter of Vice President John Taymor, has just been pronounced dead on arrival at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. The White House has not yet issued a statement, but reliable sources say that Emma, who turned seventeen last month, committed suicide. The teenager posted a WT referring to the motto of the Why Wait? Society, which asserts that—”

  Soledad gripped the edge of the sink and held on. Seventeen. And a Web Testament, with the motto of that perverted society that had grown so exponentially in the last six months: “If a better world than this awaits us after death, why wait?”

  Cam was responsible for this. Was responsible for all the Emma Jane Taymors, all the young people offing themselves across the globe. And it did seem to be mostly the young. Maybe the old were more skeptical. Or maybe it was just that they could already glimpse the second road ahead of them. “Even if a better world awaits us after death, why rush?”

  And you, Soledad? Did she believe that second road existed? The great question, and after six months she still couldn’t decide, couldn’t come down securely on one side of the question or the other. Cam’s fervent certainty, or Lucca’s equally fervent denial? Eternity for all, or “merely” stress-related telepathy activated by hormones released in the presence of death, the genes for which the Atoners had cut out of the human genome ten thousand years ago? Or something else entirely?