Steal Across the Sky

  “Frighten him? Why?”

  Aveo said, “He does not possess such a miracle himself.”

  Of course not. Cam had the impression that Aveo was saying much more than his actual words. She had that impression a lot, and she didn’t like it because it made her feel stupid. He was a difficult old man.

  Aveo struggled to pull himself off the pallet. Cam saw the flailing movements of his thin body and pushed away pity. This was not some pathetic old geezer in a nursing home. Aveo was smart, wily, and patient. She had learned that much last night, as he taught her to play kulith.

  He said, “We cannot go in your ship. It’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Many reasons.” He reached for his bowl eagerly, like a man who hadn’t eaten well in a long time. “First, Cul Escio will not travel without a heavily armed guard; we are at war. Second, I doubt he would set foot in your ship because he could not control what might happen there. Third, if that egg from the sky landed in the capital, King Uldunu Four would immediately conclude that you are very dangerous and should be killed.”

  “He can’t kill me.”

  “He can kill me.”

  It was said calmly, without drama, but Cam felt a shiver along her neck. Somehow she had become responsible for Aveo, and maybe for Obu as well. Nothing she had planned on. She said grudgingly, “How long a walk is it?”

  If he felt triumphant, it didn’t show. “Five days.”

  “Then there must be a lot of open country around the capital.”

  “Yes. Ravaged, but open.”

  “Then you and I will go in my ship to within one day’s walk of the city and wait for Escio and his troops to join us there.”

  He stopped eating, a piece of some breadlike thing suspended in his hand halfway to his mouth, and stared at her. “You . . . and I?”

  “Yes. That way you’ll be safe and we’ll get there faster. You can’t tell me that you can keep up with those soldiers, Aveo. You look like someone who just got out of the hospital.”

  “The . . .”

  “Like someone who’s been sick a long time.”

  He didn’t answer. Into the pause Cam said, “And Obu. She comes with us, too.”

  He ate the last of his bread, after sopping up the last of the juices in his bowl. “Ostiu Cam, you have missed the point of kulith last night.”

  “Kulith? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has everything to do with everything. I thought you understood. You played fairly well, for a beginner, so—”

  “I played chess in high school.”

  “—so I thought you understood. You cannot rush too fast at the opposing army, or you will lose.”

  “Oh, rats, Aveo, that’s just a game.”

  They stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. Then Cam got another idea. “Obu—does she belong to Escio personally? Or to the army?”

  “I don’t see the relevance of this.”

  “Just tell me! Who does she belong to?”

  “To Escio, I imagine.”

  “Then I can buy her from him, right?”

  “Buy her?”

  “Yes! I can make him an offer.” She had trade goods on the ship, valuable things that Atoners had supplied. Her mind became fired with the idea; she could set at least one slave free. Maybe even more.

  Aveo said quietly, “If you even make such an insulting offer, he would be within his rights to try to kill you. Or me.”

  “Why?”

  But all he said was, “We must play much more kulith, ostiu.”

  “Oh, fuck kulith! He—”

  Escio entered. Aveo looked at her pleadingly, and Cam shut up. Obu could be discussed later, as long as Cam kept the girl with her in the meantime, so Escio couldn’t rape her again.

  The two men spoke. Cam stayed quiet, letting the translator gather vocabulary and grammar for this second language. But something was wrong. Escio’s hand rested on the hilt of his knife, and although his back was to her, she saw the tension in the hard muscles of his bare back. Aveo, facing her, also tensed his thin body, but his face all at once sagged and his eyes turned bleak. Without moving his head, he slid those hopeless, silver-flecked blue eyes sideways to Cam’s face, and no effort was needed to cross two cultures, ten millennia, or hundreds of light-years to read Aveo’s meaning: “Good-bye.” Escio’s hand tightened on his dagger, even as he talked on.

  With one swift motion and no forethought whatsoever, Cam reached into her tunic, switched off her shield, pulled out her laser gun, and fired. Escio’s knife had just cleared its sheath. Flesh sizzled, smelling of burnt meat, and the cul fell. The hole in the back of his head was so small that it wasn’t even visible through his hair.

  Aveo looked at her from uncomprehending eyes.

  No no no no she hadn’t . . .

  But she had. And now she must keep going. Swiftly she reactivated the shield, grabbed Aveo’s arm, and pulled him toward the tent flap. In his ear she said softly, “Keep walking. Don’t say or show anything.”

  Outside the tent Obu waited. Cam grabbed her, too, and dragged her along. The child opened her mouth to scream, but Aveo said something sharply to her and she scurried into file behind him. “Let her go,” he said quietly to Cam, “and she’ll follow.”

  It seemed endless miles, endless hours to the ship. But no one stopped them, no one questioned the orders that Aveo snapped at the gate guards. Halfway across the enclosure, shouts arose behind them. “Run!” Cam said, and sprinted forward, dragging the old man. She got them inside as the first spears were thrown, flung herself in after them, and closed the shuttle door.

  She had killed a man. She, Cam O’Kane, who swerved her car to avoid snakes on summer roads. She had killed a soldier of the king and now she stood in an inhuman ship, staring at two humans with whom she had absolutely nothing in common, wondering what the fuck she was supposed to do next.

  11: AVEO

  IF EVER AVEO WOULD HAVE thought that this woman was a goddess, it would have been at this moment. Standing beside her in an impregnable silver egg, having watched her kill Cul Escio without any weapon actually touching him, seeing the strange and frightening objects around her—even to him they were frightening, and the slave girl had been terrified into numb rigidity—he knew that Ostiu Cam was not of this world.

  But not a goddess, either. No. A goddess would not look so distraught, so scattered. Even the Goddess of All Green, said those who followed her, killed with the impartial necessity of frost on the fields, meat for the table. But Cam, despite the hard and clear simplicity that was her usual manner, had been badly upset by killing the cul. This was a human woman, not some supernatural figure. Aveo knew so beyond doubt, and in knowing felt a sharp stab of something between disappointment and relief.

  There might be worlds beyond this one, but they held no goddesses to conduct one to the beloved dead. Ojea . . .

  “Just . . . just sit down,” Cam said, her voice quavering.

  At the sound of her voice, Obu screamed, began to wail, and tore at her hair.

  “What . . . Aveo, tell her to stop!”

  “She won’t, ostiu. She is mourning her dead.”

  “What dead? Do you mean Escio? He raped her!”

  “I doubt she sees it that way. In kulith—”

  “Oh, damn kulith! Just shut her up!”

  Definitely not a goddess.

  Aveo grasped Obu’s arm and spoke to her in a low voice, the only words that would quiet her: Cul Escio lives with the Goddess of All Green, he feasts in her Hall of Warriors, Obu will one day see him again, and if she did not stop wailing right now then he, Rem Aveo, an important scholar, would intercede with the Goddess so that Obu would never be allowed into the Hall during all eternity. Instead, she would be doomed to perpetual slavery digging the Goddess’s coldest fields, where nothing grew but frozen and withered roots. Fortunately, Cam was not listening.

  Cam talked to a section of the wall, which answered. That was fri
ghtening enough, although it was possible a person was concealed behind the wall. But Aveo also realized something else. Always before, Cam’s speech had been hesitant, with a small pause after every few words. Now it gushed forth in an uninterrupted torrent. Why?

  “Soledad, I killed him. And I—don’t—I’m in the shuttle and . . . What? No! Don’t you understand, I—” The sounds made no sense to Aveo, and neither did the answering sounds from the wall. But slowly the ostiu calmed. Obu, too, now sat quietly on the floor, head between her bent knees, terrified into submission. Aveo, listening hard, caught a few repeated sounds: “Lucca” and “Kular” and “witness.” None had meaning.

  Finally Cam said “okay”—another meaningless sound—and turned away from the wall. Her gaze fell on Obu. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing. She is mourning.”

  Cam grimaced. “Well, that’s the worst thing about slavery, isn’t it? It brainwashes . . . deludes . . . the slaves into buying into the system . . . into agreeing with the . . . the word for . . . Never mind.”

  Aveo had to not mind. Nothing she said had been rational. Keeping a tight grasp on his own rationality, he said, “What shall we do now, Ostiu Cam?”

  “We still have to get to your king. And now we’re going to have to fly.”

  “Fly?” That word had been all too clear. Still, Aveo’s mind rejected it. Fall from the sky, maybe, things could fall from a great height. But fly . . . only birds flew. Then Cam spoke another word to the wall and it lit up with an army.

  Despite himself, Aveo gasped. Uldunu Four’s soldiers, attacking the egg . . . no, not irrational sorcery but only some kind of window, showing the outside. Spears and fire besieged the egg, and the terrified faces of brave men loomed close.

  “Bye-bye, tin warriors,” Cam said. Aveo felt the floor lift beneath him. The soldiers outside fled, then grew smaller. Obu crumpled into a faint. Ground flowed beneath them like water. They were flying.

  Aveo, for the first time in many years, had to consciously resist crossing his arms over his breast in the sign of submission to the Goddess.

  “HERE’S MY PLAN,” CAM SAID, “unless you have a better idea. We land the ship just outside the city and walk in, since you think the ship will scare the king so much. Then we—”

  “No,” Aveo said. The ground still rushed away beneath them so dizzyingly that he had to look away from the window-that-was-not-a-window. He must hold steady; she clearly needed him. Or somebody. She was like an unbroken animal that ran blindly around a room, knocking over furniture and slamming into walls.

  “No?”

  “No. If you leave the . . . the ship outside the city, Uldunu Four will know of it before we reach him and be just as frightened. Spies are everywhere. Also, a thing reported at a distance can be misrepresented, but a thing seen close to the capital and by men he trusts cannot. Thus, you may as well land it on the roof of the palace and invite him to enter it, as you have me and Obu.”

  Cam glanced at Obu, curled into a corner and refusing to uncurl, and sighed.

  “Also,” Aveo said, “if I walk with you, I will be dead within two minutes of leaving the ship. I am a traitor, and I do not have your invisible armor.”

  “You’re a traitor? Really? What did you do?”

  Not a woman: a child. Did she really think he could, or would, answer that? Apparently she had learned nothing playing kulith. What kind of place did she come from, that such stupidity was not already dead? Instead of answering her, he said, “Ostiu Cam, what is a ‘lucca’?”

  “Lucca—Oh, you overheard me on the—No word for it. Okay. Lucca is the name of my friend.”

  “And ‘kular’?”

  “That’s what we call your world.”

  Again, nonsense. The world was the world. “And ‘witness’?”

  She frowned. “That means ‘to see something and report on it.’ ”

  “You are a spy.”

  “No. Yes. I mean, a spy is looking for information to help win a war, right? I’m just here to see something else, and to report on it to . . . to some other people.”

  “Report to what people?” Aveo asked.

  “I’ve never actually seen them.”

  “Report on what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are here to ‘witness’ something you cannot identify to people you’ve never seen?”

  Cam ran both hands over her face, pulling the skin into a grotesque stretch and then releasing it. “It sounds weird, I know. But we were told we would know it when we saw it. Although so far that hasn’t happened.”

  “And you believed these people that you will ‘know it when you see it’?”

  “Yes. The ship is theirs, not ours. So they—Look, Aveo, this doesn’t matter now. We need to decide what we’re doing. Look, there’s the city.”

  It was true. Aveo saw the city wall, the West Gate, the palace towers rise over the horizon like a real ship nearing land. In so short a time! Again that swooping vertigo, that sense of unreality, took him, and again he fought it off.

  She said, “So you think Soledad should land the shuttle on top of the palace? Is it that big building there? I see a flat section of roof.”

  “Yes. Are you . . . aren’t you steering the egg?”

  “No. Soledad is. My other friend.” Then more strange sounds to the wall, answering sounds, and Aveo watched in fear and awe as the egg slowed over the palace and lowered itself gently to the rooftop.

  “Come here, please, Aveo, I want to try something,” Cam said. “Really, stand as close to me as you can.”

  Every impulse in Aveo resisted. But he stood and she moved next to him, reaching inside her tunic. Then she moved even closer. As tall as he was, she bulked larger, and she smelled of clean hair and female skin. To his horror, Aveo felt his old member, long unused, stir even as he pulled back from her foreignness, and was ashamed of doing so. He was—had been—a scholar. The strange should intrigue him, not repel him.

  For the second time Cam reached inside her tunic, and Aveo felt a faint tingling along the side of his body beside hers. He drew back sharply.

  “No, don’t do that. I’m trying to see if the shield—the invisible armor—can cover us both. It covers my gun”—a meaningless sound—“but I don’t know how much area it will—Fuck it, why didn’t the Atoners give me more information?”

  More meaningless gabble, but he was slightly shocked to hear the crudest of all words for copulation come from her mouth.

  “Okay, I’m going to shove you against that cabinet handle—Do you feel that?”

  She pushed his chest against a piece of metal protruding from the wall. Aveo gasped, “No!” She shoved harder, and still he felt nothing except a fear he could not shake, like a low fever. Again and again she experimented with various parts of his body, pushing and pulling at him like laundry in a boiling pot.

  “Okay, now we know. You can be inside the shield but only if you stand behind me and really, really close. Otherwise, the force field . . . the mechanism . . . it just snaps you out. Can you do that, Aveo?”

  “I can. I will not.”

  “You will not? What are you, crazy? Otherwise soldiers are going to run you through like butter! Look!”

  She waved at the wall window. Warriors poured onto the roof from below, a full battle group without the discipline of Escio’s men but far more heavily armed.

  “I am a scholar of the Hall of Scholars,” Aveo said. “I will not go before Uldunu Four like a child clinging to its mother’s skirt.”

  “Would you rather be dead? I need you to translate because you spoke only Pularit to me. And you owe me, Aveo. I already saved your life once!”

  “And took Cul Escio’s.”

  “Saving you! God, you people! Now you come with me or I’ll just . . . take you out to the countryside someplace safe, dump you, and start all over learning whatever the fuck language it is that your king speaks!”

  He could imagine that: Cam, alone in the cour
t of Uldunu Four, unable to speak the language, ignorant of even the most basic protocol, insulting the king from the first move on the kulith board. Aveo himself wandering the countryside, hungry and very soon dead. But what matter? All life was ephemeral, all death eternal, and saving one man did not atone for the killing of another because atonement itself was irrelevant. In the vast reaches of time, nothing really mattered any more than moves in yesterday’s kulith.

  But it mattered to him. Even though whatever scholarly knowledge he gained from this bizarre adventure would die with him, anyway.

  He said quietly to Cam, “I will come.”

  “Good! Now hang on tight. I’m going to open—Wait, what about Obu? She’ll have to stay here. There’s no way safe for her—Wait, in that supply cabinet.”

  Obu wouldn’t go. The moment Cam touched her she came to life, shrieking and flailing. Finally Cam jammed Obu inside the metal chest and slammed it shut. The girl continued to scream. Cam looked near tears.

  “It’s for her own good! Tell her!”

  Wheezing with exertion, Aveo said, “She is too terrified for any words to reach her.”

  “Fuck it! Let’s go!”

  She opened the egg’s door. Soldiers, thick as vermin, first fell back and then surged forward, hurling spears and rushing in with daggers. Aveo clung close to the woman from the sky. Amid raining weaponry and soldiers’ shouts, he waddled to a stairwell in the city where he had been a scholar and a traitor and an emissary and was now a translator for a girl who did not know what she was looking for, in a place she could not even begin to understand.

  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.

  12: PRESS CONFERENCE

  June 4, 2020

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