Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  No, what confused Frank about his memories of Susban was his dislike of those memories. They didn’t belong in the life he wanted. He never should have volunteered to be a Witness for the Atoners, never should have gone into space like that, never should have shuttled down to Susban A. He actually envied Amira Gupta, the snobby Indian professor who’d gotten to stay in orbit around A and B. By the time the alien ship had arrived at Susban, Frank had recovered his senses and would have preferred to at least stay in orbit. But he hadn’t, and now he had to make a serious confession to Father Pfender. Although in one sense it was the Atoners, not Frank Olenik, who had screwed up so royally. Had let everyone down, including him.

  He went back through the kitchen and out the back door. The Ohio spring had already started, even though it was only February. When Frank had been small, snow would have still been piled everywhere; one year it had reached the second-story windows. Now the air smelled of rich earth and soft breezes, and crocuses grew by the garage. Shielded by the house, he reached the back fence of chain link, scaled it easily, and cut through the Murchisons’ yard. Prince, the huge German shepherd chained to the Murchison house, wagged his tail and Frank patted him on the head. On Sycamore Street Frank cut through the Blaine yard—no dog, and Ned Blaine hardly stirred outside since old Mrs. Blaine died—to the parking lot of Our Lady of Divine Mercy.

  The old stone church was dim and cold. No one noticed Frank as he slid into a side pew. On a Wednesday morning, the world was at school or work and most of the other confessors were elderly, ferried from St. Ursula’s Nursing Home on the bus parked out back. Scattered among the old people were a few mothers carrying infants or toddlers in wool hats with pom-poms. If anyone even recognized Frank, they had the good manners not to say so. A confession should remain private. A lot of things should remain private. He had picked Wednesday-morning confession because Father Jonathan DiPario, who was also Frank’s uncle Jack, wasn’t on duty then.

  When it was Frank’s turn, he drew the curtain on the confessional, knelt at the grill—none of that face-to-face stuff for him or, even worse, communal confession with mass absolution. His mother could rant on that particular practice for hours.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  The papery old voice of Father Pfender said, “Tell me your sins, my son.”

  In the gloom Frank’s fingers tightened into a fist. This was it. “Father, I told a serious lie, with serious consequences.”

  “Consequences to who?”

  “To the United States government. Under oath. I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but since then . . . things just snowballed. It wasn’t all my fault, and if . . . if others had done what they promised, I might have been justified. It wasn’t so much a sin of commission as of omission. Or maybe not, I’m no lawyer. But as it is . . . I think . . .”

  “Yes?” The old voice had sharpened.

  “I think I may have committed treason.”

  31: SOLEDAD

  SOLEDAD WALKED CALMLY past the man in the dilapidated lobby of her sister’s building. Ice chips slithered in her abdomen. “I told you—I’m not Soledad Arellano. Please let me pass.”

  He followed her from the building and fell into step with her on the sidewalk. “My name is Carl Lewis. I’m a freelance journalist who’s written for every major outlet in New York. I don’t want to compromise your anonymity, Ms. Arellano, really I don’t. I don’t even want an interview with you. What I do want is for you to get me in to see Lucca Maduro, and I’m prepared to offer you a hundred thousand dollars if you do.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes. You do.”

  Soledad glared at him. Three little girls on a stoop stopped fussing with their Bratz dolls to watch interestedly. “I’m not who you say I am. And if you don’t stop harassing me, I’m calling the cops on my cell. Now.”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

  She took her cell from her pocket. Carl Lewis smiled tightly and said, “I can out you, Soledad. I can tell people who you are. At first just your neighbors or maybe friends of your neighbors, and you’ll never be able to prove it was me. The government provides you with minimal protection and the cops can’t do anything until you’re actually threatened. How long do you think that will take if, say, one of the anti-Atoner fringe groups decides to go after you, or some grief-stricken papa of a teenage suicide fingers you as part of the alien conspiracy that made Junior kill himself?”

  Lewis was slime. Soledad kept her face impassive, but he had touched on her worst dread. Not the vengeful fringe groups, although God knew they were out there. Not even the danger from a grieving father gone amok, also real. What she dreaded was that the father would be right: that she and the other Witnesses had harmed the world rather than helped it. That she was guilty of promoting death over life.

  Come view the amazing totally rigid conscience! Fengmo had teased her. Stronger than diamond carbon filaments! Larger than galaxies! Ladybliss, you are not responsible for every consequence of every act you ever thought of committing. The world unfolds in its own way and you are a participant, not the designer.

  But Soledad rejected that Taoist thinking. In her view, not enough people accepted responsibility for anything. She hit 911 on her cell. By the time she’d reached the second 1, Carl Lewis was running away.

  “He go behind that building,” one of the little girls called helpfully. “There be a alley to the next street.”

  “Thank you,” Soledad said. She hoped he got mugged. If he really did out her . . .

  Two hundred thousand dollars. Freelance journalists didn’t have that kind of up-front money. He must already have an editor lined up for an exclusive interview with Lucca. Soledad was almost tempted to try to set it up; nobody would learn anything new from Lucca. Ever since Lucca stepped onto the return shuttle on Kular A, and all through his subsequent brooding and self-imposed seclusion, he had only one note that he hit over and over: telepathy, telepathy, telepathy. No one on Kular had actually seen the dead. There were no dead to see, because there was no existence beyond the physical body. What had been observed on Kular A—on Susban A and Londu A and three other planets—was stress-induced latent telepathy activated by images, and maybe hormones, of death.

  Soledad took the subway downtown, patiently queuing at the metal-and-explosive detector. On the diminutive screen of a news kiosk, an avatar repeated again and again a fifteen-second spiel about the suicide of Emma Jane Taymor. No one paid the slightest attention or paid for a printed flimsy. Most of the world, Soledad reminded herself, had not been affected by the Witnesses’ reports. Not outwardly, anyway. The trains went on running, the farmers went on farming, the teachers teaching, the cops policing. People raised their kids, paid their taxes, shot their gang enemies, went dancing Saturday night, dropped their litter in the street, just as if nothing had changed. Outwardly, nothing had.

  But, waiting on the grimy subway platform, staring down at the primitive tracks (no maglev in this part of New York), Soledad had another of the moments that had infused her ever since she returned from Luna Base. She was all at once aware of more people in the subway station than actually stood there. It was not a “psychic” sensation, not a “lost sense activating”—nothing so colorful. She didn’t see or feel or smell or hear anything out of the ordinary. Hers was a purely intellectual realization, capable of slamming into her at any given moment with all the force of the A train: There could be dead standing beside me.

  Yesterday 164 people had died in Manhattan; she had checked online. The day before, 193. The day before that, 152. Surely not all of them had immediately started on the third road (or gone through the last door or crossed the “bridge to far” or climbed the golden ladder). If not, then New York was thronged with loitering dead from yesterday, last week, last month. A shadowy realm just beside the living, fidgeting as they waited for the 1:19 downtown.

  Put that way, it was preposterous. The s
tuff of campfire ghost stories, bad movies, “séances” held by charlatans at tawdry “psychic faires.” No. Ridiculous.

  But it had not seemed so ridiculous on the Atoner ship, watching the display screen as a child standing in a bleak winter landscape had opened her rosy mouth and said, Aveo, a name she could not have known for a man she had never met.

  Seeing the dead Aveo, hearing him introduce himself?

  Telepathy, pulled from Cam’s or Lucca’s mind under stress? But why should little Chewithoztarel have been under stress?

  Was it life after death?

  Was it telepathy?

  Which? Or neither?

  And why didn’t any of these other passengers fidgeting beside her seem to care?

  The train shrieked through the tunnel and came to a stop, and Soledad got on.

  “WHY SHOULD THEY CARE?” Fengmo asked.

  “I don’t even know how you can ask that question,” Soledad said. She put down her fork and stared at him hard. They sat at a corner table at Leonard’s, Fengmo’s favorite restaurant, within sight of the South Manhattan levee that kept out the rising ocean. Leonard’s décor, techno-camp, featured old motherboards and defunct keyboards glued to the wall in intricate patterns. A non-working rotary phone sat in the middle of their table, twined with fresh flowers. Soledad had dressed up for Fengmo, who always noticed, in a turquoise silk shirt and gold necklace. Her calamari tasted like sawdust. Fengmo ate with gusto, looking like an animated Oriental elf.

  “Let me rephrase, Ladybliss. How are people’s lives any different because of the Atoners’ revelation? How is yours? There’s always been life and death, and we’ve always had to wait for death to see what happens next, and we still do. That ‘third road’ of the Kularians is still a mystery. Life and death are only two sides of the same unity, just as light is the other hand of darkness. Putting words to them, trying to codify them, solves nothing. ‘The—’ ”

  “I know, I know,” she said wearily. “You’ve told me often enough. ‘The way you can go isn’t the real way; the name you can say isn’t the real name.’ ”

  He grinned. “Lao-tzu would be proud of you.”

  “I doubt it. Fengmo, the Atoners’ revelation made a lot of difference to Emma Jane Taymor.”

  He stopped smiling. “Yes. And there are a lot of borderline types out there who are interpreting this for their own advantage. Have you heard about Anna Romany? Or the CCAD?”

  “No.” She pushed her calamari around on her plate.

  “Anna Romany is a psychic who claims her genes for seeing the dead have ‘reexpressed.’ Spontaneously regenerated, like the tails of lizards. Her TV show ratings have soared. She claims to be talking to Abraham Lincoln, who still hasn’t started down the third road.”

  “Still? After 160 years?”

  “Yes. And Honest Abe wants you to stop lying to yourself about the roadblocks to your personal spiritual growth and send money to Anna Romany. The CCAD is a lot more serious. They’re the Christian Coalition Against the Devil, a cross-denominational fundamentalist group that’s decided there is only one Atoner, not a whole bunch of them—”

  “That’s not unreasonable—”

  “—and that he’s really the Anti-Christ. They might be just a group of whackos, but the language on their website is pretty violent.”

  “What are you doing on their website?” Soledad pushed away her dinner.

  “Monitoring it for you. They think you—mostly The Six, but also the other Witnesses who left Earth—have been recruited by the Anti-Christ and now you’re all false prophets. Which is pretty funny when you consider that you can’t even make up your own mind about the afterlife. As a prophet, you’re pretty wimpy.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she said grimly.

  “Soledad, are you sleeping any better? You’ve lost weight over this.”

  “No bad thing.”

  “Sweetie—I don’t think I can visit with you anymore.”

  She jerked upright in her chair. “Not visit with me? What the hell are you talking about?”

  His face was troubled. “I should have put it together before now, dear heart. Juana lured you to her place so a sleazy journalist could see what you look like now. Any reporter—or any nut—with the brains of a poodle could also find out that you and I have been friends since the early Triassic. They could trail me to get to you. Hasn’t Diane Lovett told you that much?”

  She had, but Soledad hadn’t wanted to listen. She wasn’t ungrateful to the Agency for altering her appearance and resettling her, but neither did she want the feds controlling her life. She refused electronic surveillance on her little rented house, and she refused to account to Diane for every morning and afternoon of her life. A daily check-in with Diane was as far as Soledad would go, and the agent had reluctantly agreed. Soledad could only hope that Diane had stuck to her agreement.

  Soledad said, “I’m willing to take my chances in order to see you, Fengmo.”

  “But I’m not willing to put you in danger.”

  Soledad, as she always did in times of stress, turned impassive. Her body felt like iron. “Can we still talk on the phone?”

  “Sure. And I’ll go to Cam’s lecture tonight. But we’ll travel separately and sit apart from each other. Then I’ll call you later tonight to dish.”

  She nodded. Life without Fengmo, without lunches and dinners and the shopping trips he loved and she complained about, teasing him for the contradiction between Taoism and the love of 500-thread-count sheets. Fengmo was the only person who ever teased her back. Fengmo was the only person who could make her laugh.

  “Don’t look so desolate, sweetie. It’s not forever. After all, everything changes constantly, in the great flow of energy in—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Soledad said.

  He said roughly, “I adore you, you idiot.”

  “I know you do.” She took his hand on the tablecloth, feeling a minor peace come over her. The first peace in many days. The waitress stopped, coffeepot in hand, and beamed at the multi-ethnic young couple so ideally in love.

  MADISON SQUARE GARDEN LOOKED as closely guarded as the U.S. Mint. Cops in full battle gear guarded the entrance, holding back a crowd getting tired of the slow funneling through metal-and-explosive detectors. On one side of the building a moving LCD displayed a two-story-high image of Camilla O’Kane, waving and smiling. Soledad’s coat, which had seemed warm enough during the February day, was inadequate now that the sun had gone down. She wrapped both arms around herself and stamped her feet. Somewhere behind her in line was Fengmo.

  Who were all these people? An old woman, even less warmly clad than Soledad, looking grim and muttering to herself. A middle-aged man laughing with his teenage son. Two young girls in ridiculously high heels— please don’t let them be more members of the Why Wait? Society. A pair of heavyset men in sheepskin jackets and baseball caps with beer logos. What did they all want from Cam?

  What did Soledad want from Cam?

  A pop-up ad leaped from the sidewalk, triggered by her body heat. The holo was a beautiful woman who winked, swigged from a can of Coke, and disappeared in a shimmer of silent sparkles.

  “Excuse me, miss, you dropped this.”

  Soledad turned around. A man about her own age stood holding out a black glove. He was gorgeous, a blue-eyed and blond Viking unaccountably transported to gritty Seventh Avenue. Probably an actor; anybody in Manhattan who looked like that turned out to be an actor. She didn’t recognize him, but that meant nothing; she went to the theater only when Fengmo dragged her.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not mine,” she said, looking longingly at the glove. It looked warm. One glove would be better than none.

  He leaned conspiratorially toward her. “Well, take it anyway. Everybody else around us already has gloves, and your knuckles are turning blue.”

  She glanced up sharply. Why did he want her to take the glove? Did he know who she was? The plastic surgeon had altered her nose and chin, and a makeup artis
t had tweezed her brows, dyed her hair, and taught her to change her skin tone. To Soledad, the image in the mirror was a stranger, but to somebody with a better eye than hers . . . Was the glove poisoned or somehow rigged electronically?

  Fengmo had made her paranoid.

  “No, thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. I hope you enjoy the lecture.”

  “You, too.” “Enjoy” was hardly the right word for something you hated to attend but couldn’t stay away from. She tried to think of something else to say, something to keep his shining masculine beauty beside her a little longer, but he’d already turned away.

  All at once, two lines over, she saw Carl Lewis. He stared straight at her. When she glared back, he raised his hand to his mouth, made it into a megaphone, and pointed at Soledad.

  She turned her back on him and approached the first checkpoint to the theater.

  32: INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

  PREPARED FOR: PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

  BY: DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

  DATE: DECEMBER 3, 2020

  SUBJECT: ACTIVITIES OF “ATONER WITNESSES”

  CONTENTS:

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................... Page 1

  FULL REPORT ON ALL WITNESSES .......................... Page 4

  SOURCES ..................................................................... Page 103

  METHODOLOGY ........................................................ Page 107

  APPENDICES ............................................................... Page 121

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  Of the twenty-one people who were taken into space aboard Atoner starcraft, seven remained aboard ship when planetfall was effected, seven “witnessed” on planets on which the populace allegedly possessed the so-called “seeing-the-dead” gene (STDG), and seven “witnessed” on planets that did not. Of the twenty-one, twenty survived. Fifteen are American citizens. All fifteen have been provided with government contacts who have arranged whatever degree of anonymity or privacy was desired. In return, daily check-ins ensure a steady flow of information.