Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  Primary finding: Thus far, no American “Witness” has reported, or appears to have had, further contact with any Atoner or with the Atoner base remaining on the moon.

  Of especial interest are “The Six,” dubbed thus by the media because they are the ones who landed on planets with STDG. Activities of The Six are detailed below; activities of the other fourteen are included in the full report. The Six are comprised of five Americans and one Englishman. The original seven sent to planets with STDG also included Lucca Maduro (dual citizenship, Italy and England) and Japanese national Tomiko Takahashi, allegedly deceased. Maduro has been excluded from “The Six” by the media because of his consistent refusal to expand on his initial brief statement or to give interviews; he is nonetheless included here. Note: Camilla O’Kane was not originally assigned by Atoners to land on an STDG planet but did so anyway.

  The Witnesses have reacted variously to their journey, to their exposure to the aliens, and to subsequent media attention. This gives them varying weight as potential avenues to reopening contact with the Atoners. Briefly (for details and sources see full report):

  DuBois, Andrew Emile: American, 25, residing San Jose, CA, employed by FutureSystemsCorp, writes code for computer games. Gives interviews, and is a media favorite for his casual, eclectic POV that includes STDG, Zen, astral projection, and reincarnation. His views, though colorful, are seldom taken seriously by the media, by focus groups, or by colleagues. Check-in with Security contact: sporadic. Potential utility: low.

  Dziwalski, Sara Louise: American, 26, residing Austin, TX, has returned to work as an LPN at Seton Medical Center. Ignores media attention at work and refuses to discuss her experiences with patients or staff. Does off-hours interviews with media, but these have dropped off, as she speaks in a straightforward manner and does not vary or add to her statements. Believes complete Atoner explanation for what she allegedly witnessed. Check-in with Security contact: daily and at length. Potential utility: high, since she deviates not at all from “information” that Atoners wish to disseminate.

  Harden, Christina Jessica: American, 20, residing with parents in Boston, MA, student at Brown (junior in international relations), youngest Witness. Very bright but gives no interviews at the request of her parents (whom she defied to become a Witness in the first place) and of the university, both of whom appear to be trying to shield her. Privately says she is “still thinking over” what she “witnessed.” Currently taking courses in comparative religion, paleontology, history, and neurology. Check-in with Security contact: daily but very brief. Potential utility: uncertain. If the Atoners value brains and independent thinking, she could be valuable; however, she is very young.

  Jones, John Elijah: UK national, 27, residing Cambridge, England, doctoral candidate in mathematics. Initially gave interviews but now states he has said all that he wishes to say about his experiences. Believes in STDG but seems, incredibly, not very interested in it. Is intensely interested in adding to astronomical and mathematical knowledge through careful observations made during his journey, and for this reason enjoys celebrity among scientists in those areas. Check-in with Security contact: fairly consistent (see MI6 report under “Sources”). British willing to cooperate with us on information sharing and potential contact. Potential utility: medium.

  Maduro, Lucca Giancarlo: Dual citizenship, Italy and England, 27, residing Toronto, Canada, recluse. Maduro has consistently refused to expand on his initial brief statement, to give interviews, or to appear in public. He is supported by family money on a heavily fortified small estate (see report by Canadian intelligence, under “Sources”). Alone among those who allegedly witnessed STDG in operation, he has rejected the Atoner explanation in favor of a belief that subjects were not talking to or seeing the dead but rather engaging in telepathic acts activated by stress, which pulled the information from the minds of the living who were present. (For a discussion of this hypothesis, including its followers, see Appendix C.) Check-in with Security contact: NA. Potential utility: very low.

  O’Kane, Camilla Mary: American, 23, no fixed address, parents reside Jay, NE, working the lecture circuit. By far the most visible of “The Six.” Believes in STDG completely and exhorts audiences to believe. Gives interviews constantly, stays consistent with her story but presents it in a theatrical, dramatic manner. Check-in with Security contact: daily and at length. Potential utility: high, since she is aggressively spreading the “message” that the Atoners presumably wish to disseminate.

  Olenik, Francis Michael: American, 24, residing Barton, OH. Ex–police officer, dismissed from Barton PD for alleged evidence tampering, just before he applied to Atoners. Application appears to be out of character. Refuses all interviews. In initial debriefing said he believes in STDG and sees no conflict between that and his traditional Catholicism. Check-in with Security contact: daily but very brief and “with much reserve” (description by contacting agent). Potential utility: low.

  33: FRANK

  FRANK EMERGED FROM the confessional no better off than when he went in.

  When he was a kid, it had been so easy. Confession every Saturday morning, say a penance of three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, and emerge to stand on the church steps shining clean and completely safe. A sixteen-wheeler could hit you and you’d go straight to Heaven. It had been the best feeling in the world.

  Frank helped an old lady in a flowered hat down the steps, holding her arm. “Is somebody picking you up, ma’am?” She didn’t look capable of even seeing the street, much less navigating it.

  “Oh, yes! My grandson. Such a good boy, but never goes to church, let alone confession to . . . well. Thank you, dear. Do you see a 2011 blue Toyota Tundra?” The last words had obviously been carefully memorized.

  “Coming along right now . . . Have a good day, ma’am.” He helped her into the car, keeping his head down so as not to be recognized by the driver.

  “God bless you,” she quavered, and the Toyota squealed tires and lurched off.

  Punk.

  Frank pulled the brim of his baseball cap very low, wondered where to go now, and began to walk aimlessly. The inactivity was the worst; he hated it. No job, and no chance of getting one. The only thing he’d ever wanted was a job in law enforcement, and now that was closed to him. No girlfriend, no friends he wanted to see. His old buddies, except for Mike Renfrew, were too careful to not mention the Barton PD suspension. Or the bizarre trip off Earth (“Did you really go? Like, why, man?” Pat Donovan had asked after too many beers). Or the stares Frank got at their old bars and ball fields. But it was the reporters that really alienated his friends, the jackals that followed Frank sniffing for scraps for their goddamn newscasts. . . .

  Stop. He’d just gone to confession, and here he was taking the name of the Lord in vain. That wasn’t the way out.

  But what was? Confession hadn’t helped, not one bit. Father Pfender was too old, too out of it, too used to petty confessions of shoplifting and fornicating and fighting. But what had been the alternative—confess to the parish’s other priest, Frank’s Uncle Jack? No way.

  “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?”

  “I think I may have committed treason.”

  Did the old priest even know what treason was? He’d lived in that parish house for fifty years and he’d never been the deepest carrot in the garden, even if he was anointed by God.

  “If you’ve lied, my son, you must set it right. Go back and tell the truth.”

  “To who?”

  “To whoever you lied to, and to all those har
med by your lie. Lying comes from pride in oneself. Turn your pride over to Christ and you will see the way.”

  “But—”

  “Any more sins you need to confess?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then make a good Act of Contrition.”

  Easy to say, Tell the truth to all those harmed by your lie—but who was that? The whole world, maybe. Nobody, maybe. Frank didn’t know—that was the problem.

  “Look—a Witness! It’s Frank Olenik!”

  Oh Christ. Some old biddy with nothing better to do than stand in front of Parnell’s Grocery, and the next thing Frank knew there was a crowd of punks who should have been in school and Wednesday-morning gawkers and somebody was sure to call the fucking media on a cell.

  He walked in the opposite direction—walking, not running, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction—turned the corner, and slipped into somebody’s backyard. A dog rushed at him, but it was small and it stopped when Frank turned and stared at it, boot upraised. He climbed a fence, and then another, and came out on Anderson Street, beside the Blue Junction.

  Ten o’clock in the morning and the bar was open. Men in it, too, slouching over their drinks, pathetic misplaced losers. Frank joined them, ordered a lager, and took it to the darkest back booth.

  This couldn’t go on.

  He wanted his old life back, and he wasn’t going to get it, and it was the Atoners’ fault. Yeah, he’d gone along with the whole program, but he hadn’t been himself at the time and shouldn’t they have known that? They’d picked him out of millions of applicants; he cringed now to think how proud he’d been of that. Fucking idiot. But the aliens were supposed to be so super-smart, all that advanced star-faring technology, and they should have given some thought to the lives that the Witnesses were going to lead when they went home. There was that barracuda Cam O’Kane writing books and doing movie deals and yapping all around the country about the afterlife being real—like Catholics hadn’t known that since Jesus Christ made his promise: I tell you today you will be with me in Paradise. And there was Lucca Maduro sulking in some kind of rich man’s bunker in Canada and Sara Dziwalski trying to go on being a nurse and pretending nothing else ever happened. . . . Well, Sara was all right. She was pretty, too, in the modest and untrashy way that women should be. But they were letting her be a nurse and nobody was going to let Frank Olenik be a cop or an FBI agent or a U.S. Marshal or anything else he’d wanted to be since he was six years old. In the last six months, even the Border Patrol had turned him down. And he’d be damned if he’d go to the private security companies and end up a useless square badge.

  So what was he going to do?

  “If you’ve lied, my son, you must set it right. Go back and tell the truth.”

  “To who?”

  “To whoever you lied to.”

  He didn’t know any of the names of the government team that had debriefed him for two solid weeks. There’d been so many of them, and at first he was still dazed from the decon on the moon. Their ship— Frank’s and Amira’s and Rod Dostie’s—had landed at the ’Tonie base, guided by whatever computers the aliens had, without any help from Amira. The three of them had pulled on their EVA suits over their personal shields and walked the half mile to the Dome. The EVA suits were human designed; NASA had insisted on that, and the aliens had agreed. Not that it had done NASA any good; in decon the suits had been wiped as clean as the Witnesses.

  As they waddled in the bulky suits toward the Atoner Dome, they’d been permitted to gather rocks to bring home as souvenirs. Amira had asked about that, in her prissy singsong English, and the ’Tonies had said yes, the rocks could be sold on Earth if they liked. So maybe the aliens had looked ahead and seen how hard it would be for the Witnesses to get regular jobs. Frank was holding on to his three good-sized rocks because he figured that the price could only go up with time, but the money wasn’t the point. Not even close. A man should work.

  The screen over the bar came on, abruptly and loud. Frank actually jumped. He looked around to see if anybody’d noticed—God, he was twitchy—but nobody had.

  Once they’d been inside the Atoner Dome, the aliens had knocked them all out for decon. The Voice—that was how Frank thought of it, a Voice but no body—explained that they would be scrubbed inside and out to make sure they carried no germs or anything back to Earth. All implants would be removed. Their souvenir rocks would be decontaminated, too. When he woke up from that, Frank had felt like he’d been beaten and scourged, inside and out, and so did everybody else. Then down to Earth and NASA did decon all over again, although this time he was awake and it wasn’t so weakening, just long and boring, almost as boring as two weeks of debriefing by people he couldn’t name and didn’t trust.

  Not that you could really trust anybody in government. There were honest cops, like his father, and maybe some honest low-level civil service workers, too. Frank could believe that. But the bureaucracies that ran the honest workers were corrupt, two-faced, like the Barton PD brass. You couldn’t trust anybody in politics.

  Frank drank off his beer and considered his personal government contact, Jim Thompson, assigned to him right after the debriefing. Jim seemed all right, not too full of himself or anything, and he spoke Frank’s language. A regular guy. But that could just be to get Frank to trust him, and anyway, Jim was too small potatoes for what Frank had to confess.

  So . . . call the president? This information was important enough! But a president had to be the ultimate two-faced politician. Also, Frank didn’t believe—and he didn’t care what anybody said, he wasn’t a sexist, but Saint Paul had been real clear on what men and women were each supposed to do—that a woman should be president. So shoot him. There it was.

  But he had to tell somebody. Not only was that part of the penance that Father Pfender had given him, but the lie was eating him up. He knew why he’d told it, and it was still a legitimate reason—what the Police Academy called a permissible deception. But in the months back home he’d had time to think, really think, about the whole situation, and to pray about it, too. Prayer had clarified things for him. So now he needed help to make the whole situation right, and who—

  The television blared something about Cam O’Kane at Madison Square Garden—“tonight, live, and for three nights only!” That exploitive nutcase, why would anyone go to see her yammer on about—

  But all at once Frank knew whom he needed to tell about the lie that could change everything.

  34: SUPERMARKET KIOSK DISPLAY

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  35: CAM

  CAM DREAMED YET AGAIN that she saw Aveo. The old man stood bare chested in his rough brown skirt, but the flesh drooped in gobbets from his bones and the bones gleamed like knives, glossy and sharp. Aveo smiled at her
with blackened lips over rotted teeth, a smile like Satan himself. He held something out to her, and rasped, “You must play kulith better than that, ostiu, or else . . .” Cam woke, gasping.

  She groped by her side but the young man, what’s-his-name, must have left after she fell asleep. The bedside clock said 4:30 P.M. The hotel bedclothes smelled of afternoon sex. Cam groaned and turned on the light. She had a performance at Madison Square Garden in less than four hours.

  It was the worst of all the nightmares. And why the fuck should she be having it? Aveo’s body was not rotting in a grave anywhere; Soledad had blasted it into clean oblivion on Kular A. Aveo’s spirit had long since started on the third road, and anyway, the old man had never looked at her with evil, had never been anything but kind in his own weird alien way. So why the terrible dream? And why hadn’t that guy—Cory, that was it, Cory—stayed after Cam had fallen asleep? That had been the whole point: to not wake up alone.

  Cam’s government contact, Angie Bernelli, hated it when Cam picked up men: “bad security risks.” But Cam didn’t do it very often. And what Angie didn’t understand was that there were nights—and mornings and afternoons—that Cam simply could not get through alone. Tonight she would walk out on yet another stage and deliver the Atoners’ message, and no one in the audience would know that she had been in this frantic state four hours earlier. No one in the audience would know that Cam had killed several dozen men on Kular B and that those men did not let her sleep. No one understood.