Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  “You think I don’t know that?” She flounced away from him and entered the Orientation building, turning on her automatic, meaningless smile as the Farrington people’s cameras flashed and hovered.

  Maybe she would fail the mandatory FAA physical.

  SHE DIDN’T, AND NEITHER DID Charlie Spiro, although another would-be tourist was grounded for some kind of heart irregularity. He was an Asian businessman who looked not only healthy as an ox but also very accustomed to having his own way. Frank saw him go into a side room with a Farrington executive: probably going to throw his weight around and try to buy his way upstairs. Frank was pleased and—yes, admit it— a little surprised when the Asian went home anyway. No bribery. Farrington played by the rules.

  There were eighteen of them left to “train,” although each tour only carried six at a time to the moon. Frank and Cam were scheduled for the first group, right after training. Maybe Cam had paid extra for a rush job. Their group included three men and another woman, all business types in their fifties. It didn’t include Charlie Spiro, for which Frank was grateful. “A lifelong dream,” each of the business types said at one time or another. Nice enough people, but Frank mostly left them to their dream and their business talk and their wrinkles. To his surprise, so did Cam. She had bursts of sudden, frenzied conversation like machine-gun fire, but most of the day she was quiet and subdued.

  Not so the nights.

  “Frank? Open the door, please.”

  He swam up from sleep, pulled on his jeans, opened the door. A message from an Atoner, or interference from the government, had they somehow learned about the hair packet . . . “What’s wrong?”

  “Nightmare.” She looked like shit, with smudges under her eyes so dark that it looked like somebody hit her. “Can I sleep with you?”

  “No!”

  “Not ‘sleep with’ . . . just sleep with. Please, Frank, you have no idea how bad it is. Aveo . . .”

  His patience finally disintegrated. “You bought my trip upstairs so we can accomplish something important. My dick wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “Fuck you!” She whirled and was gone.

  Frank locked the door and went back to bed, but he couldn’t get back to sleep.

  THE “TOURISTS” TESTED out weightlessness in the fuselage of a wildly rolling and dropping aircraft. They caromed off handholds, did barrel rolls in the air, flew like Superman, made pyramids, hung upside down. One man, a doctor, threw up. Another tourist changed his mind and canceled his trip (no refund).

  They experienced the one-sixth gravity of the moon, walking and jumping, and nobody got sick. They attended lectures on moon geography, reusable launch vehicles, lunar exploration, Selene City, Luna Station, and what was known about the Atoner base, which was basically nothing, since the entire thing was surrounded by an opaque and impenetrable force field. During this part of the orientation, everybody shot covert glances at Cam and at Frank, who ignored them. In fact, the only part of the orientation that really interested him was the brief demonstration of the EVA suits.

  “You will not be wearing these,” emphasized the lecturer, a retired Air Force captain with, apparently, nothing to do in his retirement but turn PR flack. “They are for emergencies only, and Luna Station has never had an emergency. But your safety is paramount to Farrington, and so a suit is furnished for each of our guests— Yes, Frank?”

  “Are there suits in the rover, too? For the trip to the International Lunar Base?”

  “Absolutely.”

  A woman said, “That same rover trip also includes a peek at the Atoner base, doesn’t it? There’s only one rover trip per tour?”

  “That’s right,” the captain said. “You’ll make the trip in subgroups of three, four including the driver, and each rover carries four EVA suits. Although I want to emphasize, ladies and gentlemen, that this is merely an emergency precaution. No one on Farrington Tours goes EVA. Your safety is too important to us, and you can see everything on the moon just as well from either Luna Station or a rover.”

  Not quite everything. Frank watched the others struggle with the EVA suits. He had worn one before, of course, since NASA had insisted on supplying them to all twenty-one Witnesses for the walks to and from the Atoner shuttle to the Atoner Dome. The ‘Tonies had agreed without argument. Nothing about the space-suit design had changed in the last year.

  Six days more.

  Please, God, don’t let me fuck up.

  54: BOOK REVIEW

  THE CHEERFUL DEAD AND THE HUMAN BRAIN, by Joseph Villanova, M.D. (Random House, $34.95)

  Reviewed by Carol Vanderhorn

  Although this book, like so many others on the same topic, was rushed into both composition and print in just six months, it stands far above most of them. Villanova, a researcher at the respected Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, avoids the cheap and the gimmicky in his discussion of the so-called “seeing-the-dead” genes trumpeted by Cam O’Kane and her quieter fellow travelers. Villanova wisely sticks to the ways that current scientific understanding of the human brain either supports or invalidates the assertions of “The Six.”

  His overview of the literature, both physiochemical and evolutionary, is excellent. While never slighting technical accuracy, it is nonetheless accessible to the intelligent layperson. However, that same layperson is likely to end up frustrated by the “Conclusions” section of the book. The author is so careful to be evenhanded that the reader ends up little wiser as to whether seeing the dead is or is not genetically possible. After all the meticulous explanations of neural firing and neurochemical-release probabilities, I had the distasteful impression that Villanova did not want to reduce sales by committing himself either way.

  Less caution and more passion would have made this a better book. Death, it seems, is not a subject that is enhanced by being approached with cash-register timidity.

  Carol Vanderhorn is a brain surgeon at Washington Hospital Center, Washington, D.C.

  55: SOLEDAD

  BEFORE SOLEDAD AND JAMES LEFT New York, Soledad insisted on seeing Fengmo.

  “It’s been so long, surely by now there won’t be reporters still staking out the hospital waiting for me,” she said to a weary Diane Lovett, who looked at Soledad as if she were nuts.

  “They won’t be waiting. They’ll be paying orderlies or nurses or anybody else who is there all the time to alert them if you show up,” Diane said. Her tone said, Grow up, Soledad. Soledad flushed.

  “Well, okay, but if they do call reporters, then it will take a while before any show up. I just want five minutes with Fengmo. I’m going to do this.”

  “I can’t stop you.” Diane’s lack of expression spoke reams.

  The Agency was moving Soledad and James to Raleigh, North Carolina, under new identities. Meanwhile, they’d been stashed in a hotel in Manhattan, which they hadn’t left in three days. Soledad thought how unbearable those days would have been without James, and hugged him tighter. He was sacrificing his old life—his very identity—for her. He held her gently and kissed her eyelids. Diane looked away.

  “I’ll finish the packing while you’re at the hospital,” James said.

  “Good.” Not that there was much to pack. They had taken from the little rented house in the Catskills only clothes, personal electronics, and a few books. That was it. For three days these objects, this room, and an incurious room service had constituted the entire world for Soledad, and she was a bit shocked to realize how little she’d minded. Diane hadn’t even visited until now, maybe to minimize the chances of leading anyone to them. Soledad hadn’t asked.

  A few times Soledad and James had dutifully tuned to the news, but Soledad had not paid full attention. Her mind, her senses, were filled with James, and even as that scared her, it also exhilarated her. She hadn’t known she could feel like this, that all the ridiculous songs and poems could, in fact, express something as real and concrete as the battered suitcases she was busily not packing. The Atoners, Lucca, the CC
AD, Cam, the surveillance in the woods—all of it had taken on the faded, dreamy shapes of background watercolors when the picture held a sharply etched, bold graphic in the foreground. At some level she knew this was wrong—out of perspective, unbalanced, maybe even amoral— but her body didn’t care. She was a receiver tuned to one frequency: James. James. James.

  Well, no, she amended: two frequencies. She still wanted to see Fengmo.

  Soledad and Diane left the hotel by different entrances; a second agent silently joined Soledad in the elevator. All three reached St. Vincent’s without incident, and Soledad drew the curtain around Fengmo’s ICU bed to be alone with him.

  He lay on his side, curled head to knees, tubes running into his nose and arm and under the thin white blanket that covered his lower body. His skin was doughy, his black hair thinned and dull. He’d lost weight. Soledad took his hand, her fingers carefully circling the weak ones that had once reached so eagerly for a keyboard, a Cuisinart, almost any book.

  Talk to him, the nurse had suggested. We don’t know what coma patients can or cannot hear. But had the suggestion come from compassion or from a desire to overhear and pass on anything Soledad might let slip?

  “Fengmo, I’m here,” she said softly. “It’s me. I’m waiting for you to come back, Fengmo.”

  Ladybliss, she heard in her mind, but wasn’t too deluded to know that it was only in her mind, not from him. She might never hear from him again, unless Cam was right about the Atoner message. So many kinds of death—violence, disease, accident, suicide, old age—but only one life. Maybe that life continued, maybe not. Either way, Fengmo had neither life nor death. He hung between them, and Soledad couldn’t reach him in that suspended, unimaginable place.

  She held his spindly hand in silence for over an hour, then said the only thing she could say: “I love you, Fengmo. Come back to me.” She slipped around the curtain to where the others waited.

  Something was wrong.

  The second agent said, “Please wait here, miss.”

  “Where’s Diane?”

  “Please wait here.”

  Fear rose in her. Was this guy somehow a fake, was he CCAD, or . . . was even Diane not what she seemed? Get a grip, Soledad. . . . She forced her face to stay impassive, her body still.

  Diane reappeared. Her lips were pressed so tightly together they nearly disappeared. She said to Soledad, “Follow me. Please.”

  Should she? But if she couldn’t trust Diane— Soledad followed, and the male agent followed her. At the far end of the corridor outside the ICU, Diane said softly, “Lucca Maduro is on my handheld. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Lucca? Through you?”

  “Yes. He couldn’t reach you any other way, apparently.”

  Soledad’s handheld was back at the hotel; it wasn’t allowed in the ICU. “Why does he want to talk to me? What happened?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.” The lips disappeared completely, rolled inward like pale tortoise heads. “My handheld is encrypted, of course, but you still shouldn’t take this call inside the hospital. None of this has been swept, and I don’t know what Maduro’s subject matter is.”

  The Atoners— Diane meant that Lucca might have been contacted by an Atoner. Would he be their first choice? Maybe; wasn’t there a story about Christ appearing first to Thomas the Doubter? . . . “Where, Diane? Where can I talk to him?”

  “Follow me.”

  Diane led her through corridors and up stairwells, using some sort of Agency super-chip to unlock doors, until she pushed open a metal fire door at the top of a slant-roofed stairwell. She and Soledad—the third agent had disappeared—emerged onto the hospital roof.

  Spring dusk, with the lights just coming on around Manhattan. A sky dotted with wispy clouds had deepened to aquamarine, the same color as the harbor in the distance. The moon, just off full, looked misty, its craters and mare blurred. Diane keyed a code into her handheld and Lucca’s face appeared.

  “What’s wrong?” Soledad demanded. “Are you all right?”

  “I am, yes, cara.”

  There was a note in his voice that she didn’t like. Gentleness? Pity? “What, then? Cam?”

  “Our crazy woman is also all right. She’s taking a Farrington tour back to the moon.”

  “I heard.”

  “You left your place in the Catskills.”

  “The Agency took me away,” Soledad said. “They found surveillance equipment all over the woods and—”

  “Yes, I know. Now I know. They’re going to relocate you and James.”

  “Yes. I’d have contacted you as soon as they gave me the go-ahead, Lucca. But we’ve been in complete hiding and— How did you know they’re going to relocate us?”

  “My family has influence with the Canadian government.”

  Soledad stared at him. Finally she said softly, “That’s a lot of influence.”

  “Less than you might think. Most things are for sale.” His hand entered the visual and flipped in an odd, Italian gesture that all at once brought back vividly the weeks on the Atoner ship, the even longer weeks alone in orbit while Lucca and Cam witnessed on their planets and Soledad was linked to anything alive only through the digital sounds and sights of an alien commlink she didn’t understand. That lack of understanding, more than the boredom, had kept her fighting depression, even as she tried to stay steady and sensible for the adventurers depending on her. Those endless weeks had a feel, even a taste, that rushed over her now: sterile dust, choking her nose and eyes and throat.

  Lucca said, “Diane? Are you there, listening?”

  “Yes,” the agent said.

  “Good, I want you to hear this. Soledad, it’s James that I’m calling about. When you first told me about him—please don’t be angry—I had him investigated. I know your government did, too, but I wanted my own answers, for your sake. Everything checked out. He was who he said he was. But no background check in the world can account for what’s in a man’s head, what he wants, or when he might change what he wants.”

  “Go on,” Soledad said. A stray cloud drifted over the bottom half of the moon, ghostly seaweed snagged on pale rock.

  “I’m not trusting by nature, cara. Maybe too much untrusting. After your government discovered the surveillance equipment, I put a man on James. A shadow. He watched—”

  “There was nothing to watch! We’ve been in the same hotel room for three days, and James is still there! Packing!”

  “No, cara, he’s not. Not now.”

  Diane took another handheld from her pocket.

  “Once I knew where the Agency had stashed you and James, the shadow stationed himself at the hotel. He’s very good. I don’t think even Diane knew he was there. Today James left the hotel soon after you did. My man went with him. But James must have been either trained himself or somehow warned, because he doubled and weaved and led Marco into an alley. Marco was armed, of course, but—”

  “James! Is James all right!”

  “Yes, he is, calm yourself, cara. But there was an . . . altercation, and something strange happened. Marco was knocked out. He reported to me that he couldn’t touch James and that James hit him with a bare fist, but it felt hard as steel. It gave Marco a concussion. Also, just before that, Marco hit James with a blow that should have knocked him over, but James didn’t even stagger.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you didn’t go down to Kular,” Lucca said.

  “I still don’t—”

  “James was wearing an Atoner personal shield.”

  Diane made a small noise.

  “You never wore a shield because you didn’t go down to the planet. I experimented with mine, a great deal—I like to know what equipment will and will not do. I said I don’t trust many people, Soledad, but I trust you. Why does James have an Atoner shield?”

  “He doesn’t! He can’t!”

  “Then you didn’t know about it. Ah, cara, I’m sorry.”

  “There’
s nothing to be sorry about!” she cried. “What are you saying— that James is some sort of . . . of spy? CCAD or—?”

  “Of course not. They don’t have Atoner shields. I’m saying James is—”

  “You don’t even know that it was an Atoner shield!”

  “Yes. I do,” Lucca said quietly. “I have people who keep track of security technology, even top-secret security technology. This was nothing human made. It was an Atoner shield. I think James—who escaped Marco—is some new kind of Witness for the Atoners. A Witness here on Earth. He has a personal shield because the Atoners don’t want to risk him. We earlier Witnesses don’t still have our shields because, now, we are expendable.”

  “No, you’re wrong!”

  “I don’t think so. And that just leaves two questions: What is James a Witness of? And why?”

  IN THE TAXI SOLEDAD LEANED FORWARD, clutching the back of the cab’s front seat as if that might make it go faster. Diane shot concerned looks at her while talking in a low voice on her Agency handheld. At the hotel, Soledad tore up the back stairs, fingers trembling as she keyed in the lock code of their room.

  James was gone. His clothes remained, his handheld, his notebook, his books. She rushed into the bathroom; his toothbrush lay on the sink beside his razor, fine gold hairs caught in the blade. Soledad whirled on Diane. “Wasn’t there an agent with James?”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t a prisoner, and it’s you that we’re assigned to.” Diane moved closer, took Soledad’s hand. She shook Diane off.

  He was really gone. Without a word, a note, a meaning. She felt his absence in the very air, which all at once wasn’t sufficient to inflate her lungs properly. It was all true, all Lucca’s terrible statements. James had worn an Atoner shield, he had decked Lucca’s man, all these days and nights with Soledad he had been other than he seemed, he was somehow connected to the Atoners . . . how?