Steal Across the Sky

by Nancy Kress

  “Bingo,” someone murmured, while the bald man smiled timidly and tried again. “Yes, you see, Ms. O’Kane, most of us find it a bit easier to—”

  “To reject a hard truth in favor of an explanation that fits with the science you already believe. Even if you’re wrong.”

  “Until we have any real evidence that—”

  “And what I saw doesn’t count as evidence?” Cam was shouting now, and Jane put a hand on her arm. Cam shook it off. “My eyewitness account doesn’t mean anything? And not Frank’s and not Jack’s and not Andy’s and not Christina’s and—”

  “None of you is a trained observer, are you?” Dr. Frantz said. Cam knew her type through and through—not the kind to back down from a fight, and always sure she was right. Always! Dismissing somebody like Cam even when Cam was the one who was right. . . . God, was she right what were the Atoners doing why hadn’t they spoken to her since—

  Frank, expressionless, said, “Dr. Frantz, Lucca Maduro is just one untrained observer, too.”

  “True,” Dr. Frantz said, “and his theory is certainly unproven as yet, as well. But at least it has the merit of—”

  “You mean at least it comes from somebody with college degrees and not a stupid trashy PR flack like me!” Cam shouted. “Why don’t you just say that? God, don’t any of you people ever say what you mean?”

  “Cam, dear, you’re overwrought,” said Jane Kingwell, whom suddenly Cam despised as much as the rest of them.

  Dr. Frantz said, “I really don’t descend to name-calling, Ms. O’Kane. And, of course, you’ve already done it for me.”

  Cam launched herself across the table. It was done before her brain registered what her muscles were doing. She leaped with fist raised and caught Alyssa Frantz on the side of her arrogant, patronizing head. The scientist went down like a stone, like the stones Frank had hidden the genes under, the precious DNA this woman wasn’t going to let her have, she stood with gobbets of flesh hanging from her bones. . . .

  Then Frank had Cam pinned against the wall while the others scrambled and exclaimed like ants in a disturbed hive and everything—all the noises and actions and explanations—seemed to be happening a long distance away, or to somebody else. The only thing real wasn’t actually real at all: Aveo, standing in his brown skirt, shaking his cadaverous skull and saying, “You must play kulith better than that, ostiu. You simply must.”

  Cam started to cry.

  63: POSTED ON WHYWAIT.COM

  Posted: April 27, 2021

  By: questiongirl614

  Subject: Web Testament

  My real name is Chiara Joy Donaldson. I’m 16. I can post this infermation here now becuse by the time you read it, I will be dead. I’m writing this becuse the world needs to understand something and I feel that Ive been chosen to explain it. Thats a big honur and I want to live up to it.

  What you shoud know: THIS LIFE IS ONLY THE BEGINING!!!

  It’s like a tree. First its just a little stick with maybe two leaves and people step on you or animals eat you or you get run over by the mow-bot. Then when the tree gets bigger, everything gets better until finally your a huge beautiful oak or maple and your all you can be. Well in this life we are just sticks and that’s why its so hard with people hurt and wars and starving to deth. But in the next life it won’t be like that so why wait? Like the sussiety says. You can skip the bad stuff in this life so why woodnt you??????

  I’m not really dead. I’m on the second road. You can come to. See ya there!

  Chiara

  64: SOLEDAD

  SOLEDAD BRACED HER FEET, held the Beretta steady, and fired. The aluminum can leaped into the air. Lucca said, “Very nice, cara. You are a natural at what you should not be doing at all.”

  “You do it.” She lowered the pistol. “How did you learn to shoot, anyway? Doesn’t Italy have strict gun-control laws? You couldn’t have grown up doing this.”

  He shrugged. “Laws never apply equally to all families.”

  Of course not; that was a thing she already knew. Her family had not been one of those to which laws did not apply. Soledad braced herself again, fired, and hit the second can propped on the outcropping of rock. The report echoed off the mountains and a flock of crows took noisy wing. Silence floated back through the soft April air. A breeze brushed her cheek, smelling of spring.

  They stood in the small clearing behind Anna Parker’s cabin, where patches of very small pink and purple wildflowers bloomed in the sunny spots. Gray trees wore unfurled leaves of tender yellow-green like curlers on old ladies’ heads. It was one of the most peaceful scenes that Soledad had ever witnessed. She didn’t care.

  She and Lucca had been here a week, waiting for his contacts to call him. And not once had Soledad taken off James’s sweater. There was bottled water to drink but very little to wash in beyond the necessities, and Soledad could smell her own reek. She didn’t care about that, either. She shot the third can off the rock and Lucca said quietly, “You should see your face as you do that.”

  “Why?” she said without interest.

  “You look exactly as you have been behaving.”

  She didn’t ask further; she knew what Lucca meant. She looked cold, contained, unfeeling. Did Lucca sense the hell of emotion underneath or what it cost her to contain it? Probably, but it didn’t matter. All this week he had been perfect: respectful, distant, impersonal. At night he slept in the bunk above her as if they were brother and sister, and if he heard her sleepless thrashing in the bed, if he noticed that she wore James’s sweater day and night, if he was concerned that she ate almost nothing, he didn’t say so. He was uniformly calm and attentive. He was playing a role, and so was she. This was the first time he’d remarked on her behavior.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Oh, yes, of course you are. Cara, who are you shooting at?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Because I am not going to let you have the gun when we find James. I want you to know this now.”

  She swung around to face him, so fast the barrel of the Beretta pointed right at his chest. Lucca paled, reached out, and turned it away. He said, “And that is why.”

  “What is why? You know I wouldn’t shoot you!”

  “No, not intentionally. But in your present state of training and your present state of mind—”

  “You don’t know anything about my state of mind.”

  “Ah, Soledad, you are not that stupid.”

  It stopped her, if only because he seldom used her name, merely the meaningless cara.

  He went on, “You must remember, I lost my Gianna, as you have lost James.”

  Fury rose in her. She pushed it down, because if one emotion broke through, they all might. Her voice stayed low as she said, “It’s not the same. Don’t pretend it is. Gianna didn’t choose to leave you, didn’t . . . Lucca, if you’re not going to let me carry the gun, then why are you teaching me to use it?”

  “You wanted to learn. And here we are with little to do . . . Cara, I ask you again, who are you shooting at? Not those helpless tins.”

  She said evenly, “I’m shooting at Atoners.”

  An unseen bird began to sing, an operatic outpouring of loud song, joyous and insistent. Lucca said, “The bird is in that bush to your right . . . no, closer to the cabin . . . yes, there. Kill it.”

  Soledad stared at him.

  “You heard me. Fire at the bird.”

  “No.”

  “Then what makes you think you could shoot an Atoner? Assuming, of course, we ever meet up with one, which I doubt will happen.” He watched her intently.

  “That bird never fucked over the human race. Never promised something and failed to deliver. Never used people, never worked underhandedly to—”

  “To do what, cara? We still don’t know what the Atoners are doing with James. It may be an action for good.”

  “You don’t believe that, Lucca. Don’t try to goad me. You’re the one who’s distrusted them since we got b
ack from Kular . . . and you were right. Is that what you want me to say—to admit that you were right? Okay, you were. We don’t understand those alien minds, we don’t know if the Atoner message is true or not, we can’t trust them.” She heard her own voice: dead calm on the surface, and only on the surface. “Why did they give James a personal shield? Why did they use him to spy on you and me? God knows I’d have talked to them directly. We all would have, except maybe you, and so would the governments of every country on Earth.”

  She opened the pistol and slid out the bullet clip. He opened his mouth to say something, but Soledad wasn’t finished.

  “And when I said that I was ‘shooting at Atoners,’ it was metaphorical. There’s a difference between desire and action, you know.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Stop it, Lucca. I only wanted the gun to make sure nobody stops me from getting to James. The gun is just a threat.”

  “Which you will wave about like some third-rate robber in the mall branch of a bank, thinking that it will make the manager open the vault? You must know that when we find James—if we find James—your government will already be there.”

  The bird stopped singing. A chipmunk ran across the clearing, something in its mouth. Soledad saw Diane Lovett saying, Lucca’s good, but we’re the United States government, for God’s sake! “So?”

  “So they may or may not stop you from approaching James. Yes, if they wish him to stay undisturbed. No, if they don’t want to blow their own cover, or if they wish to hear what you two say to each other. But they certainly will not let you shoot him. And I will not let you carry the gun. You were right—Italians do not approve of personal firearms.”

  “Are you going to carry it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “Innocent.”

  “Lucca, don’t think you can try to—” The handheld shrilled.

  It lay at their feet on the new grass, a splotch of dark metal against the raw green. Soledad’s head jerked to look down at the screen. She didn’t recognize the number. Carl Lewis, calling from a pay phone somewhere?

  No. Lucca answered and conducted a long conversation in Italian. When it finished, he said, “My people found James.”

  Her throat closed. She managed, “But Carl—”

  “I never believed that your cut-rate journalist could find him.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  Lucca gazed at her. His eyes, a paler blue than James’s, seemed to reflect all light back at her. “There are many things unsaid here, Soledad.”

  What could she answer to that? But it didn’t matter; only one thing mattered. “Where is James?”

  “In Brooklyn.”

  At first it staggered her, and then it made sense. James had disappeared after clubbing a federal agent with a fist hardened by an Atoner shield, and the Agency would have instantly watched planes, trains, and buses out of New York. And Brooklyn had changed radically in the last decade. The blacks had moved, or been moved, out of the disastrous projects. Gentrification had taken hold and then, abruptly, had failed. In the ever-changing lottery of New York boroughs, Brooklyn had reverted to what it had been a hundred years ago: the first stop for hordes of immigrants, this time most of them illegal. Brooklyn was a warren of shifting streets, alleys, lanes made of temporary structures among the crumbling permanent buildings. Some areas were nothing more than rubble; some flourished in a dozen languages; some reflected a desperate attempt to re-create the old country in the inhospitable new. There were no reliable maps of this new Brooklyn. Landlords had given up on at least half the buildings. Police did not like to go there, and so local vigilante groups flourished. Anyone could disappear into Brooklyn.

  Including an Atoner?

  Soledad said, “Call your chopper and let’s go.”

  AS THE HELICOPTER LIFTED, Aldo shouted something over his shoulder to Lucca. Lucca turned to Soledad. “Cam and Frank Olenik are on the moon.”

  She nodded. A sudden memory took her: Cam at the start of the voyage to Kular, looking impossibly beautiful and very young, although in fact she was only two years younger than Soledad. Cam had glowed with anticipation: This is going to be so wonderful! We’re going to the stars! Soledad had watched Lucca raise his head to stare at her, his personal gloom reluctantly dispelled by her excited joy.

  What did Cam feel now about the Atoners? Why had she returned to the moon?

  The chopper approached New York. Soledad could just make out the blue of water on the horizon, blending with the blue sky. Lucca had said that of course his chopper would be tracked the second it lifted off in Toronto and that the Agency would guess where he and Soledad were headed. They may or may not stop you from approaching James.

  Now she could see Manhattan below her: the levees holding out the ocean at the south part of the island, the skyscrapers in midtown, the half-constructed dome over Central Park. Other choppers, mostly one-person copterettes, flew low below them, an orchestrated ballet that nonetheless scared her far more than the flight in an alien ship through interstellar space, and what kind of sense did that make? But the Atoner ship to the stars seemed a long time ago.

  On her lap lay James’s sweater, neatly folded now, stained and smelling of too many wearings.

  Aldo shouted something to Lucca, who shouted at Soledad, “We’re cleared to land at the helioport in Park Slope. That’s a good sign. And something else—Cam struck a woman in Selene City. Some sort of argument, and apparently Cam just went crazy.”

  “But I will not,” Soledad said, reassuring him, reminding herself.

  The chopper began its descent.

  65: FROM THE PURPLE BREADBOX

  The E-zine of Satire

  ACROSS

  DOWN

  3. Network that don’t work no more

  1. Winegrower fermented very sour

  5. Pulitzer novel that wasn’t novel

  2. Odd preference of certain aliens

  8. Like Atoner information

  4. City name launching 1,000 bad jokes

  9. Good nickname for Madam Prez

  6. Cut-rate lunar Sarah Bernhardt

  11. Greatest heist in history—or not

  7. Reddest thing on Valentine’s Day 1929

  12. Org. named for worst senator ever

  10. Worst actor on Dreamworks Holo

  (answers on next page)

  Answers

  If you didn’t know these answers, don’t come out from your melting cave at Point Barrow and rejoin the world—you’re too ignorant to survive out here.

  ACROSS

  DOWN

  3. NBC

  1. Lucca

  5. American Bulie—rehashed Jay Porter, anyone?

  2. Tyro (What—you aliens couldn’t find any seasoned observers?)

  8. Parsimonious

  4. Selene

  9. Palomino—spirited but not-too-bright blonde

  6. Cam O’Kane: Best Supporting Actress in an Interstellar Drama

  11. Genes, ours

  7. Massacre

  12. Green-o (self-explanatory)

  10. Mallie—maybe she could play Cam O’Kane in the inevitable movie?

  66: FRANK

  THE ROVER LEFT SELENE CITY at 9:00 A.M. EST the day after Cam attacked Dr. Frantz. Frank watched Cam, but this morning she seemed calm enough. He was surprised to find that he was the one feeling twitchy. Well, maybe not so surprised. It wasn’t every day you got to set human history back on the right course.

  The instant he thought this, he rejected it. He wasn’t affecting history here; God was merely using him to carry out His work. Once Frank had that firmly in mind, he felt better and went back to surreptitiously checking Cam for any signs of blowing the whole scene. Although in one way, he didn’t blame her for wildcatting Dr. Frantz. The woman was a clueless snob. Weren’t scientists supposed to need evidence to come to conclusions? Dr. Frantz had called seeing the dead “a pack of wish-fulfillment lies,” but she had no ey
ewitness evidence. She hadn’t been on Susban. Frank had.

  And there was another reason he didn’t blame Cam as much as he once would have. Seeing her launch herself at that awful woman, watching her sob afterward, Frank had come to a realization: She was a child. That’s how Darla might have behaved, if their parents hadn’t raised her with better manners. Cam O’Kane, rich and “successful” and famous, was basically just a scared and scarred child. It didn’t make him like her any better, but it did give him some perspective. Suffer the little children to come unto me, Christ had said, and so Frank felt bound to accept Cam in all her childish unpredictability, like it or not.

  “How you feeling?” he said to her as they took their seats inside the rover.

  “Great,” she said shortly, “just great.”

  Terry Siekert, the Farrington Tours group leader who was also their driver, grimaced and started the engine.

  The rover looked like a round-cornered rectangular box on tractor treads with a smaller box, the air lock, protruding out one side. Windows of clear, tough triple plastic allowed direct views out the front and side, augmented with a small display screen of images from the cameras mounted on the roof. The back half of the cramped space was all storage, life-support systems, and a chemical toilet in a closet small as a coffin. Terry sat in a seat up front, and two padded benches lined the sides, a short one beside the air-lock door and a longer one opposite. A table could be lowered between them from the ceiling. Frank sat on the short bench, opposite Cam and Jane.

  “Here we go,” said Jane, with cheerful pointlessness. Cam and Frank exchanged glances.

  High contrasts of light and shadow meant they drove in and out of sunlight. Earth hung in the black sky and the stars shone high and cold. Frank twisted to see out the window behind him. Rocks, dust, the arid landscape of lifelessness. An appropriate setting for the Atoners; Christ’s holy covenant was not here.