The Clouded Sky

by Megan Crewe

  This one is longer, a low-ceilinged hall with glass stretching along one side, providing a view into an enclosure so deep I can’t see the back wall, though when I study it, the odd blurring in the distance makes me wonder if it’s a space-expanding visual effect similar to the one in the starry function room. The scene we’re looking at is Earth-like: ruddy soil dotted with shrubs and a few scrawny trees, a cliffside built up near the left wall with a couple of cave openings. A deer-like creature picks its way across the uneven ground. A zoo?

  “Hey!” one of the kids says, thumping the glass with his palm. “Where are they?”

  “Karac!” the teacher chides as she tugs him back. “They can’t hear you through the . . . It wouldn’t be authentic if they knew we were here.”

  “Maybe they’re in the caves,” a little girl says, and the other teacher nods.

  “Good thinking. We can look inside.”

  He flicks at one of the displays glowing along the bottom of the window, and it expands several feet. A video image forms on it: a shadowy space lit by a low fire in a pit on the rocky floor, five figures sitting around it. Five human figures: an old woman, a couple who look to be in their twenties, and two little kids scratching at the floor with bits of stone. All of them are wearing rough clothes made out of animal skins.

  Cute. This must be footage taken on Earth, thousands of years before my time. A way to pretend the kids can see the planet and its history firsthand. It seems like a lot of space to set aside just for that, but obviously Kemyates have strange priorities.

  Another of which becomes evident when the first teacher speaks again. “This is the sort of living that people resort to when they have very little technology and understanding. Sad but inevitable.”

  “But how can people not understand tech?” Karac asks, and the teacher smiles indulgently.

  “When living on a planet, there may not be . . . Much is out of control. The focus is on staying alive, which leaves little . . . for other things. That’s why the Earth Travel scientists study Earth and consider everything that could happen, so we will be in control when it’s time to move to another planet.”

  “I don’t want to live somewhere like that!” another boy exclaims, his eyes wide.

  “It isn’t time yet,” the teacher reassures him. “We’ll only go when we know everything we need to, and then it will be perfectly safe.”

  “And we’ll do a better job making houses and things than those Earthlings do!” the girl who spoke before exclaims, and receives a pat on the shoulder. I cringe inwardly. So the teachings about caution and the dangers of planetary life start early—alongside those about Earthling inferiority. It sounds as if the teachers believe it as much as the kids they’re indoctrinating do.

  The kids murmur as the teachers point out a tool the old woman is using, the structure of the fire pit, and other details I tune out. It doesn’t look as though I’ll find anything that’ll help our mission here. But I follow the class down the hall to the adjoining room, reluctant to give up.

  The environment in the next “exhibit” looks more cultivated than the last. The trees in their cluster to the right have been pruned into neat shapes, with greenish fruit hanging from their branches. Several small buildings constructed out of clay blocks stand beside the grove. There’s some sort of platform made of the same material beyond them, in the depths of the space. I step closer to the glass to peer at it, and my heart stops.

  Someone’s moving on it. Someone human-shaped, in a dusty white robe, walking toward the buildings.

  As he draws nearer, a woman in similar clothing steps out of one of the houses, carrying a woven basket. She waves to him, and they fall into a conversation that speakers project into the hall. It’s not a language I recognize.

  I stare. Maybe they’re just . . . projections, like that image of the Earth outside.

  “They’re almost like us!” one of the kids squeals.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” the male teacher replies. “Look carefully. Our scientists picked out the best subjects they could find, and created a . . . as much like their natural area as possible, so we could watch real Earthling behavior with our own eyes.”

  My stomach turns, and I swivel around, toward the doorway. I can’t watch anymore. I think I might vomit.

  Those are real people, real Earthlings. Kidnapped and whisked away and caged here like . . .

  Like animals in a zoo. My first thought, when I saw the exhibits. Shut away in a miniature version of our goldfish bowl on Earth, to be gawked at and giggled over by children, to be used as a lesson of how degraded we are, why it’s necessary to keep our planet under Kemya’s thumb . . .

  When I stumble through the first hallway, the man from the footage in the caves has come out, standing beneath the cliff. I hurry on, trying not to look at him. Trying not to wonder what he must think, trapped in that replica of his home with strange boundaries he never encountered before.

  I burst through the foreroom with the globe and on into the hall outside. The air in the zoo felt so suffocating, but now I realize that was just me, my lungs clenched, my throat constricted. I’m trembling.

  “Are you all right?” someone asks.

  I jerk myself upright, as straight and steady as I can manage. A young man is eyeing me, halfway between concern and curiosity.

  If I answer him in Kemyate, he might notice my accent.

  I nod briskly with the best smile I can summon. He doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he walks on. It takes all my will not to sag against the wall. Every time I start to sort out my thoughts, my mind cycles back to the robed couple behind the glass. To the Kemyate voices. They’re almost like us! Not as much as you’d think. And my stomach churns even more.

  I stumble to the shuttle stop and press my thumb against the call button, even though I know nothing will happen. Nothing does. My legs wobble as a fresh chill washes over me. I don’t think I can walk all the way back to Jule’s apartment, not like this.

  I hesitate, and then reach for the button on my bracelet.

  18.

  What were you doing in there?” Jule demands the second we’ve stepped into his apartment. “What were you doing out of here?”

  He showed up at the shuttle stop what felt like hours after I signaled him, but I suspect it was actually only ten or fifteen minutes. He must have had to duck out of work to come, but I’m reeling too much from what I just saw to worry about that.

  “I was trying to find out more about who’s leaking our plans. I thought some place that was all about studying Earth, I might overhear people talking about something useful there . . . I didn’t know what it was. How could I have known?”

  I sink onto one of the benches. Jule takes a can from a cupboard and opens it on the table in front of me. The mist that rises from its opening is cool rather than steamy, with a minty fragrance that reminds me of the stuff I drank while I was Traveling on Earth with Win, that soothed the nerves as well as thirst. But I don’t really want to be soothed. There’d be something wrong with me if I weren’t disturbed.

  “How many Earthlings do they keep in those ‘exhibits’?” I ask, hardly wanting the answer.

  “They’re not treated badly,” Jule says. “No one hurts them—they don’t even know people are watching. The curators give them everything they had on Earth.”

  I blink at him. “Except a whole world to move around in. More than a few people to talk to their whole lives. The chance to choose where they live and who they live with. Getting to exist without every movement they make being observed and recorded and turned into an educational lesson for the kids of the people who took them. ‘Not badly,’ Jule?”

  He grimaces. “I meant—they’re all people who would have died anyway. It’s better than no life, isn’t it?”

  “You really think so?” My stomach’s starting to churn again, and this time it’s got nothing to do with my memory of the zoo. “Would you rather live in a cage with people staring at and studyin
g you than die the way you were supposed to?”

  “It’s not—” he says, and stops.

  “Not what? Not the same? Why—because they’re Earthlings and not Kemyates?” Just shadows of lives, dirt off the ground. Nothing truly important.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he says, but from the drop in his voice, I’m pretty sure that’s what he almost said.

  “Then explain it to me,” I say. “Explain how the exhibits, the pets—how any of that is even slightly okay. They’re human beings too, Jule. Just like me. Or do we only count when we’re willing to make out with you?”

  I mean the words to sting, the way it’s stinging me that I believed he saw me as an equal. But when he winces, my satisfaction only lasts a few seconds. Jule grabs the can I haven’t touched and takes a long, slow gulp. Then he looks down at the tabletop, his dark eyes fathomless.

  “No,” he says. “I know how horrible it is. I know they’re all— But there’s a difference between knowing, as information in your head, and knowing, all the way through. I know you, Skylar; I couldn’t possibly be around you and think . . . But that’s just you. I don’t have that, with any other Earthling.”

  He sits down, leaving a careful space between us. “I grew up with this,” he goes on. “From the day I was born, everyone around me has talked and acted as if Earthlings are less than us. As if what we do to them is perfectly normal. I can’t scrub it all out in a moment, or a day, or a year . . . There’s crap in my head so deep I don’t even know where it starts. It’s in everyone—Isis, Britta, Thlo—I doubt even Jeanant had it all dug out.”

  I remember Thlo’s comment: expendable. Jeanant refusing to consider my adjustment to his plan. Jule’s probably right. That’s hardly a comfort.

  “So I’m supposed to accept it?” I say.

  “I just want you to know I’m trying,” he says. “And that I’m not such a prick I don’t know when what I’m saying is crap. I’m sorry. You’re upset, and I had to go and . . .” He makes a bursting gesture with one hand.

  I see, in the regret on his face, the guy who talked me down when I was spiraling into a panic. The guy who told me he didn’t want anything from me unless I wanted it too. The guy who insisted I take that bracelet, that he’d come if I needed him—and who did. I swallow thickly.

  Maybe there aren’t any of us without sides we’re ashamed of. How many messed up ideas do I have about other people, other cultures and countries back on Earth, because of where and how I grew up?

  I don’t want to argue. I just want to wash the images from the last hour out of my head.

  I shift a little closer, and lean against Jule’s shoulder. His arm comes around me, his thumb skimming the bend of my elbow. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  “I know.” I pause. “It’s not just what they’re doing to us, Jule. They—the Earth Travel people, I guess, and whoever else is involved—they’re lying to all of you. Teaching everyone that living on a planet is so risky, so difficult to prepare for . . . They have to know it isn’t really that dangerous.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “A little paranoia to help keep the program going. Like I said before, I think some of them believe they’re doing what’s best for everyone, and that’s how they justify the . . . exaggerations.”

  “And you said for some of them it’s about holding on to their positions, getting to still be the authorities everyone looks up to . . . Why do people do such horrible things for a little bit of extra power?”

  His hand stills. “I don’t know,” he says. “But we—the group of us—have been trying to counteract the messages the Council puts out there, as much as we can. That’s been one of my jobs, finding footage and media that shows Earth in a positive light and arranging it in more prominent spots in the network. Thlo believes it’ll make a difference.”

  The thought of all those “positive” sights and activities and feelings I left behind sends a jab of homesickness through me. The breeze tickling my hair, the fresh-washed taste of the air after a rain shower, the rhythmic thud reverberating through my joints when I lope through the park. “There’s so much good there, you know,” I say. “I’m not going to claim it’s perfect, but . . . I miss it, so much.”

  “Of course you do.” Jule hugs me tighter. Then a hint of his usual levity creeps back into his voice. “And just to be clear, I would still think you’re an exceptional human being even if you’d never made out with me. Or if you never made out with me again. That has no bearing at all on my opinion of you.”

  “Well, I guess that’s good to know,” I mutter.

  “I’m not saying I’d be overjoyed about the situation,” he adds, but he laces his fingers through mine at the same moment, as if to counter the joke.

  “Are you sure people here really will let Earth go once we disable the time field?” I say, putting into words the worry that’s been swelling inside me over the last several days. “Earth Travel won’t just convince everyone they need to set up a new one and experiment some more?”

  “We won’t let them,” Jule says firmly. “It’ll be much easier to protest the constructing of a new field than continuing the current one. The resources they’d have to expend to repair the generator or construct a new one of that size, the limited time range it would give us once all the history the current one covers is out of our grasp—and our going that far at all will get people paying attention, really thinking about it—we’ll be in the perfect position to push for a change. Thlo has every possibility covered. I don’t think there’s anything she wouldn’t do to make Jeanant’s mission succeed.”

  I believe that. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s as close as I can imagine getting to one. I let out my breath.

  “All the people in that . . . zoo. Do you think there’s any way we could bring them back to Earth?”

  I don’t really expect Jule to say yes, but he pauses as if he’s actually considering it. “No,” he says. “Even one or two, to get them out and onto a ship without any alarms being tripped . . . We probably wouldn’t make it off the station.”

  Even I can see that’s not worth the risk. I close my eyes. Then all I can do is make sure no other Earthling ever ends up in that place.

  There’s not a lot else I can think of to do, within the limits of my precarious situation. I spend most of the next day immersed in the Language Learner, determined to make sure that if I go out again I can understand as much as possible—and maybe even get away with saying a few things if confronted. To distract me, I think, Jule challenges me to a series of games of Rata, which ends with two wins for each of us and a different sort of distraction. There’s a restraint to his first few kisses that reminds me of my jab about making out with Earthlings. It’s so uncharacteristic of him that any last lingering anxiety I was feeling melts away.

  “I’m okay with this, I promise,” I say, my hand on his cheek. “I want this.”

  A tension I’d only distantly registered slips from his shoulders. “Good,” he says, with a more typical grin. “Because so do I.”

  But when Isis shows up the next morning with a familiar lipstick-shaped device, my worries about Britta come surging to the front of my mind.

  “Time for your touch-up,” she says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “How’s Britta doing?” I make myself ask, afraid of the answer, as we sit on my bunk.

  “Better,” Isis says, running the device over my hair. “It seems Thlo was right: the beam didn’t do any permanent damage. But she’s still shaken up. Wobbly, physically, and scattered if she tries to think too hard about anything.”

  I can’t see Isis’s face, but she sounds both optimistic and weary.

  “There hasn’t been any problem—with her job, or her family . . . ?”

  Isis’s curls rustle as she shakes her head. “She’s been able to fake it well enough talking to them over the network, and it hasn’t been unusual for her to work from the apartment some days, working out course calculations and that type of t
hing. As long as nobody comes to visit unexpectedly, I think we’ll be all right.”

  I imagine Britta sitting in that tiny apartment, dazed and weak. Shaken up.

  “I’m sorry,” I say around the lump that’s risen in my throat.

  Isis nudges me to turn around. I assume she intends to re-shade my skin, but when I face her, she grips my arms, her eyes intent on mine. “What are you apologizing for?”

  “If I’d seen sooner that the Enforcers were going to send out that beam and warned you faster, Britta would have gotten out before they hit the ship,” I say.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Isis says. “You saved her. Maybe all of us. You caught it before I did—if you hadn’t it might have hit her at an even worse time in the jump—it might have killed her. Or they might not have had time to jump at all. If they’d been taken into custody . . .”

  I remember the way Jeanant talked about the Enforcers’ interrogations. No one’s strong enough to hold out forever. It still feels like I failed them. I haven’t even been able to make good on my resolve to accomplish more for the group.

  “Did you find out anything about who leaked our plans from the communication logs?” I ask.

  “Nothing definitive. No one contacted Mako over the network, but from the hall footage I was able to dig up, Pavel came by her apartment that day, and Tabzi may have seen her at work. So either of them could have found out something from her. I haven’t found evidence of any of them contacting someone in Earth Travel—though of course Pavel works there, so it’d be easy for him. We haven’t told any of them what happened to Britta, and no one’s seemed surprised that we haven’t mentioned any problems . . . I don’t know what to think.”

  “If everything to do with the traitor has gone through Earth Travel,” I say as she starts on my freckles, her words sparking a new idea, “is there any way you could get me access to their files? Maybe I’d notice a pattern that Thlo and the others haven’t.” That’s been the one real advantage I’ve offered them: my sensitivity to detail. The people in the rebel group who work for Earth Travel, they’ll take things for granted, they might miss something.