Steal Across the Sky Page 11

  Three men, four women, and children dashing around in too much excitement to be countable. The adults clustered around Blanbilitwan, Hytrowembireliaz’s wife. Kin, coming to visit? Lucca grabbed at Chewithoztarel as she raced past, catching the hem of her tunic and bringing her crashing down on top of himself.

  “Aiiooo! Let me go, I’m chasing Yerwazitel! She’s winning!”

  “In just a minute. Who are these people?”

  She stopped struggling to get free and peered at him. “You can see them?”

  “Yes, my eyes are working again. Who—”

  “Why?”

  “Why are my eyes working? I don’t know, they just are. Who—”

  “That’s very strange!” the child cried. “Yerwazitel, come here!”

  Lucca scowled; he wanted to be informed, not be a sideshow. But Yerwazitel didn’t come anyway, being engaged in wrestling with a small boy who was doing his best to tear her hair off her head. Lucca said forcefully, “Who are these people?”

  “My cousins,” Chewithoztarel said scornfully, as if he should already know this. “They came from up in the mountains!”

  “Why?”

  “So Plengajiaz can start on the second road, of course. Let me go, Lucca, Yerwazitel needs help!”

  Lucca released the girl and she shot off to jump on the squealing and wrestling children. The adults shifted around the mass of scuffling little bodies, and Lucca saw that one of the women was very old. Blanbilitwan steered her to another corner, where the old woman eased her body onto a pile of rugs not unlike Lucca’s, beaming at everyone. Lucca stood and walked over to her. He barely limped; however the Atoners had enhanced his healing process, it was a spectacular success. A few of the villagers glanced at him, but no one exclaimed that this blind man was suddenly navigating unerringly through clumps of adults and shifting knots of cavorting children. Was this what Lucca had been sent here to witness—an utter lack of human curiosity? Surely not.

  And why hadn’t some other disability replaced the blindness that had replaced the lack of smell?

  “Hello, child,” the old lady said. “You are the winter visitor. They told me.”

  “Yes. My name is Lucca.” Up close, he saw that her hands were twisted with arthritis, the blue veins like ridges above the weathered skin. Pain shadowed her sunken eyes. Her front teeth, one of which should have been red, were both missing. “You’ve come here to start on the second road.”

  “Yes. I was born here. I want to start out beside my daughter, so my sons brought me down the mountain as soon as the snow stopped. Good boys.”

  “Is your daughter Blanbilitwan?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  And there it was again—the assumption that everyone already knew everything, so that both explanation and curiosity were superfluous. Was that part of the telepathy? Lucca blundered on. “When will you start out?”

  “Oh, tonight, I think. I don’t want to delay.”

  “Yes,” Lucca said. Finally his luck was turning. This woman would die tonight, and he would have a chance to carry out another experiment. A new possibility had occurred to him in the long dark hours of his blindness: Perhaps something about the presence of death temporarily aroused telepathic abilities in the villagers. A response to stress, maybe, hormonally based. Then, as the stress of changes in their small population abated, so did the telepathy.

  Lucca could think of an analogy: the superhuman strength exhibited when a parent lifted, say, a car that had fallen on a child. Much more strength than could normally be summoned, and only for the brief time needed to free the trapped kid. Such phenomena had strong evolutionary survival value, and so might temporary telepathy: If a tribe or even just a hunting party was fleeing a predator that had just killed one of their number, a telepathic ability to coordinate might save all their lives.

  He said to the old woman, who was starting to doze off, “Plengajiaz? I would ask a task, as a fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road.”

  “Yes?” Half-asleep, she registered no surprise at his request.

  “Before you start out on the second road, will you tell me something that happened to you when you were a child? Something known only to us two?”

  “Why?” Awake now, she looked puzzled, the deep lines of her old face wrinkled as withered grapes.

  “It is the custom in the village I come from.”

  “A strange custom. But I will do it. I will do it now, since I start on the second road as soon as my sons have eaten.” Suddenly she cackled, as if something was very funny. “When I was a girl, I killed a pybalt. By myself!”

  Lucca knew how momentous this was. Pybalts, vaguely lionlike, were dangerous, and Kularian women did not hunt. “And no one ever knew?”

  “No one! I used my brother’s spear, and I left the body up the mountain. And now I hope that I may find that pybalt on the third path and apologize to it.”

  The third path: that delusion of afterlife where all wrongs would be righted, the childish comfort furnished by faith to the weak and the old. He said again, “And no one knows about this pybalt?”

  “No one!” She laughed again, merrily, and fell asleep.

  Lucca went over to the table, where food was being set out for the second of the villagers’ daily two meals. He wasn’t hungry, but he picked up a hunk of stone bread and nibbled on it. Ordinarily strongly flavored with something akin to wild onions, the stone bread was completely tasteless on his tongue, in his mouth. The Atoners had taken away another of his senses, which would undoubtedly return tomorrow.

  Why?

  AFTER THE MEAL, many villagers left for the long night’s sleep. Others stayed in the lodge, but Lucca could discern no kinship pattern in who went and who didn’t. Chewithoztarel, along with several other children, remained. The children quieted as they joined the ragged circle of adults.

  Plengajiaz took her place in the center, half-carried by her sons. Blanbilitwan sat close beside her, startling Lucca. He hadn’t realized that women killed women. The old lady raised her hand, smiled toothlessly at all of them, and laid her head on the shoulder of her daughter, who slit her throat.

  Unlike the man on the steppes, Plengajiaz’s blood did not spurt out in strong jets. Maybe Blanbilitwan was a more skillful executioner. Maybe she was practiced from cutting up animals for stew, cutting bread. . . . Lucca realized he was a bit hysterical. Blood oozed from the old woman, soaking the blanket under her. Hytrowembireliaz stepped forward, wrapped the body in the bloody blanket, and carried it outside.

  To dump it in the snow, and let it be mauled and eaten and . . . Sick rage rose in Lucca. This was their mother, grandmother, aunt. Their disregard for their dead struck him as horrible, monstrous, wrong. They were barbarians.

  Gianna lay in a waterproof, lead-lined casket in an English graveyard, beneath a carved headstone planted with roses.

  Now the villagers jumped up from the circle, laughing and talking, and in the confusion Lucca could not see who talked to whom. He beckoned to Chewithoztarel, who skipped over. “Chewithoztarel, what did your grandmother tell me just before she started out on the second road?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want me to ask her?”

  His mouth tightened. More games from this wretched brat. But he said, “Yes. Now.”

  Chewithoztarel ran to the other side of the room, where a group of adults talked. She disappeared between their legs, dashing back to him a few minutes later. Her dark eyes were huge. “Everybody’s talking to her! But she bent down and whispered in my ear. She said she told you that once she killed a pybalt! By herself! And nobody ever knew!”

  “Yes,” Lucca said. “Ask your mother to come here, please.”

  Blanbilitwan came over to him from the table. She hadn’t been in the knot of adults that Chewithoztarel had joined. Lucca said abruptly, “Blanbilitwan, I would ask you something. What did your mother and I talk about just before she started on the second road?”

  Blanbilitwan actually looked startled. But she didn’
t question this strange request, saying only, “I’ll ask her.” She walked over to the gossiping adults, returning in a moment. “She says she told you that when she was a young girl, she killed a pybalt. Such an ungood thing!”

  “Thank you,” Lucca managed. He pulled on his cloak and went outside. It was dark, but two young boys lingered beside the lodge, looking furtive. Lucca caught sight of a necklace of polished stones, such as girls wore before their marriages, just as one boy whisked the necklace into his tunic. “Nabnopithoz, what did Plengajiaz tell me just before she started out on the second road?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, caught somewhere among obedience, embarrassment, and adolescent defiance.

  “Go ask her! Now!”

  Both boys disappeared into the lodge. Only one returned, Nabnopithoz, to whom Lucca had given a direct order. Villager children never disobeyed. Nabnopithoz said, a little sulkily, “Plengajiaz wasn’t there. She already left on the third road.”

  “Thank you.” Lucca spun around and started toward Hytrowembireliaz’s hut.

  It made no sense. There was some kind of telepathy going on, clearly, unless the old lady had been lying to him and everyone had already known about the pybalt slain so long ago. But Lucca didn’t think they lied. The villagers were too startled by the idea of a girl hunting, and their surprise felt genuine to him. But the telepathy had faded so fast, whereas when Chewithoztarel had claimed to be “talking” to Ragjuptrilpent, the phenomenon had gone on for many days. Was Nabnopithoz merely bad at telepathy, and so covering up his inability by claiming that the old woman had “already left on the third road”? Was Blanbilitwan engaging in some elaborate cultural ritual by claiming to “ask” her mother before she pulled the information telepathically from Lucca’s own mind? What the hell was going on here?

  E che cazzo!

  He stumbled through the twilight cold to Hytrowembireliaz’s hut, only slightly warmer, where he could call Soledad and ask her to help him make sense of the senseless. A little ways out on the plain he glimpsed a small mound: a blanket already half-covered with snow. Plengajiaz’s body, abandoned and desolate. Lucca looked away and kept walking.

  SOLEDAD SAID HESITANTLY, “What if they’re telling the truth?”

  “What do you mean?” The hut was almost completely dark, and in the distance Lucca heard shouting and laughing. Soon the family would return to sleep.

  She said, “Everything you just told me, about the old lady and the pybalt and those two Kularians asking her about it . . . What if they really can talk to their dead?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lucca snapped. “I’m talking science, not some fuzzy mysticism.”

  “Sometimes science starts out as mysticism. Like . . . like alchemy became chemistry. And this is an alien world! What if the rules are somehow different here?”

  “Kularians are human, Soledad—you know that. And do you really believe that different laws of physics and matter hold in one part of the universe than another?”

  He sensed her considering, striving to be fair. “No. I don’t believe that.”

  “Then come up with a different hypothesis, cara. You talked before of my genes and—”

  “That was about your blindness.”

  “Which is now tastelessness.” He laughed, sourly amused at his own diction. The door to the hut opened. “I must go—good-bye!”

  Chewithoztarel rushed in. “Guess what, Lucca? Something really strange happened!”

  His breath caught. “It did? What?”

  “I wrestled Yerwazitel, and I won!” She crowed happily and stamped her little booted feet. “Can you believe it?”

  23: “SCHLEPPING TO THE STARS”

  (To be sung to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round

  the Mountain When She Comes.”)

  They’ll be schlepping to the stars when they go,

  They’ll be schlepping to the stars when they go,

  Aliens ship them out

  And what is that about?

  They’ll be schleppin’ to the stars when they go.

  They’ll be witnessin’ for ’Tonies when they go,

  They’ll be witnessin’ for ’Tonies when they go,

  Someone did a crime

  Way way back in time,

  So they’ll be witnessing for ’Tonies when they go.

  The crime’s a great big question mark to us,

  The crime’s a great big question mark to us,

  And why the ’Tonies fess to it

  Is anybody’s guesstimate,

  ’Cause the crime’s a great big question mark to us.

  Our guys’ll come back to see us—so we hope!

  Our guys’ll come back to see us—so we hope!

  And maybe then we’ll understand

  This weird and scary Wonderland,

  If our guys come back to see us, as we hope.

  The above is hereby officially condemned by the following organizations: People’s Co ali tion Against Alien Interference, Mothers Against Abduction, Fight Now! and the state legislatures of North Dakota, Alabama, and Arizona.

  24: AVEO

  SMALL SHARP STINGS ON HIS HANDS, his legs, his feet around his sandals. And a roaring in his ears, almost as soon as the vines touched him. No, that wasn’t the vines, it was Cam shouting, or Uldunu Four’s army shouting— No, it was Ojea, a child again and calling for his father to come right away, it was urgent, so urgent—

  Aveo knew he was dying. One always died, when mating thrul got you. Not the best kulith moves could save you, nothing could save you from the mating poison— The din inside his head went on and on, although maybe it was outside his head. . . . He flew through the air and someone was roasting meat, its smell the last thing he noticed as the nothingness of death claimed him.

  But it wasn’t death, after all. Somehow he was sitting on the inside of Cam’s silver egg and she was holding a cup of water for him. The pain was leaving him, sliding away from his head and body and feet like a tide rushing out. And although he felt no motion, the strange windows showed the city falling away beneath them. . . . They were flying. He tried to sit up, but weakness took him and he fell back.

  Cam said, “We left the city, Aveo. Here, I’m going to take off those vines that—”

  “Don’t touch them without your invisible armor! They’re poison!” He was surprised at the strength of his own voice. “How did you heal me?”

  “I put on patches that— It’s hard to explain. You explain what the fuck happened back there!”

  He groped for memory. “The plants are mating. You went among them at the time the Goddess of All Green has them in thrall, or so think the people. Ostiu Cam, I told you—”

  “I don’t understand anything you told me,” she said wearily. “I don’t even understand anything I saw directly. How can I— Aveo, we’re going to stay right here for a while. You’re going to get better and I’m going to listen to you tell me everything you know, so I can do the job I was fucking sent here to do!”

  Everything you know. Did she really think that was possible? He had a lifetime of experiences—a lifetime he had almost lost—and she was under the illusion she could absorb them without having lived his life? Without even having lived in his part of the world? Reality was not that malleable, that you could bend it like iron in the forge to fit another’s mind. So far, this woman had not even been able to understand the small pieces of reality he had shown her.

  Yet here he was in her flying ship, owing her his life, and he had no idea what else to do except answer whatever she thought to ask.

  “Yes,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Ask what you will.”

  “Okay . . . you said about the plants that I walked around in them when they’re mating and the goddess— Which goddess?”

  “Belief holds only one: the Goddess of All Green. Ostiu Cam, you have moved her piece in kulith.”

  “Kulith! That’s a game!”

  Again Aveo struggled to sit up, and this time he succe
eded. Although he was weak, it was amazing how well he felt: clearheaded, even cheerful. His fingers explored the healing cloths Cam had put on his neck, but he didn’t remove them.

  “Kulith is not a game. Don’t you yet understand? Although it uses the things of life, slaves and crops and soldiers and wars, kulith is not a mirror of life. Kulith is a mirror of the mind that produces life.”

  “A mirror . . . I don’t see.”

  “In kulith are all the thought processes, and all the results of those processes, that shape a person’s destiny. We play kulith to discover who we are, and who others are, and to foreshadow and so cause what will happen between us.”

  “Like . . . like seeing the future?”

  “No. Creating the future, by creating the interactions between players that will shape their future.”

  She scowled, a big uneducated woman trying to send her mind where it would not go. But how could it not go there? She said, “And this goddess . . . If you shape your own future by playing kulith, then gods don’t have any say in what happens? So why is there a game piece for the goddess?”

  Aveo said carefully, “Most people believe that the Goddess observes all, and affects all through her sacred servant, Uldunu Four.”

  “We have something like that, where I come from, only it’s a God. He—”

  “A male?” Despite everything, he was slightly shocked. “But how would such a belief come to be? Males cannot birth life!”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But you . . . you don’t believe in that goddess, do you?”

  Casually asked, as if it were a normal question: Is it raining? Did you breakfast yet? This question, which Aveo had never answered directly in his life except once, to his son Ojea, had gotten that son killed. Cam waited and finally he said, “No. I do not believe in the Goddess.”

  “Me, neither, only . . . but . . . Aveo, the only two things I’ve seen here that we don’t have on Earth are kulith and those plants. All the rest is the same: wars and kings and power struggles and slavery and . . . Actually, maybe we do have kulith, someplace. There’s a lot of weird religions around the world and I know that some old cultures played chess like— I don’t know enough! I didn’t even go to college! I don’t know why the Atoners picked me!”