Steal Across the Sky Read online

  The big man drew a long knife and cut the other man’s throat.

  Lucca gasped. His hand groped under his tunic, at his belt, suddenly frantic to make sure the personal shield was still activated. Blood spurted from the Kularian’s throat and flew through the air, like projectile vomiting. The victim made horrible gurgling sounds for a few seconds, waving his arms in a grotesque parody of his earlier friendliness. Then he collapsed and the large man let the body fall to the ground.

  Everyone smiled and one of the teenage boys laughed happily.

  It was darker now. The boys seized the poles of the travois and pulled it back toward the tents, then inside the largest, leaving the flap open. There was nothing inside the tent except piles of blankets, some fur and some woven. One by one the men straggled in, stamping their feet and chatting easily. Bowls of stew were brought in from the cook fire outside. The man with the long mustache, who seemed to have assumed charge of Lucca, sat beside him, and a boy handed each of them a bowl.

  Lucca couldn’t eat. The smell of the stew, fragrant in itself, turned his stomach. He reminded himself that he was safe, that nothing short of nuclear weapons could penetrate his personal shield, that the Atoners wanted him back safely to “witness,” that the Atoners knew what they were doing.

  But it was an Atoner shuttle that had malfunctioned, breaking his leg and marooning him on this steppe.

  The Kularian said, “Fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road, are you warm enough?”

  “Yes, I . . . yes. Thank you.”

  “Eat. Jikelioriatwe makes good stew, and tomorrow we head home.”

  “Yes . . . What is your name?” Maybe manners required guests to ask first.

  “I am Hytrowembireliaz.”

  Lucca would never remember it. He said, “I am Lucca.”

  Hytrowembireliaz threw back his head and laughed, a joyous sound untinged with hysteria. He said to the tent at large, “His name is ‘Lucca’!” and everyone shouted happily. The translator said helpfully, “His name is cooking ladle.”

  It was a great joke. Everyone made several jokes about ladles, the contents of ladles, women, and ladling things into other things. The tent grew noisier, smellier, more crowded. Lucca couldn’t tell who was talking to whom, including whether they addressed him as he lay on a pile of reeking furs in the corner. His hands shook as he tried to eat a few spoonfuls, and then he was furious at himself for shaking, and then he grew afraid again and that was worse.

  Out the open flap of the tent he could see, by starlight, the abandoned corpse. No attempt was made to bury it or guard it from animals.

  Eventually the tent quieted, several people left, and the remainder lay down to sleep. Hytrowembireliaz squatted beside Lucca and covered him tenderly, saying, “There—you will be warm enough now.” The tent flap was closed. In the darkness, men snored.

  He wanted to talk to Cam or Soledad, but he couldn’t link with either the ship or Kular B until he was alone. All he could do was lie here and go over and over in his mind the friendly benevolence, the many nods and smiles, the native Good Samaritans taking hours to rescue a stranger. And then the man willingly—even happily—taking his place in the center of the circle so the other could slice open his throat. All the genial joking afterward. Who were these people, and what did the Atoners want Lucca to perceive about them? The man in the center of the circle, the sweet smiles, the knife and the blood . . .

  Hytrowembireliaz never had asked Lucca who he was or where he came from.

  IN THE MORNING Lucca again felt equal to his task. Sleep, plus whatever the Atoners had put into him, fortified him. He was here to witness. Many primitive cultures practiced ritual killing, and sometimes it was an honor to be chosen to die. Or death might have been a punishment that even the victim thought he deserved. Lucca would find out which.

  Not even the sight of the corpse shook this resolution. During the night the body had been chewed and mangled by animals. Lucca’s gorge rose, but the Kularians barely glanced at the pulpy horror. With cheerful efficiency they took down the tents, loaded them and a huge pile of furs—evidently this had been a hunting expedition—onto travois made of the tent poles, and hitched up their reeking, ponderous beasts. The procession moved at about three miles an hour, making conversation easy. The men chattered, sang, waved their arms. Hytrowembireliaz appeared beside Lucca’s travois to say, “Do you want some water?”

  “Yes, please.” Hytrowembireliaz passed him a leather water bag. Communal, but Lucca expected that and tried not to think about all the other mouths that had been on it before his.

  “Last night,” Lucca began, and waited. The less he said, the less obvious his ignorance would be, and Hytrowembireliaz might spontaneously offer information.

  He did; evidently these were not a reticent people. “A good crossing, yes. Chytfouriswelpim is very happy.”

  “Why?”

  Hytrowembireliaz frowned slightly. “What do you try to say?”

  Careful. Something here is a given. “Why now?”

  Hytrowembireliaz’s face cleared. “His wife has gone on the second road. His sons moved to the south, to farm. Chytfouriswelpim wished to set out on his journey.”

  So it had been a voluntary death. Something hard and angry formed in Lucca’s chest. The dead man had been hale and laughing, not sick, not even old. A widower, yes, but widowers adjusted, went on. No one knew that better than he. Even in his blackest moods, Lucca hadn’t killed himself. He’d endured, had at least tried to be too strong for that easy escape.

  These people were cowards.

  And deluded as well. The “second road”—a belief in an afterlife, probably the single largest aberration of the human mind. The Kularians threw life away here, from the illusion of something better later. “Pie in the sky,” the Americans said. They were right. Squander this life now, in everything from joylessness to suicide bombing, and collect your rewards in Heaven, in Asgard, in Paradise, in Hades, in the Fields of Yalu. Untold light-years away from Earth, separated from the rest of human culture by ten thousand years, and Kular still came up with the same pathetic illusions.

  “Yes,” Lucca said, and hoped his forced smile didn’t hold too much of either contempt or pity. He was not here to judge. He was here to witness.

  ONE MORE NIGHT OF TRAVEL, and the land became more irregular, rising to become foothills of a low mountain range. The sky didn’t clear and the air grew colder still. Trees appeared, strange wide plants with many trunks, intertwined branches, and purplish-green leaves falling off even as he watched. Each tree stood separate, no more than three meters high but covering up to a half acre, a miniature forest. Small strange creatures darted in and out.

  Finally they reached a village of miniscule stone huts surrounding a much larger stone building, all set beside a clear, swift river flowing down from the mountains. Women, children, and old men rushed out, and there was much foot stamping, arm waving, and laughing. Temporarily forgotten, Lucca climbed carefully off the travois, pleased and astonished to find that he could stand as long as he didn’t put too much weight on his splinted leg. Whatever the Atoners had put inside him, it was wonderful.

  “Welcome, fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road,” a woman said to him. Like the men, she wore pants, boots, and tunic. Her hair, cut very short, curled wildly around her broad face as if electrified. She had one red tooth. Her dark eyes were kind. “Come inside.”

  He limped after her, Hytrowembireliaz, and three children into one of the stone huts.

  “I THINK I’M A GUEST for the winter,” Lucca told Cam. It was such a relief to finally get away from the amiable Kularians. He sat on the ground beside one of the miniforests, just out of sight of the village. Snow fell, one desultory flake at a time. He’d already reported in to Soledad and uploaded the contents of his translator with whatever it had learned of the Kularian language.

  “Well, you’re doing better than I am,” Cam said. “I still haven’t made contact. Unless you count the spear-and-fire attac
ks, and they’ve even stopped doing that. I go outside the shuttle every damn day, stand in the middle of this entire army camp they’ve built around me, and nothing happens. Nothing. Christ, why did the Atoners tell us that we can’t go to the natives until they approach us first?”

  “Why did the Atoners tell us anything they said? Your personal shield works?”

  “Like I’m encased in Lucite. The spears just slide off me and I don’t feel a thing. Haven’t you had a chance to test yours yet?”

  She didn’t listen. Just to him, or to anyone? For the hundredth time, Lucca wondered why the Atoners had chosen Cam as a Witness, and why he allowed himself to get so irritated by her. Yes, they’d had that brief stupid affair on the ship, but even as he’d entered her beautiful body Lucca had known he wasn’t going to love Cam. He wasn’t going to love anyone except Gianna, not ever again, and when he’d come inside Cam it had been with a bitter wrenching shudder that was barely pleasure at all.

  He said, “No, I haven’t had a chance to test my shield. I told you, these are cheerful people, hospitable, not easily agitated. Except when they’re cutting each other’s throats in assisted suicide, they’re nice.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “No, of course not.” But Lucca knew that all that niceness bothered him. He didn’t like it, although he didn’t know why.

  “Nice and peaceful sounds good to me right now.”

  He didn’t believe her. Cam relished the attacks that could not touch her, relished being the omnipotent and mysterious stranger around which a whole encampment of soldiers had been built. Whereas Lucca was mostly forgotten except when he was in the way of Hytrowembireliaz’s busy family, at which point they smiled at him and stamped their feet and forgot him again. He was fed, given warm clothing and a comfortable bed, and asked nothing. It was incredible. He was practically invisible.

  “So ask them things,” Cam said.

  “I do. There is only one answer: ‘over the mountains.’ The grain for porridge comes from over the mountains, in trade for furs. The family loom comes from over the mountains, in trade for furs. But as far as I can tell, ‘over the mountains’ functions exactly like here, except for a different climate. The language has no word for ‘city’ or any form of government, no word for ‘king’ or ‘president’ or even ‘leader.’ How can there be no form at all of any word for someone in charge?”

  “Anarchy,” Cam said.

  “Anarchy is actually a sophisticated form of social organization, Cam. It requires strong cultural ties to reinforce taboos against violence and stealing, and communal institutions to teach those taboos to the young. Here there are no institutions, no schooling in abstract ideas, and, as far as I can figure out, not even a written language. This is the thinnest culture possible on all possible axes. There aren’t even any interesting rituals beyond cutting each other’s throats when they decide it’s time to die!”

  Silence on the other side of the commlink. Lucca heard his own tone, lingering in the air like miasma. Finally Cam said, “Well, excuse me for not having a college education. And you’re taking all this way too personally, Lucca. I thought anthropologists were supposed to be objective.”

  It was such a Cam-like remark that Lucca put his head into his hands. He wasn’t an anthropologist, having dropped out of graduate work at Oxford when Gianna died, well before he’d finished his degree. And anthropologists weren’t “objective,” whatever that meant, because they were human and thus inevitably equipped with the lenses of their own culture. And of course he was taking this personally. Lucca had told Cam, had told the Atoners, had told the UN interrogators, that he believed the personal was all one had. Personal vision and personal thoughts, filtered through the lens of one’s biology and background, until sickness or old age or a renegade lorry took those things away and the self vanished. Cam never listened.

  He said, “I must go. My ass is cold from sitting on the ground.”

  “Me, too. Not my ass—it’s sweltering hot here. I mean I have to go and stand in front of the shuttle so nothing can happen. Again. If I didn’t have Soledad to talk to all the time I’m inside this damn shuttle, I’d go mad. It’s weird, you know—two emissaries from the stars, and two planets just ignore us. Who’d have thought?”

  Despite himself, Lucca laughed. He closed the commlink and looked up to find Hytrowembireliaz’s middle child, Chewithoztarel, watching him. The little girl, who looked about ten, had not yet had her hair cut short or her front tooth reddened, so perhaps both were puberty rites.

  “What are you doing, Lucca?”

  She must have crept up on him from around the stand of trees. No—of “tree.” He sat beside one of the tangled half-acre stalks and vines that were all one plant. Her dark eyes gazed at him with the first curiosity he’d seen since he landed. What would she report to her parents? That the stranger talked into a tiny box?

  Counter an unwelcome question with another question. He said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Ragjuptrilpent told me you were here.”

  He didn’t know the name; probably one of her little friends. “What else did Ragjuptrilpent say?”

  “She said you washed in the shed and pissed in the corner.”

  Pleasure flooded Lucca. Unable to stand his own stink any longer, he had indeed washed in the lean-to behind the stone hut where the water tubs were kept. As soon as he’d undressed, he’d needed to piss and, shivering with cold in the unheated shed and unwilling to dress again and make the trek to the privy, he’d gone in a corner and covered his urine with dirt. But the shed was closed on all sides, and no little girl with an unpronounceable name had observed him. Furthermore, Kularians never entered other families’ huts, which were so tiny they contained room only for piles of sleeping blankets and changes of clothing. Cooking, eating, and socializing all took place in the village lodge, where nearly everyone spent all non-sleeping time. If Lucca had been observed at his hasty and frigid bath, it had not been by the unknown Ragjuptrilpent but by Hytrowembireliaz’s middle daughter herself.

  So Kularians sometimes lied.

  It was the first crack Lucca had found in the surface image of happy, simple natives. So perhaps it wasn’t much—it was still something. A culture that developed lying had things it wished to hide. Chewithoztarel had lied, and she had asked a question out of curiosity. Finally, Lucca had an informant.

  He scrambled up off the frozen ground and put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Will you help me walk back to the hut, little fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road?”

  “Yes!”

  Maybe he would find out something—anything—worth witnessing, after all.

  5: FROM REWIRED AND HACKED IN,

  EDITORIAL COLUMN

  Marketing a Thunderbolt

  At first, of course, they thought it was a joke, those few Internet roamers who visited the new website. Maybe it came up far down a list at Google or Ask.com, or maybe they just stumbled across it during a session of bored, late-night conspiracy surfing. It was just one of the thousands of bogus sites that sprang up hours—maybe minutes—after NASA released the shattering news that probes had detected an alien spacecraft approaching the moon. Some of Earth’s population panicked; some rejoiced; some urged attack; some joked.

  So no one believed the website was real. Come on, now—a classified ad for human “Witnesses” to some colossal alien crime? The site didn’t even look very inventive: just sixty-seven dry words, unadorned by even basic clip art:

  We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to [email protected].

  But after the aliens made radio contact with SETI and then proceeded to talk freely—if circumspectly—
with anyone whose communication equipment could reach the moon, everything changed. The Atoners mentioned the website. Within minutes, it took millions of hits, and everything—panicking, rejoicing, attacking, joking—ramped up exponentially. Suddenly the B movies and the old comic books and the paperbacks with tacky covers were all real.

  And, in retrospect, the Internet was the perfect way for bona fide aliens to recruit humanity for the stars, for at least five reasons:

  1. A website is accessible by anyone with a computer. If you want to reach a whole lot of people simultaneously, 24/7, this is the way to do it. Radio and TV broadcasts must change frequencies across borders, adjust to time differences, pre-empt Monday night football. The Internet is always there, always ready, everywhere at once.

  2. A website bypasses the filters of government censorship, spin, posturing, and rhetoric. Instead of being told what aliens said, we can see for ourselves.

  3. This website demonstrates formidable technology. It apparently joined the Web without human agency and has resisted all attempts to remove, block, modify, or hack into it—and trust me on this, the best computer minds on Earth have tried. We know.

  4. A website reaches those people who are most computer-literate—the young—whom the Atoners apparently wanted to reach. Everyone “accepted” so far has been under thirty. Space is usually considered a game for the young, educated, and intelligent. Nothing like knowing your target audience.

  5. The website works. Millions of “applications” have been filled out and sent.

  As the entire planet waits to see who else is accepted—and whether any means really is provided to take them to the moon, let alone to other planets and back—one fact emerges about the Atoners: Madison Avenue could take lessons from them. Their sales approach is logical, attention getting, and effective.