Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress
Soledad had always believed that, despite her appalling family, she was lucky. She’d had Fengmo, a few caring teachers, and a scholarship to college, where she’d had the opportunity to discover she liked classic jazz, W. H. Auden, and fourth-century history. Also, she had cheated death for two and a half decades. At six she’d contracted a drug-resistant form of staph that should have killed, the septicemia raging through her blood like barbarians through Rome. But her body cured itself. At fifteen she was hit by a car, and at twenty-two she missed her confirmed flight on a United Airlines jet blown up over the Atlantic ten minutes out of La-Guardia. Cheating death.
But now it turned out that wasn’t what she had been doing at all, because there was no death. Of the body, yes, but not of the essence of a person. That most unbearable of truths, that everyone must lose everything, including life itself, was no longer true. As in poker with a perpetual supply of chips, everybody—those who died at 6 and those at 106—got to stay in the game.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Hamlet had the right question but the wrong grammatical tense. Will I be or will I not be?
She walked barefoot into her bedroom to get dressed for the day.
SOLEDAD’S MOTHER SAT AT JUANA’S KITCHEN table, drinking coffee and picking at an olive loaf. Maria Arellano’s thick hair hung in two uncharacteristically neat gray braids over an orange T-shirt. Her broad face looked yellowish and sodden, like used toilet paper, and her eyes were dull as concrete. But it was clear that all her bones were intact.
Soledad said quietly, “You told me she was dying.”
Juana had moved to stand between Soledad and the apartment door. Like her sister, Juana was short and stocky, but whereas Soledad looked contained and solid, Juana always seemed ready to erupt into magma flows of whirling full skirts, ashy gobs of soft powdered flesh, flying dangerous sparks of temper. No wonder, Soledad thought, that I hate the stereotype of the “fiery Latina.”
Juana attacked. “Okay, so she’s not dying! We knew this was the only way you’d ever come to see her, your own mother, you should be ashamed of yourself that you move all that way to St. Louis, keeping all that money for yourself while we live like this—”
Soledad tuned out her sister. The kitchen, in a crumbling apartment building whose stairwells smelled of urine, was neat this afternoon but bare, holding nothing that couldn’t be hocked or sold. The wooden table was deeply carved with unintelligible symbols, probably by Juana’s kids. A garbage bag in one corner held recyclable cans. Overhead, exposed heating pipes clanged restlessly, like chains rattling in the stale air. Maria raised her head. Mother and daughter stared at each other with mutual dislike, with old resentments, with a thousand bad memories that rose in Soledad like bile. She caught the sour smell of old alcohol, so deep in Maria’s pores that no shower could remove it. Are you going to go on after death, Mama? Would you even want to? Soledad dammed her distaste and reached for rationality.
“Juana, there is no money. I told you that. I didn’t sell my story for a book or a movie or a netcast. The moon rocks sold for only enough money to resume life here, and pretty soon I’m going to have to find a job. The government did help with resettling the Witnesses, but that was only for a few—”
“You’re lying!” Juana said shrilly. “Your friend Cam O’Kane—” She flounced her skirts on each of the three syllables of the name, in grotesque mockery. “—has millions! She was on the d-vids in a necklace that cost a thousand bucks by itself! I seen an ad for it, so I know!”
Soledad said flatly, “I’m not Cam O’Kane.”
“You could be! That bitch tells her story over and over, the same thing all the time, and you just sit there in St. Louis and don’t say anything to nobody and can’t even help your own family and—”
“I didn’t go down to a planet like Cam did,” Soledad said wearily. “I’ve told you that over and over. People aren’t as interested in those of us who stayed in orbit.”
“Your story still must be worth something!”
It probably was. Until Diane Lovett had taken Soledad’s life in hand, journalists and researchers and assorted whackos had besieged her. She wanted none of it. She just wanted answers, certainty, to know. But there were no answers. The Atoners sat up there on the moon, unreachable, no longer answering radio messages but not leaving, either. Lucca sulked in his Canadian fortress. And Cam turned the holy grail into a cheap sideshow. Soledad was not going to do that.
She said slowly, “Juana, why did you drag me to New York? Just to ask for money?”
Something flitted across her sister’s face, some look that Soledad couldn’t interpret. But all Juana said was, “The rent is due and I don’t have it.”
Soledad wrote out a check, as she had done so often before. She laid it on the table, beside the half-eaten olive loaf. Juana moved away from the door, not meeting her eyes. Something wasn’t right, but no one here was going to tell Soledad what it was. She left, aware that her mother had not spoken one word to her, that possibly speech was beyond her in her present state, that Maria was merely hanging on until she and Juana were once again alone and she could have another drink.
No one had even asked Soledad to sit down, or take off her coat, or have a cup of coffee. Not that it had ever been any different . . . but God, when did you outgrow this wish for your family’s acceptance, for your family’s approval, for an entirely different family? Would they still be able to upset her when she was forty, fifty, seventy?
Soledad made her way down three flights of badly lit stairs. A hundred years’ worth of dirt seamed the broken molding. Two sullen children with d-vid games glared at her on the second-floor landing. One of the security cameras had been shot out and not yet fixed. At the bottom of the last flight, in the miniscule grimy “lobby,” he waited for her.
“Ms. Arellano.”
She stared at him, and all at once she understood. A nice-looking man, Anglo, in coat and tie, not much older than she. Juana had set her up.
“I’m sorry, you’ve made a mistake. Excuse me, please.”
“No mistake. You’re Soledad Arellano. And you’re going to talk to me, whether you want to or not.”
29: FROM THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW
November 19, 2020
OPRAH: Thank you, thank you. Today we have a very serious show, on a very serious topic: the claims made by the Atoners about human ancestry. Your ancestry, mine, no matter where we came from or who we are. Now I know that all of you out there have your own views about what the Atoners and the Witnesses, the so-called “Six” who returned to Earth, have said. What I’d like to do today is open a discussion about what scientists and theologians have to say about these important matters. With me to do that is my first guest, Dr. Jeffrey Roman-Cruz of the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C. Please join with me in welcoming Dr. Roman-Cruz. [applause]
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Thank you.
OPRAH: So let me start by asking what scientists actually know about the Atoners. No one has ever seen one, is that right?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: That’s correct. No Atoner has come down to Earth, and the fifty people they took up to their base on the moon have—
OPRAH: That’s fifty total, right? The twenty-one Witnesses and also twenty-six observers from different governments and the UN?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: That’s right. Every one of the fifty has described the exact same setup, a closed room and an Atoner or Atoners stating that they are behind a screen, which no one has penetrated.
OPRAH: Has anyone tried?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: I wouldn’t know. The NIH is not affiliated with, say, the CIA. [nervous laughter from the audience]
OPRAH: So how can we know anything about the Atoners?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Well, that’s actually the point. We can only speculate. There are four schools of thought. One— Shall I just describe all four briefly?
OPRAH: Please.
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: One, that the Atoners have come from a planet much different from Earth, with a much dif
OPRAH: Machines? You mean, like my computer?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: But of course much more advanced. Artificial intelligences, but intelligences just the same. Three, that the Atoners may be so alien to us, beings composed of gases or of electromagnetic vibrations, that we can’t begin to comprehend them or their needs. Finally, that the Atoners were not behind those screens at all, but remained aboard their ship in lunar orbit, or even out beyond the solar system, sending in the equivalent of robots to interact with us.
OPRAH: And which do you believe?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: I have no idea, because there is no evidence from which to form a testable hypothesis.
OPRAH: Okay. So what about the Atoners’ message: that they kidnapped human beings from Earth— [she breaks off and turns to audience] I can’t believe I’m actually saying these sentences, can you? Did you ever think this would happen in our lifetime? [scattered applause, accompanied by murmurs and a few indistinguishable shouts] Okay, Dr. Roman-Cruz, what about that kidnapping of our “most recent common ancestor”? Who exactly is that?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Well, you get into some confusion of terminology here, because two separate things are being talked about. We can trace DNA both in mitochondria, which are transmitted only from a mother to her children, and in Y chromosomes, which are inherited only from a father. When we do that, we find that every human on Earth is descended from “Mitochondrial Eve,” a woman who lived approximately 150,000 years ago. We’re all also descended from “Y-chromosomal Adam,” who lived between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago.
OPRAH: Obviously they had a long-distance relationship. [laughter]
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: What it means is that Y-chromosomal Adam impregnated more than one woman. Of course, none of this implies that these were the only two people on Earth when they each lived. The other genetic lines just died out.
OPRAH: But that was thousands of years before the Atoners’ alleged kidnapping.
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Yes. The second relevant area of study here is work done using non-genetic models of migration patterns and population densities. Studies done as early as 2004 have been refined in just the last few years, using improved simulation software. They show that yes, there could have been as few as a dozen most recent common ancestors of all humanity as recently as ten thousand years ago. Which fits with the Atoners’ claim—without, of course, proving it.
OPRAH: Now for those literal believers of the Bible who say that the Earth itself is only four thousand years—
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Excuse me, Oprah, I have no intention of discussing religious beliefs. Of any kind.
OPRAH: Fair enough. Then let me ask you one last scientific question. Lucca Maduro claimed, in his public statements before he retreated into silence, that on one of the alien planets he went blind for twenty-four hours. Then his sight returned, but he couldn’t smell anything for twenty-four hours, and so on. I’m sure there’s nobody here that hasn’t heard the story! Is that possible—that genes can just be switched on and off like that inside his body to produce that effect?
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: Theoretically it’s very possible. In fact, two American scientists won a Nobel Prize over a decade ago for just that. Drs. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello demonstrated a technique called “RNA interference” for silencing genes.
OPRAH: So from a genetic viewpoint, Lucca Maduro may have been telling the truth.
DR. ROMAN-CRUZ: He may have, yes.
OPRAH: Thank you, Doctor. Now, not everybody is willing to trust what the media have taken to calling “The Six”—including my next guest. Back in a moment.
30: FRANK
FRANK OLENIK WANTED HIS LIFE BACK. How long should a man have to pay for a single mistake?
He finished his morning exercises in his bedroom: a hundred sit-ups, fifty push-ups, weight work. The bedroom, his since he was six years old, was painted light gray, with a single window looking out on the little yard enclosed by its chain-link fence. Frank’s dresser held only the statue of Our Blessed Lady that his sponsor had given him at his Confirmation a decade ago. Frank liked the Virgin’s expression: modest but no-nonsense as she crushed the serpent of evil under her heel. The blue of her painted gown matched the spread on his single bed, neatly made with tight hospital corners. Downstairs Ma moved around the kitchen, and the good smell of frying bacon wafted up the stairs. Frank showered, put on a button-down shirt and jeans, and combed his short brown hair.
Paul Olenik, dressed in his blues, sat at the kitchen table, finishing his coffee. Darla played with a bowl of cereal, fishing individual chocolate puffs out of the milk and lining them up wetly on the table. Frank’s mother put a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him.
“Thanks, Ma. Morning, Dad. Darla.”
“Morning, Son.” Olenik smiled fleetingly. At fifty, he was still handsome and strong, a silver-haired version of what Frank would look like someday. “Got a job interview?”
“Not today.” Frank never lied to his father.
“Then how come you’re dressed up?” Darla said.
“I’m not. I’m wearing jeans.”
“You have on a good shirt. Are you gonna put on a tie? Where are you going?”
“Stop asking so many questions,” Ma said, “and stop playing with your food. You have exactly four minutes until the school bus gets here.”
“But I just—”
“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Paul said mildly, and Darla immediately replied, “Yes, sir.” She shoveled a spoonful of cereal into her mouth.
Frank said to his little sister, “I’m going to church.”
His mother smiled at him. Paul nodded, finished his coffee, and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Gotta go.”
She held on to him a moment, the same clutching that Frank had watched his entire life. But it was brief; Judy DiPario had known when she married Paul Olenik that a cop’s life could be dangerous. For years she’d hoped he would make detective because she believed her husband would be safer that way. That he never had gotten that promotion, despite working for it, was just due to the stupidity of his captain, the same stupidity that had gotten Frank removed from the force before his probation period was even over. Paul had come close to quitting over the injustice done his son; his father’s belief in him was what had gotten Frank through the hearings, the lawyers, the enmity of cops who should have been his backups. But some of those cops had been dirty, which was why Frank had been on the verge of turning them in when somebody planted in Frank’s locker a bag of drugs stolen from the evidence room. After that, nobody believed anything Frank had to say.
Judy Olenik had talked her husband out of quitting. Paul served in a different precinct than Frank; he was so close to retirement; they needed his full pension. Frank had understood. He admired his father, always had.
But the injustice of the charges against himself had sent Frank around the bend for a while. It was the media, partly—they had tried him in the newspapers, on televison, and on the Internet. It all got blown up into a big thing, and every time Frank saw his dirty ex-partner’s smirking face yapping about “police integrity” his anger had deepened. He hadn’t known what to do with himself; a cop was all he’d ever wanted to be. And he’d been shocked and impulsive and out of control then. He admitted it. Otherwise he never would have filled out that application to be a Witness. After that, everything all just sort of snowballed. That could happen. And now here he was with the first problem of his life that he couldn’t take to his father.
Judy said, “Darla, get your backpack and get out to that school bus. Now. Frank, if you wait until the ten o’clock Mass, I’ll go with you.”
“I’m not going to Mass.”
She stopped fussing over Darl
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad,” she said simply, and said no more. Ma didn’t nag, he had to give her that. She’d been deeply disturbed when Frank started questioning his faith a few years ago, but she’d left it up to him to find his own way back. And he had, although probably not in the way his mother believed. When it came to Catholic doctrine, Judy was stricter than the Pope.
Darla, in her St. Catherine’s uniform and a Scooby-Doo jacket, scuttled out the door. Frank finished his breakfast, kissed his mother, and stood. “They out there?”
“Just him.” Judy shoved Frank’s plate into the dishwasher. “Jackal.”
“You know it.” Frank left the kitchen, with its ruffled pink curtains and wall calendar of martyred saints, to peer through the slats of the venetian blinds in the living room. No TV vans. Just the one kid reporter who was there every day, still hoping for the interview Frank was never going to give. He’d said everything he was going to say to the media, and all the other reporters had eventually given up. But his mother had called it right: They were all jackals, trying to feed on the sorry scraps of his story.
All at once there rose in his mind the city on Susban A, the lovely cream-and-pink buildings laid out in graceful circles, the heathen temples, the women with intricately bound hair and pants that flowed when they moved. A gracious city, slow moving. Corrupt, of course, and on way too many drugs, and shut out from the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. Frank wouldn’t have wanted to stay there. In fact, he tried not to think about Susban too much, because it confused him. Not seeing the dead— he’d had proof that they could do that, but what was the big deal? So the dead lingered a bit before God sent them to Heaven or Hell. If that was God’s plan, Frank Olenik wasn’t going to question it. Everybody still got their just desserts, eventually.