Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress
Aveo made the belon to her, the gesture of acknowledgment of a masterly game move. She pretended to ignore his gesture—which was also masterly.
His hopes for survival rose.
THE HOPES WERE DASHED AGAIN inside her ship.
Cam closed the door of the tiny space and flung open the cabinet door. Aveo had already caught the stench of Obu’s night soil, but the girl was in a better way than he’d dared to expect. She was not dead, not unconscious, not mad. Released from her prison, she again huddled in a terrified ball in a corner, but Cam cleaned her with water from the egg and fed her as tenderly as if she were her own babe and not a slave. It was a stupid kulith move, but there was nobody but Aveo to see. What kind of city had she come from, where slaves were treated as rem and kulith was not played and the king would send such a confusing emissary across the wide sea?
Cam said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do.”
“Isn’t that for me to say?” Aveo said, as mildly as he could. He outranked her in kulith so much it was laughable.
“You? Well, if you have anything to add— Of course, I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, and then you tell me. I think I should offer Uldunu some other trade goods—from Pular, if you want to say that—in exchange for letting me sort of hang around with him for a few days. As an observer. That way, I stand a better chance of seeing whatever the . . . the people who sent me here want me to witness. Look, here’s what I can offer him.”
She opened another metal cabinet and took out three or four boxes. Aveo, despite himself, gasped.
Jewels in colors never found anywhere on this side of the world. Cloth so soft and bright that it must have been woven by spiders he could not imagine. Small bottles of thin colored glass, or something like glass. She unstoppered one and waved it in the air. The scent of strange and unknown flowers drifted on the air, rousing even Obu. But then she opened the fourth box, and Aveo forgot all else.
Daggers. Short and mid-length, curved and straight, some with decorated hilts and some plain, and all with a wicked, sharp, thin blade. Cam said, “Not bronze. Steel, so they won’t break so easily.”
“Steel.” Another strange word. He picked up one of the shortest and plainest of the knives. It was forbidden for a scholar, painted in red and wearing the red skirt, to touch a weapon. But by Uldunu Four’s decree, Aveo was a scholar no longer. That reality was gone.
“Yes, good idea,” Cam said. “Arm yourself—I really should have thought of that last night. But do you think that if we gave him these, the king might let me follow him around the court until I see whatever I’m supposed to witness?”
“Ostiu Cam, you cannot just offer him these . . . these treasures. You must not!”
“Why?”
If her innocence was feigned, it was a wonderful act. But Aveo was losing faith that it was feigned. Another illusion gone. “It would be the grossest insult. You must lose these things to him in kulith, carefully, and with the feft move and no other.”
“With the what? Aveo, if I have to arrange this through kulith, it’ll never happen! Can’t you play for me?”
He pretended to consider. “Perhaps.”
“Oh, good. Which stuff should we bring downstairs? Will he play now, or at least soon?”
She gazed at him from those dark eyes that were Pulari and not Pulari, and Aveo suddenly saw that he would never understand her. Not if he studied her for a thousand years. He would never follow her thinking or penetrate her illusions, because even though she was not a goddess but a woman, she was so foreign, so strange, that she lay completely outside any reality he could ever grasp. She was her own reality, and she and all of the known world were not playing the same game. The best Aveo could do, he thought despairingly, was try to steer her away from disaster, and perhaps survive until she went back to wherever she had come from.
She said, “What’s wrong? You suddenly look like your entire family plus your dog just died.”
Outraged, he raised his hand. But she didn’t know about Ojea. She didn’t know anything. He let the hand fall and pointed to the box of gemstones. “Bring that first. Save the cloth and perfumes and knives. We can— Oh, in the name of the Goddess, let the slave carry the box!”
“I didn’t know you believed in any goddesses,” Cam said.
Aveo didn’t respond. He moved behind Cam, and, followed by the trembling Obu, they left the egg fallen from the sky to descend back into the palace below.
19: LUCCA
LUCCA WAS COMPLETELY BLIND.
Even the Kularians, who usually took everything in stride, seemed concerned. After he stumbled outside Hytrowembireliaz’s hut into the driving snow, shouting as loud as he could and hanging on to the open door to keep from getting lost, the villagers came running. Someone grabbed his arm and led him back inside. He could hear, smell, feel the presence of more people than the tiny hut should be able to hold, but he could see nothing, not even a glimmer of light. Someone put hands on his face, pushed up each eyelid in turn, and leaned close. Lucca felt fetid breath on his face. He groped in the dark until he found a human arm and hung on, obscurely ashamed of his need for contact.
Why blindness?
The Kularians could not provide answers. They had no real medicine, no real technology to examine his eyes. All they could offer was Hytrowembireliaz, his voice finally distinguishable to Lucca among the concerned and helpless babble, saying, “Do you wish then to set out on the second road?”
“No!” Would they listen to him, or would they slit his throat anyway? Lucca fumbled inside his tunic for his personal shield, unused for so long.
“Are you sure, my fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road? It might be easier to leave now.”
“No!”
“As you say.” Hytrowembireliaz’s smell faded.
Over the next several minutes, the hut emptied. Cold air whooshed in each time the door opened and closed. Finally, when Lucca thought everyone had gone and left him alone, he heard Chewithoztarel’s voice.
“Lucca, do you want a stone cake?”
“No. Will you—”
“Do you want me to take you to the lodge?”
“No! Will you go away and leave me alone? Please!”
He heard her get up and go out without speaking again, and he knew he had hurt her feelings. But panic didn’t let him care. He fumbled with the commlink.
“Soledad— I’ve gone blind!”
“What?”
“Blind! I can’t see anything. All at once and— What do you think it is!”
She was silent so long that he thought he’d lost the link. Then she said, “When did this happen?”
“Just now!”
“And you still can’t smell, either?”
“What? Yes, I can smell. . . . So what? Don’t you understand? I’m blind.”
“Calm down, Lucca. Yes, I understand. First you couldn’t smell, then the next day at about the same time in the morning you can smell again but not see. . . . I don’t think this is natural. Or not even caused by anything in your environment.”
“What do you mean?” Her tone, so even and rational, was lessening his first fear.
“A rapid rotation of sensory deprivation, and smell returns just as sight goes away, and both occur at the same time on successive days . . . what toxin or body failure does that by itself? Doesn’t it sound to you like something planned? Engineered?”
Her meaning seeped into him slowly. “You think the Atoners did this to me? How? Why?”
“I don’t know why. But ‘how’ might be through turning off and on various genes. Remember, they put drugs or nanomachines or something in our bodies to fight disease and lessen pain and speed healing— How can we know what else they put in? Remember, they did it after we were brought up to the moon for the second time, and no human doctors ever saw the stuff we agreed to. That one Witness who objected, that Japanese man—he was sent home and replaced by Tomiko. We don’t know what we have in us now. We were w
That sounded as if Soledad had changed her mind about the Witnesses’ malleability, but Lucca wasn’t interested in exploring this now. He seized on the hope in her theory. “So if they took away my smell and then restored it, they might restore my vision, too, perhaps tomorrow? But why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it even possible to cause blindness by switching off genes?”
“Yes,” said Soledad. “I know that because my cousin has it. The most common form of congenital blindness is caused by mutations in just two genes. Lucca, you must wait until tomorrow and see what happens.”
“They want me to ‘start on the second road.’ Which means, be killed.”
“Keep your personal shield activated.”
“I will. I don’t suppose Cam has reported anything like this?”
“No.”
Lucca didn’t ask what Cam was doing. He didn’t care. He waited for Soledad to ask, yet again, if he wanted her to bring the shuttle down and fetch him, but she said nothing. Clearly she expected him to see this through.
And he expected it of himself. He was ashamed of his momentary panic. The blindness might be gone by tomorrow. If not, he would find some way to deal with it for as long as it lasted. He had a task to do here.
But why had the Atoners done this? If they were trying to send him a message, what could it possibly be, and why hadn’t they just told him outright? The three days that the Witnesses-to-be had spent under the Atoner Dome had been packed with information. None of the volunteers had ever actually seen an Atoner; everything was spoken from behind impenetrable screens. The humans had been instructed in how to use the personal shields, the commlinks, the shuttle and ship controls, the laser guns. They had been thoroughly acquainted with the other two Witnesses that the aliens had chosen for each particular mission. They had been told about the health-enhancing injections of nanobots given while they were under anesthesia. But no Atoner had ever mentioned manipulation of the human genome. Nor even that the aliens were capable of doing so.
Lucca knew that patience had never been one of his virtues. Nonetheless, he reached for patience as he sat cross-legged on the pile of dirty rugs in the crude hut he could not see, on an alien world somewhere in a galaxy suddenly much colder than even he, so easily given to despair, had imagined.
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21: CAM
CAM, AVEO, AND THE TERRIFIED OBU were met in the long gallery by a contingent of soldiers. Aveo was pressed close behind Cam, within her shield, but Obu had no protection, and Cam had already seen one child spitted and murdered. She stopped, hoping the slave girl would not run, or drop the box of jewels that were supposed to be a gift for the king, or be attacked in any way that forced Cam to draw her laser gun. To her left the alien plants moaned and growled—how the fuck could anyone want to hear that from flowers all day?
“Be quiet,” Aveo said in her ear. He began to talk, still not realizing that her implant was giving her the translation in her other ear. Stereo.
Aveo said to the soldiers, “Conduct us to Uldunu Four. Rem Ocama has costly gifts to present from her king.”
Her king? Well, maybe you could think of the Atoners that way— No, you couldn’t. And when had Cam become a rem? Yesterday she’d been an ostiu. Still, rem was what Aveo was, so maybe that was okay.
“A gift?” said the captain of the guard, or whatever he was.
“A kulith gift,” Aveo said. Oh, Christ, more kulith. But Aveo had said that perhaps this time he could play for her, losing the jewels in exactly the way he’d insisted on: carefully, and with the feft move and no other. Like she could ever manage that.
“Come,” the captain said, and even in another language, on another world, his anger and hatred and fear were clear to Cam. She lifted her chin and started forward. But evidently the anger and hatred were equally clear to Obu, already shaking. She took one step forward behind Cam, stumbled, and dropped the box she’d been entrusted to carry. The latch sprang open and jewels spilled out like brilliant rain.
Rubies, sapphires, diamonds, garnets, emeralds, topaz . . . The trouble was that as soon as the gems hit the ground, they seemed to disappear. They were the same brilliant, glowing colors as the tiny tiles set in intricate patterns on the gallery floor and walls. Cam heard the jewels strike the ground, some clattering softly . . . and then even her twenty-twenty eyesight couldn’t distinguish where they’d rolled.
“Fuck!” she cried, and bent to gather them just as Aveo hissed into her ear, “No! Stoop and you lose all kulith!”
“Damn kulith— Oh!”
It happened fast, but Cam was faster. The captain leaped past her, graceful as a panther, drawing his dagger. Obu shrieked and fell to the ground. But he hadn’t touched her yet, and Cam thrust herself between them, touching the shield button that rooted the shield to the ground. He hit her as if she were a solid stone wall, which was pretty much what she was, and ricocheted off, in turn falling onto the tiled floor.
Then he reversed the direction of his own dagger and thrust it into his breast.
Cam gasped. Aveo said, “Quiet, ostiu.” Then, in his own language and very harshly, “Obu! Retrieve the gift!”
The girl crouched, motionless, and for a long moment Cam thought she wasn’t going to obey. But evidently Aveo scared her more than the soldiers (why?). She scrambled on all fours, snatching at jewels Cam couldn’t see, shoving them back into the metal box. Another soldier slid smoothly to the head of the military detail, knelt, crossed his arms across his breast, and said, “Please come this way, rems.”
“Follow him,” Aveo said softly.
“Obu—”
“No one will touch her now. You made good kulith, ostiu.”
She hadn’t made anything at all. Cam stepped over the body of the captain, from which blood spread in a sickening pool over the bright designs of the floor. Were any jewels caught under his corpse, in the warm, red pool? She didn’t care. Nothing here made sense, least of all the captain’s suicide, which everybody else seemed to think was normal and which of course was some sort of stupid, incomprehensible kulith move.
All at once Cam flashed on herself at twelve or thirteen, seated cross-legged on the rug in front of her PC, playing Half-Life or Counter-Strike or Grand Theft Auto with Billy and Hannah next door. Killing people and zombies and aliens in those all-engrossing games. But that was different, that was—
They entered the throne room.
IT TURNED OUT THAT KULITH wasn’t a bad way to witness this place, after all. Aveo played the actual game for her, although Cam didn’t know why. He said he was now her surrogate because she had made the “firl m
Witness what? She still had no idea. This was a savage, barbaric place, but even though her high school grades in history hadn’t been all that great, she’d seen enough movies to know that her own planet could be just as savage and barbaric. The Atoners had assured all the Witnesses that “you’ll know it when you encounter it.” But she saw nothing like that.
By late afternoon, Cam was thoroughly bored. The kulith played on, hours and hours of it. Didn’t the king have a war to run? You’d never know it. Her translator was fluent now, but she never heard anything worth noting, especially since no one spoke during the game. The vast room was as silent as a grave. Cam almost jumped when Aveo finally leaned away from the kulith board and whispered to her in Pularit, “You must leave the throne room, ostiu, and walk through the palace. You should have done it before now.”
“I should have— God, why didn’t you say so? I’m dying to get up and move around!”
His pale eyes grew weary. “I did say so. Many times. I made the pleft move . . . and ostiu, I know I told you what that means.”
“You didn’t— Forget it. I’m going.”
The moment she stood, a solid block of blue-painted, blue-skirted soldiers formed to her left and red-painted, red-skirted advisors to her right. Cam looked at Aveo, who nodded slightly, and she set off, trailed by half the palace. She walked without awareness until she found herself in the gallery where she had killed the captain of the guard. The corpse was gone, the tiles scrubbed of blood.