Heaven's War (16 page)

“Who are they? Will we meet them? Are they watching over us, helping us? What do they look like?” In spite of herself, Valya grew excited. This was a game she could enjoy…

But Camilla was suddenly done playing or talking. She shook her head, as if to clear it, then stood up…somewhat wobbly, as if her legs had gone to sleep. “Not here,” she said.

And, without waiting for Valya, she headed for the Temple opening.

With a backward glance at Stewart and his party, who were now arguing with Dale, Valya painfully got to her feet, grabbed her bag, and gave chase as best she could.

Out in the twilight of the habitat, she saw Camilla fifty meters away, gesturing for her to come. She caught up with her and, after a brief exchange, wound up following her to the wall of the habitat opposite the Temple opening—literally behind the structure.

“Do you have a destination in mind?” Valya asked. “Or do you just want to take a walk?” She could easily understand the need…if, as claimed, the girl had been dead. Of course, Valya reminded herself, her body was new; it wasn’t really as if Camilla had to shake off a year or two of cold sleep in a coffin….

Physical issues aside, however, Camilla might well feel a spiritual need to walk, run, explore, to reconnect with her hereditary hunter-gatherer impulses….

“I don’t really know,” Camilla told her. “But I have a…picture in my mind of a place against this wall.” She stopped and glanced backward. “The Temple will be farther away.” She turned down-habitat again, resuming her march.

Valya discovered that she was a little out of breath, and that her legs were weak…yet the exercise felt good. She was moving…granted, it reminded her of a joke Dale Scott was fond of repeating (as he was fond of repeating every witticism in his repertoire), about a country woman whose young son had spent his hard-earned chore money on a
merry-go-round: “Well, you’ve spent your money and enjoyed your ride…but where have you
gone
?”

She was going nowhere but, for the moment, enjoying the ride.

“I’m sorry to keep asking this question, but I hope you understand,” Valya said. “How are you feeling?”

Even in the dim light, Valya could detect a grown-up change of expression on Camilla’s face. It was almost…reflective. “Somewhere between troubled and giddy.” Then she looked directly at her. “I hope
you
understand.”

Valya then told Camilla, “You are very well spoken,” and the girl smiled and said, “As are you.” Not
You, too
.

She even followed up with a question of her own. “You can talk to everyone and you look like you belong. How do you do that?”

So, even in their brief time together, the girl had spotted Valya’s little working trick, the one that gave her so much success as a translator: Whenever she spoke another language, she acted it as well.

“When I was in secondary school, thirteen or fourteen years old, I noticed how, in moving from one language to another, speakers used different gestures, posture, and facial expressions. There was, in my school, a theater instructor named Grigory. He was very young and very handsome.”

“Did you fall in love with him?” That was another question beyond Camilla’s age.

“No,” she said. “He was not likely to fall in love with me.” Not because of age, but sexual preference…Valya did not want to discuss that with Camilla. Things were strange enough!

“But Grigory was so pleased that any student had even noticed, much less bothered to ask about it, that he gave me a master class in the value of these cues to the actor’s art. He told me, ‘Valyochka, voice isn’t just words and volume, voice is where sounds originate in your mouth.’

“Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said, ‘Valyochka, you’ve watched many American and British films.’ You don’t know this, but almost every student in Russia studies English from the first year in school.”

Camilla had only nodded, again, the gesture of a much older person.

“Part of that education was watching all these movies, and Grigory had done this, too. ‘Valyochka,’ he said, ‘watch one of each again, and this time notice: British English originates in the front of the mouth, American English toward the back. If you speak American English, and wish to sound convincing, not only must you emulate the pitch and eliminate your accent and know the words by heart…you must locate the words in the right place in your mouth.’ Then he smiled—I still remember this—and said, ‘There’s a reason they call a language a ‘tongue.’”

Caught up in her own storytelling—her biggest weakness, aside from unsuitable men, was enjoying the sound of her own voice in any of her languages—Valya didn’t realize that Camilla had stopped two meters back.

“Are we where you wanted to go?” she asked the girl.

Camilla said “Yes,” but her body language and gestures lagged, a sign to Valya that the girl was unsure.

“And what are we to find here?” They were close to the wall of the habitat…which to Valya looked like the rocky face of a canyon rising to the sky. It was shadowed, of course, and relatively smooth…but even in the dim light she could make out different-colored striations.

There were bushes and trees growing here, too, making it difficult to see whether the place where wall met floor looked artificial, or had been cleverly engineered to look “natural.”

Camilla was ignoring the wall and the trees, however. She was walking slowly parallel to the wall, eyes on the ground, like a child at the beach in search of shells. “Are you looking for something?” Valya said.

More uncertainty now. “I…think so.” She stopped. “Here.”

They were standing in an open patch of dirt indistinguishable from that around it, except for the fact that it seemed flat, with a suggesting of circularity. As if there were some kind of plate two meters across embedded in the ground.

“I see,” Valya said, lying only slightly. “And what happens now?”

Camilla smiled. “Now I want to see inside your purse.” She reached toward it.

Valya hesitated. For some reason, she didn’t want to hand over her purse—which was odd, because back on Earth, she would have been happy to show a girl what she carried.

But, as every breath and sight reminded her…she was not on Earth. “Why?” she said. “It’s just ordinary stuff.”

“I’m not entirely sure.” But Camilla still held out her hand. “But I just know I need something other than the clothes we’re wearing…”

She handed over the purse and watched as Camilla opened it and—with a fair amount of reverence, she had to admit—began taking out the items within. Phone. Package of Kleenex. Badges. A pack of chewing gum.

“Ah!” Camilla said, clutching a Chanel lipstick. She handed the other items and the bag back to Valya, then stepped into the center of the “plate” and placed the lipstick there.

“What’s going to happen?” Valya said.

“Something,” Camilla said.

Valya suddenly felt a vibration through her feet and sandals, an electric tingle that lasted less than a second. She smelled something unusual, even by Keanu standards: like plastic burning.

The dirt in the plate rippled once.

The light in the entire habitat flickered several times, bathing the scene in a strange strobelike effect.

Most human beings, in times of great stress or confusion, revert to their milk language.

Not Valya Makarova. When she saw that there were now
two
lipsticks instead of one, she found herself echoing her former lover, Dale Scott: “Oh, holy shit.”

Camilla seemed equally surprised. Hesitantly, she reached out for the “new” lipstick. “It’s warm,” she said. She handed it to Valya.

“Shouldn’t you keep the new one?”

“My mother told me I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was twelve.”

Valya wanted to laugh. This girl had died and been reborn on another planet! She had just taken part in some type of alien techno-magic! Yet she still remembered some argument with her mother! For an instant, Valya wished she could become mother to a daughter—just to know that one of her parental strictures would sustain itself across time and space, and through death!

“I’m sure that if your mother were here, she would allow you to have it. Besides”—Valya knew there was a risk to this, but felt it was time to confront the subject—“you’ve been dead for two years, right?”

“I’m not sure. Uncle Lucas said so.”

“When did you die?”

Now the girl looked troubled and sad, and Valya felt she had made a mistake. “It was late in February. I had been in the hospital since before Christmas.”

“The year was…”

“End of 2017. Beginning of 2018.”

“And you were…”

“Nine.”

“That was almost two years ago, Camilla. By my calculations, you are going on eleven. And you may wear lipstick. But let me test it first.” Valya kept her tone light, but she was not sure that this Chanel knockoff would be lipstick.

She opened it and screwed it into position…noting that it seemed to have been used to the same degree as her original. It looked and smelled the same—odd to have a whiff of that waxy fragrance here.

She applied it, rolled her lips. “Perfect,” she announced, and presented the lipstick to Camilla, who almost squealed with delight.

Valya knelt to examine the strange circle of dirt, which still showed frozen ripples, like Arctic snow. The original lipstick rested in a bowl-like depression perhaps three centimeters across. Wondering if what she had witnessed was less duplication than transference, she plucked it out, opened it, tested it.

No, it was still the same.

She considered the magic plate and the contents of her purse. “I wonder if it would duplicate my phone,” she said.

She stopped.

Camilla was simply staring at her. The lipstick was in her hand, but the girl had made no move to apply it. “What do you think?” she said.

The girl said something in a language other than Portuguese. Valya recognized it: German. “About what?”

Camilla’s eyes were bright, but vacant…much like those of eighty percent of the teenagers Valya had seen in the past generation, all linked to Slates and earbuds and even experimental direct-neural taps.

She was distracted and unable to respond.

By whom? she wondered. Or what?

“Let’s go back to the others,” she said.

Without a word, Camilla got to her feet and began walking, and never looked back or sideways.

Valya wanted to run.

“Makali girl, when did you eat last?”

Vikram Nayar’s voice jarred Makali like a slap. She was sitting against the wall of the Temple—or, as she persisted in thinking of it, part of an
alien structure
on an
alien world
!—writing in her notebook. Nayar was squatting, tailorlike, a few meters away. There was no one else around. The deadened air of the Keanu habitat made it seem as if she and Nayar were the only humans within kilometers.

“I don’t know,” she said. In the weeks she had worked with the
Brahma
mission director, she had grown to appreciate his fatherly side. She would have appreciated it slightly more if she’d believed his attentions to her were entirely fatherly. “Since the shooting.”

Nayar grunted at the reminder. Although famously ill-tempered—Makali had not yet enjoyed the full force of the man’s wrath, but she had seen it descend on any number of young and not-so-young men in the control center—he claimed to be bothered by violence. He claimed Gandhi as his model. Well, as Makali’s father used to say, “We all need our ideals, no matter how short of them we fall.”

“There isn’t much food left.”

She slid her Moleskine back into her purse and stood up. “Then why tell me to eat?”

“You need your strength. We all do.”

“Humans can function on far less food than they know. I believe Gandhi proved that.”

She knew she was provoking Nayar—knew also that a man his age might take that as flirtation, which meant that she ought rightly to share the blame for his attentions.

But she couldn’t help it. Fighting back—all the while knowing that Nayar wasn’t likely to explode at her as he would with a male subordinate—gave Makali a sense of power, which was a rare and precious thing for an Austro-Indian woman in India.

And all Nayar could do was grunt.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“A minute, no more.” His face told her he was underestimating, that he had likely sat there for some time. “What are you writing so furiously?”

“Observations, of course.” She had no need to lie about it. “I’m an exoterrestrial specialist in an exoterrestrial environment. Every breath is an observation.”

“Or, rather, an interaction—and possible contamination.” He smiled. He was reverting to fatherly, possibly even professorial mode.