Steal Across the Sky (14 page)

One of the men she’d burned crawled at her feet. He reached out feebly and tried to grab her ankle. The next moment the hand fell. She could smell him, charred flesh. . . . Her gorge rose. In her arms Aveo groaned, a pitiful sound she could hear even over the shrieking of the furious plants. Despite his light weight, her arms were starting to ache from clutching him.

Carefully, so as not to shift him outside the shield, Cam moved Aveo enough to again reach her gun. She killed everyone who didn’t flee the gallery. When it was empty, she turned off the shield, shifted Aveo to a fireman’s carry, turned it back on, and started for the shuttle.

No one approached her on the steep staircase to the roof. No one prevented her from entering the shuttle.

Panting hard, she dumped Aveo on the floor and searched frantically for the med kit. The Atoners had carefully explained each med, but that was for use with humans— Fuck it, Aveo
was
a human! But what exactly was wrong with him?

“Aveo! Hang on, it’ll be all right—”

He stared at her uncomprehendingly; she’d spoken En glish.

Cam pulled down the collar of his robe and slapped a patch on his neck. The Atoners had described this patch as “general use,” for shock or infection or allergy. . . . God knew what-all was in it. After a minute she stuck on another patch, for parasites and food poisoning. For the first time, in a detached corner of her mind that she hadn’t known was even functioning, she realized that none of the twenty-one human Witnesses were doctors or medical scientists. Was that deliberate?

Aveo’s eyes opened and he gazed at her. She watched the pain clear from his eyes. “What . . .”

“Don’t talk. I gave you some medicine. I don’t know if it will cure you or not but— Fuck!”

The entire shuttle was rocking.

Cam jumped up and switched on the external display. Slaves— hundreds of them, it looked like—were massed outside the shuttle, pushing at it. Soldiers stood behind them, shouting orders. Fury surged in Cam like a tsunami. She commlinked Soledad and shouted, “Lift the shuttle. Immediately!”

Soledad asked no questions. A minute later the shuttle rose, and the Kularians dwindled into so many tiny, head-raised figures on the roof of a miniature palace.

Soledad said, “Cam? What’s happening?”

“Tell you later. But I’m okay now. Just set us down in some empty field someplace, far away from these damned assholes!” She returned to Aveo.

He tried to sit up but fell back. Cam brought a blanket and made him comfortable on the cramped floor space. She held a cup of water for him. The shuttle settled in the middle of an empty plain. Aveo looked, bewildered, from the wall displays to Cam, back again.

“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!”

“I thought so.” She removed the dead tendrils and threw them in the disposal. Aveo’s voice sounded much stronger. Maybe he would be all right.

As soon as she thought this, Cam began to tremble. Aveo might be okay, but she was a murderer. She had killed God knows how many more people, just mowed them down as if they were grass or wheat or some fucking thing, fired over and over on
people
—

Aveo said something. “What?”

“How did you heal me?”

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

“The plants are mating. You went among them at the time the Goddess
of All Green flows within them, or so think the people. Ostiu Cam, I told you—”

“I don’t understand anything you told me,” she said, still trembling.
Firing over and over, all those murdered people
. . . “I don’t even understand anything I saw for myself. How can the— 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!”

She couldn’t read his expression—surprise, surprise. She had misread everything here. Aveo was her only success, and her only link to this so-called “witnessing” of Kular B. This weak, emaciated, intelligent old man who seemed more alien to her than the Atoners ever had.

“Yes,” he said, and once more closed his eyes.

THE MORNING AFTER HE’D GONE BLIND
, Lucca’s sight returned.

It happened as he sat in a corner of the lodge where Hytrowembireliaz had dumped him on a pile of smelly rugs, and it happened instantly. One moment darkness, and the next a room full of people. Too many people. Lucca saw what he hadn’t suspected in his unseeing misery and had never expected to see until spring: strangers.

Not that they looked any different from the villagers. But by now Lucca could name every one of the eighty-eight villagers, describe every one of their faces, recite their kinship ties, and even detail what each ate and how well each danced. With nothing else to occupy his mind and the Atoners’ mandate to “witness,” the villagers had become his library, his newscasts, his d-vid games, his e-mail, his television perpetually tuned to a boring channel. But here were actual strangers!

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.”