Steal Across the Sky (15 page)

“Thank you.” Lucca spun around and started toward Hytrowembireliaz’s hut.

It made no sense. There was some kind of telepathy going on,
clearly, unless the old lady had been lying to him and everyone had already known about the
pybalt
slain so long ago. But Lucca didn’t think they lied. The villagers were too startled by the idea of a girl hunting, and their surprise felt genuine to him. But the telepathy had faded so fast, whereas when Chewithoztarel had claimed to be “talking” to Ragjuptrilpent, the phenomenon had gone on for many days. Was Nabnopithoz merely bad at telepathy, and so covering up his inability by claiming that the old woman had “already left on the third road”? Was Blanbilitwan engaging in some elaborate cultural ritual by claiming to “ask” her mother before she pulled the information telepathically from Lucca’s own mind? What the hell was going on here?

E che cazzo!

He stumbled through the twilight cold to Hytrowembireliaz’s hut, only slightly warmer, where he could call Soledad and ask her to help him make sense of the senseless. A little ways out on the plain he glimpsed a small mound: a blanket already half-covered with snow. Plengajiaz’s body, abandoned and desolate. Lucca looked away and kept walking.

SOLEDAD SAID HESITANTLY
, “What if they’re telling the truth?”

“What do you mean?” The hut was almost completely dark, and in the distance Lucca heard shouting and laughing. Soon the family would return to sleep.

She said, “Everything you just told me, about the old lady and the
pybalt
and those two Kularians asking her about it . . . What if they really can talk to their dead?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lucca snapped. “I’m talking science, not some fuzzy mysticism.”

“Sometimes science starts out as mysticism. Like . . . like alchemy became chemistry. And this is an alien world! What if the rules are somehow different here?”

“Kularians are
human
, Soledad—you know that. And do you really believe that different laws of physics and matter hold in one part of the universe than another?”

He sensed her considering, striving to be fair. “No. I don’t believe that.”

“Then come up with a different hypothesis,
cara
. You talked before of my genes and—”

“That was about your blindness.”

“Which is now tastelessness.” He laughed, sourly amused at his own diction. The door to the hut opened. “I must go—good-bye!”

Chewithoztarel rushed in. “Guess what, Lucca? Something really strange happened!”

His breath caught. “It did? What?”

“I wrestled Yerwazitel, and I
won
!” She crowed happily and stamped her little booted feet. “Can you believe it?”

(To be sung to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round
the Mountain When She Comes.”)

 

They’ll be schlepping to the stars when they go,

They’ll be schlepping to the stars when they go,

Aliens ship them out

And what is that about?

They’ll be schleppin’ to the stars when they go
.

 

They’ll be witnessin’ for ’Tonies when they go,

They’ll be witnessin’ for ’Tonies when they go,

Someone did a crime

Way way back in time,

So they’ll be witnessing for ’Tonies when they go.

 

The crime’s a great big question mark to us,

The crime’s a great big question mark to us,

And why the ’Tonies fess to it

Is anybody’s guesstimate,

’Cause the crime’s a great big question mark to us.

 

Our guys’ll come back to see us—so we hope!

Our guys’ll come back to see us—so we hope!

And maybe then we’ll understand

This weird and scary Wonderland,

If our guys come back to see us, as we hope.

The above is hereby officially condemned by the following organizations: People’s Co ali tion Against Alien Interference, Mothers Against Abduction, Fight Now! and the state legislatures of North Dakota, Alabama, and Arizona.

SMALL SHARP STINGS ON HIS HANDS
, his legs, his feet around his sandals. And a roaring in his ears, almost as soon as the vines touched him. No, that wasn’t the vines, it was Cam shouting, or Uldunu Four’s army shouting— No, it was Ojea, a child again and calling for his father to come right away, it was urgent, so urgent—

Aveo knew he was dying. One always died, when mating
thrul
got you. Not the best kulith moves could save you, nothing could save you from the mating poison— The din inside his head went on and on, although maybe it was outside his head. . . . He flew through the air and someone was roasting meat, its smell the last thing he noticed as the nothingness of death claimed him.

But it wasn’t death, after all. Somehow he was sitting on the inside of Cam’s silver egg and she was holding a cup of water for him. The pain was leaving him, sliding away from his head and body and feet like a tide rushing out. And although he felt no motion, the strange windows showed the city falling away beneath them. . . . They
were flying
. He tried to sit up, but weakness took him and he fell back.

Cam said, “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!” He was surprised at the strength of his own voice. “How did you heal me?”

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

He groped for memory. “The plants are mating. You went among them at the time the Goddess of All Green has them in thrall, or so think the people. Ostiu Cam, I told you—”

“I don’t understand anything you told me,” she said wearily. “I don’t
even understand anything I saw directly. How can I— 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!”

Everything you know
. Did she really think that was possible? He had a lifetime of experiences—a lifetime he had almost lost—and she was under the illusion she could absorb them without having lived his life? Without even having lived in his part of the world? Reality was not that malleable, that you could bend it like iron in the forge to fit another’s mind. So far, this woman had not even been able to understand the small pieces of reality he had shown her.

Yet here he was in her flying ship, owing her his life, and he had no idea what else to do except answer whatever she thought to ask.

“Yes,” he said, and closed his eyes. “Ask what you will.”

“Okay . . . you said about the plants that I walked around in them when they’re mating and the goddess— Which goddess?”

“Belief holds only one: the Goddess of All Green. Ostiu Cam, you have moved her piece in kulith.”

“Kulith! That’s a game!”

Again Aveo struggled to sit up, and this time he succeeded. Although he was weak, it was amazing how well he felt: clearheaded, even cheerful. His fingers explored the healing cloths Cam had put on his neck, but he didn’t remove them.

“Kulith is not a game. Don’t you yet understand? Although it uses the things of life, slaves and crops and soldiers and wars, kulith is not a mirror of life. Kulith is a mirror of the mind that produces life.”

“A mirror . . . I don’t see.”

“In kulith are all the thought processes, and all the results of those processes, that shape a person’s destiny. We play kulith to discover who we are, and who others are, and to foreshadow and so cause what will happen between us.”

“Like . . . like seeing the future?”

“No. Creating the future, by creating the interactions between players that will shape their future.”

She scowled, a big uneducated woman trying to send her mind where it would not go. But how could it not go there? She said, “And
this goddess . . . If you shape your own future by playing kulith, then gods don’t have any say in what happens? So why is there a game piece for the goddess?”

Aveo said carefully, “Most people believe that the Goddess observes all, and affects all through her sacred servant, Uldunu Four.”

“We have something like that, where I come from, only it’s a God. He—”

“A male?” Despite everything, he was slightly shocked. “But how would such a belief come to be? Males cannot birth life!”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But
you
. . . you don’t believe in that goddess, do you?”

Casually asked, as if it were a normal question:
Is it raining? Did you breakfast yet
? This question, which Aveo had never answered directly in his life except once, to his son Ojea, had gotten that son killed. Cam waited and finally he said, “No. I do not believe in the Goddess.”

“Me, neither, only . . . but . . . Aveo, the only two things I’ve seen here that we don’t have on Earth are kulith and those plants. All the rest is the same: wars and kings and power struggles and slavery and . . . Actually, maybe we do have kulith, someplace. There’s a lot of weird religions around the world and I know that some old cultures played chess like— I don’t know enough! I didn’t even go to college! I don’t know why the Atoners picked me!”

Aveo followed none of this. Also, something was happening in his head, a sudden darkening. One foot began to tremble slightly.

She was still talking. Her words blurred, came back too sharply to his ears, blurred again. And then all at once there were two voices, both female, and Cam was gazing at the window on the wall where a moment ago there had been an empty field and now all at once there was a woman’s head, just the head, a monstrous thing large enough to fill the window, and the head was moving as it talked. “—and then Lucca—”

“—did he—”

“—an old lady, dead—”

They weren’t words in Pularit, or Memenatit, or Uldunuit. Nonsense words, such as mothers crooned to infants in arms. And Cam’s eyes were wide as a child’s, as if the moving picture of the woman had— How could a picture move, but of course it was a window, still a woman’s
head that large . . . and such a head, with short curls the dull red of
guem
flowers how long since—

“Aveo!”

Cam knelt over him then, while the monstrous head craned to see through the window and looked both puzzled and concerned. A sharp sting . . . oh, please not more poisoned
thrul
vines . . . but it wasn’t. A sharp, very thin sword slid into him, in Cam’s hand, and again the darkness receded from his mind and her words created sense.

“That was all I’ve got, the last-ditch effort,” she said, but where were the ditches? This flying ship held no ditches.

“Aveo, I think . . . I think you’re dying.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” Darkness soon. Pushed away for a short time, maybe, but soon.

“No!” she cried, and he had to smile. Perhaps the smile came from some potion smeared on her small sword, but perhaps not. The young were laughable. They could never see that death might be welcome.

He summoned up the strength to murmur, “Go home, Ostiu Cam,” but he didn’t have breath for the rest of what he wanted to say:
Go home to that place where there are wars but you have not fought them, slavery but you have not seen it, poisonous plants but not mating in the gardens of a goddess. Go home and
—

“Soledad!” Cam was screaming at the wall. “Take the shuttle to Kular A!”

“
To Kular A
?”

“Yes! If Lucca really saw—” There was a lot more, but Aveo didn’t hear it. The room went dark. He felt the ship lift, and then he felt Cam’s arms picking him up off the floor and holding him, and then he felt nothing at all.

LUCCA WOKE
just as the first light of dawn, thin and sickly, filtered through the hut’s tiny window. His commlink vibrated urgently against his skin.

Soledad knew that he’d kept his tech hidden from the Kularians; she would call him only if it was very urgent. Close to him—too close, their reek filled his nostrils and their snoring his nose—Hytrowembireliaz’s family slept. Lucca fumbled for the commlink, opened the link, and breathed softly, “Yes?” The rest of them might sleep as if drugged by winter itself, but Chewithoztarel woke easily. As Lucca’s eyes adjusted, he kept them on her corner of the hut.

“Something’s happening,” Soledad said, loud in his ears. “Go outside and dress as warmly as you can.”

“What—”

“Go!”

Still watching Chewithoztarel, Lucca eased himself soundlessly from his pungent pile of rugs and blankets.
Something’s happening
, she had said, not
Something happened
. The ship? The Atoners? Cam? Dread coupled with excitement sent spasms racing along his spine.

The cold was a palpable thing, slicing at him like knives. There was no need to “dress warmly”—he already wore everything he’d been given. Lucca wrapped an extra blanket around himself and crept to the door. Chewithoztarel, miracle of miracles, did not wake.

Outside it was even colder. Shivering, Lucca said, “Soledad?”

“Cam’s on her way in the shuttle to Kular A, and she’s bringing a native.”

“
What
?”

“She insisted.” Soledad sounded angry, apprehensive, and fascinated,
all at once. “You know that the Atoners said that you two are the mission decision makers on your respective planets. I’m just the coordinator.”

“But this isn’t her planet! It’s mine!” A second later, Lucca heard how that sounded. He strove, teeth chattering, for a more adult tone. “Why is she coming? Why are
they
coming?”

“The native is dying, apparently. I told Cam about your discoveries of telepathy in death, and Cam wants . . . I don’t understand what she wants, exactly. Maybe she doesn’t understand, either—you know Cam. But they’re landing three miles from your village in an hour and twenty-three minutes, and you should be there. I’m going to voice-guide you to the spot. It should be well out of sight of—”