Steal Across the Sky (18 page)

“It’s Mama! She’s dying!”

Soledad’s stomach heaved. She had hated her mother, pitied her, tried to help her, realized that Mama didn’t want help, hated her again— all the stages you go through when you live with a drunk. The teenage Soledad had screamed at her mother that she wished Mama used junk instead of liquor so that Soledad could get her sent to jail. Mama had vomited on the carpet, drunk the rent money, attacked a cop, gone missing for days at a time. But throughout she’d remained strong as a mule. She was only forty-five. Cirrhosis already? Or had she finally moved on to street drugs and OD’d?

But Soledad’s voice stayed calm as she said, “What happened, Juana?”

“Listen to you! You don’t even care! She fell down the stairs and broke every bone in her body and now she’s dying!”

“What hospital is she in?”

“She’s at home! She wants to die at home and so I’m taking care of her, Ms. Too-Proud-to-See-Her-Family! But she wants to see the great star traveler before she goes, so you better come soon!”

“All right. All right. I’ll be there this afternoon.”

“Good.” Juana banged down the phone.

Something wasn’t right here, Soledad thought. Would a hospital really send home a woman who had broken “every bone in her body”? Maybe they would, if the woman insisted on dying at home and her daughters made huge scenes and the Universal Health facility was overcrowded and inadequate, as they all were.

Dying. Her mother. Setting out on the second road, the last door, the golden ladder, the eternal sea, the bridge to far, the deep cave. Each of The Six had brought back a different description of the afterlife as perceived by the natives on an Atoner planet. And each of them was—

“APC interrupts your morning avatar with breaking news,” said the wall screen, much louder than before. The blue-skinned avatar, whom Soledad had forgotten, was displaced by a middle-aged man with the deep facial lining of serious news.

“Emma Jane Taymor, the daughter of Vice President John Taymor, has just been pronounced dead on arrival at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. The White House has not yet issued a statement, but reliable sources say that Emma, who turned seventeen last month, committed suicide. The teenager posted a WT referring to the motto of the Why Wait? Society, which asserts that—”

Soledad gripped the edge of the sink and held on.
Seventeen
. And a Web Testament, with the motto of that perverted society that had grown so exponentially in the last six months: “If a better world than this awaits us after death, why wait?”

Cam was responsible for this. Was responsible for all the Emma Jane Taymors, all the young people offing themselves across the globe. And it did seem to be mostly the young. Maybe the old were more skeptical. Or maybe it was just that they could already glimpse the second road ahead of them. “Even if a better world awaits us after death, why rush?”

And you, Soledad?
Did she believe that second road existed? The great question, and after six months she still couldn’t decide, couldn’t come down securely on one side of the question or the other. Cam’s fervent certainty, or Lucca’s equally fervent denial? Eternity for all, or “merely” stress-related telepathy activated by hormones released in the presence of death, the genes for which the Atoners had cut out of the human genome ten thousand years ago? Or something else entirely?

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.”

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 different atmosphere, and they stayed concealed both to remain sealed in chambers with their own atmospheric mix and because we might find their appearance distasteful or frightening in some way. Two, that they are machines, and remain concealed because human beings might not put much faith in machine intelligence or—

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]