Steal Across the Sky (12 page)

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.

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 willing to do anything to have this opportunity.”

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.

You’re more curious than average, bolder than average, smarter than average. You know that this universe of ours holds marvels, and you want to see as many of them as possible. And now . . . you can see more than you ever imagined. See, touch, experience.

You can go to the moon.

The ultimate adventure, dreamed about for millennia . . . and now a reality.

Contact our representatives today to book your once-in-a-lifetime trip. By appointment only.

• Trip includes four nights at Earth Base Alpha and two nights at Luna Station.
  
• Medical prescreening provided.
  
• Three-day Space Orientation and Training given at Earth Base Alpha.
  
• Rover trip to view Selene City and—NEW!—the Atoner Dome.
  
• Powerful telescope at Luna Station shows amazing sky and moon detail.
  

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
move,” although Cam had no idea what that was or when she might have made it or what it signified. But Aveo moved the game pieces, steadily doling out jewels to Uldunu as forfeits for whatever, and Cam was free to watch the comings and goings of bare-chested, skirted men painted red or blue and of naked slaves, both male and female. She was free to “witness.”

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.