Free Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress Page A

inside the metal chest and slammed it shut. The girl continued to scream. Cam looked near tears.
    “It’s for her own good! Tell her!”
    Wheezing with exertion, Aveo said, “She is too terrified for any words to reach her.”
    “Fuck it! Let’s go!”
    She opened the egg’s door. Soldiers, thick as vermin, first fell back and then surged forward, hurling spears and rushing in with daggers. Aveo clung close to the woman from the sky. Amid raining weaponry and soldiers’ shouts, he waddled to a stairwell in the city where he had been a scholar and a traitor and an emissary and was now a translator for a girl who did not know what she was looking for, in a place she could not even begin to understand.
    She had called him crazy. Aveo thought Uldunu Four to be crazy. But no one—no one—could be crazier than this woman, unless it might be those masters she claimed to have never seen but who had sent her here on this craziest of all journeys.
    They reached the stairwell and began to descend.

 
     
12: PRESS CONFERENCE
     
June 4, 2020
    PRESS SECRETARY MATTHEW STEYART : Ladies and Gentlemen, the President. [sounds of shuffling as reporters rise]
    PRESIDENT : Thank you. I’d like to make a brief statement, and then I’ll take your questions. If there’s one value that has shaped our country, it’s freedom. For nearly 250 years we have guaranteed our citizens unprecedented freedom of thought, of religion, of privacy, of movement, of actions within the law. These freedoms have yielded for the American people unparalleled social richness, unparalleled peace within our borders, and unparalleled contacts with other nations. During the last three years, my administration has made every effort to protect and defend these individual freedoms. For this reason, I firmly believe that allowing United States citizens to
choose
to accompany the Atoners to the moon, and beyond, is their right and our legacy. We must wish the twenty-one “Witnesses,” both those who are our fellow countrymen and those from other nations, Godspeed. And we must hope that the knowledge they bring back from their journeys will enrich us all. Okay . . . Sandy?
    SANFORD GARDNER, CNN : Ma’am, how would you answer those critics who say that you are risking having these so-called “Witnesses” converted to some strange philosophy or hostile military intention and so returning to the United States as brainwashed or otherwise altered spies?
    PRESIDENT : You mean they might want to ask intrusive questions of the White House? [laughter] Seriously, as I just said, the United States does not limit the thoughts of its citizens. We of course limitactions, for the good of us all. But those Americans who have volunteered to travel with the Atoners are as free as the rest of us to be exposed to, consider, and adopt any thought they choose. If, however, they return and perform actions that in any way endanger this country, of course that will be appropriately addressed at the appropriate time. But the Atoners have approached us in peace, as friends, and as friends we accept their overtures, which, I’d like to remind you, are part of the most stupendous event to affect mankind in centuries.
Centuries
.
    [ MANY VOICES ]: Ma’am! Ma’am! Madam President!
    PRESIDENT : Yes, Kyle?
    KYLE YOUMANS, NBC NEWS : You’ve been praised and condemned both for mobilizing the National Guard the moment that the anti-Atoner riots began in four separate American cities. Sixteen people are dead as a result of either those riots or subsequent Guard actions. Do you now consider that mobilization premature or in any other way a mistake?
    PRESIDENT : I do not. Most of us are not going to the stars, at least not just yet. We barely have a human presence on the moon, even with Selene City and China’s Village of Heaven and the commercial base of Farrington Tours. Most of humanity lives
here
, on Earth, and here where we live, order and law must be preserved. Jenna?
    JENNA JOHNSON, FOX