Free Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress Page B

NEWS : Madam President, your handling of the entire Atoner crisis has resulted in low—lower—approval ratings for your administration and for you personally. Do you think this reflects an understanding on the part of the American people that their leader has sold out to aliens?
    PRESIDENT : I do not. Chris?
    CHRIS DEFAZIO,
THE NEW YORK TIMES : What sort of knowledge do you expect that the Witnesses will bring back to us?
    PRESIDENT : How can we know yet? Let me tell you a story. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria summoned the scientist Michael Faraday to Buckingham Palace. Mr. Faraday had just formulated important laws related to electricity, and the queen was curious. She watched his various demonstrations and listened to his explanations and finally asked, “But Mr. Faraday, what use is this ‘electricity’?” Doyou know what Faraday answered his monarch? He said, “Ma’am, what use is a baby?”
    We don’t know what knowledge will come to us from beyond the stars. But like a baby, it should be nourished and watched as it grows and develops.
    CHRIS DEFAZIO : Follow-up question, please! Ma’am . . . If you weren’t the president of the United States, were young enough, and had a chance to become a Witness for the Atoners and visit another planet—Would you have gone?
    PRESIDENT : [long pause] In a heartbeat.

 
     
13: LUCCA
     
     
    IT SNOWED HEAVILY FOR THREE DAYS and three nights. Village and steppes piled with white. The Kularians, laughing, dug paths and tunnels from huts to community lodge to store house to privies. The winter didn’t seem to change their mood at all; they were no more affected by cold and monotony and boredom than were rabbits or badgers on Earth.
    Nor was Lucca any longer bored. He set about cautiously, trying to arouse no suspicion, to investigate Kularian telepathy. From the day he’d landed, twenty-eight days ago, the natives had assumed that he was just like them. Lucca didn’t want to disturb this notion. He wasn’t sure what they would do if they discovered he was not telepathic.
    How did it work for them?
    He feigned sleep until long after Hytrowembireliaz and his family had left for the lodge and another day of communal cooking, dancing, gossiping. Then he sat up and concentrated on an image that Chewithoztarel could never have seen: the rich Tuscany vineyards of Vino Maduro in Cortona, where Lucca had grown up. In loving detail he pictured the vines heavy with purple Sangiovese grapes, the pale fields dreaming in the sun, the tall, thin cypresses spiking the blue sky. He went back to the sights and sounds and even the smells of childhood, before Oxford and London and Gianna. As he concentrated on the images, he thought over and over the Italian word
vigna
. After at least fifteen minutes of this, he fought his way through the snow to the community lodge.
    It was more subdued than usual. No one was dancing, and the adults sat in small groups, talking quietly. Those children not outside played a betting game with stones or wove ribbons on their small handheld looms,a current fad. Chewithoztarel, however, sat alone in a corner, staring at her fingers, uncharacteristically silent.
    “Chewithoztarel?” Lucca said, sitting beside her on the usual pile of smelly rugs. “Are you ill?”
    “No.”
    “Is something wrong?”
    “No.”
    “You look sad.”
    “I am.”
    He waited. Often, saying nothing prompted people to talk—although not usually Kularians. Was this sadness somehow connected to his images of gorgeous scenery the little girl would never see? That seemed a pretty sophisticated concept for Chewithoztarel, but Lucca didn’t know for sure. He didn’t know anything for sure anymore. His heart thumped and he had to make himself breathe normally.
    Chewithoztarel, maddening as always, said nothing.
    Lucca thought hard about the
vigna
. Maybe one had to be physically closer to a receiving telepath in order to get through . . . but then how had