LUCCA
“Well,”
Cam said, rising on her toes and leaning toward the bridge’s main
screen, “there they are.”
Lucca,
despite the tightness in his throat, was startled into laughter.
All the hoping to be chosen for this insane mission, all the
agonizing over the Atoners’ unknown selection criteria, all the
complicated family reactions and media furor and governmental
observation, all the tension on the voyage out – and then Cam greets
the alien star system with the most mundane understatement
possible. And this was Cam, an American who thrived on
flamboyance like vineyards on sun. Although perhaps that was the
point. Cam was making an uncharacteristic effort to be careful.
Soledad
scowled. Lucca understood: Soledad had to be viewing the Kular
System with mixed emotions. She was the alternate Witness, and
neither Lucca nor Cam had died on the trip to Kular. Neither had
fallen ill, gone insane, changed his or her mind. Cam and Lucca
were going down to the twin planets below, and Soledad was not.
Nonetheless, Soledad was generous enough to purge the scowl from her
face and say, “I wish you both luck.” Lucca took her hand and
squeezed it.
He didn’t
touch Cam.
On screen,
Kular A and Kular B sparkled with the magnificence of the remote.
The binary planet system rotated around a common center of gravity,
1.4 AU from their G5 star. At some time in the unimaginable past
they had formed from the same dust cloud, and their composition and
gravity were similar. That much the Atoners had told their human
surrogates.
Neither planet had any moons, although each would dominate the
other’s sky. On Kular A, the pole end of the one giant continent
was obscured by a massive dust storm, but the rest shone clear with
blue seas and green flora. Clouds drifted over the one inhabited
continent on B. Or maybe it wasn’t the only inhabited continent any
longer. The Atoners had not, they said, visited Kular in five
hundred Terran years. They would never visit it again. That’s what
human Witnesses were for.
“Let’s go
to the shuttle bay,” Cam said. More mundane speech. But she was
right; commonplace words were what was needed right now. Procedural
speech, unambiguous speech, careful speech that didn’t imply
grandiose emotions which could only prove embarrassing later.
Speech such as, for instance, I will love you forever.
“Yes,”
Lucca said carefully, “let’s go to the shuttle bay.”
Soledad
led the way; she was, as of the moment the two shuttles launched,
mission coordinator. Cam followed eagerly, looking beautiful as
ever but so different in the rough tunic, leggings, and boots that
the Atoners had supplied, her wild black hair loose to her
shoulders. He was used to her in inexpensive American clothes,
trashy and sexy. But, then, he probably looked just as outlandish
to her. Only Soledad, her stocky body clothed in jeans and sweater,
looked normal.
Lucca
trailed the two young women, glancing back once more at Kular A. In
a few more hours he would be down there, a Witness for the Atoners
of Neu, a part of the aliens’ grand, remorseful, incomprehensible
program to repent of long-ago sins against humanity, sins that
humans themselves hadn’t even known had been committed.
# # #
It started
to go wrong the minute the shuttle hit the atmosphere. Insertion
was supposed to happen with the same minimum disruption to
passengers as all the other Atoner craft. Lucca didn’t understand
Atoner engineering – nobody on Earth understood it – but he’d been
assured that the shuttle would go down “smooth as good chocolate.”
He’d been so startled to hear that phrase from the Atoner in the
Dome on the moon -- what did the Atoners know about chocolate?
They must have learned the words from American television. Smooth
as good chocolate.
Lucca
screamed as he was flung violently against his webbed restraints.
The shuttle lurched crazily. On the commlink Soledad shouted,
“Lucca! Lucca!” but he couldn’t answer her. Pressure closed his
throat, burst capillaries in his eyes, lost him his ability to speak
or move. I’m going to die -- Ave Maria, piena di grazia…
Later, he
would not remember that he had prayed.
# # #
He wasn’t
dead, even though the shuttle was now silent as the grave, and as
dark. Lucca hung upside down in his webbing. His eyes burned and
his left leg ached. But pressure no longer tortured him, and he was
able to free his arms.
“Soledad?”
he said aloud. No answer; the shuttle commlink wasn’t
functioning. E che cazzo. He fumbled inside his rough
woolen tunic for the portable commlink on his belt. “Soledad?”
Barely any
delay; the Atoner ship empty of Atoners orbited only three hundred
clicks above the planet. “Lucca! What happened? Are you all
right?”
“The
shuttle crashed, I think. Or not exactly crashed—“ If it had, he’d
be dead “—but came down too hard. Something malfunctioned. Where
am I?”
“About a
thousand clicks north of where we’d planned. At the southern edge
of the dust storm, actually. Are you hurt?”
“No,
I…yes.” Lucca unfastened the last of his webbing and fell to the
ceiling of the shuttle, which was now the floor. It took all his
effort to not scream again. “I think my leg is broken.”
Soledad
swore in Spanish. “Shall I come and get you?”
“No!”
Abort now? He had been on Kular less than ten minutes! “I’m going
to use the med-kit to set my leg. Call you when I have anything to
report.” He thrust the commlink back into his hidden belt, his
fingers brushing bare skin. All at once that brought up an image of
Cam, naked in his bunk aboard ship, which in turn brought up an
image of Gianna, equally naked.
Not now.
The
med-kit was stored during flight in a metal cabinet now so twisted
and smashed that Lucca couldn’t get it open. Several minutes of
groping in the dark determined that. All at once panic, the genuine
unlovely thing, split his heart down its center seam. He hit the
controls for the shuttle door, then pulled and pushed at it, but it
wouldn’t open. He was trapped, a sardine in an alien can whose
workings he did not understand.
Cam
carried a laser gun. Lucca could have had one as well, but he’d
refused all weaponry even though he was far more proficient with
firearms than was Cam. The Atoners had agreed without comment.
But the Atoners hadn’t imagined him trapped in a prison of their own
making.
Or had
they? Surely aliens with the technology for star travel must have
made that technology trustworthy? If they could adapt ship controls
and screens for human use, if they could send those humans
light-years away in weeks, then they could…
No. This
was an accidental malfunction.
He pushed
away the paranoia and splinted his broken leg with the arm of his
chair, which twisted off more easily than he expected. The Atoner
implants in his body released pain killers and, he assumed, healing
meds as well. From a cabinet not twisted shut, Lucca extracted and
ate some protein bars. He checked the commlink, personal shield,
and translator, each in its separate tiny pouch on the belt under
his tunic. And then, since there was nothing else to do, he waited
in the dark.
An hour
passed.
Then
another.
Or maybe
not – it was difficult to judge in total darkness. But he knew the
passage of time by the deepening blackness in his soul.
This was
his real enemy, and it didn’t come from being trapped in an alien
machine, on a mission he could never have imagined and had not even
remotely expected to be chosen for. The depression was an old and
accustomed companion, as well known as the feel of his growling
stomach or the taste of his mouth when he awoke each morning. This
gray fog, this low-grade fever of the mind, had been with him since
childhood, banished only for the three glorious years with Gianna.
When that London lorry had rolled off St. Martin’s Lane, onto the
sidewalk, and over his wife, the blackness had howled through Lucca
like a typhoon and had not abated for an entire year. But that
shrieking grief had almost been preferable to the deadened
aftermath.
He’d told
the Atoners all of that during his recruitment interview, stumbling
through the simplest words in an attempt to be honest: “I am a
widower. My wife died in an accident three years ago. I become
depressed.” Did the Atoners even value honesty? No one knew.
They/he/she/it, whoever was behind that impenetrable screen, had not
commented. They won’t take me, Lucca had thought, and hadn’t
known which was greater, his disappointment or his relief.
But they
had taken him, and here he was, and not even a trip to the stars
had banished the soul-blackness. Nor had that stupid affair with
Cam, nor would anything ever except the impossible, having Gianna
back.
Time
dragged on. Eventually, he slept.
# # #
He woke to
pounding on the hull, to pounding in his head, and to muffled
shouts. Kularians.
Lucca
reached under his tunic and turned on both the translator and the
personal shield. He felt hot and feverish – a side effect of the
implanted meds? -- and the loud hammering of his heart rivaled the
banging on the hull. He banged back.
The
pounding stopped. After a while it resumed, steady and purposeful.
The Kularians were, with excruciating slowness, cutting him out of
the shuttle. Tools able to work metal. His first
observation as a Witness.
A long
time later, a meter-square of hull fell inward, clanging on the
shuttle floor. Lucca braced for the weapon that would follow,
although of course nothing they could have would penetrate his
shield. Would it be a spear? A club? An automatic rapid-fire
gun? They had had ten thousand years, after all. The Atoners said
that neither Kular A nor Kular B gave off electromagnetic signatures
of any kind: no radio transmissions, no TV, no microwave towers,
nothing. Presumably that meant, at most, an early-industrial
society. But on Earth, the Gatling gun, capable of getting off 200
rounds a minute, had been patented in 1861.
A head
poked through the opening in the shuttle. Just that -- an
unprotected head.
The head said
something.
Lucca
smiled. The translator needed native language, a reasonable amount
of language, before it could decipher anything. Lucca pointed at
his leg and made a grimace of pain. The head vanished.
A
half-hour later they had him out. By then his whole body ached,
feverish. It was daylight, although with the blowing sand, that
might mean dawn or dusk or anything in between. Grit blew
continuously against everything, coating shuttle and clothing and
tools with coarse dust. There were eight Kularians, and they worked
with a cooperative energy that involved much arm waving, heated
discussion, and foot stamping. There didn’t seem to be a formal
leader. At no time did they show anything that Lucca could
interpret as fear. They seemed intensely interested in getting a
task done, and not at all hesitant about whether it should in fact
be done in the first place.
Once they
understood that Lucca’s leg was broken, they became more careful in
handling him, although never really gentle. Finally, with a good
deal more shouting and foot stamping, they loaded him onto a kind of
travois, which at first Lucca thought they would pull themselves.
But then someone led an animal from around the other side of the
shuttle, a slow and seriously ugly beast like a shaggy elephant,
ruminatively chewing God-knew-what. The animal’s yoke was tied to
the travois, giving Lucca a clear view of its hind quarters. He saw
no anus, but the beast smelled terrible. It lumbered forward, led
by one Kularian while four others walked protectively beside Lucca.
Lucca
looked up into face of the Kularian nearest him and smiled.
Thank you.
The man
nodded. A swarthy man with deeply weathered skin, long black
mustaches, very dark eyes, and one front tooth painted dull red.
The man wore a hat of animal skin with flaps now shoved onto the top
of his head, tunic and leggings not unlike Lucca’s own although of
coarser cloth, and clumsy skin boots. He carried nothing, which was
unusual for a man in anything but an advanced culture. More
primitive humans away from their homes usually had things that
needed carrying: weapons, baskets, stringed instruments. But this
was indubitably a human, just as the Atoners had said. A human
being whose ancestors had been kidnapped from the plains of Earth
and brought here 10,000 years ago, as part of the huge experiment
for which the Atoners now dripped with inconsolable remorse.
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