Steal Across the Sky Read Online Free PDF

bothered him. He didn’t like it, although he didn’t know why.
    “Nice and peaceful sounds good to me right now.”
    He didn’t believe her. Cam relished the attacks that could not touch her, relished being the omnipotent and mysterious stranger around which a whole encampment of soldiers had been built. Whereas Lucca was mostly forgotten except when he was in the way of Hytrowembireliaz’s busy family, at which point they smiled at him and stamped their feet and forgot him again. He was fed, given warm clothing and a comfortable bed, and asked nothing. It was incredible. He was practically invisible.
    “So ask them things,” Cam said.
    “I do. There is only one answer: ‘over the mountains.’ The grain for porridge comes from over the mountains, in trade for furs. The family loom comes from over the mountains, in trade for furs. But as far as I can tell, ‘over the mountains’ functions exactly like here, except for a different climate. The language has no word for ‘city’ or any form of government, no word for ‘king’ or ‘president’ or even ‘leader.’ How can there be no form at all of any word for someone in charge?”
    “Anarchy,” Cam said.
    “Anarchy is actually a sophisticated form of social organization, Cam. It requires strong cultural ties to reinforce taboos against violence and stealing, and communal institutions to teach those taboos to the young. Here there are no institutions, no schooling in abstract ideas, and, as far as I can figure out, not even a written language. This is the thinnest culture possible on all possible axes. There aren’t even any interesting rituals beyond cutting each other’s throats when they decide it’s time to die!”
    Silence on the other side of the commlink. Lucca heard his own tone, lingering in the air like miasma. Finally Cam said, “Well, excuse me for not having a college education. And you’re taking all this way too personally, Lucca. I thought anthropologists were supposed to be objective.”
    It was such a Cam-like remark that Lucca put his head into his hands. He wasn’t an anthropologist, having dropped out of graduate work at Oxford when Gianna died, well before he’d finished his degree. And anthropologists weren’t “objective,” whatever that meant, because they were human and thus inevitably equipped with the lenses of their own culture. And of course he was taking this personally. Lucca had told Cam, had told the Atoners, had told the UN interrogators, that he believed the personal was all one had. Personal vision and personal thoughts, filtered through the lens of one’s biology and background, until sickness or old age or a renegade lorry took those things away and the self vanished. Cam never listened.
    He said, “I must go. My ass is cold from sitting on the ground.”
    “Me, too. Not my ass—it’s sweltering hot here. I mean I have to go and stand in front of the shuttle so nothing can happen. Again. If I didn’t have Soledad to talk to all the time I’m inside this damn shuttle, I’d go mad. It’s weird, you know—two emissaries from the stars, and two planets just ignore us. Who’d have thought?”
    Despite himself, Lucca laughed. He closed the commlink and looked up to find Hytrowembireliaz’s middle child, Chewithoztarel, watching him. The little girl, who looked about ten, had not yet had her hair cut short or her front tooth reddened, so perhaps both were puberty rites.
    “What are you doing, Lucca?”
    She must have crept up on him from around the stand of trees. No—of “tree.” He sat beside one of the tangled half-acre stalks and vines thatwere all one plant. Her dark eyes gazed at him with the first curiosity he’d seen since he landed. What would she report to her parents? That the stranger talked into a tiny box?
    Counter an unwelcome question with another question. He said, “What are
you
doing here?”
    “Ragjuptrilpent told me you were here.”
    He didn’t know the name; probably one of