Beneath the Gated Sky Read online

  Set down in any modern suburb, the new house would have vanished into obscurity. An architectural vision of glass and cultured wood and carbon-fiber trim, it seemed to extrude a kind of middle-class snobbishness. However, the mud-encrusted combine parked in the front yard disarmed the snobbishness quite nicely. And the owner himself seemed entirely out of place, walking stiffer than most men of his age, coming down stairs made of Colorado River rocks and bone-white epoxies.

  “By any chance,” asked Porsche, “do any of these gentlemen look familiar?”

  The farmer flipped through the ten photographs. When he reached the last photograph, he gave it a half-glance, then looked up and said, “Where’d this one come from?”

  From California, though no one mentioned it. A security camera at an apartment building close to an apparent suicide had caught the image of three men riding together in a nondescript sedan. They were dressed like businessmen, but they sat like soldiers; that’s what Porsche had thought at first glance.

  “You’re sure?” Timothy sputtered. “Absolutely?”

  Only two faces were visible, and both of them were shown from the side. Yet the farmer tapped both with a certain unflappable authority, saying, “I don’t see a lot of people in a day. So I tend to remember those that I do see pretty well.”

  No one spoke for a long moment.

  Then the farmer handed back the photographs, saying, “This one here…the one riding shotgun? He’s the one who didn’t talk. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the one you’ve got to keep your eye on…”

  8

  The day was mild and bright, the best weather yet in December, and after a full morning spent delving into the CEA’s secret budgets and bureaus, the team decided to treat themselves to a long lunch. They made sandwiches, dressed in sweaters and sweats, and sat on lawn chairs out on the glass disk, enjoying the sun and a bottle or two of sun-colored Mexican beer.

  Porsche didn’t suggest playing basketball.

  That was Cornell’s duty, and he meant just the two of them. But Timothy was in a rare mood, inviting himself into Cornell’s camp. Two against one sounded more reasonable, he argued. Nathan volunteered to serve as the men’s coach and the game’s referee. A plastic barrel stood behind the pole, and Porsche opened it and pushed aside the old toolbox, the best of three basketballs waiting at the bottom, begging to be used.

  The dark glass was warm and dusty and a little slippery. Cornell faced Porsche at arm’s length, his father between them, giving the ball a stiff little heave and sending it over her head. She swatted it toward the three-point line, then sprinted past Timothy to grab it, dribbling fast between the two defenders, making her first layup in a crisp, business-as-usual fashion.

  The net sang a few notes.

  “Two-zero,” Nathan called out from the sunflower stubble.

  It was the usual mismatch. Cornell was strong, but he had no quickness or sense of grace. And while Timothy was taller than Porsche, with long spidery arms, he spent far too much time thinking. Deliberating. Doubting. Good basketball was instinct built on practice, and when it was sweetest, it was an art form. But Timothy’s main strategy was to stand like a tree, guarding the hoop with arms outstretched, and if Cornell fed him the ball, he had a fifty-fifty chance of making an uncontested two points.

  Timothy’s first shot danced on the hoop, then fell into Porsche’s outstretched hands.

  Back she went, back behind the line, then pulled up and threw a long arcing shot that barely made music, it was so perfect.

  “Five-nothing!”

  “We know, Dad.”

  Nathan shouted at his team, saying, “Play harder. That’s my advice.”

  Obeying the coaching, Cornell drove hard toward the basket, and Porsche blocked with the relentless hands-on style that she had played years ago, in the pro women’s league.

  “Foul!” cried Nathan.

  Cornell pulled up and shot, banking it in.

  “No shot, son. You fouled her.”

  Knowing that words wouldn’t help, Cornell stood like a statue, the ball under his arm, looking very much like a little boy with his hair swirled by the wind, his face red from exertion and from being pissed.

  “It’s five-two,” Porsche announced. Turning to Nathan, she added, “You couldn’t see it, but I hit him first.”

  Only because she said so, the old man allowed the basket.

  “Don’t patronize us,” Cornell growled.

  “Okay.” She dropped back and fired from the far edge of the disk, dropping in another three points.

  “Eight-two!” three men shouted, in a chorus.

  The game wobbled along for another forty minutes. As always, Nathan lost track of the score, which was the only reason the men kept playing. Without a quantified measure of the slaughter, and managing the occasional run, little doses of hope gave them the will to keep chasing the lost cause.

  Porsche discovered basketball on the plains of west Texas.

  She was living at the acculturation school, acquiring and polishing the essential skills to be human, and one day, not long after she arrived, she found an old ball, half-deflated and worn slick. Not knowing any better, she pounded it into the pavement to make it bounce, and when that game grew boring, she took a long, long shot that somehow connected with the hoop, the old-fashioned rope net whooshing and a tiny golden joy serving as a nucleus for the next twenty years of her human life.

  Her first coach was television.

  Television was a popular tool at the acculturation school, serving as an enormous if badly distorting window into the human world. Porsche spent hours watching the college tournaments, astonished by the level of play and the palpable differences between the sexes. On Jarrtee, men were a little larger than women, and stronger, but noticeably slower, too. Among apes, with the size differences and hip disparities, the inequities were greater. Porsche was an exception. No one seemed to know how the intrusions worked, but one thing was self-evident: Porsche’s soul demanded a big body blessed with speed and an unconscious grace. That was true on her first home, and it was even more pronounced on the earth—no reason to expect any differences on any other world.

  Athletically, Porsche was just a long step short of impossible.

  Without exception, her instructors warned that if she played the game in public, she would be wise to hide some portion of her talent. “Don’t jump so high,” was the sum total of their coaching. “And miss some of your easy shots, too.”

  Of course, that was the instructors’ advice in every circumstance.

  “Whatever the moment requires,” they preached, “make sure first, last, and forever that you blend in.”

  Porsche lived at the acculturation school until summer.

  The school was hidden on a remote ranch. A dozen thoroughly humanized faculty lived with fifty immigrants—young single adults, for the most part. Officially, the ranch belonged to a minor and extremely private religious cult. The same cult owned property in twenty states and Canada, each facility turning out people who were utterly indistinguishable from those who had always been human.

  By summer, Porsche had a last name and a rich, well-documented life, including a family history that reached back for two centuries. A birth certificate filed in West Virginia carried her name, inky footprint, blood type, and other simple data. Family albums showed her growing tall in genuine locations. According to records, she had been home-schooled. In the recent years, the Neals had moved several times, usually living in backwater places, without close neighbors or notable friends. Outside investigators would be hard-pressed to say that they hadn’t lived there. Sculpted out of shadow and human expectations, their cobbled-together lives had as much vitality as anyone else’s.

  Cash was funneled from the Few, and a fictional credit history was built. The Neals purchased an anonymous brick home in a suburb of Dallas. A swimming pool nearly filled the tiny backyard. Jarrtees were too dense to float; none of them knew how to swim. But Father insisted on lessons,
and blessed with long limbs and a fearless buoyancy, Porsche was soon churning out the laps under the brilliant Texas sky.

  But basketball remained her finest love. A new backboard was fitted above the garage, the chiming net singing in the wind. But their short driveway had a ridiculous tilt, emptying into the alley that ran behind their house. Bored with her home court, Porsche would dribble up and down the alley, streaking into other driveways to make a layup or fadeaway shot, then dribble away before anyone could take offense.

  On her best days, she covered miles.

  On one incandescent afternoon—twenty degrees cooler than a jarrtee night, but brutal for humans—a voice cried out, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  With a snap of gravel, Porsche wheeled, discovering an older boy glaring at her.

  “This is my fucking yard!” he snarled.

  “Fuck you,” she said, happy for the chance to use that vivid word. “It’s your parents’ yard, not yours.”

  The boy was fifteen, nearly sixteen, tall and passably handsome. He was also sharp enough to see her logic, changing tactics instantly.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s my hoop you’re using.”

  “So stop me,” she replied. Then she drove past him, holding back nothing, leaping as high as possible and making the layup, then snagging the ball out of his hands.

  Porsche had won her first human boyfriend. They played until the heat beat them, then met again that next morning, in the local park, playing for hours in the relative chill. He was a fearless, somewhat talented opponent, and a fair kisser who claimed to be a masterful lover. But she wasn’t old enough for intercourse. Instructors and her parents had warned her about the local norms. Restraint was her new watchword, and when she felt like doing more than kissing and fondling, Porsche would simply think of Jey-im and the pain that she’d brought to her family, and her little lusts would bleed away, lost.

  Only once did she let her restraint slip, and the boy never even knew.

  In August, Father announced that the earth was ready to evert. Uncle Ka-ceen—now named Uncle Jack—had contacted him with the news. A giant array of telescopes had been completed in Utah; on its heels was a Chilean facility. The eversion would come with cloudless skies above enough telescopes. Father explained the situation, then smiled. He had a wonderful human smile, his teeth a little uneven and very white, brown eyes dancing, a deep joy running beneath the surface happiness. “Tomorrow night,” he told them. “Sometime after ten o’clock, according to Jack. And the forecast for Dallas is clear skies.”

  Everyone was excited. But Mama-ma was quick to warn her children, “We don’t know anything, and we say less than that. We’re going to watch from the back yard, unseen.”

  Porsche disobeyed, but not scandalously.

  While Father grilled steaks for a late dinner, she slipped away. Her boyfriend was waiting in the park, their court lit up by dusk, then by blue lights on tall poles. “We’re going to have a lot of fun,” she told him, and that’s all she told him.

  They teamed up against a threesome of older boys, and because it was a special evening, Porsche let herself play full-bore. Long shots rattled home. Circus tosses ended up dropping. Their enemies were intimidated, then angry, and her boyfriend was proud at first, then bored. It ended up in a rout, the enemy off to lick wounds and the victorious pair lying on the harsh Texas grass, away from the lights, in the privacy of night, necking relentlessly as Porsche kept careful track of the time.

  At exactly ten o’clock, she said, “Wait.” She said, “Let’s just look at the stars.”

  “The stars?” he gasped.

  “For just a little bit,” she promised. “Then we’ll have some real fun.”

  He was a teenage boy; he assumed sex. Suddenly the picture of obedience, he stared at the sky for a solid five minutes before asking, “Am I watching for something?”

  “A shooting star,” she replied. “When both of us see one, you get your gift.”

  The sky was busy. They weren’t far from DFW, and every kind of plane passed overhead, the wings still wrong-looking to Porsche, too long and frail, primitive engines whining as they drank the thin, impoverished air. Streetlights—little doses of daylight intended for a diurnal ape—washed away all but the brightest stars. What if the eversion wasn’t tonight? She’d probably have to give the boy something, which would be easy enough. But what if Father came hunting for her, furious because she wasn’t where she belonged? She knew exactly how that drama would play, and suddenly she was every thirteen-year-old girl, bracing herself against the coming embarrassment.

  But the eversion arrived on schedule, just as Uncle Jack had promised.

  The boyfriend complained twice about the paucity of meteors, but he remained hopeful, and aroused. Porsche fought the urge to blink, her breath quickening. Then abruptly, without fanfare, there were no more stars; the earth instantly filled its own heavens.

  The boy made a choking sound, then shot to his feet.

  “What the fuck?” he sputtered, a baffled anger bleeding into fear. Then he lifted his hands overhead, grabbing at the thin and cold earthly air as the girl below him whispered softly:

  “You’re very much welcome.”

  “Thanks for the drubbing,” said her current boyfriend, the sarcasm blunted by exhaustion.

  “You’re very much welcome,” Porsche allowed, laughing.

  They were walking back across the field. Timothy and Nathan were leading the way, Timothy’s fourth beer glinting in the slanting light. Suddenly he paused and looked toward the southeast, toward the graveled road, and while taking a last pull from the bottle, he pointed at an oncoming cloud of soft gray dust. “Friend?” he asked aloud. “Or fiend?”

  “Neighbors,” Porsche called out.

  Sure enough, a familiar Humvee rumbled past the house, two people visible for an instant before they vanished behind the shelterbelt. They were an older couple who farmed sections north of theirs. They were harmless. Porsche’s eavesdroppers had already warned her that they were coming, and with a voice generated directly on her audio nerve, they assured her, “They are gone.”

  Timothy made a partial turn, then stood motionless. He looked a little drunk and acted as if he were trying to guard the basket. His face looked sloppy. The eyes were too bright, too simple. He waited for Porsche and Cornell to step close, then with an incautious voice, he said, “I feel safe here.”

  “Good,” said Cornell.

  Timothy fell in behind them, saying, “I sweep this ground twice every week, just to be safe.”

  “I know,” said Cornell. “And thank you.”

  Timothy put a hand on Porsche’s shoulder, squeezing and saying with a drunken singsong, “Three times. I’ve found standard, government-issue bugs three times. All brought in on the backs of microrobots. Which is what our government does when it wants to be subtle.”

  Porsche couldn’t remember Timothy ever touching her. She turned to look at him, shrugging her shoulder and pulling free in one smooth motion. “We know,” she reminded him. “You showed them to us…remember?”

  “They’re hard bugs to detect,” he boasted. “I can do it because I’m better than my opponents.”

  No one spoke.

  “Yet,” he sang. “I have never, ever found any trace of your eyes, Porsche.”

  “What eyes?” Cornell asked, by reflex.

  The willowy black man grew animated, dancing around the two of them, saying, “No games. You know what I’m talking about.”

  Porsche touched Cornell first, then Timothy.

  Quietly, carefully, she said, “I doubt if you could ever find…my eyes…”

  Anger and a giddy excitement swirled together.

  “Does that bother you?” she asked. “Because it shouldn’t—”

  “No, that’s not it!” he declared, half-shouting and glancing skyward. “You’ve got more advanced equipment. Fine. I can come up with explanations, and I won’t tell anyone…but I’ve got to know: Why do you n
eed me? What in the hell can Timothy Kleck do for you that you can’t do for yourselves?”

  He was staring hard at Porsche, waiting.

  “Yourselves,” she echoed. “Why do you think there’s anyone but me?”

  His gaze flickered, dropped.

  “This is my project,” she assured him. “No one else is involved.”

  “No one?” he muttered, more surprised than dubious.

  “All I have,” Porsche warned, “are some simple tricks, and my three friends. And I can’t do this work without you, Timothy.” She said the words exactly as she had practiced them, then before he could smell what was untrue, she gestured at the reflection of the earth. “There’s no one better qualified for this work than you.”

  It was a lie that he could believe.

  Watching him smile, watching the logic win him over, Porsche wondered why almost every sentient species, given a choice, gladly selected praise before the truth.

  Then Timothy repeated, “I really do feel safe here.”

  “You should,” she replied, and her eyes slipped sideways and up, her gaze escaping into the sky.

  After three quiet years on the new world, the Neal family decided to embark on an American adventure. In a rented motor home, they drove west, then north, following the continent’s raw spine to the cosmopolitan campgrounds of Yellowstone. Their reserved campsite lay in the shadows of lodgepole pines. A larger motor home bearing Washington plates was already parked next door. The family’s name was Vortune. Mr. Vortune was an intense man, a glowering expression beneath a dark brown mat of synthetic hair. His wife was a quiet, lovely woman, very blond and very tan. Both of them had worked three years at Boeing, and they had five children, the eldest being a feral boy named Trinidad.