Beneath the Gated Sky Read online

  But she was honest first, tilting back her head, then shouting, “Trinidad! This isn’t over yet!”

  Late last summer, after returning from High Desert and resigning from the agency, Cornell and Porsche had paid a little visit to Texas.

  The solitary child of a shattered family, Cornell found himself immersed in the Neal clan. They paraded around like some American ideal. A tenacious, very Texan form of cordiality held sway over every barbecue and basketball game. They adored her new boyfriend and tried to make him adore them, which was easy enough. And of course he couldn’t help but worship Porsche—his alien-born lover, savior, and consummate mate.

  “Consummate,” he began to call her. From across the swimming pool or across the bed, he would say, “Come here, Miss Consummate,” with a voice meant to sound teasing, but in truth was, in a sense, utterly honest.

  It was the kind of relentless admiration that anyone would find intoxicating, and it was dangerous for both of them.

  Porsche tried to warn him.

  “First of all,” she said, “I’m human. And there’s no perfection in being human. Second of all, if you keep thinking this way, you’re going to wake up some morning feeling cheated. My morning mouth hits you, and I’m not in a good mood, and you’ll think to yourself, ‘I’m in bed with a bitchy alien monster.’”

  But warnings didn’t change his mind.

  Nor did anger or simply ignoring him.

  What helped was Sunday service at the local Episcopal church. Cornell had been raised agnostic by a parent who distrusted any organized faith. Christmas was a secular holiday as contrived as Halloween. He hadn’t seen more than a handful of Christian ceremonies. Yet he found himself suddenly thrown into the midst of hundreds of otherwise sane, top-drawer humans engaged in a shared delirium. It was sobering, and scary. Robes and candles and dusty hymns made for a fantastic show. But what astonished him most was how easily—indeed, how fervently—the Neal clan joined in with the general bullshit.

  “Your father really belts out the Lord’s Prayer,” Cornell observed the next day, driving them out of Texas, heading north on 1-35.

  There was a delicate new bite to those words.

  “What’s wrong with the Lord’s Prayer?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he replied, but without heart. Then after a few more miles of red clay, he observed, “The priest, minister, whatever…he sure recognized your family.”

  Indeed, the moon-faced servant of God had singled out Porsche for a warm, “How have you been, darling?” followed by a cheery, “And I hope we see you again, soon.”

  “Of course Father Combs knows us,” she replied. “We’ve been attending services since we moved to Lewisville.”

  “But do you believe?”

  “In what?”

  “In Christ as the Son of God!”

  “Well,” she began.

  “And is he your personal Savior? And do you pray to Him while you’re marching on another world?”

  She said nothing, waiting.

  “And how about the Trinity? Where do you stand on it? And Christian history? All that blood and guts…is it a good thing?” Their eyes collided, something almost reproachful in his gaze. “Whenever you have answers, feel free.”

  “I should be agnostic. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know our circumstances,” she reminded him. “When we embrace a species, we embrace its society, too. In every way possible.”

  “Sure.”

  “Jewish. Muslim. Hindu. Each faith has its Few, and most of us try to be pious.”

  He fumed for another mile, then declared, “So it’s just an elaborate game.”

  “So what’s wrong with games?” she replied. “You don’t know how we think, or how we choose to believe.”

  It was a pivotal moment.

  At the time, Porsche thought it was the perfect moment. Cornell had found a flaw in the Neals’ halo; suddenly they were hypocritical enough to be human. He never again called her Miss Consummate, which was all she wanted. And they continued north without further incidents, driving toward their shared and golden future.

  But their conversation was never finished.

  Months later, trapped in a room that she had never planned to see again, Porsche remembered how Cornell had repeated her words:

  “‘You don’t know how we think, or how we choose to believe.’”

  “That’s what I said,” she admitted.

  Then with a real prescience, Cornell asked, “But do you know what the others believe?”

  “What others?”

  “Your family,” he said, laughing as if it were a joke. “Do you really, truly know what’s happening inside their heads?”

  Cornell lay on his side and coaxed Porsche onto hers, the two of them like nested spoons. His hands were firmly, even possessively cupped around her breasts. An ancient pillow, flat as a dish, had to be shared. When the overhead light was extinguished, the room seemed even smaller, and there came the sudden lucid memory of being twelve years old, lying in this exact flavor of darkness, feeling just a little homesick for a world that she had lost forever.

  The irony was blatant: Her life was in retreat, moving back along its own curious past.

  Tonight, the acculturation center.

  And soon, Jarrtee.

  In a whisper, Cornell asked, “How would they steal technology from the jarrtees?”

  “It wouldn’t be easy,” she admitted. Imagining microphones in the walls, sewn into the mattress and crawling up their asses, she said, “In fact, I think it would be impossible.”

  Cornell waited for a moment, “They can’t just steal machines and textbooks.”

  She told the listeners, “Only souls pass through the intrusions.”

  “Only souls,” he echoed.

  Then he said, “The bastards. They’ve got to kidnap people, don’t they? The people with useful knowledge…”

  Trinidad had reported that Jarrtee was in turmoil, and that the Few had almost abandoned the world. Two key ingredients if you want to break into someone’s house: Turmoil, and a lack of opponents.

  “And somehow…somehow you’re supposed to help them,” Cornell muttered.

  Somewhere else in the barracks, a child was throwing a fit. Its wailing was insistent and self-centered and ignorant; too many changes coming too fast, and nobody able to comfort it.

  “They want to go there,” said Cornell, “and abduct some poor old engineers and scientists…I bet…”

  She shook her head.

  “There’s nothing gentle about the jarrtees,” she warned. “Not their culture, not their species. And we’re walking into their world wearing nothing. In every way, we are naked.”

  Let F. Smith chew on those words, she thought.

  “It’s a nightmare,” her lover agreed. “Or a daymare, I suppose.”

  Porsche reached behind herself, offering a caress, a glancing hug.

  “Whatever happens,” he said, “I want to stay with you.”

  What was best, she decided, was to ignore those words.

  He repeated them, then to the unseen, he said, “I’m a talent. Better than almost anyone else they’ll find, except for the Neals. Isn’t that right?”

  Yes.

  “Say yes, love.”

  She said, “You’re a natural.”

  “I’m staying with you,” he repeated, with force.

  She was absolutely quiet, closing her eyes.

  “They’re holding my father, too,” Cornell reminded her.

  “I know.”

  “One thing these pricks understand,” he muttered. “Most of us will do almost anything, if it means protecting our families.”

  5

  The prisoners were roused before dawn, apples and warm oatmeal laid out on the table where they had met yesterday, and after the adults were laced with strong coffee, everyone was loaded into a fleet of squat unmarked helicopters that roared off into the half-lit sky, flying w
est one after another, too slow by a long measure to outrace the sun.

  Porsche sat with her back to the hull, between Cornell and a muscular young soldier, perhaps Hispanic, dressed in the standard black and gray. Through a grimy armored window, she could see the country beneath them, more flat than not, more brown than green, and after years of drought, as empty as the moon’s far side.

  “It looks a little like High Desert,” she observed.

  Cornell half-smiled, glancing at the soldier.

  “I miss that world sometimes,” she said.

  “It was beautiful, in places,” said Cornell, “and it never pretended to be kind.”

  The soldier squinted at a random crate, feigning indifference.

  A dozen other soldiers faced one another over an assortment of cellulose crates and overstuffed sacks. Nathan sat on the other side of his son, buckled in, clinging to his ceiling strap. Captivity and the helicopter ride were doing their worst, yet if anything, fear seemed to make Nathan younger. There was a gleam to his face. Without warning, he gave Porsche a surreptitious wink and smile, then stole Cornell’s strap, too, bombarding the guards across from him with a lucid, accusing glare.

  They reached the mountains gradually. There was a low blackness at first, too distant to seem rugged or even real. Then came a modest upheaval of stone and dark, drought-parched forest. Wanting a better view, Porsche asked permission to pee. The Hispanic soldier accompanied her up front. The toilet was set behind the cockpit, its tiny door sealed, the IN USE sign blinking red.

  Porsche had to wait.

  Through the tinted windows, she saw the true mountains and clouds of coarse black smoke suspended over them, riding on titanic columns of heat. Tangerine flames roared in the desiccated woods. The only sounds were the endless thrumming of the rotors and the winds that buffeted their machine, but Porsche had the impression that if their engines died, she would hear the gnawing roar of a wildfire, vast and selfish, growing even louder as they tumbled to earth.

  The toilet door opened, a thickset man coming out sideways.

  It was Latrobe. He stared at Porsche for a long moment, then conjured up a broad, complex smile.

  “Pardon the smell,” was all he said.

  He claimed the seat behind the copilot, laughing, never giving her another look. Porsche stepped into the closet-sized toilet, shut the door, and did nothing. She stood before a sink too small to wash both hands at once, and she stared at her reflection in a plastic mirror. When she thought about everything, like now, she could almost feel that sense of being overwhelmed. But that was the trick. A person had to think in manageable bites. Gnaw at your problems like a fire gnaws. The world’s forests couldn’t vanish in one blaze, but given time, every splinter of wood is consumed by some kind of fire.

  She flushed the chemical toilet, then stepped out again.

  Latrobe was using his reader. With a sharp voice, she asked, “Doesn’t it worry you? Going up against us, I mean.”

  The soldier took her by the shoulder, then an arm.

  But Latrobe was amused, if anything. “You’re saying what? That there might be some terrible retribution waiting for us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well.” He blanked the reader, saying, “Your cousin assures me that you won’t. The Few aren’t in the retribution business, first of all. And besides, we aren’t going to harm any of you. Everyone comes home from this soon, and safe.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “Everyone has what they want, more or less.”

  She made herself laugh, asking, “Do you actually believe Trinidad’s promises?”

  The face was inert, unreadable.

  “I wouldn’t believe him.”

  Latrobe narrowed his eyes. “I bet not.”

  “Wait,” she warned. “Eventually, my cousin’s going to disappoint you.”

  The face was utterly unconcerned, but something passed behind the eyes, making the meaty lips pull up grim for a moment. Then Latrobe gestured, telling the guard, “Miss Neal needs to be in her seat. Now.”

  She gave the burning mountains a quick last look, then let herself be pulled away.

  When she saw Nathan again, she gave him a big, defiant wink.

  They flew through smoke and into the brilliant scorched air beyond, the ground beneath them left black and simple. Miles had to be crossed before little islands of green emerged from the ash, growing larger and eventually knitting together, a sudden forest of ponderosa pine swaddling the slopes of an ancient mountain.

  They rose with the long slope, then turned, half a dozen identical machines moving in a precise line.

  Into her ear, Cornell asked, “Is this the place?”

  Porsche watched the spinelike ridge, waiting for a flash of sunshine on black glass. But the pines hid the intrusion, and it didn’t help being airborne, the perspective making the countryside unfamiliar.

  A meadow appeared, and she imagined it with snow, and bonfires, and hot stew. Sadly, she admitted, “This is it.”

  The helicopters fishhooked and settled to earth. With a professional exuberance, the soldiers disembarked first. As she stepped onto the ladder, Porsche could smell smoke as well as dust and the cumulative stink of unwashed flesh. Tents had been erected near the forest, their mottled gray-brown fabric making them nearly invisible from above. In their gray crew shirts, in the sunshine, the soldiers looked like the hired help at someone’s peculiar resort.

  Cornell stayed with his father, one hand laid possessively on a shoulder.

  Out of the mayhem of bodies and dust, a tall, dazed figure half-stumbled into view, his gray face turning aimlessly, outraged eyes trying to absorb enormous events.

  Porsche shouted:

  “Timothy!”

  Hearing his name, Timothy paused, looking through her for a cold, hard moment. Then a soldier took him by the arm, and he seemed almost grateful, letting the man lead, glad for the guidance.

  Nathan and Cornell were waiting for her. Nathan combed his shaggy white hair with one hand, then the other, accomplishing nothing. “I’m glad to be down,” he announced. Then, “They set the fire, I bet.”

  “Let’s go, Dad.”

  “To keep people away. I bet so.” Nathan searched for an ally. “Do you agree with me, dear?”

  More than privacy, a forest fire gave the operation a cover story. It explained the presence of a military-style camp in the New Mexican wilderness, and the persistent smoke would help hide what they were doing. She glanced up at the sky, wondering who might be watching.

  A voice pushed its way through the fading roar of motors.

  “Aunt Porsche! Did you see me?”

  Nieces and nephews were escorting their mothers. Like youngsters on a field trip, the oldest were holding hands. One blond girl, spying her aunt, dropped her little brother’s hand and came running, crying out, “I was in chopper machines, Aunt Porsche!”

  “You were,” she replied.

  “Were you?”

  “I was.” Then, “Did you have fun, Clare?”

  “Yeah,” the five-year-old assured her. “I had a lot of fun.”

  “That’s what matters,” Porsche offered, feeling a pang in her belly now.

  Clare’s mother arrived, a winsome smile and shrug of the shoulders saying, in effect, “What a mess!”

  Porsche asked about her husband.

  “Donald’s with your folks, and Leon.” She took Clare by the hand, then wiped her daughter’s face with a damp finger.

  “How are you holding up, Linda?”

  The question earned a moment’s reflection.

  The woman—a talent by birth; a Few by choice—showed the world her brave face, then with a quiet laugh, she said, “I’m not doing too badly,” as if amused by her own durability.

  Their destination was a large, heavily guarded tent surrounded by even larger tents. The interior had been warmed by trapped sunlight. A grayish light lay everywhere, staining people and objects with its color and identical waxy t
extures. Tables and cots had been set up according to someone’s idea of utility. Perhaps the same person had thought of the children: Padded bats and soft balls were on the ground, still sealed in their plastic packages, begging to be opened.

  “You’ve got to admire their energy,” said Cornell, taking Porsche’s hand.

  “I admire nothing,” Nathan grumbled. “Nothing.”

  Father and Mama-ma arrived, and the brothers, and Clare led the charge, every mobile child interrogating them about their flight and the huge fire, and the big men with the guns, too. Wasn’t it amazing to be here? For the moment, it was a vacation. They were camping in the mountains. They couldn’t think of it any other way.

  Their grandfather seemed enormous and frail, his long face smiling one moment, then, without warning, verging on tears.

  Mama-ma slapped her hands together, sweeping away their admirers with the promise of later fun. “Just now,” she said, “the adults need to hold a meeting. Can you play with these toys now, please?”

  Except the packages were tough to open. Penknives and keys had been taken from them, and the plastic was tougher than fingers and teeth.

  Father called out, “Porsche!”

  The children collected their aunt, Clare grabbing one arm and her twin boy cousins, Gregory and Mitchel, pushing Porsche toward the most remote corner of the tent.

  Timothy sat nearby, glowering at a random point in space.

  “Join us,” Nathan called out, a plastic-wrapped turquoise-colored bat in one hand. “Mr. Kleck! We’re holding a meeting over here.”

  The thin face flinched as if in pain, then looked in the opposite direction.

  The Neals gave the Novaks surreptitious glances.

  It was a slippery, subtle moment. Their faces weren’t unfriendly, nor suspicious, yet the eyes appraised them with the frankness of bankers.

  Exactly how far can we trust you? asked the eyes.

  Porsche said nothing.

  Cornell noticed everything, and he said nothing.

  Nathan sat at the plastic table, announcing, “No Timothy, it seems.”

  There was a pause, then Father began. “Thoughts, anyone?”

  No one spoke for a moment. Leon and Donald watched their children and harried wives. Their parents traded glances, forty years of marriage making words superfluous. Cornell took hold of two of Porsche’s long fingers, clearing his throat, then gently asked, “Do you have any idea why he would do this?”