Beneath the Gated Sky Read online

  It was almost evening when they had finished.

  Clouds were blowing in from the northwest, covering the sun and bringing colder air. Through gaps in the clouds, Porsche caught a glimpse of the Asian coast, then the brown mass of Australia. In the east, night was a wave of darkness spreading across Indiana and Kentucky. Was there time enough for a quick game?

  Nathan was standing close to Porsche, watching her.

  With a thinly veiled horror, he said, “Imagine. Building a basketball court on the doorway to another world.”

  She smiled, a warning finger to her lips.

  “I know,” he whispered. “Don’t talk about it. I know…”

  Nathan was a sweet, well-intentioned man who had invested his adult life in chasing extraterrestrial intelligence. His profession had made him more than a little paranoid, or his natural paranoia had brought him into that plot-crazed culture. Either way, decades of disappointment had been erased just a week ago. His son had told him an amazing story about alien worlds and a secret government project, and for dessert, Porsche had sat him down on this glass and told him an even greater secret—something that was incredible to him, and in the same breath, utterly ordinary to her.

  “How’s your finger?” he asked, plainly regretful.

  She let him take her hand, examining the narrow brown-red scab. “It just stings a little. That’s all.”

  Nathan pressed the back of her hand to his lips, kissing her as softly as possible.

  And as softly as possible, Porsche said, “Thank you for your help,” while deftly reclaiming her hand.

  Sometimes in the night, Porsche would suddenly feel like a child again.

  Enlivened by the hour, utterly immune to sleep, she would lie on the lumpy old bed, gazing up at the star chart, watching the false constellations turn slowly around the false Polaris; and she would speak in whispers, describing how it was to have been born alien, how she’d spent her wondrous childhood, and sometimes, in the deep heart of night, she would entrust Cornell with other secrets, too.

  Porsche was born on Jarrtee—that word as close as human mouths could manage. “It’s a beautiful world,” she liked to say, “and not just because every world is.” Larger than the earth, more massive and considerably warmer, Jarrtee was blanketed in a thick atmosphere laced with carbon dioxide and water vapor, fat clouds stacked on fatter clouds, and beneath them, a single continent crisscrossed with rugged mountains and salty landlocked seas.

  A single night on Jarrtee lasted for several earthly weeks.

  The blistering, storm-wracked days were equally patient.

  To cope, the native jarrtees were unabashedly nocturnal. They didn’t simply sleep during the day, they estivated, their metabolisms throttling down almost to nothing, their souls hovering on the cusp of death. Then with the first trace of darkness, they awakened, thin and anxious, and famished. Jarrtees lived with their extended families, and together, they held a dawn feast, eating fatty meats and nuts, and blood meals, everyone leaving the table with their stomach painfully, deliciously swollen.

  “You were a vampire,” Cornell teased.

  “Oh, gosh, I was,” she replied. “Oh, golly. I never noticed that stupid coincidence before.”

  Jarrtees were humanoids. Seen at a distance, in the night, they looked something like thick and pale and utterly hairless H. sapiens. The bodies were balanced on a pair of stout legs. Twin arms ended with thumbed hands. And there were human-style faces: An omnivorous, tooth-rich mouth beneath slitlike nostrils, and above, in enormous sockets, a pair of wide black organs that any man or octopus would recognize as eyes.

  “I was a beautiful baby,” Porsche assured, “and not just because every baby is.”

  Chalk-white at birth and no bigger than a cashew, her first nights and days were spent inside her father’s belly pouch. The girl grew rapidly, even for a jarrtee. When she emerged from the pouch, as large as a human newborn, she was given a honored name. “Po-lee-een,” she sang; it was as close as her human mouth could manage. Po-lee-een was an ancient hero. “But there’s no special honor,” she confessed. “On Jarrtee, everyone is named for at least one dead hero.”

  Before she was half a year old, Po-lee-een had turned into a big brave daymare of a toddler, fearless and physical, climbing everything and running everywhere while most of her peers were still hiding inside false pouches made of silk and plastic, sucking happily on toes and thumbs.

  “I took a lot of falls,” Porsche admitted. “But luckily, jarrtee skin is thick and tough, and the bones inside are even tougher.”

  “And you were hairless,” Cornell mentioned, in amazement.

  The woman lying with him had a thick long forest of honey-brown hair, plus a darker tangle of fur nestled between her long human legs.

  “And you were chalk-white,” he repeated.

  “Except that as I aged,” she replied, “I developed a platinum cast. And like any decent jarrtee, I covered my body with ink paintings. Ink was worn in lieu of clothes.”

  Cornell closed his eyes, imagining the child.

  He was a handsome and lean man blessed with eternal boyishness. His delicious face was illuminated by earthglow, and it wore a complex, ever-shifting expression.

  Porsche had no idea what Cornell was thinking.

  The truth told, he had always been something of an enigma. They had become lovers only recently. They shared a genuine disdain for their ex-employer, the CEA; but more importantly, they shared a very rare talent. No, they weren’t strangers anymore. But there was a distance. Lying on their backs, under the false stars and cracking plaster, neither could say with certainty what was passing through the other’s mind.

  Just as Porsche was wondering if Cornell was a little sickened, if the image of the bald little vampire girl was too much, he smiled with his closed eyes and open mouth, saying with unalloyed pleasure, “I bet you were beautiful.”

  She was the ultimate in exotic lovers, and sometimes that status, with its endless demands and sugary pitfalls, made her ill at ease.

  Like now.

  “Which makes me wonder,” said Cornell. He finally opened his eyes—portals adapted to bright days on the open savanna—regarding her with a mixture of amusement and curiosity, and adoration, and perhaps a dose of suspicion. “Why?” he asked. “If it was so wonderful, why did you and your family leave Jarrtee?”

  A perfectly reasonable question, and dangerous.

  She said nothing for a moment—for too long, probably—then she told him, “It’s a great challenge to come to a new world, to embrace a new species—”

  “I’m just curious. Why emigrate when you did?”

  She remained silent.

  “If I’m not entitled to know, don’t tell me.” Then after his next breath, he said, “You have rules. Codes of conduct. Haven’t I tried to respect that?” He paused again, breathed again. “But when you said that shit about great challenges and embracing a new species…well, you were trying to lie to me. Weren’t you?”

  Not entirely, no.

  But she felt like a liar, and she found herself doing a liar’s trick, letting her gaze leave the room.

  Their bedroom window faced west. The topmost pane had rippled with time, and through the ripples she could make out the constellations that were San Francisco and Los Angeles and the urban wilderness between them. Eight billion souls stood on this world, very few of them like Porsche. Out of all those billions who had been born human, how many could she trust? With the long fingers of one hand, she took an inventory, fingers left to spare. It was a sobering exercise. She shook her head, smiled sadly, then slowly sat up in bed, letting the sheet and golden bedspread fall around her waist.

  Porsche was a strong, well-built woman, and she had a matching face—the kind of face that men always remembered as being prettier than it really was. And her voice matched both, sounding a little like deep, swiftly moving water, almost rumbling as she asked, “Are you tired?”

  “Exhausted,” he confes
sed. “But between Timothy’s coffee and the topic, I’m too keyed up to sleep.”

  She felt the same way.

  Cornell waited for a moment, then with a genuine delicacy asked, “Can it be such an awful secret?”

  Quietly, with a sudden amusement, Porsche said, “All right, I’ll tell you. This is my secret.” She turned and stared at a point behind Cornell’s eyes, admitting, “Your girlfriend, given the chance, will do any stupid thing for love.”

  2

  Children live in a world of rules, and any child knows that rules come in distinct flavors: Hard laws that must be obeyed without question, in every circumstance; and the lesser statutes meant for youngsters who can’t taste the difference between things that are law and things that pretend to be.

  Porsche always knew the difference.

  When she was still quite young, her best friend and favorite accomplice in crime was a certain male cousin. “He doesn’t want me to use his jarrtee name,” she admitted. “I’ll call him Trinidad, since that’s what he answers to now.”

  The City lived at night. Sometimes the clouds would clear, and the two cousins would sneak up onto one of the roofs in the family compound, bare toes and clinging fingers navigating across the steeply pitched landscape of Teflon-frosted tiles. They loved to sit in the highest storm gutters, spying on their forty million neighbors. On the best nights, they could see the heart of the City—a chaotic mishmash of stolid buildings and narrow streets leading down to the rippling blackness of a deep-water bay. Voices would rise from below, the prattle of strangers laced with laughter, insults, and sloppy songs. Float cars hummed past in an endless parade. Transport planes flew on silk wings. And on occasion, a security dirigible would burrow its way through the hot night air, passing close enough that Porsche couldn’t help but reach high, hoping to touch the armored aerogel skin.

  To savanna eyes, the City would seem cloaked in pure darkness. Yet to a jarrtee, the scene was a bright, even gaudy spectacle. The cumulative glow of so many candles and cold lamps made the long climb worth every hazard. But it was the driest nights, when the City’s perpetual haze was blown away with the rare west wind, when they were treated to the finest show. Porsche and Trinidad would gaze up at the sky, and together, they would study the ghostly image of their own world: Dayside storm clouds bathed in orange-white sunlight; between storms, glimpses of bright water and blue-black land; and where it was night and it was clear, the gentle glow of distant city-states, all nameless, and none the equal of theirs.

  The earth and Jarrtee shared at least that one seminal feature: In the recent past, without warning, both worlds forever lost sight of the stars.

  Humans called it the Change.

  Cornell had told his story to Porsche several times, in various moods. Twenty-five years ago, he happened to be outdoors on a clear August night, and he glanced up at the perfect moment. Without fuss, the stars and planets and moon vanished, replaced instantly with a diluted reflection of the earth itself. It was as if the world had been turned inside out, and whatever force was responsible—aliens or God, or shared madness—it was done so smoothly, so lovingly, that not even the most sensitive human-built machine felt the barest tremor.

  The Change was momentous, and it was an illusion.

  Seen from orbit, the earth was the same blue and snow and emerald and dirt-colored ball. Its albedo had been reduced, but not by much. On the ground, climate and the magnetic field remained unaffected, and the horizon stayed where it belonged, bending downward. And strange as it seemed, starlight continued to fall on the astonished billions. It was just that the radiations were transformed, scrubbed clean of information, their feeble energies incorporated into the magical earthglow.

  The jarrtees had an elaborate, lovely name for the Change. Porsche could hear it in memory if not quite say it with her human mouth. God-Stole-Our-Sky was a viable translation. But as she liked to remind Cornell—too often, perhaps—translations were another kind of illusion, always unreal at their heart.

  Like any good magician’s trick, the Change had given its audience new ways of seeing.

  The universe had more than one true shape, and eventually, both jarrtees and humans learned that powerful lesson.

  Each true shape was intricate, and comprehensible, and beautiful. Porsche liked to stress the aesthetics, even though she had no particular talent with the tangled, surreal mathematics.

  “God-Stole-Your-Sky,” Cornell whispered, staring at the ceiling; then after a long contemplative silence, he made a very reasonable request. “Tell me more about your species. About the jarrtees.”

  By human standards, they were an elderly species.

  No five-thousand-year fever had given birth to their civilization. The jarrtees hadn’t endured a rapid explosion of science and industry. They were patient and pragmatic, taking the long view on every important issue. Order was a blessing; tradition was their blood. And the greatest heroes, like Porsche’s namesake, the great Po-lee-een, had sacrificed everything defending their homes from the great enemies: Turmoil and Greed.

  “Take my home city, for instance.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Our written history reached back more than fifty thousand years.”

  Softly, Cornell said, “Shit.”

  “Our suburbs were older than Egypt.”

  Again, “Shit.”

  It was a stability born of evolution.

  Humans arose from roving bands of interbreeding apes. But the jarrtees ascended from tightly-bound clans who built comfortable bunkers where they could estivate in safety, who moved only in times of crushing disaster, and who mated with outsiders with the greatest of care, and then only to refreshen their lineage.

  “Humanoids,” said Porsche, “but with the sensibilities of ants.”

  Technology gave the lucky clans an advantage. The luckiest dominated their region, winning new lands through long patient wars, and eventually—if it was deserved—they were able to swallow and digest every trace of their enemies.

  Porsche’s home city had grown that way. Over ten thousand years, a single clan had conquered the bay and flanking coastline, its population genetically intertwined but swollen a hundred times. In the past, the overgrown clans would shatter—a biological fission of sorts. But the City saved itself by playing games with jarrtee nature, inventing a tangle of subclans interlinked by careful marriages, every citizen recognizing something in everyone else around her, the society hammered together with a powerful sense of shared destiny.

  “It sounds almost utopian,” Cornell observed. Then a moment later, he added, “And more than a little xenophobic, too.”

  Fair assessments, both.

  “So what’s the city’s name?” he inquired.

  A reasonable, tenaciously human question.

  She mangled the jarrtee pronunciation, then admitted, “Home is a reasonable translation. Paradise is better. But really, the City is as close to perfect as we’ll get.”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “If you were born in the City, that’s all the name you’d need.” She paused, then said, “Boston. Singapore. Copernicus Prime. Three cities that we can visit, so of course we need names for them.”

  Cornell squinted at the poster overhead, then said, “But the jarrtees don’t travel anywhere. That’s what you said.”

  “The typical citizen couldn’t imagine leaving her home territory.”

  “The City,” he repeated, as if practicing. “The City. The City.”

  She placed her fingertips on his lips, with pressure, and with a firm voice, she whispered, “Listen.”

  He stared at the false stars, and waited.

  “When I was young,” she confessed, “no other world was as lovely as Jarrtee. No other City was as powerful or as feared as mine, which was a good thing. I knew my place, and it was a very precise, very safe place, and no child in the universe was half as happy as me.”

  Cornell turned his head, gazing into her eyes.

  “I was jarrte
e,” she reminded him. “An alien in every sense. But frankly, if you think about it, human children aren’t all that different. Are they?”

  To a human child, Porsche’s life would have seemed comprehensible.

  She played games with a glancing resemblance to chess and basketball, and she fought with her brothers—“Winning most of the fights,” she added, with an authentic pride—and at regular intervals, twenty times during each long night, Porsche would tuck her computer under a muscular arm and make the long hike to school.

  A bright, curious student, Porsche was both a joy and a challenge for her assorted teachers. Motivated, she could be left alone to learn at a galloping pace. Bored, she would smoothly disrupt any class. Most of her teachers made peace by letting her read as she liked, and socialize too much, and if some topic hooked her interest, they gave her the chance to design her own elaborate projects.

  Her school was older than most earthly nations. Constructed from granite and tough jarrtee mortar, it had once served as a fortification on the City’s outskirts. But the City grew west toward the coastal mountains; the old fort was abandoned, left empty for years. Its vast courtyard was filled with quick weeds and slower trees, and before the first black-eyed student strolled through the front gate, a mature forest had established itself.

  In the night, a jarrtee forest was gorgeous.

  Lying on the old mattress, Porsche shut her human eyes and watched as the luminescent night flowers burst open, begging for insects and other night fliers to take their pollen. She saw swollen balloon birds courting each other, dancing like smoke in the air. Mud fish bellowed from their homemade ponds. And there was the endless chittering of sonar, a multitude of species lending the air an intoxicating, almost electric energy.

  Yet for each celebrant of the night, one or two more species lived entirely by the day. It was as if Jarrtee were two worlds dancing together but facing in opposite directions. Porsche read volumes about the day world. At the City’s many zoos, there were dozens of exhibits showing the diurnal fauna and flora on display, all existing in contrived environments, their carefully reversed lives spent behind heavily smoked glass. And she could look into the sky, imagining the brilliance beneath the clouds, and the great rains, and the fantastic fecundity that would rebuild her world while she lay underground, estivating in peace. But still, the day remained a remote, dreamlike realm, and how could she make it real?