Beneath the Gated Sky Read online

  The school’s children ruled the courtyard’s forest by night, but by day, a baboon-like species named terrors took control.

  Po-lee-een, the eventual Porsche, decided to study the terrors.

  “With my cousin’s help, please!”

  But her science teacher was uneasy. Terrors estivated inside tangles of razor brush poisoned with their own spit and urine. The girl had most of the necessary skills, but she was too brave, too easily tempted by risk. And Trinidad was much the same, or worse. The teacher—a conservatively inked woman rumored to be as old as the school—agreed to the project, but only if Po-lee-een worked with an older student. Someone bright but naturally cautious. “In fact,” she declared, “I know a perfect candidate. You will despise him!”

  The promised boy was a year her senior, prefertile but not for long, his chin and forehead showing the first long ridges that came with manhood. “His name was Jey-im,” said Porsche, her human voice half-singing, half-squealing. Then with a softer voice, she added, “He was my first lover.”

  Cornell was lying with her beneath the covers, a solid arm tucked beneath her head.

  After a long moment, he asked, “What? Are you waiting for me to get jealous?”

  “I don’t know. Are you jealous?”

  Another pause, then he admitted, “No. It’s more bestial curiosity.”

  On Jarrtee, she explained, sex preceded fertility. Generations of children had used that square patch of forest as their private laboratory. Porsche and Jey-im took a tiny clearing behind a wall of blooming red trees, and after their first clumsy experiments with intercourse, they lay back and gazed at the clearing sky, admiring their world and themselves, discussing the shapes of the universe and their own vital, personal place within it.

  The Jarrtee sky had changed long ago, when their grandparents were young adults.

  Despite the dense, humid atmosphere, the original nights were capped with thousands of brilliant stars.

  “Because your eyes were that sensitive,” Cornell guessed.

  “And because Jarrtee was deep inside a spiral galaxy,” Porsche added. “More stars packed close together, at least in the old way of looking at the universe.”

  Millennia ago, the more prosperous clans had erected telescopes on their tallest mountains, intending to spy on their neighbors but naturally pointing them skyward now and again. But the atmosphere had limited science until several centuries ago. In the City, and elsewhere, clever engineers devised more powerful observatories. Vast dirigibles were built out of the lightest silks, then lashed together in the thin chill upper atmosphere and anchored in place with a lacework of diamond wires. Those airborne islands were covered with mirrors and radio dishes; finally, her nocturnal species was able to peer into the heart of the ultimate night.

  “We had a few hundred years of observation and speculation,” said Porsche, “then God-Stole-Our-Sky.”

  “How did Jim’s people cope?” asked Cornell.

  “Jey-im’s people did awfully well, considering.” She shook her head, admitting, “There was some panic, of course. Old gods and unknown aliens were given credit, or blame. Some jarrtees retreated into their deepest basements, convinced that the world was finished. And as a precaution, every clan put its security forces on alert.

  “My grandparents told stories,” she continued. “They saw their neighbors’ moods leap from giddiness to paranoia, then to pure fatalism. Every street held some impromptu gathering. People danced and sang and spouted every possible idea about what the Change meant for them and their clans…which are one and the same thing, according to the average jarrtee.”

  “That sounds like my old neighborhood,” Cornell offered.

  When Cornell saw the sky change, he let out a great scream, bringing the neighbors outdoors, their faces bright with astonishment and simple terror. Then his father had stepped into the chaos, and with the composure of a prophet, or a madman, Nathan assured everyone that only an advanced and benevolent species could accomplish such a wonder. The sky was a wake-up call, and the extraterrestrials, bearing even more wondrous gifts, would surely come soon. Perhaps tomorrow, he had promised: A statement of faith and hope, and utterly wrong.

  No starships swung into view over Washington, or McCool Junction.

  Nor did they appear in the jarrtee sky, either.

  Like humans would do over the next few decades, the jarrtees had struggled to understand what had happened, sifting and re-sifting through the same tangled and very peculiar clues.

  The richest city-states, hers included, had had their own space programs. From out in the vacuum, satellites and interplanetary probes saw a home world that was essentially unchanged. The Jarrtee sun—still setting and rising on schedule—remained its orange-white self; the neighboring planets held faithful to their orbits; every star was locked in its proper place; and the physical laws of the universe acted oblivious to the impossibilities.

  The Change was a local phenomenon, it seemed.

  An astonishing, but limited, mystery.

  The mystery ended at the edge of space. Astronauts riding inside nuclear-powered shuttles would see Jarrtee overhead one moment, then it would vanish, the old stars reappearing without the smallest complaint.

  The event was stupendous enough that neighboring city-states made treaties of convenience. For the first and only time in jarrtee history, Master scientists from unrelated clans were allowed to join ranks, genius talking to genius in order to decipher the new sky. Ancient enemies suddenly pooled resources. For several glorious years, borders turned porous. And the sacrifices brought success: In a limited way, the truth was found.

  The sky’s new rules were complicated, and they were complicated in exactly the way that a city’s building codes are baffling, laced with bylaws and exceptions, ancient riders, and nebulous statutes.

  Simply put, the universe of stars and galaxies was a fiction.

  Once, perhaps billions of years ago, there was such a universe. But life arose, and intelligence, and there quickly weren’t enough habitable worlds for the burgeoning populations. Dead planets and big rocks could be terraformed, but for only so long. Stars could be sacrificed, their plasmatic meat used to fashion new worlds. But that took phenomenal resources, and patience, and besides, the builders—whoever they were—eventually found easier, more potent means to build homes.

  Matter and space were harvested, then doctored and enlivened, obscure dimensions and bizarre mathematics reshaping the cosmos.

  An artificial universe was created.

  Like a wild forest chopped down for lumber, the builders took axes to the galaxies, and they left a grand subdivision in their wake—worlds nestled flush against worlds, a delicate minimum of suns illuminating each one.

  Perhaps Jarrtee was forged in those times.

  Or perhaps it was older, built from dust and gas, and the builders had simply incorporated it into their work.

  Either way, the old sky had been left behind on purpose. That much was obvious. Like a painting of the vanished woods—a painting hung above the new home’s feast table, perhaps—the stars were a simple, compelling means to show people: “This is how things once looked.”

  But the stars were left purposefully imperfect.

  Stare hard enough at a starry sky, with enough telescopes demanding information, and the illusion melts away with that bewildering suddenness.

  God-Stole-Our-Sky.

  It was much the same on the earth. Except here the Change had happened twice. After the sky was lost to the earth, new telescopes were built on the moon. The Cosmic Event Agency had its own expansive fields of dishes and mirrors. And before anyone realized the danger, the moon’s sky had everted in exactly the same way.

  “So that’s what the two of you talked about? The Change?” Cornell asked the question, then with a feathered sharpness added, “You and your Jim.”

  “Jey-im,” she cautioned.

  “I said that.”

  Porsche waited, then said, “
Kids everywhere talk about the sky and their place under it.”

  With his head propped up on a forearm, Cornell did his own waiting.

  “Most of a century had passed,” she explained, “but educated jarrtees were still debating what had happened, and what would happen in the future.” She paused, then added, “More than humans, jarrtees adore wrestling with details.”

  “So,” Cornell began. “Did they know about the intrusions?”

  Porsche said nothing.

  “No?”

  She shook her head, briefly.

  Quantum intrusions were gateways into neighboring worlds. The CEA had found and exploited them. Porsche met Cornell while working for the agency, their souls sent to a desert world, their ignoble mission to hunt for any and all advanced technologies.

  “From what you’re telling me,” said Cornell, “the jarrtees are more advanced than humans. Nuclear shuttles. Diamond ropes. And whatever in hell a float car is…!”

  “And?”

  “I’m just asking…if my species can crack open an intrusion, why couldn’t the jarrtees?”

  Quietly, carefully, she reminded him, “Intrusions are nearly impossible to find, and opening one of them—”

  “Is an even tougher trick. I remember.”

  A steady, knifelike pressure was slicing Porsche in the belly.

  But she said nothing inappropriate, honoring every secret. “When I was a girl,” she admitted, “the jarrtees were suspicious. Their model universes showed worlds packed against worlds, and there was at least the possibility of gateways—”

  “Okay,” Cornell responded, watching her with an unnerving intensity.

  Because she couldn’t help it, Porsche gazed out the bedroom window again, focusing on the distant glow of cities.

  “Did they have any idea that aliens were living among them?”

  She heard the question, and she didn’t.

  “But if they knew gateways were possible,” Cornell persisted, “then wouldn’t they expect to have visitors?”

  “It was…it was something that occurred to some of my people. Yes.”

  Cornell was smiling, suddenly enjoying this peculiar game.

  Quietly but harshly, he said, “Lucky Jim.”

  The man was tired, she reminded herself. And humans were jealous apes, by nature. Porsche tried to ignore his little barbs.

  “So,” he continued, “did Lucky Jim ever realize just how lucky he was?”

  Porsche rolled over in bed, lying on her stomach. Then with a quiet smooth force, she told her present lover: “You know, I sometimes miss that sweet boy.”

  3

  Jey-im was a sweet, bright, and strenuously unremarkable boy; and Po-lee-een was strong-willed and confident, but treacherously naive about love and other madnesses.

  Years later, buried happily inside another species, the woman would remember the first damning moment: The two earnest students were slipping a homemade sensor into a terror’s thorny nest, trying to fasten it to the creature’s neck. It was the last normal session at school; they needed to work carefully but quickly. There was no time for witless nonsense, Po-lee-een warned herself. Yet her hand began to shake suddenly, and the sensor waggled in the air, and because explanations lent strength, she told herself that she must have a simple blood-fat imbalance. She even mentioned the possibility to Jey-im, her voice sliding from nervous curiosity into pure embarrassment. Then, bless him, Jey-im tried to help, taking hold of her hand just to steady it. She remembered the slick feel of his flesh and the concerned if somewhat impatient expression on his face, particularly in the night-colored eyes. Suddenly Po-lee-een was smelling the forest, the pungent stink of the poisoned nest, and in particular, a delicious male flavor that lay thick against the roof of her mouth; and despite every code of decent jarrtee conduct, it was the girl who took the boy, grabbing him roughly and pulling him close, unable to get enough of his sweetness.

  They made love twice, then lay back to admire the sky and themselves. Their dreamy conversation might never have stopped, except suddenly the school’s siren voice called out the end of the session.

  Springing to their feet, the lovers offered each other inadequate words, then rushed indoors and escaped school through the main gate. Jey-im’s mother immediately took her boy into custody. The night had one more session, always reserved for exams, and as she did every night, the stern mother intended to stand over Jey-im as he studied—a common jarrtee tactic, particularly in ambitious families.

  Po-lee-een’s parents showed less good sense.

  She found herself alone in her private cubicle, hopelessly distracted. Gazing into a sheet of mirrored silk, she appeared unchanged: A sleek, handsome face and the familiar big body, both decorated with strong swirls of red ink. Yet beneath the normalcy, her soul was sick, a perfectly fine lust ruined by a strange, intoxicating paranoia.

  What if Jey-im confessed to his mother what he had done, she asked herself, and what if his mother considered her son too good for Po-lee-een’s modest subclan?

  Or worse, what if Jey-im now despised Po-lee-een because she had broken the ancient rules, forcing herself on poor him?

  The exam session began on time, as all things jarrtee did. The children were lined up by age, then herded into the subbasement, each given a bleak stone room originally meant to hold prisoners taken in the old wars. The tests were a different flavor of torture; Po-lee-een sprinted through hers, then raced upstairs for the oral evaluation. Where was Jey-im? “Still chewing on his exams,” their science teacher reported. “Come and sit, Po-lee-een. Show me your field notes and lab work, and your sensor’s data, too.”

  But the sensor had never been attached to the estivating terror, and her notes were in disarray. Unaccustomed to making excuses, the girl did it badly. Then, finally, Jey-im arrived, numbed and frazzled and half-lost. Suddenly neither child was able to speak, sitting side by side, unable to see anything but the other.

  Their teacher had seen this illness many times.

  Out of sympathy, she allowed the lovers to slip off into the courtyard on the pretense of finally implanting their sensor.

  Naturally, nothing of the kind was accomplished.

  The siren announced the session’s demise. As the eastern sky grew red, Po-lee-een received her sealed grades, plus a special note meant for her parents. Walking with her boy, she passed through the stainless-steel gate and crossed almost half of the wide stone plaza, the two of them comfortably close until Jey-im’s mother suddenly pounced.

  Jey-im allowed himself to be yanked into the float car, vanishing without a sound.

  It seemed cruel and unfair, robbing them of their chance for a mournful, melodramatic good-bye.

  Grumbling to herself, Po-lee-een started for home, navigating through the maze of ceramic streets, robot checkpoints, and little-used alleyways. A note from a teacher is perishable on any world, but the girl resisted temptation. Clenching the note in one hand, she entered the family compound, and Mama-ma ambushed her before she could entertain any second thoughts.

  Smiling in the jarrtee fashion—big eyes shaking gently inside their sockets—Mama-ma asked sweetly, “What do you have for me, darling?”

  There are no tears on Jarrtee, but in anguish, eyes grow opaque. Open-But-Blind, it is called.

  With eyes white as opals, Po-lee-een confessed. Her grades were awful, her judgment was horrid, and worst of all, she had fallen in love, and in punishment she was being wracked with gnawing, unbearable fears.

  It must have been an astonishing moment. Po-lee-een had given Mama-ma ample reasons to worry in the past, but it was always the girl’s fearlessness. Yet, the woman must have reminded herself, Po-lee-een was still a child, and earlier than most jarrtees, her daughter was entering the wicked hormonal years.

  Grasping her from behind, Mama-ma gave a long smothering hug, and she carefully whispered the advice and bland encouragement that could have come from mothers on a trillion worlds.

  “Of course love frigh
tens,” she proclaimed. “It’s all new,” she said, “and it brings such risk.”

  Then Mama-ma confessed, “When I realized for the first time that I loved your father, I was at least as scared as you!”

  Words helped, but not as intended.

  Po-lee-een didn’t appreciate knowing that her circumstances were less than unique. Anger helped clear her vision, and with a portion of her old poise, she handed over her grades and the teacher’s note, bracing for any disaster.

  But the grades were only slightly disappointing, and the note did nothing but sing praises for the studious girl.

  “If only I had twenty children like your Po-lee-een,” said the recorded voice. “And if only our great clan had a million bright, trustworthy citizens of her ilk…think how much greater our great City would be…!”

  The fear evaporated; suddenly everything was right and good.

  As the sun crawled across the Dawn Sea, Po-lee-een’s father and uncles were working in the kitchen, busily preparing the dawn feast, and everyone else took their customary seats in the feast room. Years later, Porsche would describe the room to Cornell, in exacting detail. She would tell him about the limestone walls and floor adorned with venerable mural rugs, and the beams of green olivine overhead, portrait holos dangling from them on invisible diamond threads. There weren’t any windows. A handful of tiny ceremonial candles filled the room with a delicious ruddy glow. Sitting around the feast table were three grandparents, assorted aunts and Mama-ma, plus a dozen girl cousins. Po-lee-een’s brothers and boy cousins waited outside the kitchen door, their bodies dipped in silver ink and silver helmets on every head. They represented the sun flames, and when Uncle Ka-ceen gave the command, the flames filed inside, returning with the first treats: Bowls of chilled blood stew and statues of Fertility herself, bloated and lovely, carved expertly from an assortment of sweetened and spiced fats.