Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

pulled away from their odorless scratchiness, and said, “Let’s go inside.”
    “All right. This game was stupid.”
    “Yes,” Lucca agreed. “It was.”
     
    HE WAS GOING to have to use an adult as an informant. He was going to have to devise a more sophisticated telepathic experiment. He was going to have to wait for someone else to die.
    Before any of these things could happen, Lucca’s sense of smell returned. He was seated on a cushion in a dim corner of the lodge, eating a porridge made of soaked and boiled wild grain and dried meat, when all at once odors rushed in on him: the steaming food, the unwashed people, the sour fermented ale in his mug, the smoky peat fire. It was a rich, redolent, repulsive mixture, so strong after the total absence of smell that he almost cried out. He looked around, trying to identify something—anything—that might have caused his nose to work again. Nothing looked different.
    The next moment, he went blind.

 
     
17: WWW.URGENTALIENCRISIS.ORG
     
     

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    If you are outraged that “aliens” would waltz in and demand human sacrifices for some “experiment” in “witnessing” . . .
     
    If you are rightly suspicious of their vague motives . . .
     
    If you think our spineless government has just bent over and let this first step toward Atoner domination happen . . .
     
    If you believe they have—as they themselves admit!—abducted humans before and are doing so now . . .
     
    THEN DO SOMETHING
ABOUT IT!!
     
    No, we can’t reach their so-called “base” on the moon (if it really even exists), but we can organize massive protests on Earth—OUR planet!!!
     
    HELP STOP HUMAN EXPLOITATION NOW

 
     
18: AVEO
     
     
    TO WEAVE A BLANKET , you carefully intertwined warp and woof, pulling on each with just the right amount of tension. To polish a gemstone, you turned it evenly to each facet, neither neglecting nor favoring any one. To create a strategy, in either kulith or life, you both wove and turned, and if you failed with one thread or one facet, you died.
    Aveo looked at Cam, eating her breakfast of incredibly rare and costly delicacies as if they were so much ber bread, and knew he could never explain any of this to her. She was not capable of understanding it. Her heart, he had come to believe, was good, but her mind was that of a child, simple and straightforward and easily distracted. She could have studied kulith for years and the roughest fisherman on the Niol Sea would have beaten her. Never would she understand that life mixed reality and illusion, and that in most people’s minds these two
were
warp and woof. Including hers.
    She drank off her wine, wiped her mouth, and said, “Aveo, the first thing we have to do is go back up to the roof to the shuttle. Obu’s been in the supply cabinet all night! And I have to talk to my friend on the . . . the commlink.”
    That last word was meaningless, but no more so than the rest of her speech. He said with the patience one would use when talking to a child, “You can’t do that,
ostiu
. You can’t leave these apartments until the king says you may.”
    “The hell I can’t.” She stood. “I’m not a prisoner, and neither are you. Nobody even tried to bother you last night, all night. I can’t leave that poor girl in the cabinet any longer. . . . How could you even think of such a thing? She’ll starve to death or die of thirst or something! And anyway,surely we should establish right now with Uldunu that I’m an emissary, an equal, not his subject?”
    Aveo groaned. She had just said aloud that she was the equal of the king. She had called him Uldunu, not Uldunu Four. She had set up her will against his. She had also forgotten what Aveo had said last night about the spyholes, and even as he searched for the right words—