Forgotten Suns

FORGOTTEN SUNS

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
Apri 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-477-2
Copyright © 2015 Judith Tarr

Sincerest thanks to the backers of the Kickstarter
campaign, without whom this book could not have been written. You are all
Awesome.

Marty, Dr. Alice Ma, Rick Kirka, William F. Bowen, Oz
Drummond, Robert Glaub, Gwyndyn Alexander and Jonathan Farr, Marie A. Parsons,
Mark Vandervest, Adam L. Crouse, Kari, Cora Anderson, Joni Teter, Geoff Cooper,
Rhel ná DecVandé, Ingrid Emilsson, William Lewis, J. Quincy, Alan Hamilton, C.
Joshua Villines, Lisa Clark, R.K. Bentley, K&K Case, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth,
Yaron Davidson, Pete Newell, Amy Sheldon, Noe Medina, Miles Matton, Houman,
Estara Swanberg, Burt Beckwith, CE Murphy, Zuhur Abdo, John A, Hannah
Steenbock, Trygve Henriksen, Donna P., Clinton W Harpman, Phil Johnson, K Liu,
Kathleen Hanrahan, Anne, Jan Hendriks de Geweldenaar, Adrianne Middleton,
Joseph Hoopman, Mike Weis, Evaristo Ramos, Jr., Max Kaehn, Linda Antonsson,
Bryant Durrell, Lynne Glazer, Rachel Neumeier, Meredith Tarr, Ray Rischpater,
Melita Kennedy, Mary Spila, Jase, Cosma Shalizi, Mike Zipser, Soli Johnson,
M.L.K. Ondercin, Megan Beauchemin, Blair MacGregor, Twila Oxley Price, Ruth
Stuart, Anatoly Belilovsky, Paul Weimer, David K. Mason, Nick Bate, Gregory
Norman Bossert, April Steenburgh, Karen Grennan, B. A. Lawhead, Ashley
McConnell, Tainry, Tara S, Melissa Scott, Robin D. Owens, Johan van Selst, Tony
Fiorentino, S. L. Gray, Emily Mah, Katharine Kerr.

Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams

—Langston Hughes

Aisha had blown the top off the cliff.

It was an accident.

The parents had been excavating a circular mound on the
eastern side of the old riverbed. While they argued over whether it was a
palace or a temple, Shenliu wangled permission to explore across the long-dead
river, where the cliff rose up sheer. He had climbed most of the way to the
top, and found the opening of a cave there.

Shenliu was an artist with nuplastique. In the old days he
would have fought in wars and blown up trains. Now he was a xenoarchaeologist,
and he planned to blow a little hole, a tiny one, then drill down and open up
whatever was below. Instruments didn’t work so well on the cliff; all they
could tell was that there was a larger cave inside, without any apparent way in
or out.

Shenliu was set to open up the cliff before the end of the
season, but then Mother and Pater found the room full of broken pottery.
Shenliu had to forget about his cave and get to work cataloguing boxes of
shards. He left the explosives in their locked box, away up in the cave where
nobody was likely to go.

The night after he had to give up his project, Aisha had
been awake long after bedtime, finishing just one more book. After she put the
reader away and told the lights to go out, she heard the parents talking in
their room down the hall.

Lately she’d been able to hear people through walls and even
if they whispered. She had to close her eyes and listen very, very closely, but
the words as often as not came through.

She might not have done it tonight, because it was late and
she was sleepy, except Mother had that tone she’d had too much this year.
Tight. Just a little too soft.

“I can’t find any way to keep the expedition going past next
season. We’ve put everything we have into it. Outside funding is getting leaner
every Earthyear, and what sources we can scrape up are getting more and more
insistent on actual, measurable, marketable results. Now Centrum’s trying to
gut the Department of Antiquities. We’re done, Rashid. It’s time we faced it.”

Pater was harder to hear, but Aisha pushed herself almost to
the point of headache, and his answer came clear. “We’ve been here twenty
years. That’s a good run by any standard. If we have to back off, regroup, we’ll
do it. The planet is a Perpetual Preserve. It will be here when we come back.”

“Will we ever come back?” Mother had raised her voice. That
was so rare it startled Aisha. “Once we’ve packed up and gone, you know what
will happen. Centrum will find an excuse. The designation I fought so hard to
get will evaporate. All those untouched resources, those empty continents,
those seas that no one’s sailed on or fished from in five thousand Earthyears—the
feeding frenzy won’t end till the world’s stripped bare.”

“We’ll fight,” Pater said. “The family has some power still.
We’ll hold off the Goths and the Vandals and even bloody Psycorps, at least for
long enough to get new funding.”

“If there is any,” Mother said.

“Marina—”

“Rashid,” she said, flat and hard and so unlike herself that
Aisha’s stomach clenched into a knot. “You were raised like a prince. I wasn’t.
I know when doors are slamming shut. We’re being pushed off this planet.
There’s nothing more we can do.”

“There is one thing,” he said. “We can find something that
even the idiots in Centrum will notice.”

“What? More potsherds? More scrolls and tablets in languages
no one can read? Even a burial wouldn’t do it by this point—if there had been
one single bone left anywhere that we’ve ever been able to find. It would take
a Rosetta Stone to even make a dent, and then we’d have to explain it to the
idiots in ways they might begin to understand.”

“I won’t give up hope,” Pater said. “I will not.”

Mother didn’t answer that. She’d shut herself off, turned
away from him and gone inside herself where no one could reach, even Aisha.

~~~

Aisha never did sleep that night. By morning she’d made
her plan. She crept out while it was still dark, sneaked into the stable and
saddled her horse and led him out, to find her brother Jamal blocking the way.
He had his own horse, whose empty stall she hadn’t noticed in the dark, and he
was looking even more like Pater than usual: scowling and trying to loom.

Since he was still half a head shorter than she was and
built like a runner bean, that didn’t play well. “You can’t stop me,” she said.

“I wouldn’t waste the energy,” he answered. “Whatever you’re
up to, promise it doesn’t involve explosives.”

She set her lips together.

He sighed. “Of course it does. Look, Aisha—”

“I have to do this,” she said. “If there’s any chance at all
of saving the expedition, I’ve got to try.”

“You know we’ll be all right if we can’t. Beijing Nine has
been after Mother for years to take that endowed chair. We like Beijing Nine.”

“To visit,” Aisha snapped. “Not to live on. It’s not home.
This is home.”

He didn’t point out that when she was older, if she wanted
those doctorates she planned to get, she’d have to live off Nevermore for
years. That wasn’t important, and he knew it.

He pulled himself up on Ghazal’s back without another word.
She mounted Jinni much more gracefully. The spotted gelding was off and
cantering by the time she landed in the saddle.

Which was bad of him, but this morning she was as impatient
as he was.

~~~

She’d watched Shenliu often enough that she thought she
knew how to set a charge. There was treasure down below. She was so sure of it
she could taste it.

She wasn’t thinking about gold and jewels. She meant to find
something much more important. Something that would save the expedition, and
keep them from having to leave the world she’d been born on.

A Rosetta Stone, Mother had said. A key to languages that no
one alive read, not even the nomads who followed the herds of giant antelope
across the plains. They had no written language, no books, and precious few old
stories. It was as if their whole culture had been mindwiped.

That was why Mother had named this planet of endless, empty
ruins—which was designated MEP 1403 on the star maps—Nevermore. Pater held out
for Lethe, but nobody else liked that. Nevermore it was.

Aisha knew that there was a key to the mystery somewhere,
and she was going to find it. The cave was as good a place to start as any.

First she had to get in. It was hardly Aisha’s fault that
she mistook the amounts, and thought a unit of nuplastique was a whole stick.
Afterwards, when the top of the cliff had fallen in and she and Jamal had
barely got out before the earth swallowed them, she found out that a unit was a
hundredth of a stick. Her little hole, just big enough to let a narrow-bodied
girlchild through, had turned into a terribly big hole.

She was too crushed even to cry. There was a cave, but there
was nothing in it. There had been a little gold and a jewel or two—mostly
vaporized—but no real treasure at all. Not even a bone, or a word carved in a
fragment of stone. Certainly no key to the mystery that they were all trying to
solve. That they had to solve this year, or never do it at all.

~~~

Now the cliff looked like a broken tooth, starker than
ever above the long-dead river, and Aisha and Jamal were on lockdown. No
intersession off planet for them. Everyone else got to go back to civilization
for a handful of tendays, but Aisha and Jamal stayed on Nevermore with Vikram,
who had been in Spaceforce when he was younger, and Aunt Khalida, who was not
talking about why she had shown up in midseason and gone to work cataloguing
artifacts.

It was supposed to be a dire punishment. Pater hadn’t said a
word to Aisha since the cliff blew. Mother had. Aisha could still feel the blisters
on her conscience a tenday later, after the shuttle had carried them off to the
tradeship.

Usually Aisha looked forward to intersession. Mother and
Pater went off wherever they had to, to pull together staff and funding, and
Aisha and Jamal spent the time on Earth with the grandparents and a pack of
aunts and uncles and the tribe of cousins.

This year she had a mission, and she had the whole world
almost to herself. Jamal would do whatever she told him. Vikram was barely
there, and Aunt Khalida spent most of her time in her room. Except for making
sure Aisha was not about to blow up any more portions of the landscape, and
checking the schoolbot’s records every evening for evidence that the prisoners
had done their day’s assignment, she left Aisha and Jamal completely and
gloriously alone.

Aisha wished Blackroot tribe was still in their camp outside
the ruined city, but they had left for the summer pastures. That was too bad:
some of them, especially Aisha’s friend Malia, would have been interested in a
treasure hunt. Aisha and Jamal had only themselves for company, and the horses,
who were happy to spend most days roaming and grazing.

Within the first tenday they had covered every quarter of
the city, and spotted a new edge of it, too, buried under grass out on the
plain. That left the territory on the other side of the riverbed, and the
broken cliff.

“I want to go back up there,” Aisha said halfway through the
second tenday.

“Oh no,” said Jamal. “That’s strictly off limits. You can’t
even think about—”

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Aisha said. “I saw
something before it all came down. I want to see if it’s still there.”

“Of course it’s not,” Jamal said. “It’s all blown up with
everything else.”

“Most of what blew was the roof of the cave. There’s still
plenty left underneath. What I saw was down below. I’m betting it’s still
there.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What was it? All I saw was
rocks flying.”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I just know there was something
down there.”

“Well, if there was,” he said, “it’s buried twenty meters
deep.”

“Maybe not,” she said.

He was stubborn, but she was worse. They were both bored. At
the very least, he finally allowed, they could ride over there and look—from a
safe distance. It was better than dangling around the house.