Forgotten Suns (40 page)

“All the way out here?” The bartender grinned, baring teeth
inlaid with chips of space iron. “A shot of that would cost you half a
planetoid.”

Heshe meant that literally. Khalida held out the glass for
another shot. A connoisseur could probably have determined to the last molecule
where the imitation departed from the original, but to her untutored palate, it
was close enough.

While she dealt with the second glass more slowly, she took
note of the patrons in the bar: the ones who seemed to be regulars, staked out
at tables around the room; the tourists, who were not numerous and who were
transparently convinced—and half hoping—that any moment they would be slugged
and rolled and sold off to pirates; and those just passing through as she was,
alone or in pairs along the bar or settled against the walls where they could
watch all possible entrances.

None of them triggered her inner alarms. Maybe she was a
tourist after all: she was a little sorry. She might have welcomed a spark of
danger, if not a full-blown bar fight.

She was not quite bored enough to wander back to Meser Abaad’s
house. She switched to beer after the third shot and kept half an eye on the
nearest screen, which had run through a game of null-g soccer and shifted to a
documentary on extra-U.P. exploration.

The hereditary archaeologist in her could not help but lock
on. The buzz of synth-Lagavulin and the bitterness of local beer added an air
of surreality to the rambling narration and the panoramas of dead worlds and
deserted systems.

There seemed to be a great number of those. Through the
faint golden fog, she let her mind pull in data from the web, from her own
cache, and from wherever else it happened to think of. Nothing came back at
first but random hits and
Data Not Found.

Then patterns started to emerge. The vid ranged far—clear to
the edge of the galactic arm. She had not even known that was possible.

Maybe it was not. But the pattern persisted, even when she
tried to exclude that last bit of data.

It was not quite the same, but similar to Rama’s star maps.
Similar distribution of points across space. Similar jumps and backtrackings.
As if someone, or some thing, had followed the same set of parameters, and left
a ruin or an abandoned settlement exactly there.

Sometimes there was nothing but space where the ruin should
have been. Suns grew old and died—swelled into giants or went nova. Wandering
wormholes swallowed planets and systems. Planets collapsed upon themselves, or
broke apart under stresses that sometimes could be known, and often not.

She was dizzy with the immensity of the universe. She stood
on the edge, on the last world, looking up at a sky empty of stars but dotted
with the swirls of galaxies.

In her dream or hallucination, she stepped through a doorway
that stood in the emptiness. It was made of stone, with carvings worn almost to
nothing.

The world behind was barren, endless tracts of dusty waste
and crumbling stone. Water had long since vanished, and dust had blown into the
tracks that it had left, sweeping the planet clean.

On the other side of the door was light. Yellow sunlight, no
brighter than Earth. Green, and falling water. The song of something like a
bird.

Someone knelt by the waterfall, bending to drink. Fall of
blue-black hair, long curve of blue-black back and haunches.

It was not Rama. Oh, no. Rama was never so tall or so lean,
or so very female.

The woman looked up from the water. Her eyes met Khalida’s:
dark and bright at the same time, with a glint of humor and a flicker of
curiosity. Khalida opened her mouth to speak, and willed her foot to step
forward out of the door.

Darkness fell. Khalida snapped awake, glowering at the bar
and the screen and her half-empty glass of beer.

The dream wanted to cling. She pushed it away. She was
unreasonably and unexpectedly angry. Because it was a dream. Because she wanted
it to be real.

The pattern stayed in her head, saved to her personal cache.
The most immediately useful datum was the provenance of the vid: a company
owned by her hosts in Central.

~~~

The villa was quiet when Khalida came back to it. House
net marked everyone as asleep. She was still ferociously awake, as the buzz of
the liquor wore off and the dull ache in her head set in.

She found the kitchen and the supply of drinking water, and
drank until she felt ready to serve as the habitat for another of Alexandra’s
species.

As if the thought had conjured her up, a screen woke in
front of Khalida. Alexandra’s golden eyes stared blandly at her. They were on
stalks, Khalida happened to notice, and capable of focusing wherever they
pleased.

The eyes shrank until the whole creature fit into the
screen, frills undulating and spines rising and falling in an almost hypnotic
rhythm. “Sera Nasir,” Alexandra said.

Khalida saluted her with the empty water bottle. “Sera. You
have interesting hobbies. Do you physically track down ancient ruins, or do you
delegate?”

“You might be surprised,” Alexandra said. Her tone was
amiable, however unreadable her physical expression happened to be. “Fascinating,
isn’t it, how many worlds show signs of habitation, but no indication of who or
what, or how those worlds or those structures were destroyed.”

“Fascinating,” Khalida agreed, “and puzzling. Because none
of those worlds seems to have been generally inhabited. Outposts, the ruins
seem to be. Way stations. Markers on the way to—who knows?”

“Ah,” said Alexandra. “You do have your family’s tropism
toward the archaeological.”

“Bred in the bone,” Khalida said, without quite the edge of
sarcasm that she was used to giving it. “You targeted that vid at me. Didn’t
you?”

“Not necessarily at you,” Alexandra said, “but it seemed
that you should see it.”

It was not really Khalida’s place to do this, but she had
the data. Her gut might be well pickled with synth-Lagavulin but her mind was
clear enough. She sent what she had in a dataspurt, all of it, patterns and
speculations and extrapolations, though not either the dream in the bar or the
truth about the being they all called Rama.

There was enough there to make Alexandra’s frills flush
bright gold. “Oh! Oh, my dear! This is astonishing.”

“We were hoping,” Khalida said, “that you might help us
decipher the patterns. They’re a map, we think, or an itinerary. But we don’t
know where it leads.”

“My dear,” said Alexandra, “this is the kind of thing we
live for. For you, after what you’ve done, it’s the very least we can do.”

Khalida had no expectations. When she left Araceli, she had
gone outside of time and space.

It was a kind of freedom. It made her smile at the alien in
the screen, retrieve a new bottle of water, and reflect that now, maybe, she
could sleep.

When everyone had had a chance to catch up on sleep, the
house that had seemed so quiet started to fill with people.

Some of them came for Meser Abaad or his lifemate, who lived
in the web as well as in the lake. Some came for Marta, because everyone here
seemed to know and love her.

The rest were simply curious. It might seem odd that the
largest outpost of explorers and free traders would even notice yet another
handful of strangers, but strangers who came in a living ship were something
different.

Aisha had grown up never knowing who she might run into
wandering down a passageway or waiting in a sitting room. It went with living
in big houses in the middle of archaeological sites.

Still, it was a little startling to go in search of
breakfast and find her way blocked by an assortment of large and
dangerous-looking persons. They looked like pirates from every vid she’d ever
seen, dressed on the far end of last decade’s high fashion on Centrum and
bristling with things that looked like weapons, but they were a delegation from
the musicians’ union in Central, armed with their instruments. Looking for
Marta, of course. Wanting her to sing.

Marta took care of that, herding them all into the garden
that filled the whole middle of the house. Aisha slipped on past.

When she came back with her belly comfortably full and a cup
of chai warming her hands, there were even more people in the garden with
Marta. And Rama—Aisha could feel him.

He wasn’t angry, but he wasn’t calm, either. Aisha slipped
through the crowd of larger bodies, toward the middle where Marta sat under a
trellis of blood-red roses. “I want you to sing with me,” she said.

Rama leaned against one of the supports of the trellis,
seeming lazy and casual. He smiled as he said, “I’m not what you’d call a
master of your art.”

“Oh, but you are,” she said. “I’d like to try a new piece,
and it needs a particular range of voice. Please try, ser. I promise you won’t
be pelted with rotten fruit if you’re not perfect.”

“Oh, no,” one of the large persons said. “We lean toward
throwing knives and the odd blowgun.”

Rama’s grin had too many teeth in it. “Now that’s a game I’d
play.”

“Sers,” Marta said with quelling sternness. “Hiroshi, there
will be no weapons in my concert hall. Meser Rama, will you look at my music?
It needs your voice.”

Rama might know exactly what she was doing, but he was not
immune. He bowed. “If there are blades and darts, I’ll do my best to defend
you.”

Hiroshi laughed. So did most of the others.

Aisha took note of the rest. They might not be worth noting,
but she liked to be sure. There were undertones, and things that weren’t being
said. Marta wasn’t just doing this on a whim. It meant something.

Aisha would have dreaded singing in front of who knew how
many total strangers. Maybe Rama didn’t care so much. It couldn’t have been any
worse than leading armies into battle.

He was making them pay attention to him now. Asking
questions. Listening to the answers. Managing to make it seem as if he was
interested in every person there.

She didn’t listen to the words. She watched the expressions,
and the feelings that ran beneath. The ones who’d been skeptical were starting
to think he maybe was, at least, interesting. The ones who’d thought so to
start with were moving from interest toward fascination.

Marta was watching, too. Listening. Being amused. Turning
what she saw and heard to music.

Aisha caught a skein of it, a bit of melody floating through
the worldweb. Words drifted underneath. “He sang a psi master into submission.
What could he do here?”

“What do you want him to do?” Aisha asked.

She didn’t get an answer. Not then. She would eventually,
she was sure.

~~~

Rama escaped without making anyone think he was running
away. He wheedled Marta into singing an aria from one of her most famous roles,
and while she sang, he slipped out.

The aria was the one she’d sung when they first saw her,
back on Araceli. Aisha wanted to hang back and listen, but Rama was almost out
of sight.

He was headed for the street. She didn’t think he had any
plan in mind, just to get out and see where they were. Aunt Khalida had done
that when everyone else was asleep. Now Rama wanted a turn.

He wasn’t headed for a bar, and he didn’t want to drink
himself out of whatever funk he happened to be in. He had thinking to do.

Aisha settled herself in his shadow. Rama didn’t object.
Probably because he knew it wouldn’t do any good, but he seemed content with
it.

Aisha kept track of where they were on the city’s grid.
Parts of it weren’t so well monitored as others. Rama aimed for one of those,
down toward the lake.

It was midday, Central time, and the streets were not maybe
as crowded as they would be after the virtual sun went down. People wandered in
and around the shops and restaurants, though the bars were quiet at this hour.

Rama didn’t stop anywhere. He was doing a walking meditation
as Pater called it. Moving to keep his mind moving. Processing.

Up one street, down another. Around a proscribed area:
nonhuman habitat, atmosphere toxic to humans. Getting the shape of this place.

“Madhusudana Rama?”

He stopped. Nobody ever used the whole of his presumed name.

Unless they were MI, and blocking the way. The one in charge
was a sturdy, grizzled man with a look of perpetual tired. “We’d like to speak
with you, Meser Rama, if you don’t mind.”

The sergeant wasn’t any taller than he was, but Rama managed
to look as if he sneered down his nose at the man. “I believe I do mind.”

“It will only take a few minutes,” the sergeant said. “This
way, ser.”

“I think not.”

The sergeant’s troops closed in. There were more than Aisha
had thought at first. They weren’t taking any chances.

“You have no authority here,” she said sharply.

“Actually, we do,” the sergeant said. “We’ll be wanting to
speak to you, too, Sera Nasir. If you’ll come with us.”

“By treaty with Kom Ombo,” Rama said, sounding just as
casual as he’d been in the garden with Marta, “kidnapping, if proved, and if
the victim is of appropriate age and family, is a crime without borders. That’s
his authority.”

“Nobody kidnapped me,” Aisha snapped. “I stowed away.
Stowing away isn’t a crime without borders, is it, Sergeant? You can’t touch
either of us.”

“That remains to be proved,” the sergeant said.

“Exactly,” said Rama. “When you have proof, lodge a
complaint with Central. In the meantime, if you don’t mind…”

Obviously the sergeant did. Unlike Rama, he cared if he
lived or died. And he had rules to live by.

He snapped a nod. His soldiers stepped back.

Rama saluted them. Aisha thought about it, but that might be
too much. She settled for making sure they could see that she was armed, and
staring down the sergeant on the way by.