Forgotten Suns (42 page)

“And us with him,” Khalida said.

He peered at her through the link. She could feel him trying
to reach into her mind after all: a sensation like a limb going numb, a faint,
vaguely uncomfortable tingle. She met it with blankness and the polished
surface of a mirror.

He flinched. She hoped, not kindly, that he had a headache. “Aren’t
you even a little bit afraid?” he asked with the first hint of temper she had
seen in him.

“Of Rama?” She snorted. “Compared to what we had to cope
with on Araceli? Not particularly. He doesn’t mean us any harm, unless we get
in his way.”

“I wish,” said Zhao, “I could be trusted with the truth.
There’s no sign of anyone or anything like him, anywhere within United Planets.
Anywhere
. He’s not a child; I
believe—I know—he’s older than he looks. Where did he come from? How did we
never have to contend with him? Because, Captain, the kind of man he is, he
would never be content with obscurity. Tides of events swirl around him. He
shapes those tides. He makes them turn to his will.”

“Why,” Khalida said, “you’re a poet. And a precog. Aren’t
you?”

He bent his head. “It’s not my strongest talent. I don’t see
clearly. Shapes, patterns, movement and change: I feel them. This man, this
being, whatever he is, is like a shockwave. Where he goes, worlds change. I
think—sometimes—they die.”

Across the connection between them, her own familiar files
began to stream. Star maps, patterns half-formed, traces of ruins across known
and unknown space.

“He didn’t make those,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Moderately,” she answered.

“It’s a riddle,” he said. “Isn’t it? There has to be a key.
A code that opens the—whatever it is. Files. Door. Jump point.”

“You’ve been spying,” she said.

“And thinking,” he said without shame, which surprised her
slightly. “That’s my talent. Synthesis. I could help you, if you would let me.
If you would trust me.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d have to think about it.”

“That’s fair,” he said steadily. The sadness beneath was not
intended to incite pity, she thought. Or no more so than he could help.

~~~

“Did you dream?” Khalida asked. “While you were asleep?”

Rama had not been awake for long. Khalida had camped in his
room, with coffee on order for the moment he cracked an eyelid. Which, when she
had almost dropped off herself, he finally did.

“I dreamed a panther stalked me. Just as it was about to
spring, I woke up.”

Khalida showed him her teeth. “Not just now. Then. When you
were asleep in the rock. Did you dream?”

His eyes were the darkest she had ever seen, but they always
had a light inside: a brightness in the heart. That brightness went abruptly
dark.

“I have a reason for asking,” she said. She gave it to him
on the web, or in her mind if he preferred that.

A fragment, a few bytes in the stream of data that Zhao had
run past her. A collection of children’s stories from a multitude of worlds. A
tale from an all but abandoned world, told by members of a forgotten tribe. How
a terrible enchanter, half a demon, had been trapped by his mortal father and
his lover and their children, and shut up in stone, and condemned to sleep
forever, or until he dreamed his way out.

The light sparked again, as Rama’s brows twitched upward. “A
children’s story?”

“Children get the truth when everyone else has forgotten. It’s
wrapped in story, but it’s there. Did you dream?”

“Incessantly.”

“Of what?”

“When I wasn’t living my last day over and over?” He sat up,
clasping his knees. He looked so young she was almost sucked in, but she was
too old in paranoia for that. “I dreamed of suns and stars. Suns in multitudes.
Stars wheeling in ranks like armies—galaxies, I know now. Then—nothing.”

“Emptiness?”

“Nothing. No thing. No suns. No stars. Absolute blackness.
And then…”

He paused so long that Khalida caught herself leaning
forward until she almost fell over. “And then?”

“Light,” he said, “at the utmost end of time. Where the
stars have all died or were never born. Except one. With…something…in its
heart. Something that I could never see.”

“Never?”

“Not ever,” he said. “Except…”

This time she waited. He had a long, long run of dreams to
remember.

When he spoke, it was in his own language, a swift flow of
words that gradually resolved into something she could understand. “I was cast
into sleep because I saw only light and darkness, and nothing between. Light
was perfect; darkness was evil. I was absolutely convinced of it—as only the
true believer can be. I nearly brought down half a world.

“I deserved my sentence. But something was out there.
Something beyond any of our gods or even our night terrors. Something that
would cause our people to empty the world and sweep away a moon, to destroy it.
Or,” he said slowly, “to lure it. To draw it away. To trap it, and bind it.
Because that was all they could do. Or all they dared do.”

“Because none of them was as strong as you?”

“I doubt it was the strength,” he said, dry as his bones
should have been after six thousand years. “I was—I am—a weapon. A mindless,
deadly thing. A power that can, and without compunction will, destroy—and not
care if it is destroyed.”

“You’re not mindless,” Khalida said.

“Am I not?”

She had nothing to say to that. Instead she focused on
another part of this inherently preposterous story. “What is so terrible that
it needs the sacrifice of a whole world?”

“Not just one world,” he said. “All those worlds, all those
ruins—world after world, star after star. It took them all. Until my people
stopped it. Wiping out all trace of who they were, that was part of it. The
mystery. The void that beckoned. And beckoning, became a trap.”

She could almost make sense of that. “So—what? They left a
trail for you? It’s not just random worlds?”

“Not random at all,” he said. “Each world was a destination,
and a point of departure. A gate. We hadn’t mapped them, but we knew of them.
After I was gone…I think our world became a nexus. A gathering place, a
port—like this place. But not for ships; for worldgates. Then something came
through. Something that could only be stopped by destroying them all.”

“Or that destroyed them all, once it had gone through.”
Khalida had stopped trying to suspend disbelief; she had proof enough that
something was out there, or had been. “If that all happened a thousand years
after you went into stasis, why is it so urgent that you find the answer now?
You’re no part of whatever it was. You were awakened by accident.”

“Was I?”

“Aisha miscalculated the quantity of explosives. She was
only trying to open a door.”

“Yes.”

Khalida throttled back a strong urge to hit him. “My niece
has nothing to do with you or your world or your people.”

“Your niece is a strong psi, as you would put it. If it was
time, and she was there…”

“I don’t believe in destiny,” Khalida said. “Or in divine
will.”

“Or fate, either, I would presume.” Rama reached for the
coffee that had been steaming in its mini-stasis field, and grimaced as he
drank it. “You are all godless heathen, and my old self would have given you a
choice: to be converted to the one true faith, or killed.”

“Really?”

“No.” After coffee there was breakfast: enough for three. He
ate it all, methodically. Fueling. Just as the
Ra-Harakhte
fueled itself for a voyage to the edge of nowhere. “Our
kind of holy war was not about conversion. It was about who was demonstrably
right.”

“Which you were?”

“Until I was manifestly wrong.”

“Do you think you might be wrong now?”

“I think I have to go where I’m directed to go. I’m no use
to this universe otherwise.”

“Everyone is of some use,” Khalida said. “If only to
fertilize a field.”

He stared; then laughed. “You would have done well in the
world I come from.”

“I am a bit of an atavism, aren’t I?” She stood. “You have
an opera to rehearse. I have a set of patterns to stare at, and try to make a
little more sense of.”

“Why?”

“Why rehearse? Because you need to know where to stand, and
when not to start singing.”

He shook that off. “Why do you help me? What’s in it for
you?”

“Knowledge.”

He pondered that. After a while he nodded. “It’s in your
blood.”

“Tomb robbing. Since before even you were born.”

“Searching not for gold but for understanding. Yes. Your
niece is the same.”

Sudden anger gusted, catching Khalida by surprise. “My niece
is nothing like me. She’s clean.”

“Of what?”

Khalida could not bring herself to answer that. She left him
sitting there with the empty cup in his hand.

Aisha had been capturing and filing all her messages from
Nevermore since she came out of jump on the
Leda
.
She hadn’t opened any of them. She knew what they said. She wasn’t sure she
could handle the way she’d feel when she finally read them.

Now she’d promised Rama, and she kept her promises. Even
when she hated to even think about it.

There were many more messages than she remembered, most from
Pater. Nothing from Mother. Only two from Jamal, and one of them was the most
recent of all the messages in the file.

They’d probably put him up to it, hoping she’d answer him if
she wouldn’t go near them. They were right. He’d filter them anyway, and he
might have something to say other than How Dare You and What Were You Thinking
and Get Back Home Right Now.

The message was plain data, no enhancements. Just words.

They’ve been freaking since they found out where you went. I
know you can’t come back, but you’d better say something to them before they
finish ripping my head off and feeding it to me sideways.

I’m on lockdown. I can’t even go outside the house unless
somebody goes with me. Not that I mind, really, but they keep trying to
restrict my web access, and that I do mind. Did you know we got our hackitude
from Mother? Not just from Aunt Khalida? She put an actual tracer on my
searchbots. Took me two whole Earthdays to get rid of it.

Aisha had known about Mother and the web, and she suspected
that what Jamal had got rid of was just a decoy. But she wouldn’t tell him
that. Some things a person had to learn for himself.

Everything’s crazy here. The horses are all impossible without
you and Aunt Khalida to keep them in line, and Mother’s too busy with
everything else to take the time. The antelope are actually less trouble than
the horses. Malia comes and goes and keeps them mostly from climbing walls and
breaking down fences. Pater wants to turn them loose, but Mother won’t let him.
She still wants to write that paper.

The new interns are an exceptionally incompetent collection of miseducated
acephalic organisms, Pater says. U.P. tried to cancel the grant for the season,
which just happened to happen after you turned up on the Leda. We’ve been
descended on by a shipful of tourists who aren’t, if you know what I mean. I
think some of them are Psycorps agents pretending to be Centrum richidiots, and
the rest are MI and maybe even black ops. It’s like a vid, with more screaming.

Aisha was almost jealous. Life on Nevermore had never been
that interesting when she was there.

Look
, Jamal said.
Send something, all right? Just so they’ll
calm down a little bit.

Which we will.

That wasn’t Jamal. Aisha let go the breath she’d been
holding. Mother came through in text, but with her image attached, eyes steady
on Aisha as if she could actually see her.
Daughter of mine, I won’t
tell you anything you don’t already expect, except this. If you need help, or backup,
or more advice, good or bad, than you can ever use, send a message with the
code I’ve embedded. Direct it to any tradeship in or out of U.P. space. They’ll
give you what you ask.

Now that Aisha hadn’t been expecting. She knew a little
about Mother before she met Pater—how she was crew on a tradeship because she
didn’t have the funding to be a research scholar. She’d met Pater on one of the
ship’s runs, while he was still setting up the expedition to Nevermore.

That was very romantic, though like Nevermore at the moment,
with more screaming than one mostly saw in stories. What Aisha hadn’t known was
that Mother still kept her contacts with the tradeships.

Odd to think of Mother as someone with secrets. Odder to get
an offer of help, instead of a demand that she come home.

Stay sensible,
Mother said.
Take notes. Your first
doctorate is in there somewhere.

Aisha broke down and bawled. Not too long. Just to howl a
little bit. Let it all out. Wish she could be home again—for an hour or a
night.

Then she could be sensible again, the way Mother said. She
kept the message-within-a-message with its encrypted code that she didn’t
expect she’d ever use.

It was the thought that counted. She put together her own
message, just a short one.

Dear Mother and Pater and Jamal and Vikram and everybody, I’m
well, really I am. Aunt Khalida is here and keeping me in line. We’re looking
for ways to save Nevermore. We’ll come back when we find them. That’s a
promise.

P.S. Mother, I’m taking notes.

That was the best she could do. She marked it to send the
next time the subspace packet went out, which would probably be when MI left
the system.

She still felt odd and weepy. She went to watch rehearsals,
to have something to do that wasn’t on the web or inside her own head.

~~~

Marta’s piece played as part of an opera, with chorus and
instrumentals and virtual sets and costuming. They were putting it all together
when Aisha slipped into the hall.