Forgotten Suns (7 page)

His voice came soft in the bloody light. “I don’t suppose
you know what happened to the other moon.”

“What other moon?” Khalida said. “There’s only the one.”

“There were two,” he said.

“No, there weren’t,” she said. “This is all there is. If
there had been a second one, there would be evidence. Rubble in space. A ring.
A crater in the planet, or in the other moon. Evidence of major tidal
disturbances. There’s nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a thing.”

“I suppose they could have taken it with them,” he said.

“That’s crazy.”

He shrugged, no more than the lift of a shoulder.

He had the torque on again. It looked odd with a work shirt
and a well-worn pair of Spaceforce uniform trousers. They were both leftovers
from the storeroom, and they both fit, which was all that mattered to him.

“We’ve got to get you some clothes of your own,” Khalida
said. “I’ll have Vikram put in the order tomorrow. With luck there’s still
enough time for it to come in with the supply ship.”

He said nothing about how long it taken her to think of it.
Not because he was being kind; he honestly did not care. There was too much
else to care about. Giant antelope. Ruined cities. Missing moons.

“Don’t mock,” he said.

Her body went hot, then cold. She measured each word
precisely. “Get out of my mind.”

“Stop shouting at me, then.”

“I am not—”

“One thing Psycorps has right,” he said. “An unschooled
talent is a menace to itself and everything around it.”

“You
are
Psycorps,”
she said. Her stomach had done a duck and roll, and then gone to ground.

“I am not,” he said.

“That you remember.”

“I am not Psycorps,” he said.

She scoffed. “Oh, stop! Of course you are. Maybe they
mindwiped you and tossed you, but nobody with that much talent can escape the
Corps. I wonder what you did to earn the mindwipe? It must have been
impressive.”

“What I did...” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “It
was more what I would have done, and was starting to do. But it wasn’t
Psycorps.”

“They gave you false memories,” she said. “But they didn’t
neuter you. I wonder why? Is it possible they couldn’t?”

“I am not—” He gave it up. Not because he yielded. He was
still determined to believe that he had nothing to do with the Corps.

“That’s part of the programming,” she said. “When they’re
ready to reactivate you, it will all come back.”

“I should be so sure of myself and my world,” he said.

He meant the words to sting. She gave him a brick wall. It
was authentically antique: glazed brick, with a dragon stalking across the top.

He laughed. “Oh, wonderful! Where is that?”

“Earth,” she said. “Babylon.” Then: “Get
out
of my mind!”

“I am. It’s mine you’re in.”

“I am not.”

He counted breaths. She counted with him. At a hundred and
three, he said, “I do apologize. I was not in my right mind when I did what I
did. I opened doors that were bricked and plastered shut. I filled wells that
had been drained by the most ham-handed, the most ineptly brutal—” He stopped;
he brought himself under control. “I did this. I will not undo it. But I can
make amends.”

“You
won’t
undo
it? That means you can.”

“I will not mutilate you all over again,” he said.

“I was defective,” she said. “Psycorps repaired the defect.”

“Psycorps gutted you and left you a mass of scars.”

His disgust was so deep, his anger so fierce, that Khalida
could hardly see. “I was still defective. I still had to—”

“You were
not
!”

The force of that flung her back into a chair and knocked
most of the wind out of her.

He dropped to his knees in front of her. His hands gripped
the arms of the chair. “I see what Psycorps does. It chooses and trains the
middling and the weak, and binds them to its rules and regulations. The strong
it destroys. You are strong. That is the defect. That is what had to be cut
out.”

“I’m not—”

She stopped. If her psi was not weak—if he told the truth—it
all finally made sense. Why the Corps had taken her. What it had done.

Those memories were buried deep, below even nightmares. Mindwiped.
But what they must mean…

“Strong is dangerous,” she said. “Strong can’t be
controlled. Strong can destroy.”

He dropped back onto his heels. “So it can,” he said, soft
again, sounding unspeakably tired. But the anger was as hot as ever. “So can
bodily strength or high intelligence. Are there agencies to destroy those, too?”

“Of course not. Brawn and brains are normal human
attributes. Psi is different.”

“How? Isn’t it born in you? Is it not as much a part of you
as your eyes or your hands?”

She looked at him. At his eyes; at his hands. He had
something in his right hand. In that light it looked like a bleeding scar. As if
something had cut out the palm and filled it with—what?

His fingers closed over it, clenched as they had been when
she first saw him. He rubbed it along his thigh. It hurt, she thought. Badly,
from the way it trembled.

She was evading. Again. “My eyes can’t kill. My hands can’t
break a person’s mind.”

“Of course they can.” He looked her in the face. “Psycorps
is afraid. It knows so little and understands even less. It breaks what it
should cherish, and destroys what it should keep.”

“You’re saying it’s a pack of amateurs.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Then what are you?”

He did not answer. His face had closed in on itself.

“You’re its worst nightmare,” she said.

“It doesn’t know I exist.” He stood. Even exhausted, even
shaking all the way down to the bone, he had grace. He always knew exactly
where the parts of him were.

His hand brushed her hair. Before she could remember to
flinch, it was gone. So was the sensation of wearing her skin inside out.

The world was its normal self again. She deliberately
refused to find it dull or her senses muted.

He was gone. She refused to regret that, too. No matter how
hard it was.

A tenday before everyone was due back, Aunt Khalida called
a family council. That included Vikram. It did not include Rama. He was out
with the antelope, teaching the stallion to canter under saddle.

Aisha would rather have been watching him or riding Jinni.
But Aunt Khalida was not in a good mood. She hadn’t been for days. In fact,
though Aisha would get her mouth washed out if she said so, Aunt Khalida had been
a raving bitch.

Even with that, she looked healthier. The hollows weren’t so
deep under her eyes. The places on her arms where she cut herself, which Aisha
was not supposed to know about, were healing. Her nightmares had stopped
shaking the house quite so hard. She was even sleeping, though maybe she didn’t
realize it.

Now she sat in the kitchen over the last of breakfast and
glowered at Aisha and Jamal and Vikram. “All right,” she finally said, catching
Jamal just as he reached for the last of the cloudberry juice. He snapped his
hand back as if she’d slapped it.

She paid no attention. “I heard from Rashid this morning.
They’re getting in early—half a tenday from now.”

Aisha wanted to cheer, but didn’t dare.

Vikram was braver. “We’re all ready. Just need to make sure
the cabin assignments are sorted out, and finish tuning up the rovers.”

“Good,” said Khalida, who’d barely been listening. “That’s
good. There’s just one thing.”

“Rama,” Jamal said.

Everybody stared at him. He was never the one to blurt things
out—that was Aisha. He went red, but he stood up to them all, even Aunt
Khalida. “Well? He does need explaining.”

“Rama,” said Vikram, “is my cousin from Govinda, who got
himself into a bit of trouble with a certain young lady’s family. Our family
judged it best to send him out of the way for a while.”

“That doesn’t sound like Rama at all,” said Aisha, now
everybody had got to talking.

“Do you have a better idea?” Khalida asked her.

Aisha was been thinking, too, and noodling around in the
computer, and she knew what to say. “He’s Vikram’s old shipmate’s son, and he’s
from Dreamtime. He’s on walkabout. A tradeship dropped him off here.”

Vikram rubbed his chin under the curly grey beard. “Now
that,” he said, “is downright plausible.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Khalida only sounded halfway bitchy. “So
do we change his name? I don’t think there’s anybody named Rama in the
Dreamtime.”

“Let’s not get any more complicated than we have to,” Vikram
said. “I called him that and he liked it. It stuck.”

“That’s the truth,” Aisha said.

“Yes,” said Khalida. “You understand why we’re doing this,
don’t you? As long as we don’t know who he really is, it’s safer to give him a
cover story.”

“Like MI,” Jamal said. “I get it. The less everybody knows,
the less there is to find out.”

And, Aisha thought, the less trouble Aunt Khalida would get
into for letting a total stranger babysit her brother’s offspring when she was
supposed to be doing it. The fact Rama was completely trustworthy in that
respect would make no difference whatsoever. Pater was hard line about
responsibility, and Aunt had been slacking it.

Everybody had reasons for wanting to keep people in the dark
about Rama. “I’ll go tell him who he is now,” Aisha said, and got out of there
before anybody could stop her.

They did try. Jamal was loudest. “
Hey!
It’s your turn to put the dishes in the cleaner!”

~~~

“That’s a good story,” Rama said.

He’d had Jinni saddled, and Lilith too, when Aisha got to
the barn. She thanked him for that.

The antelope stallion was not happy. Not in the least.
He
wanted to go out.
He
wanted to do the running and the
carrying. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. Not because he’d been wild only
three tendays before; Rama didn’t worry about such things. The stallion needed
more practice carrying weight.

So he stayed with his wives, roaring and ramping and
screaming, and Rama and Aisha rode toward the middle of the city. They stopped
beside last year’s excavation, the building with the round paved floor that was
probably a temple.

While the horses grazed around the broken pillars, Rama and
Aisha sat on one that had fallen down, and shared a fruit pastry. Aisha had
told him who he was supposed to be once everybody got back, and he smiled. “Walkabout,”
he said. “That’s like a journey, yes? Such as a priest would take, to discover
the world and himself.”

“People on Dreamtime don’t do priesthood,” said Aisha. “They’re
not that formal. They go ’way back, did you know? Thirty thousand Earthyears,
more or less.”

He widened his eyes. “That’s old,” he said.

“About as old as anything human gets. When everybody went
into space, some of them went walkabout. One way and another, most of those
ended up on Dreamtime. Now when the young ones go out, they go all over, but
they always head back home. Just like in the old times, when home was an island
continent on Earth.”

He nodded. His eyes were dark and as soft as they ever got. “I
went walkabout when I was young. Maybe it’s time I did it again.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “You can’t leave! You
just got here.”

“Did I say I was leaving?”

“You said—” She sucked in air. “Never mind. It was the way
you said it. Are you really from Dreamtime, then?”

“No.”

She went still. “You remember, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the
answer.

His eyes understood. Without stopping to think, she said
inside her head, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

He hadn’t said it aloud.

She stilled even more. “I’ve got it, haven’t I? The thing.
What Aunt Khalida had. Has.”

He bent his head. Neither of them needed to hear him say it.

“You do, too. Lots of it. Lots and lots. But Psycorps didn’t
take you. Did it?”

“It never found me,” he said.

“I wish it would never find me.”

There. She’d said it. She hadn’t been thinking about it.
Much. About how the tendays were spinning on, and she was getting closer and
closer to the day when Psycorps would come. Because it always came. Even to the
remotest places, where a person turned thirteen Earthyears, and the law said
she had to be tested.

On populated planets, parents took their offspring to
Psycorps stations. In places like this, Psycorps came to them. She had her
appointment. It had come in yesterday. She would get a present for her
birthday: a Psycorps agent with his testing protocol.

“That’s what they call it,” she said. “Testing protocol.
Like who gets to speak first at the summit meeting. Or who gets taken off to a
processing center.”

“Is that what they do? Take you away and turn you into
sausage?”

She didn’t want to laugh, but she couldn’t help it. “Just
about. You get more testing. The more you pass, the more they teach you.
Eventually you turn into an agent. Or they decide you won’t work out, and
neuter you.”

“Yes,” he said in his throat. “That I have seen. Your aunt
was there for a while, wasn’t she?”

“Half an Earthyear,” Aisha said. “She never talks about it.”

“She doesn’t remember.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t want to,” Aisha said. She had to say
it, because if she didn’t, it would tear her up inside. “I’m just like her.
Everybody says that. I don’t think I’m that bitchy, but I haven’t been through
all she has, either.”

“Nor will you,” he said.

“How do you know? Can you see the future?”

“That’s not my gift,” he said. “I’m making you a promise.
Psycorps won’t do a thing to you.”

“Look,” she said. “Don’t go killing the agent to save me.
That will just make everything worse.”