by Judith Tarr
“Horses,” he said. He mimicked her pronunciation exactly. “A horse is this?”
“A horse is this,” she said.
“Tell me where I am,” he said. “How did I come here? Who are you? What are you? What are these animals, these horses?”
Aisha could not answer half of what he asked. The part that she could, she did her best with. “You’re on Nevermore. We’re from Earth. We’re digging here—my parents are. They’re with the Cairo Museum. In Egypt, you know. In Greater Eurafrica.”
His eyes on her were perfectly blank. Not one of those names meant a thing to him. He turned his head from side to side without taking his glare off her. It was hot enough to crisp her skin. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not—where is this? Who brought me here? Where is my city?”
At almost the same instant, Jamal howled at her, too. “Aisha!”
Him, she could slap some sense into. The wild man, not so much. His hands were on his weapons, gripping them so hard his knuckles had gone grey, but he had not drawn them. She noticed that. He was not trying to hurt her.
“I don’t know,” she said to him. “I’m sorry. I think your memory must be—”
“My memory,” he said. Maybe his face twisted. It was hard to see in all the hair. “I remember—I was—I can’t—”
“I’m sorry,” Aisha said again. It was pathetic and useless, but it was all she could think of. “You can come home with us. We can see if—”
Jamal’s yowl nearly ruptured her eardrums. The wild man’s face went blank; his eyes rolled up. He dropped like a rock.
She laid Jamal flat, then hauled him up and shook him until he stopped shrieking. Which he did eventually. Jamal was an idiot, but if she hit him hard enough, he usually came around.
“Now look what you did,” she said through the ringing in her ears. “You’ve killed him.”
“Good!” Jamal half-yelled, but only half. Her hand was waiting to smack him again if he tried any more than that.
The wild man was alive. He was breathing fast and shallow. His heart when she dared to touch his chest was hammering. He shook in spasms, as if he’d taken a fit.
Lightning walked down the dry riverbed. Wind plucked at Aisha’s hair. She smelled the electricity in it, and the faint sharpness of rain.
They would be lucky to make it back to the house before it hit. Aisha threw Jamal toward his saddle—on the ground and half trampled as she’d expected—and ran for her own.
Sometimes the horses liked to play at being hard to catch. Today they knew better. Aisha and a loudly reluctant Jamal pulled and hauled and heaved and shoved the wild man up onto Ghazal, who was quieter. He was too far gone to sit upright; they had to tie him face down and plan to apologize if he woke up on the way.
Jamal had to ride double with Aisha, which he didn’t like, either, but she was long past paying attention to him. As soon as he was solid behind her, with his arms around her waist, she got a grip on the bay’s rein and urged Jinni into a canter.
~~~
The storm chased them all the way to the gate of the compound. It broke just as they clattered into the barn.
“That’s luck,” Jamal panted.
Aisha had her own theory, but she kept it to herself. Jamal had stopped yowling and made his peace with the world, or close enough. A hard ride in rough weather could do that. He hardly complained at all about having to cool the horses out by walking them around the barn while Aisha fetched the hay cart and eased the wild man onto it.
He was no lighter now than he had been across the river. Even with Jamal helping, he was a sturdy weight to move. She had been thinking to get him up into the loft, but that was not happening. She hauled him down along the covered porch to the staff quarters instead.
Shenliu wasn’t there to mind that Aisha stole his apartment for the wild man. It was the closest one to the stable, and she knew the key for the lock. She also knew where things were, which made it easier to get the bed made up and the stranger into it.
Then she just stood and breathed. He needed things, but she could hardly think what.
“We have to tell Aunt Khalida,” Jamal said.
He was wobbling in the doorway, darting glances at the wild man, like a horse shying and then coming back to the scary thing and then shying again. “The horses are all cooled off?” Aisha said.
“Pretty much,” he said. “I put them in their stalls and gave them hay.”
“Water, too?”
“Of course water, too,” he said. “We have to tell Aunt. She’ll know what to do about him.”
Aisha had been thinking the same thing, but because Jamal had said it first, she had to say, “No! We’ll figure it out ourselves.”
“What’s to figure out? This is a crazy man. We found him in the middle of nowhere. He could be an escaped criminal. He was mindwiped, wasn’t he? He can’t even remember his own language.”
“He knows Old Language,” Aisha said.
“That’s what I mean,” said Jamal. “He’s not from the tribes. He’s got to be from offworld. Either he went native or he went crazy, or somebody wiped his mind for him.”
Jamal was an idiot, but he was anything but stupid. All the while he had been yowling and kicking, his mind had been working. He’d put it all together even better than Aisha had.
She had to give him credit. Even when he said, “Aunt is MI—Military Intelligence. If anybody knows what to do about a criminal or a hostage or whatever he is, it’s Aunt.”
The fact he was right didn’t make Aisha any happier about it. “So what do we say? That we were where we were told flat out not to go? We’ll be grounded for the rest of our lives.”
“We don’t have to tell her exactly where we found him. Just that he was out there, he passed out, the storm came—it’s all the truth. She can take it from there. Then if he wakes up and tries to kill us all, we won’t be the ones he goes for.”
“He won’t try to kill anybody,” Aisha said. She was absolutely sure of that. She had taken the sword and knife off him and hidden them in Shenliu’s closet, but that was mostly to keep him safe from himself.
“Look,” she said. “Let’s just let him sleep until morning. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“What if he wakes up and runs off again?”
“I’ll make sure he’s locked in,” she said. “Just until morning, all right?”
It was not all right, but the fight had gone out of Jamal. He gave in.
Aisha should have felt better about it than she did. She always won; that was the way things were. But this was too odd for anyone’s comfort.
3
The Brats were up to something.
They usually were, but this one had an exceptionally odd feel to it. They were quiet at dinner, kept their eyes down, ate everything they were fed, and most damning of all, offered no objection when ordered to bed early.
Khalida would have welcomed the quiet, but the quality of it raised hackles that should not have been there. The nightmares were back, and so were the other things, the things that had got her sent away on psych leave.
She had been rationing her computer time, because that was another symptom: compulsive escape into the mysteries of a planet that had gone from extensively populated to nearly deserted in the space of days. Rashid thought months or even years, but Khalida did not think so. What must have taken years was stripping out every image of humanoid or domestic animal, everywhere, in every inhabited place. That meant they had had warning of whatever it was, and time to prepare. But they had left quickly.
Even thinking about it was an evasion. While she sat at the window, staring into the dark, she avoided sleep and the dreams that waited in it.
Her head ached. Phantom-psi syndrome. Psycorps had taken what little psi she had out of her when she was Aisha’s age, declared her fully and acceptably neutered and free of abilities too defective to develop further.
She could still feel them. Still, when she was tired or disconnected or clos
e to sleep, reach down into herself and for a few brief instants know she was whole.
This was whole, she told herself. This, now, with all the damage it had taken in the disaster on Araceli. Normal, human, ordinary traumatic stress, duly and officially treated. Not some complication of a quarter-century-old procedure for a moderately common birth defect.
“You,” she said to the blur of her reflection in the window, “are a right mess.” She pushed herself up, meaning to stagger off to bed, but as she paused, swaying in the darkened room, she saw shadows against shadow flitting outside.
The Brats were headed toward the stable. That was enough to send Khalida in pursuit.
~~~
They did not, after all, steal horses and slip away into the night. They went on past to the staff quarters, the row of cabins down along the south wall. Those were deserted: Vikram had an apartment above the stable, and everyone else was offworld.
Aisha and Jamal had something hidden in Shenliu’s quarters. Whatever it was, it kept them busy and bickering for close to an hour. Khalida considered walking in on them, but decided to wait instead and see how long it took them to finish whatever they were doing.
It was dark and cool in the shadow of the covered porch. There were no stars tonight; the storms had moved off, but the sky was heavy with clouds. Khalida breathed the smell of rain.
Every world was different. Here on Nevermore the rain had a sharpness as in the deserts of Earth, but with an undertone that was alien. She had yet to put words to it. Spice, a little. Greenness. A faint, cold note, like wind in empty places.
The Brats came out of the cabin, still bickering. She could not make sense of the words, nor did she try overly hard. She sat for a while after they had gone back toward the house and their beds, not sure what she would or even should do until she found herself in front of Shenliu’s door.
Someone was inside. She could feel the life and warmth in the darkness behind her eyelids, and hear the rush of breath into and out of lungs. Human—an animal felt and sounded different.
She opened the door.
The children had left a light on, heavily shaded but bright enough after the dark outside. Khalida stood over what they had brought home.
It was certainly not what she had expected. If she had had to guess what he was, she would have guessed Govindan, with a few rather extreme modifications. But the treasure trove he was loaded down with was distinctively of this world, and rich enough to widen her eyes. The xenoarchaeologist in her catalogued and provisionally dated it at some centuries before the Disappearance—Nevermore’s late Bronze Age, more or less. The craftsmanship of the belt, the sheer weight and mass of the torque around his neck . . .
He must have got into a tomb. Or someone had shut him up in one and left him for years, feeding him just enough to keep meat on his bones.
He burned with fever. When she laid her hand on his forehead, she recoiled from the heat of his skin.
His head tossed. She reached by instinct to steady it. His eyes opened.
There was nothing sane about them. They fixed on her face as if it had been the most fascinating thing in any world. He spoke a running stream of words in a language she knew just enough of to recognize. It was a very old ritual language of the tribes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t studied enough to understand—”
He went still. His eyes were still completely crazy, but his voice was soft and steady, and he spoke perfectly comprehensible PanTerran. “A bath,” he said, “would be a welcome thing. And a razor, if you have one.”
“Not if you’re going to slit your throat with it,” she said.
It was next to impossible to tell, but maybe the corner of his mouth curved upward. “I will not do that,” he said gravely.
If she had been a suitably modest daughter of the family, she would have called Vikram to do the honors. But she had not been either modest or proper in a long time, and Vikram would add complications that she was not, at the moment, in a mood to face. She ran the bath herself and found a razor in one of the other cabinets, and a set of shears, too. While she was at it, she raided the common storeroom for clothes that she hoped would fit, and a few other useful things.
He was still in Shenliu’s bed when she came back, and still awake. The pure madness had retreated from his stare, but was still there underneath.
She knew that madness. She had a fair share of it herself. She contemplated carrying him into the bath, but although he was weak, he could walk. He was a little taller than she was: not a big man at all, but well-built and compact, and surprisingly fit. When he was back to himself, he would be quite strong.
He had no modesty that she could detect, and nothing like shame. He acted as if it was perfectly natural for a man to be bathed and shaved and turned into a civilized being by a woman.
He was much younger than she had thought. Under the thicket of beard he had a young man’s face, though not exactly a pretty one. Distinctive, that was the word. Whatever modifications had given him that skin like black glass, she suspected the features were the ones he was born with.
He had scars, which meant the modifications were years old. Most were on his arms and chest; there was a deep one in his thigh. His right hand was a fist; it would not open for any pressure she could put on it. His fingers and palm must have fused together with some old injury.
He would not let her cut his heavy curling mane, though it hung clear to his waist. She combed it out as much as she could and twisted it into a braid as thick as her arm. That contented him, and got it out of the way.
He was still feverish, and weaker than she liked to see. He hardly argued when she helped him back to bed, though when she ordered him to sleep, he said, “I’ve slept enough.”
“You’re sick,” she said. “You need to rest.”
“Not any more,” he said.
She shook her head. If she had to sit on him to keep him down, she would.
She bullied water into him, and tipped a pana-tab in with the last of it. He choked and tried to spit it up, but it had already dissolved. “Stop glaring,” she said. “It will help with your fever.”
“It will not.” He was breathing hard. Panic attack, she thought. She knew about that, too. Oh, did she. The shakes, the sweats—all of it.
By the time she realized that he was not panicking, he was actively sick, it was too late to head off the reaction. She cursed herself ferociously. Any three-year-old knew not to give medication before asking if the patient was allergic. Even a pana-tab. Especially a pana-tab, when the patient had an unknown quantity and variety of modifications.
“Never,” she said. “Never without a scan. Damn. If I’ve killed him, I’ll kill myself.”
With luck he would kill her first. The first assault of fever laid him flat and kept him deathly quiet. She did what she could: ice baths, cold cloths, prayer to a God she had stopped believing in when she was Aisha’s age.
Then came the delirium.
It was daylight by then. She noticed it because the door was open and the children were standing in it, all eyes and shock.
She gave them something to do: mine the house computer and the schoolbot and find something, anything, to counteract a severe allergic reaction. Miraculously, they did as she told them. They were gone before all hell broke loose.
The convulsions and the raving were easy. Soft restraints, then hard ones. More cold baths. The bed was soaking wet. If she survived this, she would have to get Shenliu a new one.
What came after that was harder.
If Psycorps had neutered this one, the neutering had not taken. He was not only completely unregulated, he had aberrations she had never even seen.
Most of it had to be illusory—trapping her inside his hallucinations. He had not really destroyed the whole city and everything in it, then put it back together again exactly as it was, ruins and excavations and all.
He had not remade the city, either, as it must have been several thousand yea
rs ago, bright and sharp and new, full of people and animals, life, light, voices and laughter and song. Giant antelope in saddle and bridle or drawing wagons or chariots. People of what must have been a dozen nations, some of whom looked like the tribes she knew, and some were fairer but most were darker, and all of them were taller. The darkest were the tallest. They looked like him when she had first seen him, with black eagle-faces and exuberant beards and a clashing array of ornaments.
That had to be a fantasy. He was certainly no giant.
It was a wonderful dream, vivid and strikingly real. She could feel the pavement underfoot, and smell the complex smells of a thriving city, and hear the song a woman sang: a woman with skin like honey and hair like fire. It was a love song she was singing, and she smiled as she sang, with warmth that reached across all the hundreds of years.
Such sadness struck Khalida then, such grief and such rage that it broke her mind apart. She felt it breaking. She felt it healing, too, as the dream melted around her: wounds knitting, scars fading, places that had been stripped bare filled up again with light.
4
Aisha and Jamal brought Vikram in when Khalida collapsed. As she clawed her way out of whatever had happened to her, she was more than glad to see that well-worn face with its web of old radiation scars.
During a lull in the delirium, Vikram helped her get the stranger into the main house. The walls were more solid there, and there was in-house security—not much by MI standards, but better than nothing.
“We need a name for him,” she said as they finished rigging the restraints in one of the guest rooms. He, whatever his name was, was unconscious for the time being. The house medbot had already confirmed that he was breathing, his heart was beating, and he had a dangerously high fever.
Vikram rubbed his jaw where a flying fist had caught it. “Rama,” he said. “Call him Rama.”
His expression was odd. So was hers, she supposed. “Rama, then. We’ll let him tell us what it really is when he comes to.”
