by Judith Tarr
If he did. She did not say it. Neither did Vikram.
~~~
On a civilized planet there would have been resources. Medics; hospitals. The medbot here was programmed for the ills an archaeological expedition was prone to. It had only the most basic accommodations outside of that. For what ailed Rama, it was next to useless.
There were no ships within two tendays’ reach of the system. Vikram had determined that before Khalida even thought of it. Khalida was almost desperate enough to load the Brats into a rover and order them to fetch a shaman from a tribe when the storm of delirium stopped.
It was abrupt, and it happened in the deep night. An hour before, he had been throwing off sparks. When Vikram tried to hold him down, he was nearly electrocuted.
That, the medbot could treat. Vikram was in his own bed recovering. Khalida sat at a prudent distance, wide and painfully awake.
The silence grew on her. It was more than a lull. Rama lay on his back, perfectly still.
She leaped. At the last instant she remembered lightning, but that was gone. His forehead was cool. He was breathing, deep and slow.
He was asleep. It was sleep; the bot confirmed it. He was not in a coma.
The tension ran out of her so quickly her knees buckled. She did not need the medbot to tell her the fever had broken. There might be brain damage; he was probably insane. But as far as the bot could tell, he would live.
~~~
He slept for a day and a night. The bot fed him a glucose drip, but not—cautiously—anything pharmaceutical.
Khalida woke at dawn. She was restless and irritable and ready to claw the walls, but she could not bring herself to leave the patient alone. She curled up in the corner with a reader and a box of databeads, running through expedition files.
She had most of the finds from the southwestern quadrant of last season’s dig organized and catalogued when something made her look up.
He was watching her. He seemed perfectly calm. As far as she could tell, he was sane.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he replied.
“You’ve been sick,” she said, “but you’re getting better.”
“How long?”
He said it quietly, but it seemed to matter a great deal to him. “Four days,” she said. “I made a mistake. I gave you something I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t trying to kill you.”
“Four days,” he said. It was a sigh. “No wonder I’m hungry.”
Probably she should not have laughed, but he actually smiled, which was a relief. She preferred that to being blasted where she sat.
“Breakfast,” she said. “Let me see what I can find in the kitchen. Promise you won’t go anywhere.”
“I promise,” he said without irony.
She was ravenous, but she made sure to feed him first. Not much, and nothing solid—not yet. He obviously was not impressed with the mug of liquid ration, though he drank every drop.
“Good,” she said. “A meal or two more and we’ll try you on something you’ll like better.”
“I do hope so,” he said, but he sounded more wry than annoyed.
She kept a close eye on him, and kept the medbot running. He showed no sign of a relapse. Toward noon she fed him again. By evening she was as ready to feed him solid food as he was—and she was beginning to believe that he had come through intact.
~~~
Next morning when she woke from an entirely unplanned and nearly nightlong sleep, he was gone. The bed was neatly made. The clothes she had found for him were gone.
Part of her was purely and whitely panicked. Part knew exactly where he was. She could feel it the way she felt her own hand, twitching at the end of her arm.
It was part of what he had done to her. She was not ready to think about that yet. She scraped the sleep out of her eyes and the hair out of her face and stumbled into the early-morning light.
He was cleaning the spotted gelding’s stall, slowly, with frequent stops to rest. Aisha had done the whole of the opposite row and started on the end of that one. Khalida swooped down on her like the wrath of Spaceforce. “What are you doing? How could you let him? He almost died!”
“I made her show me,” he said behind Khalida. “If anybody’s earned a whipping, I have.”
“He already knew how,” Aisha said. “I showed him where things were. The horses like him.”
That was obvious. Jinni was wrapped around him, nibbling his hair.
“Back to bed,” Khalida said. “Now.”
“No.” There was nothing defiant about it. He simply refused. “I’ve had enough of beds and sleep. Let me finish here. Then let me lie in the sun. That will heal me better than any pill or potion.”
He was amazingly hard to argue with, and not because Khalida had seen what he could do when he was out of his head. He was so very reasonable, and so very sure of himself.
She threw up her hands. “Do what you like. Die if you want to. I don’t care.”
He bowed, which nearly tipped him over. The gelding propped him up.
Khalida turned her back on him and left him there.
~~~
He lay in the sun of the courtyard all morning and part of the afternoon, basking like a lizard on a rock. Any unmodified human would have burned to a crisp. He bathed in light.
“He’s charging,” Khalida said from the upper floor of the house, where she had been trying to put together fragments into something resembling a statue.
“Like a solar panel,” Vikram agreed.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?”
He shot her a glance. “You’re MI, and you’re asking me?”
“You were Spaceforce,” she said. “If there’s anything to hear, Spaceforce hears it. MI gets the leavings.”
He grunted. “Somebody somewhere has to have come up with the mod, or he wouldn’t have it. Unless . . .”
“What?” Khalida demanded when he did not go on.
“Unless he was born that way.”
“What, gengineered?”
“Do you have any other ideas?”
“Not offhand,” she said. “I’ve sent inquiries on the subspace feed. There’s no telling how long it will take to get anything back.”
“I sent a few myself,” said Vikram. “So far all I’ve got is nothing. If he’s one of ours, he’s so classified even he probably doesn’t know what he is. If he’s one of yours...”
“I suppose we’ll find out eventually,” she said. “Are you going to report him to Psycorps?”
“Are you?”
She shrugged. It was more of a shiver. “I’m thinking about it. If he’s theirs, I’m not sure I want to be anywhere near him when they find him.”
“I’d worry more about them,” Vikram said.
That, Khalida had to agree with. There were rumors about what happened when a psi went rogue. A psi of the level of this one would have the whole Corps out after him.
Which would explain why he had turned up here, at the back end of nowhere, on a planet with effectively no inhabitants. Either he was hiding, or someone had been hiding him.
Her inquiries would trigger searchbots, if there were any. So would Vikram’s. It was small comfort that he had failed as badly as she had at thinking things through.
Too late now. It would take a while in any case. In the meantime Rama or whatever his name was was as safe as she or Vikram could make him.
He certainly seemed happy. When the sun vanished behind clouds and the thunder began its daily walk, he came in to be fed. He was walking steadily, and he looked orders of magnitude better.
The implications of that for MI were enough to tie her stomach in knots. She was here on psych leave. She could not be thinking what she was thinking. Because if she did, she would start remembering. And memory was deadly.
She put on a smile and showed him how to make his own lunch. “We don’t do room service here,” she said, “unless you’re on your deathbed. Breakfast and lunch, y
ou’re on your own. Dinner, we take turns. Be warned: when it’s the Brats’ turn, the menu can get creative.”
He smiled at that. “Do I get to be creative, too?”
“Not too much,” she said. “I’ll show you how to work the cooker. It’s not that hard.”
“Everything is easy here,” he said.
“Like magic,” said Khalida.
All the lightness drained out of him. “Oh, no,” he said. “There is nothing easy about magic.”
5
Vikram called the wild man Rama. That was not his real name, but he liked it. He wanted to keep it.
He was not so wild now, with his face open to the world. Aunt Khalida had dug clothes and shoes and even a pair of boots out of the storage room for him, raiding the boxes of castoffs and extras and I-forgots. He could never look ordinary, but at least now he looked civilized.
Aisha had looked up his new name on the house computer. She had guessed right about what Vikram had really wanted to call him. He looked just like Lord Krishna.
Maybe he was an avatar. She had looked that up, too.
“That’s just mods,” Jamal said. “He must be a Ramayanist. They all want to be Krishna. Or Kali or Lakshmi Bai or Vishnu.”
“You’ve been hacking the schoolbot again,” Aisha said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to,” he said. “You were busy cleaning stalls with Lord Krishna.”
“Don’t call him that,” Aisha said. “It’s bad luck.”
“There’s no such thing as luck,” said Jamal. But he stopped tempting it with a god’s name.
Not that there were any gods but God. Aisha just liked to cover all the possibilities.
~~~
With Rama in the house, it was much less tempting to wander off. He got over his fever in no time at all; then he settled in to make himself useful around the house and the stable. Mostly the stable. He liked horses, and horses loved him.
He sat in on lessons, too. First because he came wandering in in the middle and the bot thought he was another student and asked him a question, and then because he got curious about the answer.
Aunt Khalida said he had amnesia. If he did, he picked up new memories fast. Aisha gave him one of the spare readers that they kept for interns, and the box of databeads that went with it. After that, if he wasn’t mucking out stalls or grooming horses, he was parked somewhere, usually in the sun, with the reader perched on his nose.
A whole tenday went by without any of them going outside the walls. Rama didn’t seem to remember there was anything out there, and Aisha and Jamal found enough to do around the compound.
Aisha was anything but bored, but Jinni had been stuck in the paddock for all that time. He let her know that if she kept him in much longer, he was going to do something about it.
The day she caught him eyeing the back fence, she knew she had to get him out of there. Jamal was up for a ride, for a change. She said to Rama, “You can come, too.”
Nobody told Rama what to do. Even Aunt Khalida had learned to ask, and not to argue if he said no. But Aisha could hand him a halter and point him toward the fat pinto they kept for beginners, and be reasonably sure he would go.
Of course, being Rama, he didn’t bring in the pinto. He brought in the red mare.
Nobody rode Lilith but Mother or Aunt Khalida. Nobody else could stay on her.
Rama could. He got on without even bothering with the stirrups, and when she started to buck, he rode her out almost as easily as if she’d been cantering around the paddock instead of turning herself inside out trying to get him off.
Lilith was evil but she wasn’t stupid. She stopped all once, ears flicking back and forth, and tried one last, half-hearted twist-and-kick. When he didn’t budge, she let out an explosive, two-ended snort, shook herself all over, and made up her mind to behave herself.
He laughed. He was not being unkind, at all. She made him happy.
Aunt Khalida would be jealous. Aisha looked forward to seeing that. Meanwhile the horses were saddled and the water bottles were full. Aisha was ready to go.
~~~
They went in the opposite direction from the dead river and the broken cliff, down along the edge of the city. Aisha thought she might find the river where it was now, and see if she could catch some fish for dinner. She had hooks and coils of line in her saddlebag.
This part of the city was still under the grass. Here and there a wall stuck up, but mostly you had to know the hills and hollows hadn’t grown there on their own. The track they rode on had been a road a long time ago; it was more or less smooth and mostly straight.
Lilith liked to lead, but she was out of shape. Soon enough, Jinni caught up with her. Aisha grinned at Rama and got his white smile in return.
Some days it was hard to remember he was really old—as old as Shenliu at least. Maybe even as old as Aunt Khalida. He looked at Aisha and Jamal as people, not children, and treated them accordingly. It made all the difference.
His smile widened to a grin. “Race you up the hill,” he said.
Lilith had a few sparks left in her after all. She left Jinni in the dust.
It was a long hill and not very steep, but from the top it dropped off more sharply, plunging down to the river. Rama never even hesitated. He gave Lilith half a dozen strides to get her back legs under her, then let her go.
Aisha’s heart tried to jump out of her chest. Jamal wasn’t even trying to keep up. He was smart. Aisha was completely crazy: she sent Jinni after Lilith.
Nobody died. Nobody fell, either. They slowed down when they were neck and neck, cantering along the bank. Aisha was breathing harder than Jinni, but her grin stretched from ear to ear.
Without saying a word, they curved around together and settled to a walk. Jamal had picked his way down the hill before he speeded up daringly to a trot. His expression was thunderous.
Aisha laughed at it, which only made it worse. She tossed him a coil of hook and line. “Let’s go fishing,” she said.
Jamal was much better at fishing than he was at riding. Rama was about the same at both. Aisha wasn’t patient enough, but she had been using it as an exercise, and she actually caught two fish to the others’ half-dozen apiece.
With fish on strings and horses and riders lazy and smiling, they made their leisurely way back to the house. Aisha deliberately went a different way, farther along the river where the bank went up in terraces. The top had the best view of the city that Aisha knew: it was high enough to see most of the excavations and a good part of the rest, clear across to the old riverbed and the cliff.
She was ready to explain to Rama how her parents liked to come out here and plot the work for a new season, but when she opened her mouth to begin, something stopped her.
He sat perfectly still on Lilith’s back. Aisha had seen effigies on tombs that looked more alive than he did then.
She looked where he was looking. There was nothing new or different there. Just trenches and markers, the market square with the colonnade that they had spent two seasons digging out, the round temple on its low hill, and a great deal of grass and ruins. They could dig for decades, Mother said, and barely begin to uncover it all.
He could see it. Not everybody could. He saw what was there, and what must have been there before time and weather broke it down.
“It’s gone,” he said. He was speaking Old Language, which he hadn’t done since he came out of his fever. “All of it, gone. Even—”
His eyes lifted. They fixed on the cliff and its broken top. “Even that? But how—?”
“That’s my fault,” Aisha said. It was a bad idea, maybe, but she had to say it. “The rest of it, nobody knows.”
“How can no one know? Where is everyone? What happened to the people?”
“That’s the mystery,” she said. “The planet’s empty. It’s all ruins.”
“All of it?”
“The whole planet,” she said. “We’ve scanned it all.”
“How long?”
“Five thousand planet years. A bit more than that in Earth years.”
“Five thousand years.” It seemed to be more than his mind could take in. “They all went away? Where? Why?”
“We don’t know,” said Aisha. “This planet is at the top of all the Most Mysterious lists.”
“They must have left something. Some word.”
“We can’t read their writing,” she said. “Even if we could, I don’t think we’d find anything. They took out all the statues and the paintings. Every likeness of a human, and most of their animals. Smashed them or wiped them out. Completely destroyed them. We can guess what they looked like, but nobody can be sure. It’s as if they wanted to keep someone, or something, from ever recognizing them.”
He sucked in a breath. “No. No, they can’t have been that afraid of—”
“Whatever it was, they can’t have liked it much.”
His fists were clenched on the pommel of Lilith’s saddle. Aisha watched him get his breathing under control. “To keep something from recognizing them. That would be something that had never seen them. Not—”
“That’s what I think,” she said. “There are all kinds of theories. But if it already knew them, why hide? Even if it was so awful the whole population had to run away, what would be the point in covering up what they were?”
“Yes,” he said. Then: “There are books still?”
“Books and inscriptions. We’ve never found anything to help us translate them.”
“I’d like to see them,” he said.
“Even if you can’t read them?”
He shrugged. “I’m curious. That’s all.”
Aisha eyed him sideways. She could tell when a person wasn’t telling the whole truth. She could also tell when he wasn’t going to answer any more questions. “They’re in the vault with the rest of the really valuable finds. I don’t have access to that.”
“Someday you will.”
“Yes,” she said. Refusing to think about what might happen if the expedition ended next season. “Years from now. After I’ve grown up and gone to university and got all my degrees. Then I’ll get a key.”
