by Judith Tarr
“When you’re terribly old,” he said.
He was teasing her. He must have got over whatever shocked the breath out of him. “Yes,” she said with a hint of a snap. “When I’m almost as old as you.”
That shut him up. A little too completely, maybe, but she refused to feel guilty. It served him right for treating her like a child.
6
Khalida knew about the Brats’ excursion. She also knew who had gone with them. If she wanted to think like MI, she could wind herself into a glorious fit of paranoia.
The person they all called Rama was not about to kidnap the offspring of the Doctors Nasir and Kanakarides. Whatever he was here for, she was sure it had nothing to do with the Brats.
He liked them. It was as simple as that. They kept him out of mischief. As for what he did for them—she had seen the way he moved. Somewhere, whether he remembered it or not, he had been trained to fight. The Brats could do worse than attach themselves to a bodyguard.
They came back windblown and loaded down with fish, which by house rules they had to clean and cook. Rama, too. He was better at it than they were.
Khalida happened to notice how quiet he was in all the bubble and babble. She also noticed when she went through the kitchen that he had the boning knife in his right hand, and it worked as well as the left. Whatever had been wrong with it when he first came, he seemed to have got over it.
It was one more odd thing about him, of more than she had the patience to count. She recorded it, tagged it, and passed on by.
There was still no response to her inquiries. Searches had turned up nothing. As far as she or Vikram could determine, the man did not exist.
The latest results were waiting when she came up from dinner, with Vikram’s tag on them: Spaceforce Intel. Can’t get any deeper without setting off alarms.
She had already tried and failed to convince him that they could hack into Psycorps. That was insane, he said. Which it was, but Khalida was reaching the point of not caring.
Here was the best Spaceforce could come up with: a deep gene scan that made no sense at all. He was, according to the scan, distantly but definitely related to Khalida. He had also, the scan declared, originated on Nevermore.
She had committed the most basic of all errors: she had contaminated the samples. She moved to delete the message, but paused. As humiliations went, it was minor, and it was a useful reminder. There was no excuse for sloppiness, no matter how distracted she was.
There was a second message attached to the first. That was even more ridiculous. Physiological age, thirty to forty-five years. Chronological age—
“Six thousand years?” Khalida dropped onto her bed and let out a small, cathartic howl. “Now that’s not my mistake. They should know better than to test the artifacts instead of the man.”
She kept that, too. The rest was less egregiously wrong but equally useless. He was not, Spaceforce Medical opined, modified. This was his original form, as indicated by the genetics.
Vikram had been right, then. Gengineered. The scan was not set up to speculate as to where or how.
Khalida shut off the feed and pressed her hands to her eyes. “A mystery on top of an enigma,” she said. “He couldn’t have found himself on a more appropriate planet.”
She should get up, undress, get ready for bed. She was much too comfortable to move. Sleep had been harder and harder to come by lately. Tonight she thought she might manage it. She might even keep the nightmares down to a statutory minimum.
She lowered her hands. Her arms stung. She did not remember cutting them.
She sat up and stripped off her shirt. There were scars on top of scars, up and down her forearms. The new ones crept close to the veins again, to the deepest and oldest scars, the ones she had almost died of. Would have, if Max had not been there to—
Max was dead. So were Sonja and Kinuko and John Begay.
Because she made a mistake much worse than contaminating a genetic sample. Much, much worse. So much worse that she could not let herself die for it. She had to live. To remember. Because there was no more fitting punishment.
Her nails were cut to the quick, to keep her from doing what they tried to do now: claw the skin off, let the blood out.
It was all perfectly reasonable. She had been repaired. Psych had smoothed over the rough edges, cut away the worst of the mental proud flesh, lasered off the scars. Just a little therapy, they had told her when they discharged her, and she would be as fit as she ever was.
All of this—side effects. Normal. Nothing to trigger alarms. The blood was a nuisance, but when it was all gone, so would she be. Then there would be no alarms at all.
Fingers closed around her wrists. Their grip was light, but it was too strong to break.
There was no mistaking whose they were. She raised her eyes to Rama’s face. “Don’t you know what it means when a door is locked?”
“Yes,” he said.
The lock on this door was nothing to what else he could hack into. He was wearing the torque she had found on him that first night. “That was in the vault,” she said.
“It’s mine.”
“Technically,” she said, “it’s the property of the Department of Antiquities for Ceti quadrant.”
“It belongs to me,” he said.
“So that’s what you are,” said Khalida. “An interstellar thief. I’d had you down as a mass murderer.”
“I took what was mine.”
He was stubborn. She already knew that. “You’re the thief,” she said. “I’m the murderer. Do you know how many people died because of me? Two hundred thousand six hundred and fifty-four. The last four were my direct responsibility. I looked them in the eyes when I hit the trigger. They knew exactly what I did to them.”
He said nothing. His face was blank.
“You’re lucky,” she said. “You got the mindwipe. I didn’t qualify. I acted to the best of my capacity to forestall a greater disaster. That’s how they put it. Word for word. I appealed. They said, You performed a service. You also committed a substantial error. The decision is just. It stands.
“Just,” she said, “but merciful? Not even slightly.”
“Sometimes there are no right decisions,” he said.
“What, are you the wise sage now? How many people have you killed?”
“With my own hand? Hundreds. By my order? Thousands. More than you, maybe. I stopped counting.”
She gaped. Then she laughed, sharp and bitter. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I never do that.”
“They seeded you with false memories,” she said. “In extreme cases, that’s what they do. Wipe the mind clean, give it a new set of programming, drop the result somewhere out of the way. If he survives, he’ll never know what’s real and what isn’t. If he doesn’t, how convenient.”
“Memories find their way out,” he said. “Even through this thing you people do.”
“‘You people’? Who do you imagine you are? Some alien warlord pulled out of a tomb?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I can’t deal with you tonight,” she said. “Go away. Go to sleep. Forget I ever said anything.”
“No,” he said.
She would have knocked him down, if he had not still been holding on to her wrists. Damn, he was strong.
“Sleep,” he said. “Dream peace. For this night, forget.”
That bastard. He was turning her orders back on her. Making them stick.
“You’re Psycorps,” she said before she slid down into the dark. “That’s the only thing you can be.”
“Not the only thing,” he said.
She was floating: drifting through infinite space. His eyes were dark, but they were full of the sun.
A solar-powered man. MI would be all over him when it found out.
Not from her. MI should have mindwiped her when it had the chance. She owed it nothing now. Not one thing.
~~~
Rama never
mentioned that night. Khalida made sure he never had occasion to try. She had the rest of the cataloguing to do before everyone came back. He had stalls to clean and Brats to chase and locks to hack. But if he stole anything else, Khalida did not know about it.
Most of the antique gold he had come with was safe in the vault. The torque never did turn up there, nor did one of the armlets and a ring. Khalida quietly adjusted the inventory to fit. Just as quietly, Rama appeared wearing none of the articles he had liberated.
He had settled in so seamlessly that unless she stopped to think, she could not remember this place without him. That was disconcerting in its way, but so far it managed not to be dangerous. She had him under surveillance. That was the best she could do.
7
Intersession was ending, and not just because the chrono told Aisha so. The summer storms were shorter and weaker, and the heat was gradually getting less. Some of the nights were almost cool.
Birds had started flying south. The herds of antelope had come back to the plain. Very soon, the tribes would come back, too, and so would Mother and Pater and the rest of the expedition.
She hadn’t forgotten her mission. She’d changed tactics. She had questions to ask the tribes. She might find ways to get hold of a rover, too. She was still pondering that.
~~~
Aisha and Jamal took Rama out one morning to see the antelope. It was the schoolbot’s day to be down for maintenance. They could do what they wanted, as long as they had adult supervision.
That, these days, was Rama. Vikram had the bots out in force, cleaning cabins and getting them ready for the new crop of staff. Aunt Khalida was where she usually was, holed up with the computer.
Aisha was worried about Aunt Khalida. She was working too hard and not sleeping enough, and she bit one’s head off if one said anything. Pater would talk some sense into her. For sure nobody else could.
But today was a free day, one of the last before everybody came back. Aisha planned to enjoy it.
The antelope were just beginning to fill up the winter grazing grounds. There were hundreds now, compared to the thousands that would pour in later, with the tribes following. Antelope were the best hunting of all, and they brought smaller animals with them, and birds, enough game to feed half a world.
Aisha was not out to hunt anything. She just wanted to see.
Jamal had his reader with him. Watching animals was not his favorite thing, though he was always glad to get out of the house. She thought Rama might bring his, too, but all he had was his water bottle and a bag full of lunch.
Aisha’s favorite herd was back already. The old male with the crooked horn was still alive. He had a dozen babies, most of them striped dark brown and gold like him, and a band of new wives that he had won from another male.
Aisha was glad to see him. “He’s old,” she told Rama, “but he just keeps going on, collecting wives and scars.”
Rama lay beside her in the tall grass. He had a hungry look—not kill and butcher and roast a fat doe hungry, but as if there was something here that he wanted so badly it hurt. When some of the babies came bounding and leaping and mock-sparring over near where they were, he almost forgot to breathe.
“They’re beautiful,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I think people rode them once. Don’t you think so? They’re not really shaped like Earth antelope, not in the back. They’re more like horses. Though the males with their horns might be a problem. They could put your eye out.”
“Not if you knew what you were doing,” he said.
She had to agree with that.
The old male’s herd moved on after a while, grazing its way down to the river. A new herd wandered by. This was much smaller. Its male was young, with horns barely longer than her arm. He had three wives, and just one baby, which was red with a white foot. He was black, which told Aisha it was probably some other male’s baby. Blacks didn’t sire reds out of red females.
“Look,” she said. “He just won those ladies. He’s all proud of himself.”
She looked to see what Rama thought, but he was no longer beside her. He was up and walking through the grass, not even trying to hide. She opened her mouth to yell at him, but that would only spook the animals sooner.
The females were still grazing. The baby was bouncing around its mother. The male had seen Rama: his head was up, his horns as straight and sharp as spears.
His eyes were ruby red. Aisha had only seen that once or twice before, and never in a black. The others were normal brown or amber, and the baby’s were blue.
Rama walked right up to him. By the time Aisha realized what he was doing, it was too late to move.
He was talking to the antelope. She was too far away to hear what he said. The rhythms weren’t PanTerran. They weren’t Old Language, either. He sounded very polite.
He reached out his hand and laid it on the male’s forehead between the horns. The male’s head lowered. Aisha sucked in her breath.
The male didn’t spit Rama on his horns and trample him to death. He lowered his nose into Rama’s palm as if he had been a horse, and blew. Rama’s other hand rubbed him around the base of the horns and behind the ears, working his fingers into the thick mane that grew like a horse’s on the long neck.
Tears ran down Rama’s face. He pressed his forehead to the antelope’s forehead and cried.
And the antelope let him. He stood the way Jinni stood when Aisha needed a hug more than anything.
Then Rama did something completely, totally insane. He caught hold of the hank of mane at the antelope’s withers and swung onto his back.
That was it. Aisha was done with him. She couldn’t watch him die.
She couldn’t stop watching, either. The explosion wasn’t any worse than Lilith had given him. It was the same kind of thing: testing, feeling him out, getting the balance.
Just the same. Rama rode it the same, too. If anything he was more comfortable with that big, long neck in front of him and those horns spearing the sky. They couldn’t put his eye out unless the antelope aimed his chin straight up, which he wasn’t built to easily do—any more than a horse was.
This was a wild animal. Feral, Mother would say. Mother was precise with her terminology. Domesticated once, but gone wild for thousands of years.
Aisha would never have known it to see this one. Rama didn’t ride long. Just long enough to get the bucks out, get a sensible walk and a bit of trot, then he slid off and smoothed the black mane and said in Old Language, “Come.”
The antelope came. So did his wives and his stepdaughter. They followed the horses—and Jamal wide-eyed and as speechless as Aisha was—away from the plain and into the city and straight to the corner paddock with the shedrow shelter, that happened not to have horses in it at the moment.
~~~
Nothing ever surprised Vikram, but Aisha thought he might be as close to it as he ever got. He took in the new additions, checked that they had water and hay, then found Rama in the tack room, taking apart one of the old saddles.
“Horse backs aren’t quite the same,” Rama said when Vikram came in, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation and not right at the beginning. “We’ll need to rig the bridle differently, too.”
“You’re planning to ride those things?” Vikram said.
Aisha bit her tongue. It wasn’t her place to say Rama already had.
Rama smiled at Vikram. “Wouldn’t you like to see me try?”
“Why?” Vikram demanded.
“Why not?”
“Your funeral,” Vikram said, the way everybody did sooner or later with Rama.
Except Aisha. She had observed that when Rama set out to do something, he knew he could do it. He never tried anything totally impossible.
“Before you lay me in my tomb,” Rama said to Vikram, “will you help me with the saddle? I can see what it needs, but I’m not familiar with this kind of tree. Show me what to do.”
Vikram shook his h
ead, but he sat down on the workbench and pulled the half-dismembered saddle over toward him and held out his hand. Rama put the seam ripper in it. A moment longer and their heads were together, wavy black and steel grey, turning a horse saddle into an antelope saddle.
~~~
Jamal was a menace with a computer. Mother said it, and she would know. She was fairly dangerous herself.
Aisha caught him the day after Rama brought the antelope in, pretending to take a nap but actually deep inside the house web. She’d been looking for Mother’s articles on antelope, but a tweak in a search string led her to Aunt Khalida’s files and a fragment of code that Jamal hadn’t quite got around to hiding.
She slipped out of the web as stealthily as she could, ducked down the hall to his room and sat on him. She was still heavier than he was, though just barely.
He came out of the web with a lurch and a squawk. “Hey! What do you think you’re—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” she shot back. “You know what happens when Aunt Khalida catches people hacking her files. Do you really want to be locked out of the web for a tenday?”
“The way you were?” He scowled at her. He’d been practicing Pater’s patented expression again; it didn’t work as well on his thin boy-face, and he’d have to grow much more imposing eyebrows. “Do you think she knows what Rama is up to?”
“Why?”
He pushed at her. She stopped sitting on him and perched on the end of the bed instead. He sat up and hugged his skinny knees. “You don’t think it’s weird that he’s training wild antelope to ride?”
“I think everything about him is weird,” she said. “What were you doing in Aunt Khalida’s files?”
“Nothing.”
He barely looked guilty, which told her all she needed to know. “You couldn’t get in.”
That stung him. “I would have, if you hadn’t ripped me out.”
“You’re lucky I caught you before she did.”
“I was almost there,” he said, and now his scowl was almost of Pater proportions. “She has to be running searches to find out who Rama is. Or what. I want to see what she’s found.”
