Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  “She hasn’t found anything,” Aisha said. “You should have asked. I could have told you.”

  “I hate you,” he said mildly.

  “I hate you, too.” Aisha fixed him with her firmest stare. “Look. Whatever happened to Aunt before she showed up here, she’s a right mess. I don’t think we should cross her any more than absolutely necessary. And that includes getting caught hacking her personal files.”

  “I won’t get caught.”

  “No, you won’t. Because you’re not going anywhere near them.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says you, if you just wake up to yourself. It’s not worth getting grounded to come up with nothing, and you know it. If anything does show up, we’ll find out. One way or another.”

  One thing about Jamal: if she pushed hard enough, he actually stopped to think. He was still scowling, but he’d stopped arguing.

  “What Aunt doesn’t know won’t hurt us,” he said. “Fair enough about the files. But, Aisha, there are antelope in the barn. Sooner or later, she’s going to—”

  “Make it later,” Aisha said.

  ~~~

  Aunt Khalida might not have found out at all until everybody came back, except that one day she wandered down past the barn, looking for something in the staff cabins and not paying attention to anything else, and walked right through the antelope pen.

  She found herself face to horns with the male. It wasn’t a threat exactly. His stepdaughter was playing with her shadow in the corner, and Khalida had come between her and the rest of the herd.

  Khalida stopped. The baby, encouraged by her mother’s calling, skittered past. The male backed away, bowed to Khalida, and left her standing there with her mouth open.

  Aisha found that out later. The first she knew of it was a bellow like a drill sergeant’s, loud enough to lift the schoolbot off its moorings and set it bouncing against the ceiling.

  Aisha had never heard Aunt Khalida in full cry before. It brought Aisha and Jamal out of the classroom and Vikram out of the cabins, but she wasn’t calling them.

  Rama took his time answering. He had a polishing cloth over his shoulder and a bridle in his hand.

  Once she had him in front of her, Khalida went back to her normal volume. “I’m sure you can explain this,” she said, jabbing her chin toward the herd.

  “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” he said. “The mares are all in foal. By spring we’ll have a proper herd.”

  “What do we want a herd of antelope for?”

  Aisha could feel the thunder rumbling in that. She could see Rama wasn’t going to do anything to calm it down, too. She butted in with as much wide-eyed innocence as she could. “It’s an experiment, Aunt. Remember that paper you and Mother wanted to write about alien riding animals? We’re going to prove your thesis.”

  “The children are,” Rama said smoothly. “I’ll be the illustration. I’ve adapted a saddle for the stallion, and rigged a bridle. Would you like to see?”

  “You can’t call them mares and stallions,” Khalida said through clenched teeth. “They’re not horses.”

  “No,” he said, “but they were bred for riding. I’ve been teaching the stallion his basics. See.”

  He held out his hand. The male snorted at Khalida and danced on tiptoe around her, and slid familiarly and comfortably in under Rama’s arm.

  He was smaller than the average male of his kind, about as tall as Jinni, but he was sturdy and well made like Rama, and he was laughing at Aunt Khalida. Aisha could feel it. It tugged at her lips and made her want to laugh, too.

  Khalida’s eyebrows had gone up. “Basics are turning a wild animal into a lapdog?”

  “Basics are obedience and discipline and”—Rama raised his arm and sent the stallion out in a circle around them all, tossing his head and flagging his tasseled tail—“the skills essential to a ridden animal. Correct gaits and paces. Balance. Ability to carry a rider with ease and grace.”

  “First a thief,” Khalida said. “Now a riding master. What will you turn into next? A starpilot?”

  “That’s your skill,” he said. “When I’m done with this gentleman, he’ll consent to let you ride him. Then you can write your paper from experience as well as knowledge.”

  “Experience is no authority,” Khalida nastily. She stalked away. Her back was stiff; it got stiffer the more Rama laughed at her.

  Still, Aisha thought, most of that was temper. She actually was fascinated. Give her a day or two to get over it and she’d be out there with Rama, trying her hand with one of the mares.

  Rama had bet on it. He had a second saddle started, and the bridle in his hand wasn’t a horse bridle. It was made for the wider-set ears and smaller muzzle of an antelope, without the extra buckle on the side that he needed to get the headstall over the stallion’s horns. Mares had none, which made bridling them much simpler.

  “You’re evil,” Aisha said approvingly. He grinned at her. He was as pleased with himself as a male ever was when things were going his way.

  8

  Khalida was losing her grip. Walking through a paddock she had assumed was empty, not even seeing the herd of horse-sized animals until she was in the middle of them, was worse than idiotic. It was dangerous.

  She was damned lucky the animals were, somehow, domesticated. That needed examination, but not today. Today she had to examine herself.

  She could keep falling apart without any effort to stop it. She could kill herself. Or she could scrape together what was left and make the best of it.

  Everything should be so simple. MI had run her through therapy, declared her repaired, and sent her on leave to finish the process. She had another six tendays to reinstatement. It was fully expected that she would return to active duty.

  What had not been expected was that she isolate herself so completely. On an actual inhabited planet she would have had ongoing therapy, constant supervision, and an expectation of complete recovery.

  That was why she had come here. She had not wanted to get through it. She wanted to feel the whole of it. Every corrosive drop of guilt. Every nightmare.

  Now she was seeing things even when she was not asleep. Hearing voices. Plucking feelings from the air. When she walked through rooms in the house, she could taste the people who had been in them since they were built, layer on layer of memories.

  That was her mind dissociating. Disintegrating. It was supposed to be putting itself back together.

  She had no appetite for dinner. Jamal pounded on the door and went away. When Khalida gave way to the jabbing in her stomach, she found a tray, and dinner still hot inside the tiny stasis field.

  She ate a few bites and pushed the tray aside. The computer pinged at her. Subspace message incoming, said the crawl across her vision.

  It was from MI. Again. She let it file itself as unread, yet again. The computer informed her that she had forty-seven unread messages. Forty-three were from MI in its various incarnations. Most of them were flagged as urgent.

  The computer did not count all the other messages she deleted as they came in. She considered deleting the ones from MI, but she was not that far gone. Yet.

  The walls of her room closed in on her. Ah, claustrophobia. It had been a while since she had a bout of that. She should have seen it coming today when she went on an errand she never had finished, even if she could have remembered what it was.

  The house had quieted down. Everyone was in bed. Khalida went up the ladder to the roof.

  Whether the people of this world had used their roofs as rooms for sleeping or eating or cooking in hot weather and for growing gardens all year round, the archaeologists were still arguing. In this house, because Rashid and Marina had restored it, the roof was an extension of the rooms below.

  The Brats were supposed to tend their mother’s garden up there with its boxes of vegetables and its row of fruit trees in pots. One corner, which had a view of the city, had a long table and a crowd of chairs and benches. The staff had
meetings up there in season; they could sit for hours arguing about this find or that theory.

  If Khalida half-closed her eyes, she could see them: Rashid in his usual spot wearing his usual scowl, Marina up and pacing as she argued, Shenliu stretched out long and lazy on a bench, and last year’s interns in a huddle, wide-eyed and too shy to speak.

  One of the figures in the vision stayed when she opened her eyes to the night. The moon was rising, huge and red, with its cratered face and its white cap: it was winter in the north of the moon, and the icecap had spread as far as it would go.

  Rama leaned on the parapet that rimmed the roof. His head was tilted back. The moon’s light bathed his face in blood.

  Khalida’s first impulse was to turn on her heel and stalk back into the house. But why should she have to leave? Let him go if he wanted to be alone.

  He did not move, but he knew she was there. She felt him feeling it, a uniquely strange sensation, like being two people at once.

  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.

  9

  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 nightm
ares 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.”