by Judith Tarr
Tomiko shrugged, a lift of the shoulder, a graceful spreading of the hands. “Like Meser Rama, I didn’t know she was here until right before the jump. I didn’t know who she was until today. There were other priorities, and I had her under surveillance; she wasn’t a threat to the ship.”
“You should have told me.” Khalida was not sure which of them she spoke to. Both, she supposed. All of them.
None of them reproached her, or gloated at her, either. She settled on Aisha as the cause of it all, but it was Rama she spoke to. “If she gets so much as a sniffle between now and the time I ship her home, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
“I do take that responsibility,” he said.
“Does it mean the same thing to you as it does to me?”
Rama met her glare. His eyes could be hard to meet: there was so much in them, so many years, so many things she could never understand. At the moment she was too angry to care. He said, “It’s quite possible it means more.”
That was a rebuke. She shook it off. “You had better be telling the truth,” she said.
~~~
She slept alone that shipnight, in the cabin that had been nominally hers to begin with. Tomiko did not try to force sense or reason on her.
In the morning, directly after shift change, she went down to the cargo bay. There were other people going down there, too, and not many of them had official reason to be there. They were circulating in that direction, that was all.
The cargo bay was useful for troop maneuvers and martial training. The gravity made a soldier work for her balance, and the open spaces away from the cargo could host a whole mock battle.
This morning a small crowd had gathered halfway down the bay. Most of them were watching. A few, dressed for exercise, were doing katas.
That at least was what they looked like. Khalida had seen something like them before, in one of the sword dances in the tribal village on Nevermore; but this was the root from which they must have sprung. They had a great deal of elegance and a great deal of speed. They were completely merciless.
Rama led them, wearing the bottom half of a gi and nothing else. It was not surprising Tomiko had called his shadow a ninja: she did look like a secret warrior of old Japan in her black robes and veils. He had a real sword, slim and slightly curved like a katana. Hers was a practice sword, made of plasteel, with a blunt blade. The others had hands or staves or practice blades or whatever they happened to have brought with them.
Aisha must have spent time training with the Blackroot warriors. She was good, though not perfect: sometimes she had to stop and redo a step.
So did everyone but Rama. He was teaching children. He was not patronizing and he certainly did not insult their clear and visible talents, but Khalida knew the difference.
He reached the end of the sequence, turned and bowed. The line of students bowed back. There were a good dozen besides Aisha. They were breathless and sweat-streaked, and some were grinning.
He grinned back with a sudden, wild edge, and whirled into motion.
Then they saw what this art was supposed to be. He was a blur of darkness struck through with the flash of steel. With each leap he sprang higher, until he was spinning in the air, striking with fist, feet, blade.
Tomiko had told the truth. In the half-gravity, he flew.
After the first startled instant, Khalida got the measure of the dance and the speed. Some of it was still too fast to follow, but most she could. She could use her full-G strength in the half-G, let it balance and speed up the spins, keeping her eye on the imaginary target, striking to wound, disable, kill.
Especially kill.
It had been much too long since she did anything more physical than shift an artifact from a shelf to a table. She pushed through the pain. She ignored the exhaustion. She could not match him—quite. But she did not embarrass herself, either.
He wound down gradually. She followed a fraction of a step behind.
She was going to pay for this. She was wringing wet, shaking, sobbing for breath. But she stayed on her feet. She bowed when he bowed, and was gratified to see him sweating, too. Then he really did look like obsidian, black glass born of volcanic fire.
For an instant in his eyes she saw what he was. It shook her in ways that she was not ready to define, and steadied her in others that she was even less ready for.
Then he had drawn the veil across them again. They were only eyes, dark in a dark face, and rather more human than not.
She walked away on her own feet. People were applauding—giving him his due.
“Yours, too,” he said.
He was beside her, not touching her, but his presence was holding her up.
“Stop that,” she said. She had just enough breath to say it.
He ignored her. When they were in the lift, and full gravity weighed them both down, he caught her before she fell over.
His breath was still coming faster than usual, but most of his strength was back already. She glowered at him. “What are you feeding on? Blood?”
He shook his head. His smile was wide and sweet and a little crazy. “This ship has a core like a sun.”
She sagged in his arms; then she struggled until he set her on her feet. “The fusion reactor. Of course.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was afraid, I admit it. Away from the sun, what might happen to me? But the ship is here, and it sustains me. I’m free of all the stars.”
“God help us,” she said.
The lift stopped. The door opened. The handful of crewmembers who stood there got an eyeful of Khalida wringing wet and clinging to a half-naked man.
Too bad Tomiko would never believe it. Khalida was not feeling charitable toward her at all.
Rama went with her down the corridor, though the way to his own cabin was three levels farther up. At her door she turned on him. “That’s far enough,” she said.
He bent his head in the way he had. It must be a habit from when he was a king. Without a word he turned and walked away.
She surprised herself with disappointment. A fight would have felt good then—since Tomiko was not there to get what she deserved.
No one could give Khalida what she deserved. Not Tomiko, not Rama, not anyone. She punched the lock and let herself fall through the door as it opened, not caring where she landed or what happened when she did.
21
Aisha was worried about Aunt Khalida. Not because Aisha was in unbelievable amounts of trouble, though she was, but because Aunt Khalida looked awful. When she came to the cargo bay and matched Rama in his katas, that was impressive, but it was crazy. It felt all wrong.
Rama made sure she got safely to her room, but that was as far as he went. When Aisha yelled at him for it, he said, “She didn’t want me there.”
“Should that even matter?”
“With her it does,” he said.
Aisha had to think about that. When she was done thinking, she went to someone who could actually do something, though she might be as stubborn about it as Rama.
Aisha could have worn normal clothes for that, since she wasn’t really invisible any more, but if she did that, she might have to explain to Rama what she was doing. Then he would try to stop her. She stayed the way she was, then, and hoped it would keep people from getting in her way.
~~~
She went the back way, through the access ducts. It was faster, and she was less likely to meet anybody. The ship had surveillance in there after all—she couldn’t believe how wrong she’d been before—but it didn’t seem to care what she did as long as it could keep an eye on her.
The captain had an office she worked in when she wasn’t on the bridge. Aisha would stake out the office and wait, and eventually the captain would come in.
It was a foolproof plan, especially the part where she convinced the door to let her in. She didn’t hack it so much as persuade it. Jamal wasn’t the only one in the family who could make a computer do things people insisted it couldn’t
do.
She made herself comfortable in a hoverchair, after she discovered and used the lavatory. There was a bowl of nuts to nibble on—real nuts from a tree on a planet—and water from a dispenser. She could stay for hours if she had to.
It was not even an hour before she heard people in the outer room. One was the captain: Aisha could feel as well as hear her. The other one made her shrink down in the chair.
Lieutenant Zhao was talking fast. Aisha had to strain to understand the words. “Please, you must understand. This is urgent. No one else can do it.”
“Why not?” the captain shot back. “Rinaldi is barking mad. As soon as he gets his hands on her, he’ll rip her to pieces.”
“No!” The word came out as a yelp. “He’s not like that. He’s insane, yes, most of the nines are, but he sincerely believes that there is no other choice. What she did won his respect. He hates her, fears her, but he trusts her judgment. He knows she’ll judge fairly.”
“Will she?” said the captain. “He manipulated her into nuking Ostia. Do you have any idea how much that damaged her?”
“She’s been repaired,” Lieutenant Zhao said. “Whatever residual damage there may be, we can take care of on the way there. She will be fit for duty when she gets to Araceli.”
“What if she isn’t? What if I’m right and you’re wrong, and she’s still broken and Rinaldi wants to gnaw her liver? Will you take responsibility for what happens then?”
Lieutenant Zhao sputtered. “I’m not—I don’t have—”
“I didn’t think so,” the captain said. She sounded tired and disgusted. “Go away. Leave me alone. Above all, leave her alone. I’ll get her evaluated. If Psych says she’s not fit, she’s not fit. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Lieutenant Zhao said, “that the need is strong enough to bypass a Psych hold. She won’t get out of this, and you won’t get her out.”
“We’ll see,” the captain said grimly.
~~~
Aisha would have run away if she could, but the only way out was past Lieutenant Zhao. She stayed in the captain’s office. When the captain came in, she was still there, sitting stiffly upright in the hoverchair.
The captain stopped. She wasn’t even as tall as Aisha; she looked like a flower carved in ivory. But Aisha knew how strong she was.
She loved Aunt Khalida, and Aunt Khalida loved her. That was one of the things the parents didn’t talk about: that Aunt Khalida was never going to marry a man. If she married a woman, the family back on Earth would pitch a fit, but Mother and Pater would still speak to her. Probably more than they would to Aisha by the time she finished doing what she had to do.
Knowing all that made it easier to keep her chin up and say, “You can’t let him do that to her.”
The captain’s brows went up. “You heard that?” Then she answered herself. “Of course you did. Did you understand even half of it?”
“Don’t talk down to me,” Aisha said. “Maybe I don’t know all the whos and whys, but I can tell when my aunt is in trouble. Whatever Psych did to her didn’t fix her. It made her worse.”
“Did it? And you know this how?”
“I lived with her on Nevermore for almost a T-year. She’s not repaired, Captain. At all.”
The captain dropped down into the chair behind the desk and rubbed her forehead as if it wouldn’t stop hurting. “That’s not supposed to happen.”
“You know it has,” Aisha said. “You can see.”
Captain Hashimoto kept talking as if Aisha hadn’t said a word. “Traumatic-stress repair is as effective as any therapy we have. Results are guaranteed. They can’t fail.”
“Who says that?” Aisha asked. She really wanted to know.
Captain Hashimoto frowned at her. “Everyone. All the literature. Psych. Those protocols always work. No matter who or what they work on.”
“Nothing always works,” Aisha said. “You know what I think? I think people need it to work, so they make a lie and tell it so often they believe it’s the truth.”
The frown turned into a narrow-eyed stare. “How old did you say you were again?” Before Aisha could answer, the captain said, “I’ll fight this. I will. But if they’re determined to send her back into the unholy mess that broke her in the first place, they will do it. Nothing I can do will stop them.”
“I don’t believe that,” Aisha said.
“Now you’re acting your age,” the captain said. “I hear you. I believe you. I’ll do my best. That’s all I can promise.”
“I would rather be my age than yours,” Aisha said. She shaped each word carefully. “Thank you for listening to me. I won’t bother you again.”
She stood up. Before she turned to go, the captain said, “Think before you do anything. Think long and hard. Promise.”
“I won’t do anything without thinking about it first,” Aisha said. The captain wasn’t happy, but neither was Aisha. They both had all they were going to get.
~~~
Every shipday, Rama spent hours on the observation deck. There was nothing to see—really nothing; subspace was completely blank. Most people found it disturbing. He seemed to like it.
When Aisha sat near him, he lifted his head. His eyes moved as if he watched something above him.
Something big, swimming huge and slow, trailing fins as long as the ship, and thrusting itself through subspace with a tail so wide even Rama couldn’t see its edges. It was singing, a song too deep and at the same time too high for human ears.
It was easier if she closed her eyes. Then she could feel and see and hear.
He was singing back to it. He couldn’t use his voice; it didn’t have the range. The power in him, the psi that was ’way, ’way above a nine, could make the fabric of subspace thrum and ring.
The huge creature swam on past. There were others around the ship, but none so big and none so close. Aisha opened her eyes.
Rama lay back on the padded bench with one knee drawn up. He looked as if he was asleep.
“What were you singing?” Aisha asked him.
He answered without moving. “It asked me who I was and what I was and where I was going. I answered it.”
“What did you say?”
“That I swim through the other world, the one so barren of song; that I was born to both worlds; that I was going to find what I had lost.”
“Your world? Your time?”
“Nothing can reclaim time,” he said.
“But—”
“There are things that can travel as freely in time as in space. I am not one of them.”
“Really?”
He didn’t answer that.
“I think you don’t want to. There would be no place for you there. You’d tear yourself to pieces.”
“And everyone and everything around me.”
Rama sounded most cool and distant when he was hurting the worst. It had taken Aisha a while to figure that out. “You’re not a bad person,” she said.
“I don’t need to be bad to be too dangerous to live.”
“Do you have to be dangerous? Why is it so awful to have as much psi as you’ve got?”
“You know what they say about absolute power.”
“You had it,” Aisha said. “I don’t think it corrupted you. I think you got set on a particular way of doing things, and it turned out not to be the right one. People do that all the time. Now you have a chance to make up for it.”
“People aren’t all like me,” he said.
“You might be surprised.”
He turned his head to look at her. His eyes got very wide and very sharp. He came up in one motion, so smooth it didn’t look human, and knelt in front of her.
He took her chin in his hand. She didn’t pull away. She wasn’t afraid, either, though he had gone completely strange. He turned her face from side to side, and then looked into her eyes, so deep she felt him walking on the bottom of her skull.
“No,” he said, all the way down there. “Oh, n
o, you aren’t. That is just too—no.”
He wasn’t speaking PanTerran, or Old Language, either. She didn’t know what language it was. It didn’t matter; where he was, all languages were the same.
“You turned against me,” he said. “Even you. Most of all you. How many eons do you think it will take me to forgive?”
Aisha didn’t want to understand that. That he saw something so deep inside her that she hadn’t even known it was there. That he recognized it. And that she could—if she wanted; if she tried—let it speak through her.
She wasn’t ready. She might not ever be.
She twisted free. But she didn’t run away. “Whatever you think I did, or was, I don’t remember. All I know is what I am now.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t push,” she said.
He shied at that, a little bit shocked, a little bit offended. She wasn’t about to apologize, except sideways. “Whatever you think you have to do, just make up your mind to it. Then do it. You can do anything you set your heart on.”
“Not anything. I am not all-powerful. I’m not a god. No matter what people said or will say.”
“Oh, no, you’re not a god. But you’re not the normal run of human, either.”
“Neither are you.”
“I’m starting to think,” said Aisha, “that there is no such thing as normal. People who try to make just one kind of human the right kind and get rid of everybody else, or cut them down to the same size, are making a terrible mistake.”
“You could argue that I’m not human,” Rama pointed out.
“Genetically you are,” she said. “We’ve got all but the tiniest tiny fraction of bits in the same places. We’re just not from the same planet. Lots of us aren’t. There’s a hundred inhabited worlds. It’s not just Earth any more.”
“Or Nevermore.”
“Or anywhere.”
She sat and he knelt, thinking about that. His hands were on his knees.
She took his right hand and turned it so she could see what was in it. It was still his own sun, with spots and a flare.
“You know,” he said, “before I went to sleep, or into stasis if you prefer, it wasn’t like this at all. It was gold, like an inlay in the skin. Doubters said that was what it was. Somehow in the long years, it changed. Now it looks on the outside the way it feels on the inside.”
