Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  “See?” said Aisha. “Things can change. Even you.”

  He laughed. It wasn’t much: just a gust of breath. But it was real. “You keep waking me up, do you know that?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Aisha. “The first time was an accident. Really.”

  “And this one?”

  “Well...” she said.

  He smiled. She did love his smile, when he wasn’t being wild.

  It made her remember why she was here in the first place. She went straight to it. “Can you fix Aunt Khalida before we get out of jump?”

  That killed the smile. “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Mend her broken bits. Make her whole again.”

  “I’ve done as much as I can.”

  “As much as you can? Or as much as you will?”

  “I’ve given her everything she needs,” he said. “The rest is hers to do.”

  “You’re just like the captain,” she said, and it was hard, because her throat was suddenly tight, “and I’m just a baby, because I think nobody is doing enough.”

  “Oh, no,” said Rama. “Some of us are doing altogether too much.”

  “Including me?”

  “You love her. That’s exactly right, and exactly the right amount. We’re doing what we can for her. Do believe that.”

  “But it’s not enough!”

  He let those echoes settle down into silence. In it, another of the huge beasts swam below the ship and sang. Its song was the saddest thing in any world.

  That was why Aisha burst out crying. Rama didn’t say anything, didn’t laugh at her; didn’t push her away when she held on to him and bawled.

  She’d be horribly embarrassed when she got done with this. At the moment she didn’t care at all.

  22

  Tomiko had never been one to waste time. She was not above stacking the deck in a game, either. She sent her own morale officer to evaluate Khalida.

  Dr. Sulawayo had the manner polished to a fine art: soft, quiet, scrupulously non-threatening. Khalida knew from his dossier that he was barely a decade older than she was, but he had modified his appearance to the most comforting percentile: wise lined face, dark liquid eyes, pure white hair. She found it ironic that he looked so much older than the oldest living thing on the ship.

  She tried to imagine Rama wearing the face of age, but her imagination failed. That species of antique conqueror never grew old.

  One day she was going to remember to ask him what his name really was. Names were important. She was Egyptian; she was born knowing that.

  She needed to focus. Dr. Sulawayo was standing in her closet of a cabin, watching her. She ordered the wall to present him with a place to sit.

  The cabin was scrupulously, clinically clean. So was Khalida. Her uniform was new, crisp, and impeccable. Her mind might be ricocheting all over creation, but her physical surroundings would, by Allah, be perfectly organized.

  “Doctor,” she said. “This is a pleasure.”

  He smiled. It was genuine; so was he, with all his modifications. He honestly believed in what he did. “It’s been a little while, hasn’t it, Captain? I still remember our visit to the tomb of Menes—such a find; such pride for all of you, that your father was the one to find it.”

  Khalida remembered, too, but it was bright and distant, like someone else’s memory. Everything was like that, that had happened before the suppurating wound that was Araceli. “Our family does have a certain gift for archaeology,” she said. “A tropism, I suppose. We’ve been robbing tombs for millennia. Now it’s not only legal, it’s respectable.”

  “Your father argues that your ancestors were not the robbers but the occupants of the tombs,” Dr. Sulawayo said. “There have been tests, have there not? Proof of kinship.”

  “Just about everyone in Egypt is related to a pharaoh,” Khalida said, “one way or another. It’s the same in Asia: if you’re not Genghis Khan’s descendant, you’re a rarity.”

  “Genetics,” said Dr. Sulawayo, “are a wonderful thing.” He smiled at her. “Tell me about Nevermore. Is it as mysterious as it’s reputed to be?”

  Sudden shifts of subject where the psych officer’s favorite tool. Khalida had enough training herself to have expected this one. “It’s a planet-sized nature preserve with minimal human inhabitants and an impossibly large number of ruins. It’s beautiful. It’s driving my brother to happy distraction. He wants so badly to decipher all the inscriptions—thousands, millions of them. And no key to them anywhere.”

  “Not in the inhabitants?”

  “They don’t read. It’s a religious restriction. We don’t even know which of the different scripts would have belonged to their ancestors, if any of them did.” But someone did. Someone on this ship. Someone whom Khalida had no desire to explain to anyone.

  “A great mystery,” Dr. Sulawayo said. “Quite wonderful, wouldn’t you agree? The universe needs unanswered questions.”

  “It’s my job,” Khalida pointed out, “technically, to make sure all questions are answered. That’s what intel is.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Voluntarily?”

  Khalida met his calm gaze. “Actually, no. If I tender my resignation, will you accept it?”

  There: she had got him to squirm. It was subtle; he was very well trained. But she felt it.

  She pushed. She did not care if it hurt either of them. “They’re not going to let you, are they? I’m going back to Araceli if I go in a box, screaming.”

  “Will you do that?”

  “Will it make any difference?”

  “To me,” said Dr. Sulawayo, “yes. Not only because you were repaired, and it seems the repair may not have been as successful as Psych believed. Because we are friends, and I have a personal investment in your welfare.”

  “We were friends,” Khalida said. “I don’t feel it any more. I don’t feel much at all. Everything before, it’s globed in glass. And here I am. I’ll shrink to a point in space and disappear. I realize people will notice, and some will even care, but I? I can’t make it matter.”

  He reached toward her. She watched him realize that might not be the best course of action, debating it inside himself, in the endless stretch of a time-out-of-time between one second and the next.

  He completed the gesture. He took her hands. “Oh, my dear. This is a gross failure of treatment. Whether it is the fault of the mechanism or the technicians—no matter. They left you in this state; they let you go. That is unconscionable.”

  She stared at his hands. He had no psi. His touch did nothing but grant her a small gift of warmth. Trickles of thought came in with it, worry and fret and gratifying anger and a dangling bit of reminder that he had another appointment within the hour. Which he could change.

  “No, don’t,” she said before she could stop herself.

  He let her go. She caught the stab of his guilt. He had no way to know what she was telling him not to do; of course he would think it was his touch.

  She could correct him. She could tell him why. Then he would be sure she was insane. She was neutered. She had no more psi than he did. She certainly had not had it restored by a legend out of an ancient and completely forgotten tomb.

  Stasis chamber. Enchanted tower.

  “My dear,” said Sulawayo, “we don’t have the facilities here for the care you need. I will arrange for it in Centrum. I promise you.”

  “Before or after I’m shipped off to Araceli?”

  “Before, I hope,” he said.

  “You know,” she said, speaking the thought as it came to her, “I believe I understand why Rinaldi wants me back. He knows I’m as crazy as he is. Finally, there’s someone who can understand him.”

  “Do you believe he caused this?”

  She laughed—honestly; that was mirth. “I’m not that far gone! Whatever went wrong with the repair, it has nothing to do with him. This is my very own damage.”

>   “I prefer to blame Psych,” he said. He actually sounded fierce.

  She patted him as if he had been one of the expedition’s horses. “You do that,” she said.

  “We will undo this,” he said. “I promise you. Whatever it takes, we will do it.”

  She sat for a long while after he had gone. On the other side of the glass, she was astonished and touched and even humbled. She always had been rich in friends.

  ~~~

  Max and Sonja and Kinuko and John Begay.

  “Hand-pick your unit for this one,” said the Under-Undersecretary for Damage Control and Intraplanetary Affairs. Civilian clothes, as drab as bureaucracy in Centrum could tolerate, but a dossier that read like a pirate’s tour of flashpoints in the United Planets. The fact that she was dispensing the orders, from well above the stratosphere of MI’s channels, told Khalida just how anomalous, and critical, the situation was.

  She sat in her featureless cube in an anonymous office tower out of Centrum proper, linked in to more feeds than Khalida could count. Khalida wondered if each of the rest of them had the same sense of being the Under-Undersecretary’s first and only focus.

  “It’s that bad?” Khalida asked.

  “They’re all bad,” the Under-Undersecretary said. “This one is slightly more delicate than usual. Pick a team you can trust implicitly.”

  She was stating the glaringly obvious. Khalida suppressed the first, reflexive retort, as training and field sense woke up and started to function. Of course this one would be difficult. Psycorps was not only involved, it was one of the warring parties.

  The Under-Undersecretary nodded, following her train of thought through their mutual web link. “Exactly. Godspeed, Major.”

  Easy for her to say from her safe bunker in the heart of U.P. The link was already cut, and Khalida’s mind had gone straight to the answer—no question as to who should ship out with her to Araceli.

  Max and Sonja, joined at the hip since training camp. Kinuko, eleventh generation of MI noncoms, dragged kicking and screaming through officer candidate school and still fighting it, but not quite hard enough to up and quit. Big, quiet John Begay, exempt from Psycorps testing by a treaty so old it predated the first starship. Sometimes Khalida wondered…

  MI had thrown them together for a routine mission to the outer worlds, shutting down that earthmonth’s drugs-and-sedition cartel and slamming the lid on it hard enough to keep it from cropping up again for at least the next earthyear. They clicked well together: Max and Sonja young enough to find it all a grand adventure but intelligent enough not to make idiot decisions, Kinuko absolutely ruthless when it came to facing down the inevitable opposition, and John Begay a genius at tracking both people and cargo through the tangle of the outer planets’ web systems.

  Araceli on the face of it was a much more standard intraplanetary political mess, but the Under-Undersecretary’s subliminal message and the crawling sensation between Khalida’s shoulders promised enough adventure to satisfy even Max and Sonja.

  “Not hardly,” Sonja said the day it all went sideways. “You think Captain Batshit is telling the truth? Ostia wants to blow up Castellanos?”

  The shuttle was prepped, the coordinates set, the weapons armed. Captain Batshit—Meser Rinaldi to his nonexistent friends and his many enemies—had requested that Major Nasir command the mission remotely. In his company. “For protection,” he had said, smiling his too-sincere smile.

  Khalida was stretching the limits of her orders by meeting her team in the crew lounge of one of the shuttle bays in Castellanos’ spaceport. It was deserted except for the five of them; its shields were on high. MI of course was recording. For internal purposes. As Rinaldi might say.

  “I don’t believe a word Rinaldi says,” Khalida said, “but every other form of intel we can gather indicates that a revolutionary cell in Ostia is aiming a dirty bomb at Castellanos. We’re ordered to take out the cell by any means possible.”

  “They’re desperate,” Kinuko translated.

  “Which ‘they’ do you mean?” asked John Begay. “I don’t like the smell of this place. There’s enough rot here to reach all the way to the top.”

  “Still,” Khalida said. “A hundred million human lives. A whole planet, with all its biosphere. Rotten or not, it doesn’t deserve to be poisoned.”

  “That might be up for debate,” John Begay said.

  “You can refuse the mission,” said Khalida. “Any of you. I’ll take the heat, and whatever penalties MI slaps on us.”

  “No,” said John Begay, and the rest nodded. Good soldiers, all of them, no matter what their dossiers might say. “It’s highly probable we’ve been lied to. That doesn’t put the planet in any less jeopardy. We’ll fly the mission.”

  Khalida had known he would say that. The ache in the back of her skull, the sense of deep and subtle wrongness, had grown stronger, the closer they came to departure. “You fly,” she said, “but I make the call: execute, or abort. If it gets bad, it’s on me. My head on the spike.”

  Every one of them wanted to argue: faces growing tight, eyes narrowing. They all knew better. The alarm buzzed. Fifteen minutes to departure.

  Khalida followed them out into the bay. The shuttle waited, all systems optimal, all clearances granted. Specs for the mission were loaded into the shuttle’s computer, set to download when it came in sight of the target.

  Khalida knew the substance of them. Locate target, take over target’s system, disarm target. With protocols for various possible modes of resistance, from small-arms fire to electromagnetic pulse.

  Standard procedures. Standard disposition of forces: Max in the pilot’s cradle, John Begay linked in to the web, Kinuko and Sonja manning weapons.

  Nothing about it felt standard. The universe around her seemed thin, brittle, as if it could crack at a touch. “Listen to me,” she said as the team filed into the shuttle. “If anything—anything—strikes you as off, get out of there. Don’t stop, don’t question. Just go.”

  Max arched an eyebrow. “Premonition?”

  “Political instinct.” Khalida eyed the interior of the shuttle. Orders be damned, and Rinaldi be triple-damned. She was going.

  “Don’t,” Max said. She knew Khalida too well; could always read her, no matter how she schooled her face to blankness. “Whatever Captain Batshit is up to, we’re all better off if you’re near enough to stop it.”

  “Stop talking sense,” Khalida said. “You’ll ruin your reputation.”

  Max grinned and pulled her in, kissing her until her ears rang. “Keep the bed warm for me.”

  The shuttle powered up. Khalida stepped back away from it. Hating herself; hating her orders, and the bastard who had laid them on her.

  Max was the best kickass shuttle pilot in the quadrant. If anybody could get out ahead of a dirty bomb, she could.

  Unless the intel was off by fourteen minutes, and the bird started to go up directly below the shuttle, just as it entered Ostia’s airspace.

  The bomb could blow right in the heart of Ostia, or on the way to Castellanos and take out that whole sector of the planet, or hit target and turn Psycorps’ heart and center to radioactive slag.

  Khalida had Max on the comm and the bomb in her sights. One single, simple command. That was all it took.

  She looked into Max’s eyes, and Max understood. She nodded. Khalida blew her into the next universe.

  Over and over and over again.

  ~~~

  “Enough.”

  Oh, of course he would be there. “What are you?” she asked. “My personal deus ex machina?”

  “You are giving me a mother of headaches,” said Rama. He was speaking Arabic. He was also physically there, in her cabin, locks be damned as usual.

  He was unusually ruffled; his eyes were narrowed as if the light were too bright. Since he could stare directly into the sun with no ill effects, that was noteworthy.

  “Don’t tell me you have a weakness,” she said.

 
“I have a host of them,” said Rama. “Of which you happen to be one.”

  “Not interested,” she said.

  He blinked. He really did look as if the thought had never occurred to him. Which was insulting in its way.

  “I have a habit,” he said with some care, “of trying to mend what is past mending. I brought a man back from the dead once. He was never especially grateful, though he did allow as how he had by no means done all he needed to do in this life. I gave him the room to do it. The second time he died, he made sure I let him go.”

  “That’s very sad,” said Khalida.

  “Sad? No. He was the best of friends; of all the allies I had, he was the closest. He was happy, once he got over raging at me for violating Nature. He was part of me.”

  “I definitely am not part of you,” she said.

  “Unfortunately you are. When I mended you, I wove part of myself into the working. You were so horrendously badly cobbled together, there was no other way.”

  Khalida stared at him. “So I’m not just crazy for myself any more? I’ve got your crazy, too?”

  “That,” he said with a distinct wry twist, “is one way of putting it.”

  She did not need his humor, black or otherwise. “If I kill myself, will it kill you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am sure,” he said.

  “That’s a relief,” she said. She studied her hands. They were thinner than they used to be. She had gone down a uniform size. Which was not a good thing, but there it was. “I am a mess, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, and you are wallowing in it.”

  That, she had not expected. No kindness; no sympathy. Not even a leavening of understanding.

  “I’m not your morale officer,” he said, “or your brother, or your lover. I am certainly not the machine-happy fools who ran you through their standard program and never bothered to verify the results. I am only a bloody-handed Bronze Age warlord, but it seems even I know more of the science of the mind than your so-wise Psych Division.”