by Judith Tarr
That didn’t reassure her as much as it might have. They were humming down a clean and open street, for a port city, with barriers up to keep the squatters out, and not too many people loitering on the corners and trying to look as if they belonged there.
The houses that lined the street had privacy shields as well as physical walls. When there were shops or places to eat or drink, they were perfectly tidy. Nobody sprawled out in front or sleeping it off within sight of the street.
The transport stopped in front of one of the houses, most of the way down the street. There was nothing exceptional about it at all. It was just a house, a good bit smaller than the one Aisha lived in on Nevermore, with a plain brown door and nothing pretty painted or holoed on the wall either outside or in.
The privacy shields were planetary-prison strength. The two Psycorps agents who had gone inside with Aisha and Rama lurched when they crossed the threshold, and one of them looked if he’d have liked to faint. But he caught himself in time.
Aisha already had psi shields even stronger than that, and she didn’t have her worldsweb chip yet. The only difference for her between inside and outside was that the web portal stopped reading Araceli and showed the Greek letter psi in flat black—Psycorps’ logo, which made her shiver just to look at it. It was still the same heavily restricted web.
The house was as painfully ordinary inside as out. They built them from the same plan on every world that needed a quick and easy way to store people. Big open room past the entryway, smaller rooms along a corridor in back, each with its own bath. The kitchen was a wall unit off to the side of the big room. Another wall was a screen that could be made bigger or smaller depending on what one wanted it to do, from watching vids to monitoring the street outside.
The stronger of the two Psycorps agents tried to herd Aisha away from Rama. “You’ll want to rest,” she said, “and refresh yourself. We’ve prepared a room for you, if you’ll come with—”
“No,” Aisha said.
Even Rama seemed startled at that. Aisha had surprised herself, a bit. She was tired of being herded here and there. And she seriously did not like being captured by the Corps.
The agent visibly swallowed a sigh. “You’ll be perfectly safe, and you won’t be confined. This house is open to you entirely. It’s only—”
“No,” Aisha said again.
The agent spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “You are safe. We promise you that.”
“No,” said Aisha for a third time.
The agent’s lips had drawn into a thin line.
Aisha was glad. “I’ll pick my own room. Thank you very much.”
“Let her be,” the other agent said. He sounded as if he might like to laugh, if he hadn’t been so tired. “They’re both safe enough, however they decide to arrange themselves. And we’re late for the meeting.”
That got rid of them both. Aisha was almost sorry—she would have liked to see what she could get out of the weaker agent. If only to find out what meeting they were both called to.
The house seemed much bigger without them. There were spycams everywhere, of course. Probably psi monitors, too, though they wouldn’t get much.
Rama had wandered toward the kitchen unit and started poking at it. The vat of pilaf that came out of it was almost as good as Pater’s—which made Aisha’s throat lock shut.
There really was no going back. Not from here. This was real. Not a game she was playing. Not a fight she had run away from for a day or a handful of days, till she crept home and everybody pretended nothing had happened.
She still knew all the way down that she had to do this for the expedition, and the family, and for Nevermore. It was the only glimmer of hope any of them had. That didn’t keep her from wanting, suddenly, to burst out bawling.
She got no sympathy from Rama, and she didn’t want any. She put her half-empty plate in the cleaner and left him still eating, and shut herself in the first sleeping room she came to.
~~~
Aisha lay for a long time in the unfamiliar dimness. The air’s smell, the way the room felt around her, were subtly alien. This wasn’t her world or her place. She didn’t belong here. She should never have come.
On the Leda, mostly she’d been in jumpspace, which was its own reality. She’d made herself not think about what she’d left behind. Told herself she wouldn’t miss Jinni, or Jamal, or Mother or Pater or Vikram or Malia or—
She could let go here. Nobody who mattered would see.
She cried for a while, till her throat ached and her eyes burned and her head felt heavy and thick. Sleep ambushed her, with dreams in it.
She was riding Jinni on the plain outside of the city. Jamal trudged along beside her, with grass stains on his breeches and a long lead in his hand, but it wasn’t Ghazal on the other end, it was the antelope stallion.
“Don’t tell me you’re trying to ride him,” Aisha said.
“You think I’m crazy?”
Aisha let that hang in the air.
“I’ve been trying to link through to you,” he said. “You weren’t on Centrum. It took forever to find you. I think I know where you are in space, but now you’re firewalled so wide and high it’s like a ring of volcanoes all around you. You aren’t about to blow up, are you?”
“Are you sure you don’t have any psi?” Aisha asked. She didn’t expect an answer, nor did she get one. “I’m all right. I’m not blowing up. I don’t plan to, either.”
Her plans might not have much to do with what actually happened, but he didn’t need to know that. “Tell Mother and Pater,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“You know that won’t stop them.” He looked up at her in the hazy light of the dream, scowling just like Pater. “You should have told me you were leaving.”
“What you don’t know, you can’t suffer for.” That was a line from just about every pirate vid they’d ever watched together.
She wanted him to laugh, or at least shrug and let it go, but she should have known better. He hit her, so hard that even in the dream it stung. “I hope you do blow up. Serve you right. You went away and didn’t tell me. After we swore to each other. Pirate’s Oath, Aisha. You forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I was trying to save you!”
“Well, you didn’t.” He stood on the windblown grass, with a rope in his hand that wound away now into the sky. There were stars in it, and skeins of suns. “I’ll never trust you again.”
~~~
Aisha woke not knowing where she was. Her head ached, but not nearly so much as her heart.
Everything around her was strange. The only familiar thing was the sun roaring and shooting off plasma behind her eyes, and Rama’s voice saying, “Come and eat your breakfast.”
“I just ate,” Aisha said before her eyes were half open. Then her stomach crunched, and the web told her she’d slept over half an Earthday. Her mind might still be remembering dinner, but the rest of her was ravenous.
By the time she stumbled into the common room, she was almost capable of making sense. Rama prowled like a big cat. If he’d had a tail, it would have been twitching.
“What’s wrong?” Aisha asked him.
“Eat,” was all he said.
She opened her mouth to argue, but shut it again. Psycorps was watching. She tried asking inside, where the sun was. “What is it?”
He didn’t snap her head off, which surprised her somewhat. He didn’t answer, either. Not exactly. He made her feel instead, and remember.
Lying on the observation deck on the Leda during jump. Drifting through absolute nothingness. Feeling huge bodies moving in the void. Swimming. Singing.
One song out of them all was different. It made her ears hurt. It tried to tear her heart out of her chest. It was beautiful, and it was screaming. It was making glory out of agony.
She sucked in a breath and almost choked. It was a wonder she didn’t fall down. That terrible, beautiful, awful song filled her till her skin felt rea
dy to crack and split and burst wide open.
Quiet. It was a word in Rama’s voice. It was a thing: a cool and soothing wave of blessed silence.
“That—” she tried to say. “That—”
“Hush,” he said. “Eat.”
Food was the last thing she ever wanted to see, but the bread and hummus and pickled vegetables had to go somewhere. She ate what was in the bowl, twitching because she couldn’t say any of the things that her tongue itched to say. She didn’t dare think them at Rama, either. They tangled up inside her and lost themselves in the memory of the song.
Something shifted. She felt freer somehow. She could take a deep breath and not feel as if it stopped halfway down.
Rama stood up straighter. Aisha hadn’t realized how quenched he’d been until he turned, quick as a cat, and said, “I can keep this going for a while, but the quicker we move, the better.”
“What—” Aisha said.
“We’re going out,” he said. “Bring whatever you can carry—but not so much it weighs you down.”
“We might need to fight,” Aisha translated. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She might be excited. Or she might be terrified.
“We will not seek violence,” Rama said, sounding as prim as Vikram throwing cold wisdom on a hot adventure. Unlike Vikram, he threw a flash of a grin at it. It looked like light catching the edge of a blade.
The part of Aisha that mostly wanted to be a good daughter and grow up to be a good archaeologist was wibbling frantically. The rest built a long, slow burn over that tortured singer—whoever, whatever it was.
“We’re going to rescue it,” she said, though Rama wasn’t in the room any more. “Aren’t we?”
He didn’t answer. She didn’t need him to.
~~~
Nobody just walked out of a Pyscorps facility. Rama did it—not working too hard at it, either, as far as Aisha could tell. He had his old barn clothes on, the hand-me-down Spaceforce trousers and the faded red shirt and the riding boots that had seen better days. With the torque he’d worn when he came out of the ruined cliff and a pair of gold earrings that Aisha distinctly didn’t remember seeing in any of his kit, but she had seen them go into the vault on Nevermore, he fit right in in the part of the port that she’d been warned never to go near on any world.
She looked dangerous, she reminded herself. She was all in black and her face was veiled and she had a pair of swords that she more or less knew how to use. They were plasteel practice swords, but they had an edge that could cut.
She could walk like a panther, too; she’d learned it at the same time she learned to use the swords. The rest was keeping her head up and her eyes hard and not letting anybody see how badly she wanted to shrink down and disappear.
People didn’t stare here. They darted glances, or they carefully didn’t look at all. Minding their own business, their body language said. Not meaning any harm. Just getting through what they had to get through in order to stay alive for one more day.
Vids showed the scenery often enough. Dirt and vomit and bodies in gutters. Most of the bodies were even alive. The dead ones hadn’t gone too far off yet—the cleaners would come through sooner or later.
Vids didn’t show the smell. Or what was under it, a taste almost, bitter and harsh and suddenly, overwhelmingly sweet. Aisha wanted to gag, but her throat had locked. Her whole body was stiff.
Rama walked through crowds and clots of traffic as if they hadn’t been there. He seemed to know where he was going, which was more than Aisha could manage. This part of the city she hadn’t mapped on the web, and she was not likely to try it now. Psycorps would leap as soon as she tried.
As far as Psycorps was concerned, she was linked in to the schoolbot in the house, studying Old High Marsian. Rama was in his room, meditating. Or sleeping. Being still. Biding his time.
She could have been happy with that, just now, as they passed a clot of very dirty people around a very clean one. He looked as lost as Aisha felt, but he didn’t have Rama to keep him safe.
“They’re going to eat him,” she heard herself say. “Don’t you think we should—”
Rama ignored her. Aisha slowed down, loosening her left-hand sword in its scabbard. She knew how deeply stupid it was, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
Rama slapped Aisha’s hand away from the sword and hauled her forward, half off her feet. Then he let her go.
He wasn’t waiting for her to find her balance. A few more meters and he’d be gone, and she’d be alone in the back armpit of the port.
That might not be such a bad thing. Even while she thought it, she staggered after him.
By the time she looked back, she’d gone too far to see what had happened to the other lost outworlder. Aisha had to hope he’d got away somehow. Or that it hadn’t hurt too much when he went down.
30
The city got filthier the deeper they went. Aisha slipped in blood more than once, and in worse things more than that. She kept her feet because if she didn’t, and landed in some of the things she tried to step over, she would want to rip her skin off along with her clothes.
She knew inside that skin that the only safe place here was directly behind Rama. He didn’t care enough about anything to be afraid. He didn’t even care if he died. He’d just come back and keep on hunting for the world he’d lost.
People here could smell fear. They could smell its opposite, too. They left him alone and stepped wide of his shadow.
When he stopped, she almost ran into him. The street they were on was narrow and twisty, but it was different from the past dozen twisty streets they’d been winding down. The pavement was almost clean, and the piles of garbage seemed to be restricted to the areas around the disposer units.
Somebody cared, here. Or was paid to care. Aisha’s eye ran down a line of shops with names that didn’t mean anything to her, and signs in writing that she couldn’t read. The one nearest seemed to sell spices, Old Earth curios, and, from the smell, high-quality ganja. Which Pater would not be pleased to know she recognized.
Rama wasn’t paying attention to the shop. The place just past it looked like either a tavern or a brothel—Pater would not have liked her to know that, either. It smelled like beer and wine and lower-quality ganja, and voices babbled out of it.
Another sound wound above the voices. It wasn’t the song Rama was still following and Aisha was trying not to remember too clearly. It was much more obviously human, and as clear and pure and strong as it was, it didn’t feel mechanical at all. It was coming out of a living throat, with a living mind inside.
“That’s Old Earth opera,” Aisha said. “What is she doing singing it in—”
“She’s weaving dreams,” Rama said. He turned toward the tavern.
~~~
Taverns in vids were dark and full of people with strange mods and stranger addictions. There were mods enough here, and most of them made Rama look distinctly normal, but the lights were up. Except for the ganja, most of what went around seemed to be safe enough for a children’s party back in Cairo.
Rama made his way to a table by the wall, not too far from the door, but close enough to see the singer, who floated in a hoverchair at the far end of the room. He sat with his back to the wall, leaving Aisha to settle beside him.
The singer looked as if she rode in a globe full of stars, wearing a gown of stars, with stars woven into her abundant black hair. Her voice was so pure it hurt.
Queen of the Night. Rama’s voice swam beneath earthly sound, the same way the great shapes swam through jumpspace. The words woke knowledge in somewhat the same way a web-ping did: the name of the opera and the character and the song she sang—aria, it was called.
It was born on Aisha’s home world and not his, but it spoke to him. Music: sacred song. Songs for the gods, and of them.
His long sleep had taken them away from him. This song, and this singer, brought them back. All of them. A whole soaring tide of them.
The
y were part of the other song somehow, the terrible one, the song of agony. They were a guide. A point of focus. Leading him to the singer.
“Drinks, meser? Food? Dreams?”
The person speaking to Rama had no discernible gender. Heshe was blue—blue eyes, blue spikes of hair, skin shading from sea-blue to just this side of midnight. Hiser features were smooth and round and vaguely piscine, and hiser movements were smooth and flowing, as if heshe swam through air like water.
Rama’s eyes were slightly wider than usual, taking in the sight, but then he relaxed. The person inside was human, and quite ordinary. There still wasn’t a gender, exactly; more a sense of a body that was one thing and a mind that was another.
That hurt him, for some reason Aisha couldn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she wanted to: it was an old hurt, as old as he was, but as fresh as if it had happened that morning.
He covered it quickly, and said, “Food and drink we’ve had elsewhere. Dreams, we make for ourselves.”
The blue person giggled behind hiser hand. The fingers were webbed. “Yes! Yes, we do, don’t we? Drink, then, if you would stay. Directly, meser!”
The blue person didn’t wait for an answer, but air-swam away. The singer still sang. Her voice never wavered and never seemed to tire.
Aisha was almost sad when the aria ended. She hadn’t understood a word, but it didn’t matter. Everything she needed to know was in the music.
The singer floated away into the darkness of holographic night. Something else took the stage, but Aisha didn’t pay attention. It wasn’t music; it was a babble of nothing much.
The babble in the room rose to drown it. Aisha only had vids to go by, to judge the people that crowded around her, but she didn’t think many of them ran on the high side of the law.
It wasn’t the ones with the extreme mods who made her skin creep. It was the quiet ones, the ones with their backs to the walls and their eyes watching, watching.
They were watching Rama. He looked bored now the singer was gone, leaning back, ignoring all the eyes on him. The more he ignored them, the more they stared.
