Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  He was not dying. Dying was a gift. He would live. On and on. In agony.

  Psis of the Corps had felt none of the ship’s pain. Until Rama gave it to them. All of it. In all its vastness and its unfathomable depths.

  ~~~

  Justice.

  Khalida laughed. Roared; howled. Rolled on the floor like a mad thing, till there was nothing to do but lie hiccoughing, with tears streaming down her face, and Rinaldi’s screams fading beneath the whoop of the boarding klaxon—his, not Ra-Harakhte’s.

  Ochoa had gone to arrest him for high crimes and misdemeanors. It was a crazy thing, and should have been a dangerous thing, but not any more. No psi in this system was a danger to anyone but herself, now and for who knew how long.

  Forever, Khalida hoped, though she knew better than to expect it.

  Rinaldi’s screams cut off. One of Ochoa’s medics had dropped him with a tranq.

  Ochoa was in battle armor with the helmet pushed back. Even through the dicey connection, she looked faintly green around the edges. “What in the name of the twenty hells did you do?”

  Rama spoke before Khalida could find the words. “Their eyes opened, and they learned to see.”

  “Stop talking like that,” Aisha said, startling them all. “He means they were giving the ship such pain it was almost out of its mind. They didn’t know. Now they do.”

  “All of them,” Khalida said as the datastream caught up with her. “Every psi-five and higher, all through this system. Every three with any claims to be an empath, and even the ones, if they had enough of that capability to do anything with. It’s a massacre.”

  “Not one of them is dead,” Rama said.

  “No,” said Khalida. “They only wish they were.”

  He barely hinted at a shrug. He felt no more guilt than she did, and no more grief, either.

  What guilt she felt was for feeling none. Every psi in the system could not have known or colluded in torturing the ship. Some of them might even have been innocents.

  They were Corps. The children in stasis—those were on their account, too. The planet that had nearly died. The corruption that ran through MI. And more, much more, that she did not know and could not prove but had heard or suspected.

  Justice.

  She met Ochoa’s stare. The feed had steadied, though it was still grainy and visibly pixelated. “Tell Captain Hashimoto I wish her luck.”

  “She’ll rip me a new one for letting you go,” Ochoa said. She did not sound terribly perturbed. “Try to stay alive, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Khalida said. Slightly to her surprise, she meant it.

  Ochoa nodded. “Better get out of here while you can. Nobody’s chasing anybody for a while, but once the thrashing and blaming stops…”

  “…they’ll blame me.” Rama sounded almost pleased with the prospect. “We understand, Commander.”

  Ochoa’s salute included him as well as Khalida, with a fair portion of respect. The screen blanked, then opened again to a field of stars.

  Khalida drew a long breath. She felt strangely light. Empty; free.

  43

  The ship had settled down now the Corps was done torturing it. Rama gave it a course that it was happy enough to set: toward a system called Kom Ombo, out toward the edge of United Planets’ space.

  Under the euphemisms that clouded the web stream, Aisha recognized an old and almost completely worn-out warning. The system belonged to pirates.

  Free traders. That was what they called themselves. Most of the stream was perfectly dull: missing taxes and shipments that didn’t add up. But a little was at least distantly like a pirate vid. Smugglers, chases, the occasional arrest. U.P. usually gave up after a while and issued letters of marque, and then the system ran itself.

  Kom Ombo had been running itself for a long time. There weren’t any Earthlike planets in the system, but a cluster of planetoids orbited its sun at a usable distance. Those had grown, with the addition of a web of stations and orbital colonies, into a trading hub for that whole part of the Outer Reaches.

  It would be a while before they reached it. The ship was still in orbit around Araceli’s moon, but its systems had shifted into jump mode.

  Rama called them all together in a space the scientists had been using as a lab. It was smaller than the bridge but ample for everyone who was awake and out of stasis.

  He was still stretched thin, but Aisha didn’t think anyone else could see it. He’d stopped talking in gnomic utterances, which was a good thing. Mostly he looked like the Rama she’d known on Nevermore: solid, sturdy, and blessedly clear-eyed.

  He scanned them all. Crew, scientists, recent additions—even Lieutenant Zhao, who was managing to hold himself together.

  They scanned him back. Crew and scientists especially. Dr. Ma looked as if she would have liked to dissect him on one of the tables pushed against the wall.

  When they’d all had a chance to decide what they thought of each other, Rama said, “Before we reach Kom Ombo, it’s time we turned ourselves into a functioning ship. We can’t afford another adventure like the one we just, somewhat miraculously and with thanks to my friend here, managed to survive.”

  It dawned on Aisha that he was talking about her. Heat flooded her face; she had to work to keep her head up and not duck and try to hide.

  “Agreed,” said the crewman named Kirkov, “but as far as I know, you’re the only one with psi high enough to control the ship. Unless you’re planning to install the slave circuits again?”

  The ship shuddered. Aisha braced herself, but the movement stopped. Rama had calmed it down.

  Not everybody had felt the tremor. Zhao had, and Aunt Khalida: they both looked slightly wild. Kirkov might have. It was hard to tell.

  “No more slavery,” Rama said. “It lets us ride it; but it needs a certain slant of mind.”

  “Psi,” Kirkov said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Rama. “You’ve ridden land animals, yes? Horses?”

  “A long time ago,” Kirkov said.

  He was wary, but Aisha could tell he was interested. One or two of the science staff were, too, though maybe not in the right way.

  “When we’re in jump,” Rama said, “I’ll teach as many of you as can learn.”

  “And the rest of us?” Dr. Ma inquired. “Are we to keep to our quarters and stay out of your way?”

  “That depends,” he said. “I’ll be learning myself what goes into the running of a ship. Is that something you can teach?”

  “I might,” she said.

  She hadn’t thawed even slightly, but Rama smiled as if she had. “Go now, prepare for jump. We’ll gather again once we’re all safe in subspace.”

  Some of them would ride out jump here: the remains of the maintenance crew, the lab techs, a handful of people who looked after the kitchens and the storage bays. Rama would want to know them all by name, Aisha thought, because he was like that.

  But first they had to begin the deep dive. The ship was ready. It wouldn’t wait much longer.

  Subspace was its native habitat. She could feel how it yearned to go back. It had come out like a whale breaching, to feed in the harsh dry wastes of what she knew as space; but its home, its sea, was the endless deep below.

  ~~~

  It went down soft and slow, sliding seamlessly through the layers of the multiverse. No mechanical ship could ever do what this living creature did. It knew the exact angle and the precise speed. It was beautiful.

  Aisha had let the ship feed her a light dose of drugs, but she barely needed it. She could feel Rama riding the way he did his antelope on Nevermore: quiet, balanced, letting the ship move the way it was born to move. All he did was ask it to go where he needed to go.

  Because he asked and didn’t compel, it was happy to oblige. It was young—a baby. Still growing; still learning how to be itself.

  Subspace was different from inside a living ship. Aisha could hear the singing clearly. She could almost understa
nd what it meant.

  She wanted to lie in her bunk and just listen, but there was too much to do. There were crews and duties and rosters, and everyone had to help.

  Even Rama, though Aisha didn’t think anyone asked him. He did it, that was all. Taking a turn on kitchen duty. Inventorying cargo. Presenting himself as lab assistant.

  “No,” said Dr. Ma.

  Aisha had been enlisted to record data streaming off a set of sensors. She wasn’t told what it referred to, but a quick search told her they were measuring the ship’s responses to shifts in the external environment. Which was subspace, but to the ship it was real space.

  She didn’t tell that to Professor Robrecht, who took the data after she’d organized it, and went away to mutter and scowl and tear out what hair he had left. The datastream was mostly running itself by the time Rama came in and took a station over by the sample-analysis bay.

  He’d already started in with a set of samples when Dr. Ma stopped him. “It’s not appropriate,” she said.

  “For whom?” he inquired.

  For some reason Aisha could not understand, Rama didn’t hate Dr. Ma. He found her interesting; he wasn’t insulted when she snapped at him.

  She did not return his sentiments. At best she was frostily polite. At worst, she looked ready to take his head off and run it through a scanner to see what it was made of.

  She had that expression now. “You belong on the bridge,” she said, “Captain.”

  “I belong wherever I’m needed,” he said. “The ship knows where to go. The bridge crew has nothing to do but watch the monitors and wait for emergence.”

  “I don’t need you here,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Have you any scientific training at all?”

  “That depends on your definition of science.”

  In a vid, they’d keep fighting till one of them grabbed the other and the kissing began. That wasn’t going to happen here. Not in a thousand years. Or six thousand.

  Dr. Ma closed her eyes. She seemed to be counting at least that far, to calm herself down. “When you hijacked this ship, we had no choice but to accept it. That places me under no obligation to accept you as anything but the pirate captain you chose to make yourself.”

  “When I rescued this living creature from pain unimaginable, I only did what I must in order to set it free.”

  Even on the other side of the room, Aisha felt the force of that. Dr. Ma, in front of him, braced as if she stood in a strong gale.

  It barely swayed her. “So you say,” she said. “I don’t see you turning it loose. In fact, it seems you’ve found a way to use it for yourself.”

  “I asked,” he said. “It chose to help.”

  “Prove it,” she said.

  His white smile lit up the lab. “Ah! Science!”

  “Always,” she said.

  “I’ll teach you to ride it,” he said. “Then you’ll have your proof.”

  Aisha bit her lips before she burst out laughing. He had trapped Dr. Ma perfectly. Now she had to do what he wanted, to get the proof she said she needed.

  Dr. Ma saluted him. “Well played, sir.”

  He bowed to the compliment. “I will need your help, and the help of some of your colleagues. The links you’ll need can be made, I’m told, but they won’t be simple, and they’re not the usual configurations.”

  “That’s not my specialty,” she said.

  “No, but you can advise as to whose it is.” Rama was as polite as ever, but he wasn’t going to let up.

  It was obvious that he didn’t need her to tell him anything. But he wanted her to.

  She was too curious—too much a scientist—to keep resisting him. She made an exasperated face, but she gave him what he asked for.

  ~~~

  She came to the first lesson, too. Aisha had more than half expected to see everybody there, but it was just Rama and Dr. Ma, Kirkov, the scientist named Robrecht who used to be MI, and Aunt Khalida and, not surprising but not welcome either, Lieutenant Zhao.

  Not Lieutenant any more. The Corps was broken and he was a deserter. Or kidnapped—it didn’t matter which.

  Just Zhao, then. Pale and much too still, with hands that shook when he wasn’t paying attention.

  “Are you sure you can do this?” Aisha asked him when they were all together in a smaller space just off the bridge.

  He stared at her as if he barely recognized her. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I can’t, either.”

  “You can,” Rama said. “You will.”

  He stood in front of a set of screens. They weren’t showing anything that made sense. Ship’s web had the same feel to it: vague, sort of empty, but not really.

  Waiting.

  The ship was aware of them. Aisha didn’t know if she should call it that, but she couldn’t think of anything else. It liked being Ship, as long as it got to choose when the tiny creatures inside it tried to make it do things.

  It was like a horse that way. Intelligent, very. Focused on eating and moving and someday making new ones. When humans asked it to carry them places, it was just as happy to do that, if they let it eat as much as it needed, and swim the deep seas under space, which it also needed.

  Rama had taken its pain away. That was like rescuing a horse from a bad owner. It looked to him for the things that made it feel good. It took starstuff out of him, a little, the way a horse would take sugar from a human’s hand: because it was sweet, and if it did more of what he wanted, it could have more of the sweet.

  Humans who were not Rama couldn’t give it that, but Rama, with the techs who were still telling one other that what he’d asked them to do was not possible, had rigged Ship’s web to feed it small sparks of hydrogen and helium when the person at the helm needed or wanted to offer a reward.

  The screens in the training room were the old backup screens from the bridge. In place of slave circuits, they connected with the ship’s neural network through thin filaments that looked like human nerve cells. Ship had grown them, and insulated them. Rama didn’t say so, but Aisha knew that if anyone tried to slave the ship to their commands ever again, the loop would feed straight back into the pilot’s own head.

  That was what had happened to the Corps in Araceli. He hadn’t done a thing to them—just given them what the ship felt. The raw feed. No filters.

  Ship was comfortable now, happy to be swimming through the deep sea, and curious about the humans who one by one, shakily, tried touching it through the web. Each time, the screens lit up, not showing anything yet, just light. Clear and bright for Aisha and Robrecht and Kirkov. Darker for Aunt Khalida, with a shimmer in the back of it, like moon on water. Deep gold for Dr. Ma: striking and beautiful.

  Zhao was last. His face was pale; his lips were tight. His hands shook. He knew, Aisha thought. One wrong move and he’d go the way of the rest of the Corps.

  She watched him almost decide to do it. To finish it. Then he wouldn’t have to hurt any more.

  “Focus,” Rama said. His voice was soft and surprisingly gentle. “Think of light. No more. No less. Just that.”

  Zhao’s face twisted. He lashed out with his mind, and near flattened Aisha—like the worst headache she’d ever imagined. Like a spike through the skull.

  She only got the edge of it. Rama took it head-on. He hissed, but held still. The screen behind him blazed so bright it blinded.

  Ship kicked: a snap of protest; a wave across the screen, dark shot with stars. Zhao went down without a sound.

  Rama hauled him up and slapped him back to what senses he had. When he could stand on his own feet, Rama let him go. “Grieve as you please. Hate me at your leisure. Slit your own throat if you must. But spare this creature that consents to carry us.”

  Zhao jerked as if he’d been shot. Which in a way he had: straight to the center of his guilt.

  “Again,” Rama said. “Properly this time.”

  He was sullen, but he did it. His light was softer
than Aisha’s, which surprised her. He was trying not to hurt the ship again.

  “Good,” Rama said.

  He asked as much as Zhao could stand to give, and a little bit over. As they set to learning how to access the screens and then how to ask Ship to do simple things, he did the same to all of them. Aisha, too.

  They each had a screen, and they each keyed it in whatever way felt right. For some it was like a straight web connection. Aunt Khalida made it like a pilot’s console.

  Aisha set her screen for ship’s web, because that seemed simplest, but when she closed her eyes, what she saw and felt was a horse like one of the herd on Nevermore.

  That hurt in ways she completely hadn’t expected. She missed Jinni suddenly, with a pain like grief. It barely helped to tell herself she was doing what she had to do, and she had every intention of going back home when she was done. When she’d made sure there was a home to go back to.

  The twisting in her gut didn’t care about that. Behind her eyelids she saw the long rolling grassland and the bitter-blue sky. She rode a horse she didn’t know, big and glistening black. The mane on its neck swirled and streamed like a solar storm.

  It was a strong horse, with a mind of its own. It wanted to run through the endless grass. It was happy to carry her, but it wasn’t particularly interested in doing what she asked it to do.

  Other horses crowded around her. The field was full of them, grazing and dancing and mating and dreaming. They ran in herds or wandered off alone.

  The one she rode felt like a young thing, old enough to ride but not much more, a little awkward and not as confident as the others. It was bright and curious and eager to explore, which was how it had surfaced from its native space where it had, and been beached and then caught.

  Instead of pulling it around when she wanted it to turn, she started asking it with shifts of weight or turns of her own body. It turned then because it had to, and she was there to keep it from falling over.

  It was more patient than a horse would be, especially with six other people taking turns poking at it. When Aisha’s screen went down, she watched the others, trying to see and feel what they were doing.