Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  The sea of grass stayed in the back of her mind, and all the creatures in it. Subspace was empty, people thought. Void without substance. Too alien for the human mind to understand. Even computers could barely begin to give shape to it.

  But it wasn’t like that at all. Any more than Ship was a mindless tube full of holes and compartments, capable of generating breathable atmosphere and maintaining human-tolerable temperature, but incapable of feeling anything so sophisticated as pain.

  “How did you manage to be so blind?” Aisha asked Zhao while he waited his turn, too.

  “We weren’t looking,” he answered.

  She hadn’t expected him to have an actual answer. That changed how she felt, a little bit. “Not looking in the right places, you mean,” she said.

  His eyes flickered: a yes. “We fell into the trap of thinking we knew far more than we did. Because we had a set of gifts, a hierarchy, and a system, we thought that was all there was. We didn’t allow for the size of the universe. Or,” he said, “the multiverse.”

  “I’m sorry,” Aisha said. Not for that, exactly. For everything.

  He understood. His eyelids lowered; his head bowed slightly. “We did it to ourselves.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. Then it was her turn again, and Ship seemed glad, and she let his sadness slip away beyond the sea of grass.

  44

  “Why?” Khalida asked.

  The null was still in shackles. That was petty, maybe, but Khalida was not moved to take them off.

  The cell had been made for this prisoner. It was slightly smaller than crew quarters, with a bunk grown out of the wall, and a protrusion like a chair, on which Khalida sat.

  The null’s name was MariAntonia. Khalida wanted to render her nameless in the ancient way, but if there was to be a record, there had to be ID. Ship’s web gave her what data was to be had: name, rank and position, performance reviews. No history. Where one should have been was a blank: Redacted.

  Even her past was null.

  Maybe Marta knew what was behind the wall. Khalida had no particular need to know.

  “Why did you sell us out to the Corps?”

  MariAntonia pulled her knees up to her chest and hid her face against them. Her shoulders were stiff.

  “What did they have on you? Or did they buy you?”

  The voice that came out of the rigid knot was both muffled and defiant. “You’re not MI any more. What are you now, then? Torturer in chief to a pirate king?”

  “Do you wish I were?”

  MariAntonia raised her head. “How did he buy you? Or do you just have a finely honed death wish?”

  “I thought I did,” Khalida said. “So they bought you. I hope they paid a living wage.”

  “Or a dying one?”

  “I know what I’m atoning for. You?”

  The null twitched: half shrug, half raw nerves. “So what’s the sentence? Death? Worse?”

  “As far as I know,” Khalida said, “nobody’s given much thought to you since you were shut up here. The ship feeds you and sees to your needs. When it gets tired of that, it will do whatever it pleases.”

  Khalida knew what unvarnished truth could do, but MariAntonia surprised her even so with the vehemence of her reaction. She looked ready to spit acid. “That’s a lie.”

  “You know it’s not.”

  “I sold this ship and all its contents to the Corps. Almost succeeded, too. If it hadn’t been for—whatever that is, out there on the bridge.”

  “I know what he is,” Khalida said. “Now I know what you are. You bet on the wrong hand. So did the rest of the Corps.”

  “I am—not—Corps.”

  “Of course you are.” Khalida stood. “If it were up to me I’d space you. But that’s the ship’s to decide. You might try bargaining with it. I don’t know if it can understand you, without psi or a working web connection. If it can, and if you do talk it into letting you go, then you can worry about the rest of us.”

  MariAntonia curled back into her knot again. Defensive posture, Khalida thought. She was no stranger to it herself.

  She should have left well enough alone. That was the residue of MI: wanting to sound out the prisoner, to extract what truth there was.

  There was nothing there. No point in trying to find anything, except to wonder if some or all of the nulls in stasis had had this same programming: to turn against their own. If so, she hoped she was far away when they woke.

  ~~~

  The scientists had come out of their shock at the hijacking of the ship to find themselves in a kind of heaven. With their instruments properly calibrated to the ship’s systems, and the ship actively cooperating with them, they were making discoveries that would, at the very least, secure their careers for life. Or kill those same careers, if what they discovered contradicted enough of the accepted wisdom.

  Either way, they were gloriously content.

  “Were you always a patron of the arts?” Khalida asked Rama toward the middle of the third shipday in jumpspace.

  “Yes,” he said. “And the sciences.”

  He had been pulling galley duty, running the cleaners in the crew’s mess. It was one of the things he did that made some of them exquisitely uncomfortable.

  Now he was done, but Khalida had stopped him before he went on to something else. She pulled a pair of cups out of stores, and filled them with coffee that was hot, fresh, and wonderfully real. She pushed one toward him as they sat at one of the long tables.

  “You’re corrupting me,” he said, grimacing slightly as he sipped. “Who knew bitter could be bliss?”

  “That’s a lesson for all occasions,” she said.

  He watched her as she tackled her own cup. After a while he said, “You’re healing.”

  “Scabbing over.”

  “Yes.”

  She met his dark stare. “You, too.”

  She thought he might look away, but he held steady. She should be afraid, maybe. Knowing what he was capable of.

  He was only dangerous if she got in his way. “Did you do that before, too? Work in the kitchens and give the staff fits?”

  It was a risk to ask him that, but she was bored. She would welcome an argument, even a fight.

  He gave her neither. “Sometimes I did. People didn’t expect it, even more than here. But there were so many more of them, and the world was so much bigger than this ship. I could go for a whole day, sometimes, without being recognized.”

  “So you looked like everyone else.”

  That was transparent. His lips twitched: a flicker of a smile. “I look like my mother. She looked like her whole tribe. Smaller—that was her mother’s blood; that lady had been like the people who remain on my world. It was a state marriage: an attempt at alliance that ultimately failed.” He drained his cup and set it down. “Old wars. Politics so ancient even I barely remember them. What they were; why they mattered.”

  “Maybe someone remembers,” Khalida said. “Wherever we’re going, if we find your people—”

  “Somehow I doubt they’ll care for the petty details of a tiny kingdom at the back of beyond, that was a thousand years gone by the time they abandoned the world,” Rama said.

  “They remembered you,” said Khalida.

  “Oh, but I was a great monster,” he said. “I’m sure there were legends. Horrors real and imagined. Nightmares for children and their more delicate elders.”

  “They left a message for you,” she pointed out. “Whatever they might have thought of you, they believed they needed you.”

  “No doubt to kill something,” he said.

  “Or save it.”

  “I don’t think,” he said, “that that was my reputation.”

  There was not much she could say to that. She changed the subject instead. “Have you figured out where you need to go?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “The map from the Ara was left for me, I’m sure of it, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to read it.”

  �
�It must be keyed to you somehow,” Khalida said, “if it’s aimed at you.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Tired, she thought. “I may be thinking too hard. If I could slow down, stop—not lost in the ship; just be…”

  “This is as good a place and time as you’ll get,” she said. “Rest, then let your mind find its way.”

  “I don’t think—” He bit back what looked like a snap of temper. “This place, this space, is not restful. It teems with life, or what might be life if it were in that other face of the universe. It sings—so many songs. So many voices. Even when I ward myself, when I go down as far as I dare, I still hear them.”

  That Khalida had not expected. “Here? In jumpspace? But—”

  “The space we come from is infinitely quieter,” he said.

  “So you can hear the songs.”

  Khalida had neither heard nor felt Marta come into the mess. Rama had: he regarded her without surprise. “You, too?”

  “Yes.” Marta fetched her own coffee and sat a handful of seats down from Khalida, where she could see both of them but not intrude on their space. “Somewhere in this is a very serious scientific paper on the hitherto unexplored range and variety of psi. In the space we call normal, I’m null. Here, there’s so much music I can hardly hear myself think.”

  “I can’t hear anything,” Khalida said with what she realized was a flicker of regret. “Just a little human babble. And the ship. It’s singing, off and on. Humming to itself.”

  “That would be restful,” Rama said. He slanted a glance at Marta. “You’re not really null—not empty of psi. You have strong natural shields. What’s beneath is, in its way, equally strong.”

  “You can see,” she said. She did not sound completely comfortable with the thought.

  “I can hear,” he said. “When you sing. Music concentrates what we are.”

  “You sang your way to command of this ship.”

  “Do you find that objectionable?”

  “You know I don’t.” Marta smiled, sweet and deceptively vague. “Someday you’ll have to tell me your story.”

  “So that you can put it to music?”

  “Of course.”

  “Someday,” he said. “In the meantime, how well can you read a star map?”

  “I’m not a pilot,” Marta said, “but I’ve traveled enough, and been curious enough, to learn a little. What would you like me to see?”

  “Something that I’m missing,” Rama said.

  He called up the maps on one of the screens by the far wall. There was no mistaking where they had come from: the first set of images showed the Ara with its carvings; then the star maps extrapolated from them.

  Marta approached the screen with her face intent. “So. That’s what you were doing there. Did you deliberately bring it down, once you’d finished scanning it?”

  “No.”

  There was no telling if she believed him. She studied the maps from all angles.

  Khalida expected nothing. She went for a fresh cup of coffee, and thought about wandering off. She had a turn on watch, but not for another few hours.

  Rama stared at the maps as he must have stared at them over and over since he first recorded them. He must know every dot and symbol, down to the cracks in the stone in which they were carved.

  After a while Marta said, “I can’t see anything useful, but in Kom Ombo, there are people who may.”

  “I had hoped for that,” he said.

  “Some of them know me,” she said. “I’ll speak to them for you, if you like.”

  “I would like,” he said.

  It had not struck Khalida yet how long his search might be. Longer than he had left to live, maybe.

  He caught the thought: his glance flicked past her. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If these maps were left for me to find, they were meant to guide me as straight as may be. Unfortunately, that route is no longer direct. I’m condemned to take the long way. Still…”

  “More direct than jumpspace?” Khalida asked.

  He seemed to ignore her. The screen shifted the star maps to a corner and began to flicker through sets of images. Ancient sites on various worlds. Remnants of cultures, some of which had survived, while others were long gone.

  There were no apparent connections between them. Some were alien, some had been some form of human. They were scattered through the United Planets and in the space beyond.

  None of them fit with the star maps from the Ara Celi. As far as Khalida could tell, they were completely random.

  Then each image narrowed and focused. They were different spaces—rooms, caverns, gatehouses, the gates themselves, and here and the bones of a ruin. Marks were cut or carved or somehow turned into the substance of the ruins.

  It was the same set of star maps, over and over. Some were so worn and faded they were barely visible; others were as clear as if they had been carved within living memory.

  The system collated them, matched them, and filled the screen with the results. There were small differences, minor slips or—

  Khalida left the table and moved closer to the screen. “These are calibrated,” she said. “Oriented to, or from, each system. Which means…” She shifted her voice to command mode. “Ship. Extrapolate the age of each map. Then arrange from oldest to newest.”

  She held her breath. The image remained unchanged for so long that she had to breathe after all, and then a dozen breaths more.

  The shift at first was almost too subtle to see. Then it fell into place.

  “Now,” she said, “extrapolate. New sequence based on existing pattern.”

  That took longer than the first, but this time she was prepared. Rama and Marta were perfectly silent, watching.

  One by one, the maps fell into place on the screen. Each was labeled with the name of a system.

  Khalida held on to hope for as long as she could. But as the images piled one on top of the other, she sagged. “It’s completely random. There’s no pattern.”

  “No,” Rama said, slipping past her and stopping almost inside the screen. It oriented itself to him, wrapping around him, so that he stood in a globe of nearly identical star maps.

  He turned slowly, arm outstretched. The maps turned with him.

  Spiraled.

  “This isn’t a map,” he said, “exactly. It’s an itinerary.”

  “An itinerary designed by a random generator,” she said with a touch of bitterness. “It doesn’t go anywhere. It jumps from one end of the galaxy to another, in no perceptible order.”

  “Ship,” he said, “track destinations by jump routes. Add wormholes and spatial distortions.”

  Khalida was holding her breath again. She had fallen into the error of thinking like a conventional pilot. This was not a conventional mission. But—“Wormholes? Those were never viable. Once we discovered how to access jumpspace—”

  “—we stopped exploring other options.” Marta had joined them by the screen. “This is fascinating. May I ask what you’re trying to find?”

  “I don’t know,” Rama answered.

  “Look,” Khalida said. “Here’s the beginning.”

  Nevermore. Of course. Then a succession of worlds in no apparent order—until the pattern of wormholes and jump routes overlaid it.

  Something else appeared over the pattern. A succession of points, each glowing brightly and then dying away like an ember. One after another, world by world, ruin by ruin.

  The jump alarm went off.

  45

  Kirkov had been practicing flying Ship, using the virtual modules that it had developed to teach the student pilots. Aisha, having nothing better to do, was half napping in the pilots’ bay, half picking through a plate of pastries that one of the cooks had been experimenting with.

  The jump alarm throbbed straight through her bones. “Kirkov! What did you—”

  “Nothing!”

  It was true, he hadn’t done anything. The lesson had nothing to do with the alarm. Ship was jumpi
ng back into realspace.

  Kirkov was already gone, diving for his jump cradle. Aisha bolted for her own.

  Her mind babbled around and around inside itself. Three days, only three days, was supposed to be a tenday, where are we coming out, what are we—

  Ship gave her calm. It was more than the drugs in the jump cradle: it was a sense that they were going where they were supposed to go, there was nothing wrong, everything was the way it should be.

  All she could do was accept. And hope Ship was telling the truth.

  ~~~

  They had come out on the edge of Kom Ombo’s system, outside the usual lanes of traffic, but still close enough to receive a hail from system center.

  In three days of jump from Araceli.

  “We calculated based on our own ships,” Kirkov said. “We didn’t stop to think that this living creature might be different.”

  Which was stupid, Aisha thought but didn’t say. Thinking human machines were the universal standard.

  She hadn’t thought otherwise, either. Till Ship proved how wrong they all were.

  It was amused—that was the best way she could describe the feeling it sent her. Humans had so much to learn.

  It was showing off. Aisha felt Rama step in, soft but firm, and ease it on course toward the center of the system. Marta answered the hail: “Ra-Harakhte to Kom Ombo. Request berth at Central.”

  The voice on the other end paused, then said, “Marta? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Jonathan,” she said. Aisha could hear the smile.

  “You have the shipment, then? Already?”

  “Already,” she answered.

  He got control of himself—the hint of excited babble disappeared, and he said crisply, “Sending course heading via datastream.”

  While that was busy coming through, Rama pinged Dr. Ma on the pilots’ stream. “Doctor. Would you like to take us in?”

  Aisha held her breath. She more than half expected Dr. Ma to say she would not. But she came through promptly. “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  ~~~

  They were all on the bridge as the ship made its careful way toward Central. Dr. Ma had the conn; Rama stood in front of one of the screens to the side, scanning the system.