by Judith Tarr
It was a cluster of stations and ships and planetoids and odd bits of space debris that had been turned into habitats. The original asteroid belt was still mostly there, and mostly occupied, where it hadn’t been mined out for everything from iron to water.
This was the wildest place Aisha had ever been. Nevermore was wild, but it was well within U.P. space. Kom Ombo stood on the edge of the unexplored.
People who ventured past it had no federation of worlds to help them. They were out on their own, or traveling in relays, running supply lines back to what civilization there was.
For the edge of nowhere, it was a remarkably crowded place. Free traders ran in and out. Explorers used it as a base. Bits and pieces of U.P. showed up here and there: an embassy, a handful of consulates, a military installation that wasn’t allowed to dominate anyone.
Aisha was sure it tried. It knew they were coming: Ship caught the ping and routed it to the pilots’ screens. A whole stream of data unreeled from the ping, a hack that made Aisha widen her eyes in respect.
She heard Aunt Khalida choke, but couldn’t tell if it was laughter or outrage. Probably laughter.
Meanwhile they sailed on along the route that Central had set, aiming toward the heart of it all, the planetoid that had been the first settlement in this system. It was a full-on space station now, surrounded by a webwork of docking bays and biospheres: habitat modules for alien as well as human species.
The bay they’d been assigned was on the outer level above the planetoid’s south pole. It had been built to hold a starship; it was just big enough for Ship.
Ship was happy enough. There was star-stuff to feed on, thin enough here, but the bay was positioned to catch the wind from Kom Ombo’s sun. It was like a terrestrial whale floating in an ocean current, waiting for plankton to stream past.
While they docked, Rama left the screen he’d been monitoring and moved toward the conn. Dr. Ma let him have it.
“Central,” he said. “May we come aboard?”
“We were just about to say,” said the voice on the feed. “By all means. A shuttle will be ready for you when docking is complete.”
~~~
The shuttle was actually a sort of elevator: a string of cars on cables that connected the bay to the outer level of the station. Most of the crew would stay on Ship until Rama was sure of what was below, but he couldn’t stop Aisha from going, and Aunt Khalida didn’t intend to stay behind, either. He took Marta, who knew people in Kom Ombo, and to Aisha’s not entirely pleasant surprise, the former Lieutenant Zhao.
He left Kirkov and Robrecht and Dr. Ma in charge of the ship—balancing each other out, Aisha thought. Nobody would hijack it in any case. It wouldn’t go unless Rama asked it to.
They were a nicely piratical collection of people. Aisha even wore her swords; nobody said anything about them, and there didn’t seem to be any restrictions against them. Unlike energy weapons, which were supposed to be peace-bonded, or projectile weapons, which were outright banned.
Central’s web ran a stream of what regulations there were, along with information, instructions, and so much advertising for goods and services that it made Aisha dizzy. Most of Central, as far as she could tell, was one huge open bazaar, where a person could buy just about anything, and just about anything was legal, as long as admin got a cut of the take.
Aunt Khalida shut that off before Aisha could test it. “Not till we’re down,” she said. “Everything on this feed is jacked for the tourists.”
“They get tourists out here?”
“Tourists are everywhere.” Khalida sounded almost cheerful. She’d been terribly quiet since they left Araceli, but something about this place had opened her up—or made her stop caring.
Aisha eyed her warily, but there wasn’t anything to be done here. All she could do was watch and wait.
~~~
The shuttle passed through the outer levels, then through a tunnel into Central itself. Everything was pitch black except for the faint glow of emergency lights and a glimmer around Rama that Aisha almost might have thought she was imagining. Then suddenly they burst out into light: clear and bright, shaded more toward the blue spectrum than the suns of Earth or Nevermore, but still not so far along that it made her eyes hurt.
The whole world was hollow. Bubbles floated in it, full of people and buildings and machines, and some that were empty except for water and greenery. Cars hummed and darted and swarmed in patterns controlled by the worldweb, flowing all around and about and into the bubbles.
A car was waiting for them when they came out the shuttle, with a pilot who greeted Marta as if they were long-lost cousins. Aisha didn’t think they were technically related, and the web wasn’t helpful when she asked, but they obviously went back a while.
He was a smallish man, no taller than Rama, and built square, with black hair cut short, and bright black eyes. He took them all in with transparent pleasure. “Welcome!” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Welcome to Kom Ombo!”
“Meser Abaad,” Aunt Khalida said. “We’re honored.”
“The honor is mine,” he said. “Come, there’s someone who’s eager to meet you.”
Aisha followed the rest into the car with the pilot who was actually, the worldsweb said, one of the principals of Kom Ombo. That being what they called someone who ran the system.
He didn’t act like any important person Aisha had ever met. He was easy, casual, and full of information as they flew in a long arc toward the center of Central. The bubble there was almost big enough to be a planetoid in its own right. There was a whole city inside, and a lake on the bottom, surrounded by deep green woods.
The car flew through the surface of the bubble—slowing a little and stretching the bubble until the world outside blurred and then came clear again—and wove into a swarm of traffic, aiming down toward the lake.
Marta called Meser Abaad Jonathan. He didn’t feel like a null, but he didn’t feel ordinary, either. Sometimes when Aisha turned away to look out at the city floating past, and then looked back again, there seemed to be two of him: one laid over the other, as if he rode in a bubble of his own.
She’d never met a grown person who was so happy without being impaired somehow. The city he flew through made the port of Araceli look clean and simple, and he was in charge of it. It didn’t seem to taint him at all.
The car slowed as it descended toward the lake. The water was dark and looked deep, but Aisha could see something moving in it. Something huge, though not as big as Ship.
“My dear,” Jonathan said, and this time he wasn’t speaking to anyone in the car, “our guests are here. When you’re ready…”
A voice even brighter than his came lilting over the comm. “My dear! Of course I’m ready. Bring them in, if you please.”
“Immediately, my dear,” Jonathan said, sweeping a smile around the car. “Going down,” he said.
By which he meant into the water: nose down, diving straight, with the searchlight arrowing ahead of him.
Aisha had never been in a submarine. She didn’t think Aunt Khalida had, either, and Rama was no seafarer. Neither of them allowed any expression to show, but Aunt gripped the arms of her seat so hard the padding bulged.
There was something about the pressure of water on a hull. No pressure at all, in space, or whatever weirdness jumpspace was made of, didn’t feel as perfectly dangerous as this.
Strands and coils of weed curled up past the searchlight. Small shiny creatures darted out of the way. They weren’t fish, exactly, but close enough.
Something rose up from below. At first Aisha thought it was more of the weed, but it moved differently. Its undulations weren’t random. It was swimming.
She’d seen something like it in an aquarium on Earth. A lionfish: an explosion of shimmering striped fins and spines, daring the world to try, just try, to get in its way.
This was enormous. Bigger than the car, and its eyes were bright gold, flaring like a cat’s when the light stru
ck them.
“My dear!” Jonathan cried.
“My dear,” the voice on the comm trilled. It came from the thing in the water, which had stopped swimming upward to hover in front of them.
Aisha could see it perfectly well. The car’s hull had gone transparent. They floated in a bubble, with nothing between them and the dark water but a few millimeters of glasteel.
“Sers and seras,” Jonathan said, “this is my beloved, my dear one, my sweet Alexandra.”
They all murmured polite things. Aisha felt faintly stunned. She’d seen aliens before, of course she had. She’d been through enough spaceports and traveled on enough ships. But never one like this.
“My dears,” Alexandra said. Her voice must be synthetic, but it sounded wonderfully real. “You’re most welcome. I do apologize for dragging you here without even a pause for a rest or a bite. I’ve been waiting so long, you see. I’m just a little overeager.”
“That’s easily remedied,” Jonathan said. He waved his hands like a stage magician. It all came out of the blanked storage bins, of course: water and wine and something light and fizzy and alarmingly good, and boxes that opened into smaller boxes full of food.
Aisha didn’t want to imagine that the creature called Alexandra ate for dinner. She was hungry enough to not particularly care.
Even Zhao ate a little, under the force of Jonathan’s good humor and Alexandra’s luminous eyes. They were being studied, and no one pretended otherwise. It was all very open and uncomplicated.
It was weird. Aisha should have been ready to crawl out of her skin, but she was as comfortable as if she’d been at home on Nevermore.
Even that didn’t hurt as much as usual. She breathed past the too-familiar pain in her heart, and focused on the food in front of her and the alien now wrapped partway around the car.
“Dear Marta,” Alexandra said after they’d been eating for a while and were starting to slow down, “would it be terribly rude of me to ask if you would sing for us while you’re in Central?”
“Not rude at all,” Marta said smiling, “and of course I will. Only tell me when and where.”
“We’ll do that,” Jonathan said. Then Aisha caught a glimpse of his other side, crisp and professional, before he shifted back to his happy self. “My dear, shall I take them to Home Above now, and let them rest?”
“By all means,” Alexandra said. “You’ve all been most kind.”
46
That was one of the stranger meals Khalida had eaten. They were on display to the alien who was also, obviously, the human principal’s lover and lifemate. What the creature really thought, or why it was so important that they be brought to her in her own habitat, Khalida lacked the data to know.
It was a test, she supposed. She noticed that no one had much to say while they ate, and Rama had not spoken a word since he left the Ra-Harakhte.
He was not in the fugue state that had taken him down on Araceli. His eyes were alert and his movements as light and powerful as ever. He was in observation mode, even while he was being observed.
Khalida for one was glad to leave the lake behind and be delivered to a house halfway up the curve of the city’s bubble. It was a near-perfect replica of an early Industrial Age villa in Luxor in Old Egypt, complete with palm trees and mock Pharaonic columns.
Aisha laughed when she saw it. Fortunately their host took no offense. “Isn’t it delightful?” he said to her.
“It looks like my grandfather’s house,” she said. “You really live here?”
“I really do,” he answered. “Now you will be my guests while you’re in Central. The house is keyed to all of you; you have only to ask and it will provide.”
“A bed,” Aisha said promptly. “Sleep.”
“As madam wishes,” the wall said. It sounded exactly like Khalida’s father’s major-domo.
She suppressed the start of recognition. That was a test, too. Everything here was a test. She did not know what it led to, but she meant to pass, or at least to come out intact.
~~~
The guests, however willing or unwilling they might be, were housed along a corridor on the second story. Aisha made sure to claim one of the rooms next to Rama’s, and Khalida tossed her kit into the one on the other side.
The others seemed happy to put themselves to bed once their rooms were sorted, but Khalida had no sleep in her. She prowled the house, investigating its nooks and corners, and made note of which doors failed to open when she approached.
When she set an alert on Aisha, the house was cooperative. It had no objection to her going out, either.
Their host was long gone. Being a principal, she supposed. Or being lifemate to his alien beloved. It was none of her business either way, unless it threatened her or her niece.
Central’s web was extremely well designed and impeccably maintained. For a pirate network on the edge of nowhere, it compared favorably with Centrum itself—and probably intentionally, considering the name.
It provided her with a detailed map of the city, though not of the people in it, except in terms of traffic patterns and, here and there, species. Not every sector had human-breathable atmosphere.
She was almost tempted to test one of those, but her mood was not quite that contrary. She found her way to the center, to the Mercado as it was called here: the bazaar, they would have said at home in Egypt.
Odd that she was thinking of Egypt as home. She had stopped that along about the time she enlisted in MI. Now that she was out, old habits seemed to be coming back.
She had her sidearm tucked in a pocket—no one had shown any interest in relieving her of it, in spite of the regulations that had been streamed at them on the shuttle. Her jacket and pants with the insignia removed were still a little too obviously MI, but if any eyes took note of it, they slid on by.
She was not being stalked, either, that she could detect. Predators tended to go for the weak, and she had never projected that, even as a raw young recruit with more temper than sense. She was anonymous, and somewhat surprisingly safe.
She turned in to one of the dozen bars along that particular stretch of street. It was an honest dive, not trying to be anything else: walls held up by a combination of grime and smoke and the smell of ancient beer, screens showing random streams from the worldweb, and a holobar tended by a person of approximately the same vintage and provenance as Vikram on Nevermore. The radiation scars if anything were thicker, the skin was darker, and the gender indeterminate, but the voice was smoky sweet and so was the brown-golden liquid the bartender set in front of Khalida.
She tipped back the shot and paused while the liquor burned its way to her stomach. A low whistle escaped her. “That was pure peat. Not the real Lagavulin?”
“All the way out here?” The bartender grinned, baring teeth inlaid with chips of space iron. “A shot of that would cost you half a planetoid.”
Heshe meant that literally. Khalida held out the glass for another shot. A connoisseur could probably have determined to the last molecule where the imitation departed from the original, but to her untutored palate, it was close enough.
While she dealt with the second glass more slowly, she took note of the patrons in the bar: the ones who seemed to be regulars, staked out at tables around the room; the tourists, who were not numerous and who were transparently convinced—and half hoping—that any moment they would be slugged and rolled and sold off to pirates; and those just passing through as she was, alone or in pairs along the bar or settled against the walls where they could watch all possible entrances.
None of them triggered her inner alarms. Maybe she was a tourist after all: she was a little sorry. She might have welcomed a spark of danger, if not a full-blown bar fight.
She was not quite bored enough to wander back to Meser Abaad’s house. She switched to beer after the third shot and kept half an eye on the nearest screen, which had run through a game of null-g soccer and shifted to a documentary on extra-U.P. exploration.
> The hereditary archaeologist in her could not help but lock on. The buzz of synth-Lagavulin and the bitterness of local beer added an air of surreality to the rambling narration and the panoramas of dead worlds and deserted systems.
There seemed to be a great number of those. Through the faint golden fog, she let her mind pull in data from the web, from her own cache, and from wherever else it happened to think of. Nothing came back at first but random hits and Data Not Found.
Then patterns started to emerge. The vid ranged far—clear to the edge of the galactic arm. She had not even known that was possible.
Maybe it was not. But the pattern persisted, even when she tried to exclude that last bit of data.
It was not quite the same, but similar to Rama’s star maps. Similar distribution of points across space. Similar jumps and backtrackings. As if someone, or some thing, had followed the same set of parameters, and left a ruin or an abandoned settlement exactly there.
Sometimes there was nothing but space where the ruin should have been. Suns grew old and died—swelled into giants or went nova. Wandering wormholes swallowed planets and systems. Planets collapsed upon themselves, or broke apart under stresses that sometimes could be known, and often not.
She was dizzy with the immensity of the universe. She stood on the edge, on the last world, looking up at a sky empty of stars but dotted with the swirls of galaxies.
In her dream or hallucination, she stepped through a doorway that stood in the emptiness. It was made of stone, with carvings worn almost to nothing.
The world behind was barren, endless tracts of dusty waste and crumbling stone. Water had long since vanished, and dust had blown into the tracks that it had left, sweeping the planet clean.
On the other side of the door was light. Yellow sunlight, no brighter than Earth. Green, and falling water. The song of something like a bird.
Someone knelt by the waterfall, bending to drink. Fall of blue-black hair, long curve of blue-black back and haunches.
It was not Rama. Oh, no. Rama was never so tall or so lean, or so very female.
