by Judith Tarr
Now that Aisha hadn’t been expecting. She knew a little about Mother before she met Pater—how she was crew on a tradeship because she didn’t have the funding to be a research scholar. She’d met Pater on one of the ship’s runs, while he was still setting up the expedition to Nevermore.
That was very romantic, though like Nevermore at the moment, with more screaming than one mostly saw in stories. What Aisha hadn’t known was that Mother still kept her contacts with the tradeships.
Odd to think of Mother as someone with secrets. Odder to get an offer of help, instead of a demand that she come home.
Stay sensible, Mother said. Take notes. Your first doctorate is in there somewhere.
Aisha broke down and bawled. Not too long. Just to howl a little bit. Let it all out. Wish she could be home again—for an hour or a night.
Then she could be sensible again, the way Mother said. She kept the message-within-a-message with its encrypted code that she didn’t expect she’d ever use.
It was the thought that counted. She put together her own message, just a short one.
Dear Mother and Pater and Jamal and Vikram and everybody, I’m well, really I am. Aunt Khalida is here and keeping me in line. We’re looking for ways to save Nevermore. We’ll come back when we find them. That’s a promise.
P.S. Mother, I’m taking notes.
That was the best she could do. She marked it to send the next time the subspace packet went out, which would probably be when MI left the system.
She still felt odd and weepy. She went to watch rehearsals, to have something to do that wasn’t on the web or inside her own head.
~~~
Marta’s piece played as part of an opera, with chorus and instrumentals and virtual sets and costuming. They were putting it all together when Aisha slipped into the hall.
It was dark, and quiet except for the shimmer of music far away. Aisha could feel the people in the big high room, the bodies moving and breathing and thinking. They didn’t matter, any more than the air around her or the floor under her feet. Everything was about the music.
It grew slowly, bringing light with it. Faint at first, like dawn on Earth, or on Nevermore. But the setting was neither. It was a landscape of rock and ruins, stripped of anything living. The dark overhead was a sky without stars, but that changed, too, little by little.
What rose was not the sun but a wheel of stars, a spiral galaxy climbing over the barren horizon. The music swelled from instruments into voices.
Under the wheel of stars was a wheel of stone. It was broken: parts of it had fallen into rubble. But the arch held, and on the other side was white light.
The voice that soared above the chorus was Marta’s, pure and strong and high. It was singing in a language Aisha almost recognized: a little like ancient Egyptian, a little like the old language of Nevermore.
The words weren’t important. The music said everything it needed to say. Grief and loss. Anger and sorrow. So many years. So many worlds. So many lives poured away into the unforgiving rock.
When the voice changed, it was so natural and inevitable that Aisha almost felt safe. But this wasn’t about safety. It was about something so terrible that it had no name, and so powerful that it had broken whole worlds.
He stood in the light, distilled out of it: as dark as the darkness, but full of the fire of suns. His voice was dark and bright and harsh and sweet. It was trained—he’d been too humble about that—but the way it wrapped around the notes was completely different. Not of Earth or the worlds that looked toward Earth. Alien.
He sang in web-common, which was like all languages piled together and made into a matrix for data. He’d thrown his own words into that, and along with the rest they made more sense than they had any right to make.
They translated in her mind as images. The endless rolling grasslands of Nevermore. The vanished cities, the people gone, every face, every voice, every name. The moons that had been; the one that was left, broken and barren. As barren as the world around him on the stage.
He stood on the edge of infinity, staring down and down. She knew he would jump—he had to jump. There was nowhere else to go.
He soared instead. Up and up. Into the sun. Through the sun. Into darkness and quiet and a far glimmer of green.
Marta’s voice found him again, there on the other side of spacetime. They sang the light back into the universe, populating the sky with stars, and the stars with planets, and the planets with life in infinite variety.
When silence fell, it was perfect. Aisha remembered to start breathing again.
Everyone had the same blank, stunned expression. Even Marta—though she shook herself out of it. “That will do,” she said. “With a few small adjustments. The blocking of the sets—”
~~~
“I’ve seen a face like that before.”
Aisha was still recovering. She’d known what Rama could do with his voice, but Marta had turned it into something even stronger. It was almost terrifying.
She blinked at the person in front of her. It was one of the techs, a very tall person, very pale, like something carved in ice. Heshe was staring at Rama, whom Marta was talking to low and fast, while other techs and the musicians swirled around them.
“Those proportions,” the tech said, “are almost human, but they’re not. Are they? Not quite. I’ve seen them in one other place.”
Aisha sucked in a breath. This was huge, if heshe was telling the truth. Though why would heshe not? “Where?” she asked.
“Very far away,” the tech said, sweeping hiser long thin hand outward and upward, the way Rama had flown out of the abyss. “Out toward the farthest station, on the edge of human space. It was just for a moment, in passing in the zocalo, but I’ll never forget.”
“Did you record it?” Aisha asked. “Can you show me?”
“No,” the tech said with real regret. “It was too fast, and I was too startled. It’s only in my head.”
Aisha knew someone who could view that. Several someones. She couldn’t make herself say so. It felt too strange.
“Will you come?” she said. “And tell him?”
The tech stiffened. “I couldn’t—I don’t have much to—”
“He’ll want to know,” she said.
Heshe dithered, but Aisha waited himer out. After a while heshe twitched toward Rama. Aisha led himer the rest of the way.
~~~
Marta had let Rama go while she went into conference with the musicians. He had the odd, closed look he got sometimes, turning inside himself and facing things Aisha didn’t want to imagine.
“Rama,” she said.
Her voice brought him back out of his head. He smiled at her, and slanted an inquiring glance at the person with her.
“Rama,” she said, “Mesera Pereira wants to tell you something.”
Mesera Pereira looked ready to bolt, but Rama’s smile held himer immobile. It was like bathing in sunlight. Aisha was used to it, and she could still just bask; for someone new, it must be overwhelming.
“Mesera,” he said.
“Meser,” heshe answered. “I said to your friend—your sib—your crewperson? I saw someone. A face like yours. It’s not—it’s hard to forget.”
He went perfectly still. The warmth was still in him, consciously so; he was trying not to spook the tech. But all his focus had gathered and fixed. “You have seen one like me? Where?”
“A station,” Mesera Pereira said, “very far out. Starsend, it’s called.”
“Will you show me?” Rama asked.
He did it so gently, and so warmly, that the tech could only nod. Aisha felt him go in, gliding like a fish through deep water, and finding the one thing he wanted, that floated up near the surface.
She saw it, too, pulled along in his wake. A crowded marketplace under a few sparse stars, a swirl of faces, and then that one. The one that—yes, it looked like Rama.
It was just a glimpse as the tech had said. A person walking fast be
tween market stalls, not acknowledging anyone nearby, going from here to there with as much speed as traffic and long legs would allow.
It was a very tall person. Much taller than Rama, but the profile was strikingly like his, and the skin like black glass, and even the way it—heshe? No, she—held her head and turned her shoulders, as if she ruled the world.
Rama paused the memory like a vid, to bring out details that the tech might not have consciously recalled, but they were there. Hair in braids strung with copper beads. Rings swinging in the ears. Clothes almost disappointingly ordinary, but brightened with embroidery.
Real embroidery: thread stitched on cloth, rimming collar and fastenings and sleeves and hem of the closely fitted coat. Glint of metal under and over it: at least two necklaces and a collar made of hammered plates—copper, maybe; in that light was hard to tell. The rest Aisha couldn’t see; the woman was too far away and there were too many people in the way.
Rama let out a long, slow breath. Aisha blinked: she was out in the physical world again, and Mesera Pereira was staring at them both, puzzled and a little dazed.
“Thank you,” Rama said, and he meant it. “From my heart, I thank you.”
The tech didn’t seem to know what to say to that. Rama dazzled himer with a smile several solar magnitudes brighter than the one he’d had before, and one way and another, got himer moving toward the rest of the techs and the rehearsal that was still going on.
For Aisha it was over. For Rama, too, though he wasn’t inclined, just yet, to leave.
“Is it?” she asked him. “Is it really? But if it is, how—”
“Yes,” he said. “It is. Really. There can be no mistake. As to how—that’s a question to which we will have to find the answer.”
We. She liked that. Unless he was being royal, in which case she had no intention of being left behind.
“You can’t go now,” she said. “Not till after the performance.”
“No,” he said. “Not until then. But as soon as it’s over—”
“We’ll be ready,” she said.
50
While the Ra-Harakhte’s captain made music in Central, his crew had been taking shore leave in shifts. Khalida found herself functioning more or less as his XO, not through any effort of her own; it just seemed to happen.
She still had MI clearances, with Kom Ombo clearances on top of those, and more experience on the bridge of a starship than anyone else on the ship. With one thing and another, various bits of administrivia devolved to her; as she dealt with them, more appeared. She had every intention of tossing them all into Rama’s lap when he finally deigned to come back aboard, but in the meantime, it did pass the time.
Robrecht had also fallen into executive-officer duties; when he came down, she went up, onto a ship gone oddly silent with so few personnel on board. Even the scientists had gone below. A skeleton crew manned the bridge and watched over the cargo in its shielded bays.
She appreciated the quiet. The ship was in feeding mode, which was somewhat like sleep. The two members of the crew at the screens were not far from sleep themselves; they were only there to respond if something unexpected happened.
She could as easily monitor them and the ship from quarters as from the bridge, but there was something oddly comforting about sitting in the captain’s cradle and staring at the dynamic sameness of traffic in and out of Central. The webfeed streamed through, with the occasional blip or near-miss, but nothing to do with this ship.
What alerted her, at first she hardly knew. A slight anomaly running underneath the feed. A blip that had nothing to do with external traffic.
Something was trying to hack into the ship’s web. That was not particularly unusual—except that it came from on board.
All of the crew were either off the ship or doing their duty, or else, in one or two cases, asleep. Khalida tracked the anomaly with one of her own, and hissed.
Of course. Everyone had forgotten the prisoner in the ship’s brig. The ship fed and monitored her, but seemed not to have bothered to stop her when she found her way into its web.
Khalida entertained the thought of simply shutting off life support to the brig. But she had done enough killing.
She waited instead, and observed. The anomaly was a very small and subtle bot, exploring specific sites.
Not necessarily the ones she would have expected. Free ships in search of crew, yes. Deep-cover sites for MI and the Corps—of course. But also archaeological journals, news of the weird and the outré, and statistics related to the trade, both legal and illegal, in alien artifacts.
Khalida set her own bot to shadow MariAntonia’s. When that was taken care of, she happened to pass by another stream of the web, a feed from crew quarters.
The former Lieutenant Zhao had been keeping to himself. Aside from that one ping from the station four days ago, Khalida had barely paused to think of him. For a person whose whole world had imploded, he was not doing too badly.
Or so she had thought. Without the Corps behind him, he was a more or less harmlessly pretty thing with just enough psi to be noticeable. It had not burned out with the rest on Araceli—the ship had shielded him, and Rama, too, as far as Khalida knew.
And now there was survivor’s guilt, which she knew much too well, and grief, and shock, and all the rest of the aftermath of an intensely personal disaster. With no one to care enough to get him mended, even if Khalida had believed in such a thing after the little good such therapies had done her.
He was asleep, and he did not intend to wake. She would have left him to it—his life to waste or lose—but some vestige of childhood training brought her to her feet.
~~~
Crew quarters had grown down toward the ship’s ventral sections, clusters of three- and four-meter globes strung along tubular passages like grapes on a vine. She found Zhao in the farthest of these, drawn into a fetal knot.
The ship was as willing to shock him awake as it had been to send him into a gradually deepening coma. She would have to do something about that, she thought as he thrashed and flailed. The ship did not, yet, know how to distinguish between actual pilot’s duties and suicidal stupidity.
Zhao’s convulsions quieted slowly enough to knot Khalida’s stomach. She had not set out to damage him, though she had not tried terribly hard not to, either.
Ship’s web scanned him, but apart from a headache and some cognitive confusion, found nothing out of order. He lay shaking, sucking in breaths.
“Idiot,” Khalida said.
He blinked at her. His face twitched; he shuddered. “What did you— Why—”
“I didn’t get to die after what I did,” she said. “Neither do you.”
“What I—I didn’t do anything!”
“Tell that to the children you dragged in for indoctrination. The ones who went on to become good soldiers. The ones who wouldn’t surrender; who were neutered and thrown back out.”
“The ones your alien beast stripped of mind and sense and left to go mad inside their own skulls?”
That might have been the first truly honest thing he had ever said. “All he did,” Khalida said, “was give them back what they had given.”
Zhao shuddered again. “I wish I could hate him.”
Khalida’s brows lifted. “Don’t you?”
“I hate myself.”
He was drawing into a knot again. She slapped him hard enough that his ears must be ringing, but not so hard that he lost consciousness.
“Get up!” she snapped at him. “Get out. Walk!”
He had been conditioned to do what he was told. He got up; he lurched toward the door.
Khalida hauled him back. “Not toward an airlock, damn you. You’re coming to the bridge with me, and you’re making yourself useful. No more hiding. No more wallowing.”
“Talking to yourself now, Captain?”
“Is it working, Lieutenant?”
“No.” But he stood straighter. When she pushed him forward, he walked,
and did not try to escape.
~~~
She had had nothing in mind for him to do, but by the time she herded him onto the bridge, she thrust him in front of a screen and said, “Monitor traffic. Out as well as in. If anything makes a move that doesn’t feel right, alert me.”
He blinked at her. “Something wrong? What do you—”
“Ordinary and sensible precautions,” she said, “and a feeling in my gut.”
He nodded. “I’ll keep watch.”
Maybe he would. Maybe he would fall back down into despair, or maybe he would wander off when he grew tired. But he was disposed of for the moment.
Part of the feeling in her gut was hunger. She dealt with that, and considered sleep, but the thought of leaving the bridge made her shoulders twitch.
She still had patterns to ponder, and a mystery that needed solving. Too much, her old self would have said, before it ran to hide. This new self, after Araceli, let it all run together.
~~~
“Captain.”
Khalida snapped out of a half-dream. In it, she had been swimming through a sea full of stars, following a shadow that sometimes had no shape at all, and sometimes looked back at her with a woman’s face.
Zhao was still at his screen, but his voice spoke directly in her ear, through a focused weblink. “What do you make of this?”
The feed he sent seemed unexceptional. Flow and ebb of traffic. MI ships reaching jump points and vanishing from the system. Other ships coming in—free traders, a cruise ship, a freighter or two.
“Not out there,” Zhao said. “In here.”
He meant around the docking bay, not inside the ship. Inside was quiet, even in the brig.
Every bay had its quota of human traffic, even at this upper level. Inspectors inspecting, travelers traveling, the occasional random explorer. Khalida’s scans had allowed for this. What they had not considered was an explorer of apparent alien origin who happened to be a mask for—on quick count—fifteen all but perfectly shielded human bodies.
