by Judith Tarr
In the middle of the city was the hub from which the streets ran like spokes. Screens walled it in, and one arched overhead.
They were blank, until Rama came into the center. Then they came alive.
Aisha jumped like a startled antelope. So did the others. Even Rama reared back a fraction.
There were screens on screens all around them, and screens within screens, all showing desolation, and the wreckage of worldgates. World after world. System after system.
They had an order to them. One after another. In the very middle, a place Aisha recognized: the tower above Blackroot village.
That image had to have been made long before the village, or long after it—because who knew? Whoever had done this might be traveling in time.
It was night there, on the screen, and the stars were different, too: subtly shifted and changed. Five thousand years’ worth, maybe. Give or take.
Farther along, closer to Rama, was the Ara Celi still intact. And farther still, the wheel of stars over the wheel of stone that Aisha had seen, in virtual form, in Kom Ombo.
Here were Aunt Khalida’s star maps all in order, one by one. Past the wheel of stone was one more: the gas giant that loomed above the dome at Starsend.
And then nothing. Absolute blackness. Emptiness deeper than truespace and jumpspace together.
That was the clue. Aisha bit her tongue. What she was thinking was so wild, so far off what could possibly be likely, that she wasn’t even sure she should say it.
A face took shape in the blackness. It was so dark at first that she thought her eyes were bored and inventing shapes of their own. But then she realized: it was a face like Rama’s.
The same face she’d seen in Mesera Pereira’s memory—here, at Starsend.
Aunt Khalida hissed and lurched forward. She recognized it, too. Though where she might have seen it, Aisha didn’t know.
Dreams. The voice in her head had no name or person on it. Just the raw understanding.
Aisha glanced at Rama. His eyelids had lowered and his chin come up.
“There is no way in but through,” the woman said.
She was speaking Old Language—softened in places and changed in places, but understandable. There was no life in her voice; it was purely mechanical.
“Do you know,” Rama said to no one in particular, “how very much I hate riddles and coy mysteries? Give it to me straight, damn you. Or don’t give it at all.”
The AI had gone flat and slightly pixelated while he spoke, as if its programming couldn’t both sustain the image and process the auditory data. He spun away from it in disgust.
The AI started to sing. The language was older than Old Language, too old for Aisha to understand; all she could tell was its age, and that it had the rhythms and timbres of Nevermore. It was a chant, a long slow roll of syllables like a wave on a shore.
That voice was alive. Rama had stopped, and his shoulders gone stiff.
The chant ended on the hint of an up note. He answered it almost angrily, but slowing down as he went on, falling into the same stately rhythm.
Recitative. Response. The voice in the darkness answered his answer, and he answered it again. Back and forth.
He turned to face the singer. She was alive, but surrounded by a sense of unimaginable distance. “So,” she said in Old Language. “It is you.”
“You doubted it?”
“Not any longer.” She looked him in the eye, dark to dark, and each with a terrible brightness deep inside. “You know the way. Now come.”
~~~
Aisha knew the way, too. In her bones, along with the meaning of the chant. It was old, yes, so very old. It was a hymn: to the sun and to the dark. They were brother and sister in that world, twinborn, back to back and spirit to spirit.
They were universes, too. Back to back. The gate between shone overhead, a giant planet with an almost-sun at its core.
“No wonder they all left,” she said as it all came clear.
Rama was halfway gone already, looking so far ahead she could barely follow. But he heard her. He answered her.
“I leave destruction wherever I go.”
He wasn’t sad about it. He’d left that behind. He was a little bitter, maybe. A little wry.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t you go forgetting what you are.”
“I never forget,” he said. “This is what I am. Destroyer of worlds.”
“That’s Lord Shiva,” she said with a snap in it. “You’re going to save what’s left of your world. Remember that.”
“By destroying this planet,” he said, “and taking part of the system with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Maybe there’s a way,” Aisha said. “Why don’t you ask your science people?”
“My—” He almost laughed. “They’re not my people. My people are out there.”
“Your people are wherever they happen to be. And whoever they happen to be. Whether you want them or not.”
He opened his mouth. She glared him down. “Do you want to change something? Be something else? Ask for help. Maybe you’ll get it.”
“Or maybe not.” Dr. Ma frowned out of the screen in front of him, and Aunt Khalida had an expression that dared Rama to do anything about it.
“Damn you,” he said to them all impartially. Then: “Well? I suppose you know what I’m about to do. Can it be done without taking out the system?”
Another person came up behind Dr. Ma: Robrecht, the professor who’d been MI once. He’d been keeping quiet and keeping his head down, but now he said, “Give us the data. Route it to engineering.”
“And while you do that,” Aisha said, “figure out how that woman showed up in the zocalo at Starsend without breaking the planet. If she did it, why can’t we?”
“Magic,” Rama said, but he was only half laughing.
“Or projection,” Robrecht said. “A holographic image projected through the wormhole or gate or whatever you like to call it. If you can project yourself in the opposite direction—”
“That would be relatively simple,” said Rama. “I have to go there in the body. What they need me to do will require all of me. If not more.”
“You know what that is?” Aisha asked.
“Don’t you?”
She didn’t, really. Or she didn’t want to.
Until now, this had been an adventure. Inconvenient. Sometimes dangerous—people shooting, and waging wars. And the Corps doing terrible things to people and other sentients.
What it hadn’t been, in her mind, was immediately and personally deadly. Rama was going to try to cross between universes.
He, and whoever went with him, could die. Or worse than die. Be trapped. Or erased. There was no way to know until it was done.
They were all beyond crazy now. This was real.
55
The Ra-Harakhte orbited the moon called Starsend, which orbited the gas giant called Acheron. Khalida appreciated the symbolism.
“Was this a worldgate?” she asked Rama after he returned to the bridge.
“Maybe,” he said.
He paced while the scientists and some of the crew huddled around a cluster of screens. Their conversation was forbiddingly technical and, as far as Khalida could tell, getting exactly nowhere.
“Do you know how those were made?”
“No.” He bit off the word.
“Can you guess?”
“No!” But then, while she nursed the mental blisters from that blaze of temper: “There were no gates in the middle of stars. Or almost-stars. They were all on planets. And no, none of them showed signs of having been constructed from the corpses of stars. They were just there.”
“They were gates within this universe,” Dr. Ma said. She had left the latest round of getting-nowhere, retrieved a pot of coffee and was on her way back. “I gather you didn’t know of any that connected adjacent universes.”
Khalida held her breath, b
ut Rama seemed to have recovered his temper. “I was never a master of gates. My arts and talents were elsewhere. Still…”
“Your masters of gates,” Dr. Ma said when the silence stretched. “They were psi masters. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Not engineers, then. Not physicists. Though they manipulated matter and energy. Are we coming at it from the wrong direction? Should we be addressing this with psionics?”
“Such as we have,” Zhao said. His soft voice was flat. Which was an improvement over bitter, Khalida supposed.
“We may not have much,” she said, “but you do.” Her eyes caught Rama. “If you were passing through a gate, how would you go about it?”
He frowned. He was not angry, or not much. “I would walk through. Because it was already there.”
“Just walk through? Just like that?”
“Not exactly. There were guardians and guides. The places between could be dangerous—more than jumpspace, though that maybe was because we didn’t have ships to shield us.”
“You have a ship,” Khalida said. “You have shields.”
“The nulls? Yes, they may protect us. But the planet, the moon—”
“A gate had two sides,” Zhao said. “Someone guarded either end, yes? While you went through. Someone must have been keeping the gate from swallowing the planet around it. Or something.”
“Something,” Rama said. “A structure. Stone. Bones of the earth—whichever earth it was.” He shook his head. “There’s no stone here. It’s all gas.”
“Not at Starsend,” Khalida said. “The core is nickel and iron. Or does cold iron kill magic for you as it used to for us?”
“Only if it’s forged into a blade,” Rama said with the faintest flicker of humor.
“If you can show us what you know of how gates were constructed,” Robrecht said in his precise and careful way, “we may be able to use Starsend as the anchor point. Then when you aim the Ra-Harakhte to the core of Acheron, the whole thing will be a gate, and it should hold stable. Provided, of course, there’s another anchor point on the other side.”
“I think we have to take that on faith,” Rama said.
“Flying on a guess and a prayer,” said Khalida. “It’s almost suicidal enough to be worth doing.”
Rama’s eyes glinted. “Almost?”
“We might actually survive,” she said.
“We would hope to,” he conceded. “For the sake of whoever, and whatever, is on the other side.”
~~~
The engineers and the scientists were in their version of heaven, creating a structure that might not be possible, for a purpose that no one precisely understood. Even, Khalida suspected, Rama.
He was going to try to leave them all behind and take the ship ahead alone. She could tell, looking at him, and seeing how he drew back little by little from their discussions.
It made a reasonable amount of sense. He had been placed in stasis alone and would be presumed to have waked alone. Whatever was needed of him, it must be unique to him.
Still, she persisted in feeling that there was more to all this. Something else that had not figured into their calculations. The woman in the zocalo: she was an anomaly. Or, possibly, a key.
Khalida retreated to her cabin. No one took any notice: they were all focused elsewhere.
She needed quiet, and sleep if she could get it. Once she had the first, the second was no easier or quicker than she had expected.
She lay on her back, staring at the faintly glistening, subtly organic arch of the ceiling. It would have shown her starfields if she had asked, or the sky of any planet in the database, or an arch of branches, for that matter.
Branches, she thought. Green leaves, long and delicate. A tracery of flowers as pale as her own Earth’s moon, but these had never grown under it.
She turned her head. She knew that fall of water, that slant of yellow sunlight.
That figure kneeling by the water, watching her. Waiting to be seen.
“How?” she asked.
Of all the things she might have said, it was probably the most obvious. Or the least.
The answer of course was obvious.
“Magic,” said the woman from the other side of the gate.
She must be a figment of Khalida’s imagination. She was too much like Rama, even to the wry twist with which she said the word.
“I am quite real,” she said. “Are you?”
“As far as I can tell,” Khalida answered.
“Listen to me,” the woman said. “When you begin, remember this. Keep it firm in your memory. No matter what you see or think you see, no matter what seems to happen around you, don’t lose focus. Stay fixed on me.”
“Why? I’m not the one you’ve been waiting for.”
“No?”
She was fading—letting go. Khalida tried to hold the image, the presence, whatever indescribable thing it was, but it slipped away. All but the memory. That was perfectly and indelibly clear.
~~~
Khalida only rested for an hour after the dream or vision passed, but she surprised herself with how refreshed she felt. She made her way back to the bridge, and found the ship’s whole waking, walking complement there. Even Marta had emerged from her quarters.
They were all fixed on Rama. Eyes intent; faces grim or stern or studiously blank. And one almost exalted: Zhao, whose grief had mutated into a pure and glorious deathwish.
“We will do this,” Rama said. “All the science staff who are left, and all the crew, will disembark into Starsend, and the nulls with them. Marta, Zhao, you build the gate between you. When the gate is made, the ship and I will make the jump—into Acheron, and if the gods will, out beyond.”
“Oh, no,” said Zhao. “No. I’ll be on the ship.”
“You will not,” Rama said. “You are the only psi with any semblance of training. Without you, there will be no gate. The nulls alone can’t do it. Marta can’t. It has to be you.”
“It might kill you,” Marta said. She was cool, dispassionate. “It probably will.”
“And you? And your children?” Zhao looked ready to shatter.
“If you do your part as I’ll show you,” Rama said, “the power will route into and past them, but not through. They’ll be safe.”
“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Zhao said, “or any more minds to break.”
“Hold to that,” said Rama. “Make it your shield and your armor. Try not to die, if you please.”
“Yes, do that,” Khalida said. “We’ll be needing you when we come back.”
Rama’s glance was quite as wild as she had expected. Of course he had no expectation of returning. This was his suicide mission even more than it was Zhao’s.
“There is no we,” he said. “I’m leaving all of you here—you, too; you have no training, but you have power, and you will feed it to this man.”
“I don’t think so,” Khalida said. “You don’t know for sure where you’re going. I do.”
She had to give him credit: he suppressed the reflex to deny what she had said. “Do you? How is that?”
“I had another dream,” she said. She gave it to him as best she knew how—sloppily, she knew; she had no training. Zhao caught it, too, and Aisha.
Aisha was not surprised. That interested Khalida. Rama was—and that was also interesting.
She could not tell if he was jealous. Bemused, certainly. Maybe a little put out. “I see,” he said, “that there is more to this than I thought. Very well, then. You’re our pilot. As soon as everyone is settled in Starsend, we go.”
So soon?
That was foolish. It could hardly be soon enough.
Khalida reminded herself to breathe. The woman whose name she had never thought to ask was waiting.
She might be an AI after all. Or an illusion. A lure or a trap or an entity long dead and set at the gate to guide the traveler through.
She felt real. She must be. Khalida would accept no other possibility.
56
Aisha her mouth shut while everyone sorted out what they would do and where they would be. She wasn’t going to let herself be left behind. No more than Aunt Khalida was.
The other one who refused to leave the ship was Dr. Ma. She and Kirkov were polite but immovable. “Robrecht will take charge of Starsend,” she said. “We will go. This is our mission as much as yours.”
Rama shrugged. “I’ve never in my waking life done anything alone. Why would now be any different?”
“Believe me,” Dr. Ma said, “solitude is vastly overrated.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
He was more wry than annoyed. He went to help load the nulls on the shuttle that Robrecht had commandeered from Starsend, and Dr. Ma kept on collating data in her array of screens.
Aisha stayed on the bridge. Invisibility was her plan, until they’d left Starsend and headed into Acheron.
She should have known she wouldn’t be that lucky. Aunt Khalida was supposed to be supervising the loading along with Rama, but she turned up here instead, dropping into the captain’s cradle and fixing Aisha with a hard eye.
“I’m not leaving the ship,” Aisha said.
“I didn’t think you would.” Khalida looked tired all of a sudden. Or dizzy. “Did you know about—her? On the other side?”
Aisha shivered a little. “Not really. Just what I heard in Central.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true!” Aisha ramped herself down before she squealed any higher. “I keep thinking she’s family. Which can’t be possible.”
“No,” Khalida said. “No, it can’t, can it?”
“You think it can.”
“There is no way.”
“Worldgates,” Aisha said. “Somehow. A very long time ago, if it did happen. People could be related anywhere and everywhere. It would explain—”
“Nothing. It explains nothing.” Khalida launched herself out of the captain’s cradle and dived for the door.
Aisha wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. She went to her quarters instead, and lay on her bunk and turned her face to the wall.
It wasn’t that she was afraid. She was lightyears past that. She’d had enough, that was all. She was full. Overloaded.
