by Judith Tarr
By this time tomorrow, ship’s time, she could be dead or evaporated or rendered into antimatter. Or she’d be on the other side, in another universe. Doing Rama’s god knew what. Saving Nevermore, she could hope.
She pulled the covers up over her head. She missed Jamal just then. His annoying voice. His even more annoying finicky fussing about anything and everything. His familiar presence and his particular way of seeing things.
He would tell her to get out of there right now and not look back. He’d be right, too. He had all the caution between the two of them. Aisha had all the craziness.
This was the craziest thing either of them could have imagined doing. Crazier than blowing up a cliff or chasing lightning or riding through jump without drugs. Even crazier than stowing away on a Starforce ship.
She could sleep. Ship would wake her before it started its jump. She might dream, but then she might not. She still had the sun inside her, that protected her from the Corps. It could protect her from nightmares, too.
~~~
It was time.
Everybody had settled in Starsend except the handful who wouldn’t go. The nulls in their stasis pods were stowed at the city’s core, in one of its vaults. Marta and the crew guarded them.
And Zhao, because without him to anchor this side, the transition couldn’t happen.
That was a fragile branch to hang a world on.
Aisha went looking for him before he left the ship. No one else seemed to care about him, and that didn’t seem fair. He’d traveled a long way from anything he knew or was, and he might die here.
“Or be broken the way my wife and my family were,” he said when she found him in the passage beyond the bridge, staring out the port at the curve of Acheron.
He wasn’t bitter. It was the simple truth.
“I’m sorry,” Aisha said.
He glanced at her. He was still pretty, but his bones were visible now under the ivory skin. “We aren’t evil, you know. Most of us are just trying to do what we feel is right.”
“Right for you, or right for the Corps?”
He winced. “You’ve never been hated, have you? Never had people cross the street to avoid you, or spit on the road behind you. Mothers hide their children from us. Sometimes we’re shot on sight.”
Aisha could have answered all of that, but she set her lips together and let it go. The truth was, if he hadn’t been Corps, she would have liked him. He was a gentle thing, and he tried to be kind.
“I don’t hate you,” she said. She let him see it, if he was looking. “I think what you’re doing is a brave and powerful thing.”
“Thank you,” he said. He meant it. “I won’t break before I’ve done what you need me to do. I promise you that.”
“Don’t break at all,” she said. “Promise.”
“I don’t know—”
“Promise,” Aisha said again. She leaned on him inside.
He leaned back. He was strong: she had to push hard.
“I will try not to break,” he said finally.
She nodded. “That will do.”
~~~
It had taken longer to get ready than Rama liked. Long enough for Aisha to have a solid sleep and a belly-load of breakfast, and even to start to wake up.
Rama had stopped twitching and gone dangerously still. He was building power: Aisha could feel it crackling along her skin. The back of her skull felt strange, as if something was trying to get in—or out.
Most of the screens showed the system, such starfield as there was, Acheron and Starsend. The ones in front of Rama shifted, focusing on the people at the core of Starsend.
Nobody spoke. For all of them, this was the last breath before the long dive. Maybe one of the last they ever took.
Rama bowed to them, a deep and formal gesture. They nodded in return. Marta smiled with sudden, startling brilliance.
That brightness seemed to hang in the air as she moved with the ship’s crew toward their own bank of screens. Robrecht raised the meteor-deflector shields, for what good they could do if the planet blew.
Zhao took his place last, strapping himself into a modified jump cradle. He wasn’t smiling, but he touched Aisha with a hint of warmth. Wishing her well. Remembering the promise he’d made. Then he was gone from inside her mind, as his focus narrowed and shifted.
Aisha more or less understood what he would be doing. It was basically the same thing as a deflector shield, but with psi. Marta would connect him to the nulls, and they would build a wall of energy around him. He would be an anchor, which Rama and Ship and everyone in it would hook on to. Then they would jump.
She had a moment of fear for him; of knowing this was all going to fail. They were going to die.
It was only fear. Not foreseeing. She pulled herself together.
A faint shimmer rose around Zhao in his cradle, hardly enough to see. His face was pale and still. He looked deep asleep, or dead.
He was neither. She could feel him inside his wall, like a twisting core of flame in a globe of glass.
She could feel Rama, too, the rioting fire he’d always been, like a captive sun. And Aunt Khalida. Aunt Khalida was the map, a living set of coordinates.
She had her own anchor on the other side. The line to it stretched vanishing thin through the planet’s core.
“We are going to have to train you,” Rama said inside Aisha’s head—calmly, and calming her by not being either nervous or afraid. He’d left all that behind. There was only the battle ahead, that he intended to win.
“Her, too,” Aisha said, flicking her consciousness toward Khalida.
“Both of you.” He was already withdrawing, focusing on the jump.
They were all in cradles but Rama. He’d finally stopped pretending to need one. His feet were braced on the deck. He had his gi on, his fighting clothes.
Aisha was dressed to dig in the dirt on Nevermore. Shirt and pants and sturdy boots. Hat tucked into her tool belt.
It had felt a little bit stupid when she put it on, because she wasn’t likely to need any of it on a starship, but wherever she was going, if she got there, had some form of outdoors. She meant to be prepared.
There was nothing she could do to prepare for this jump, except lie in her cradle and keep her mind open to ship’s web and the other web, the one made of psi. Ship was powered up to the brim, and so was Rama.
The connection with Starsend locked on and held. Zhao was stronger than Aisha had thought, and steadier. The nulls fed him in ways even he might not have expected, and protected him, too.
They were like a bow. Ship was the arrow, and Rama was its point. The target loomed over them: the vast red-gold-silver bulk of Acheron.
The archer was Khalida. She had the map inside her.
“Now,” she said.
~~~
Acheron swelled until it there was nothing in the universe but swirls of glowing gas with a heart of fire. The forces outside Ship, the buffet of winds strong enough to break a lesser world, the relentless pull of gravity, didn’t touch the people inside at all. They were safe. Surrounded. Protected.
Diving deep. Into the fire. Swallowing it. Being swallowed by it. Catching the point at the very middle, the space, the place, the instant in which universes touched. Flowed; fought.
The anchor’s connection frayed. The map blurred. Matter dissolved into energy. Energy into—
There were no words.
It was like jump—the weirdness; the senses all turned inside out and backwards. The feeling of being broken down into atoms and then put back together again.
But it was different. Part of her rode through it as she always had. Another part—grew. Opened up. Saw/felt/smelled/heard/tasted worlds on worlds on worlds on…
They were like bubbles, a little. Enough to give her mind something to hold on to. Drifting and floating and swirling and touching. So many—so vast.
Too vast. She was too small. It was too much for her tiny mind to contain.
A strong
hand caught hers. Then another, almost as strong.
Rama. Khalida. They gave her boundaries. They guided her back toward shape and solidity. They anchored her behind and drew her through ahead, from bubble to bubble among the countless masses of them.
Khalida knew which one they were going to. Rama knew where they’d come from, and he’d locked on to Khalida’s view ahead. Aisha was exactly in the middle.
She balanced them. She didn’t know what she was doing or how. Ship surrounded her and kept her from disappearing into the mass of bubbles.
Universes. Worlds and worlds and worlds. Every one different. Some by a little, some by so much that there was no wrapping her understanding around them.
She fixed on Khalida, on where she was going and what she was going to. Here in this not-space, she could barely resist the temptation to fall forever and ever and ever. In between the worlds. Never moving, growing, changing.
Until—
Ship was dizzy with freedom. It wanted to dive, too, filling itself with the energies of worlds, sweeping through them all until its bays were full and its skin ready to burst.
Then it would become. That was the word that came to her. It would shed its skin and unfold and grow and change. It was a larva, a nymph. What it would be when it became—
Not yet.
Rama reined it in with gentle firmness. It bucked and twisted, but he rode it until it settled. It was not happy; still, it knew he was right. It was much too young. It had other and lesser becoming to do first, and much traveling and learning and feeding.
Beginning here, ahead of them, where Khalida’s anchor was. Her goal; her guide. A bubble that touched their own, then slipped away, but still kept that thread of connection.
Other threads wove through the multiverse. Aisha pulled herself back before she followed any of them. They were oh so beautiful. Oh so tempting.
Her mind was going to break. She had to wall it in. Focus it. Make it tight and small and clear.
Then she could see. Finally, she knew what Khalida knew. Where to go; how to get there.
She reached out with Ship and Khalida and Rama and all, and dived down into that one of all the bubbles that were.
57
They rode through a field of stars—huge, gleaming swirls and sweeps of them. Those were galaxies, crowding together, full of newborn suns.
Ship brought them to perfect emptiness, except for a thin scatter of suns. One gleamed directly ahead, deceptively familiar: M-class, yellow, like Earth’s sun, like the sun of Nevermore. It shared its stretch of void with a scattering of sister stars and a handful of planets: a gas giant or two, a ringed beauty, a bare and meteor-pocked globe of greyish rock.
That last had a moon nearly as large as it was, and the moon wore a familiar face: swirls of clouds, blue of oceans, green and brown of land masses.
Aisha’s whole body and mind let go at sight of that, like a long release of breath, or the unlocking of muscles clenched to pain.
Rama, too. His knees buckled. She could swear she saw tears in his eyes before he shook them fiercely away.
“There’s your moon,” Khalida said. “It’s reading gravity on the scale of Nevermore, though it’s not near the size or density. Or the orbital speed to make up for either.”
“Magic,” Rama said with the flash of a smile.
“Gravity generators,” said Dr. Ma, quellingly simple.
Ship swam toward the moon while they went back and forth like fencers. This space was not empty for its senses; there were energy sources all around, some so strong it shivered. It was hungry—starving. Swimming between universes was the hardest work it had ever done.
It fed carefully, too wise to gorge. While it fed, it swam, and the blue-and-silver-and-green moon grew larger in the screens.
Dr. Ma and Kirkov ran scans of the moon and its planet. Aisha would be interested in their composition later. Now she only wanted to know what evidence there was of living things—people, animals, anything that grew or moved.
“No sign of a worldweb,” Khalida said, “or electronic signatures, or any other indication of what we call civilization.”
“You’re looking at the wrong things,” Aisha said. She wasn’t tactful, which she realized too late. “With the wrong instruments. Use your mind.”
She did it herself now she thought of it, imagining a web like a worldweb, but made of psi. At first she thought she was as wrong as her aunt was—that there was nothing; the moon was empty.
Then it lit up like a galaxy full of suns. Hundreds, thousands—minds with strong psi, minds with just barely enough to wake a spark, even the dead zone of a null here and there, and every possible range in between.
The moon was not just inhabited; it was dense with people. Whatever tech they had didn’t register on Ship’s sensors, but that didn’t mean there was none. It wasn’t electronic was all.
Khalida had lost her beacon in the mass of them, but Aisha felt her find it again and lock on. It was clear, and focused, and aware of them.
It wasn’t friendly. It was calm and open but distinctly wary. It might have called them, but it wasn’t at all sure that they were to be trusted.
All they could do was keep on toward the moon, settle into orbit around it, and ready the shuttle for descent. There were no spacecraft in orbit with them, no stations, nothing but the emptiness of an uncharted system.
~~~
Rama piloted them all down in the shuttle—even Dr. Ma. Khalida or Kirkov could have done it, but one look at his face and they both found cradles in back of the pilot’s station.
Aisha ended up in the cradle beside him, because no one else would go there. She wasn’t altogether comfortable about it, either, but she’d never been afraid of him.
He went completely still as the shuttle descended. His face in profile looked as if it was carved in obsidian, all sharp planes and fierce angles.
She’d thought he might put on whatever a king wore in his world, to show himself to the descendants of the people he’d ruled, but he’d gone the other way. He was in the first clothes he’d found on Nevermore, the faded red shirt and the hand-me-down Spaceforce trousers and the well-worn riding boots. And gold, plenty of it: ring and bracelets, torque and earrings.
It said what it needed to say. What his people would think, Aisha couldn’t know.
She’d dressed for practicality herself, in her digging clothes. No weapon. If they needed any, they had Rama, whose whole self was a weapon.
When they touched atmosphere, Aisha caught her breath. It felt like fire running across her skin.
At the same time her hands were cold. She kept reminding herself to breathe.
“Steady.”
She almost thought she’d imagined it, but Rama’s eye was on her, with the hint of a smile.
He was as scared as she was. Being Rama, he built walls around it and locked the gates against anyone who tried to get in.
Behind Aisha, Dr. Ma was talking to Kirkov, softly. “This is a universe being born. All those clusters of galaxies and infant stars—we’re at the beginning. It’s possible we’ve traveled in time as well as in—and beyond—space.”
“That’s not possible, is it?” Kirkov said, but not as if he was really arguing.
“Theoretically it may be,” she said. “If every universe is different, however subtly, why not one at the beginning of its cycle?”
“But time travel—”
“What would you call the space—place—continuum—that exists between universes? Does spacetime follow the same rules there? Might time be as simple to traverse as space? Could we—”
“You’re giddy,” Kirkov said.
“I am never giddy.” Her voice was pure frost. “This is scientific euphoria. I need the worldsweb, with all its data and its computational powers, but I think—I hypothesize—I theorize—”
“You know we’re not likely ever to get back there,” Kirkov said. “All you have is the ship’s web and what’s inside your own head.”
“I’ll make do,” she said.
Aisha had to admire her. She was not easy to like, but she had passion. As for what Kirkov had said…
Aisha refused to believe it. They would get back. Somehow. They’d find a way. After they finished whatever they’d been called to do on this lost moon of Nevermore.
58
When the shuttle touched atmosphere, what felt to Khalida like a tractor beam locked on. No voice came on the conn; no planetary security system issued a challenge. They were simply and effectively trapped and held.
Rama tried an evasive maneuver or two, met an invisible wall. He shrugged and folded his hands and let be.
Once when Khalida was visiting Nevermore, before Araceli broke her inside, the expedition had been invaded by one of the giant plains cats, a young one looking for its own territory. It had badly injured one of the interns and killed a mare and her foal.
Marina and Vikram had got the rest together to build a trap and half lure, half herd the cat into it, with a young antelope for bait and all the available transports to make sure it went where it was supposed to. Then once it was trapped, they had flown it, in the cage, to a far and unclaimed corner of the plains.
This felt like that. Bait for the predator; a route constructed to bring him to it.
They flew over the widest of the moon’s several continents, a rolling expanse of brown and green, mountain and plain, that reminded Khalida almost painfully of Nevermore. She looked down on a tracery of rivers and a deep green of forest, and in among them, the regular shapes of roofs and walls, streets and plazas.
Roads connected the towns and cities. The shuttle flew too high for its passengers to see people moving there, but flocks of winged things passed below. Khalida’s mind was almost antic enough to wonder if any of those was large enough to carry a human rider.
She would have thought the shuttle would be drawn toward one of the larger cities, but whatever was in control piloted them toward a complex structure perched on the sides and summit of a mountain above the blue bowl of a lake. The walled interior of the mountaintop looked like a park: an intricate pattern of stone and greenery bounded on the farthest edge by a waterfall that plunged half a hundred meters into the lake below.
