by Judith Tarr
“Even in dreams?”
“I didn’t believe them.”
“I thought mages were great believers in dreams.”
“That one made me too happy. I was sure it had to be false.”
Khalida’s breath was coming short. “Are you sorry it wasn’t?”
“If we fail, and we all die,” said Daiyan, “I will be.”
The shuttle bucked and yawed. Khalida dived for the controls. Daiyan reclaimed her hand, but the memory of her touch lingered.
Khalida was too happy. She knew it, just as she knew that there was no way it could last. But she could not make herself care.
62
Dr. Ma could have died and gone to Paradise and been in less bliss than she was on this rogue moon of Nevermore, trying to make sense out of data that ranged between improbable and impossible. Even more wonderful, she had to gather what she could through a child translator who did not speak the language perfectly—and that language was like Old Earth Latin or classical Mandarin, an artifact as ancient as the Sleeper in his tower.
Aisha could appreciate how she felt. Pater and Mother would have killed to be here. Aisha was more tired than anything, and her head hurt with the effort of bringing psi and science together.
Her psi, too. Being surrounded with it made it want to spread and push and grow. It felt as if it was trying to crack her skull open.
Sometimes she got to sleep. On the third night or maybe the fourth, she stumbled into the room she’d been given, near the long-disused barn that the scientists had set up as a laboratory, ready to drop into the oversized and excessively comfortable bed.
That was not going to happen. Aunt Khalida sat in the chair by the window with her head resting on her hand. She looked asleep, but her eyes opened when Aisha stopped in front of her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did you have a fight with Daiyan?”
Khalida blushed, which made Aisha want to laugh. But she didn’t dare. “Daiyan is wrangling mages who have no intention of being wrangled. I wanted a little quiet.”
“In my room?”
“The wrangle is happening in mine.” Khalida yawned. “I suppose I could curl up in a corner of the lab. I’ve slept in worse places.”
Aisha was tired. That made her irritable. “Don’t be stupid. This bed is big enough for six. Just don’t hog all the covers.”
“I promise,” Khalida said.
~~~
“Do you think we’ll ever go home?” Aisha asked Khalida.
Once she was in bed, of course she couldn’t sleep. Her aunt was awake, too, turned away from her, lying very still.
Khalida rolled over when Aisha spoke. “I don’t know,” she answered.
One thing about Aunt Khalida. She didn’t soften the truth to spare the children.
“We aren’t, are we?” Aisha said. That had kept her awake: that fear, even more than fear of the soul-eater. “This is where we’ll always be.”
“Not necessarily,” Khalida said. “We are in a different universe, but Dr. Ma thinks we made a gate when we came through, and that we might have the coordinates to open it again. Though we can’t do it until that thing out there is dealt with, because it feeds on gates. We’re purely lucky it didn’t wake before we closed the gate.”
“We weren’t lucky,” Aisha said. “Rama and Ship were doing something—shielding, hiding—to make sure nothing caught us. I think Rama knew what we were coming to. Or guessed. Remember when he talked about a fish in a pond?”
“And algae,” Khalida said. “I do remember. I wonder…maybe the thing wasn’t just feeding on gates and stars. It was like our ship: it was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a gate caught it. It ate the gate the way an animal chews off its foot to get out of a trap. But the trap surrounded it, and eating the gate pushed it through another gate, and on and on. The harder it tried to get back to wherever it came from, the deeper into the trap it went. Breaking out into this universe didn’t help. It’s still caught. It can’t get free.”
“Don’t tell me you feel sorry for it,” Aisha said.
“Think about it,” Khalida said. “If I’m right, it’s squeezed into this tiny single cell of a universe, and it can’t get out. Of course it wants to tear up anything that stops it. It went after the people who were in charge of the gates, and not only did it not manage to destroy them, they made its situation worse.”
Aisha still wasn’t convinced. “Umizad told us people of another world tried to communicate. It ate them all.”
“Would you notice if an amoeba tried to talk to you?”
Aisha folded her arms behind her head and frowned up at the beams of the ceiling. She was annoyed that she hadn’t thought of it herself. From what everyone had been saying and reading and theorizing, it made sense.
“We should tell Rama,” she said.
“I’m sure he already knows.”
Now Aisha was sleepy, suddenly and almost completely. It let down her guard so far that she said to the air, “You do know, don’t you?”
It felt as if he was there with them, but he lay in his own bed on the other side of the house. Aisha heard his voice clearly.
“I haven’t conceived it exactly as you put it together,” he said. “That it fell through a gate, and the gate trapped it—that it encompassed universes, and was forced down into a single one—that succession of thoughts I hadn’t come to.”
“That was our error,” Khalida said: “to think inside the boundaries of a universe. Even when we allowed for two, we didn’t reckon on something that belongs outside, that was never meant to shrink itself so small.”
“But if we make a gate big enough for it,” Aisha said, “won’t we risk blowing this universe wide open? And maybe the other one, too, through the gate we made?”
“Maybe there’s another way,” Rama said.
“Such as?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He left them with that, closing himself off, leaving silence where his voice had been.
Aisha should try to get up. She’d put an idea in his head. God knew how far or fast he might run with it.
She couldn’t force herself to move. She had to sleep. If he flew off into another universe before she woke up, there was nothing she could do about it.
~~~
For the second time in as many days, Aisha opened her eyes to find Rama standing over her. She was sprawled across the bed, still in her rumpled clothes. There was no sign of Aunt Khalida.
“We’re leaving tonight,” he said.
She sat up blearily. “We?”
“You weren’t going to insist?”
“Would you care if I did?”
He didn’t answer. He was gone as if he hadn’t ever been there. Which in the body, she realized as she woke up a little, he hadn’t been.
Nobody else knew. She stumbled out of bed and got herself as ready for the day as she could get. She was wanted in the lab; she had to pretend there was nothing different about this morning than about any of the others.
It didn’t make sense for him to leave in secret if he wanted them all to help him with the eater. Unless he wanted to avoid a fuss at the start. Or had a plan that didn’t include a planetful of psi masters arguing over what to do.
They were doing that outside the lab this morning. Aunt Khalida had brought back another shuttleload of sages, wild-eyed and wild-haired men and women from an island without beach or harbor; it could only be reached from the air.
Aisha doubted they had anything new to bring Rama, except entertainment. And maybe understanding.
He was learning what made them what they were. Not just their psi; their thoughts, and what they wanted, and what they dreamed of.
Their nightmares he already knew. He was one of them. The eater was another.
Her day in the lab ended early. Dr. Ma was running data that didn’t need translation, and Kirkov and a handful of mages had a new experiment set up that involved telescopes and linked screens, focused on the star nurseries dee
per into this universe’s core.
What that had to do with the eater, Aisha didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She would be gone when the eater’s prison rose over the mountain.
Ship was ready. It waited in orbit, full and shimmering with the stuff of stars.
It knew what they were going to do. It was afraid, but it hadn’t dived into subspace or bolted for the other end of the universe. It was like the rest of them. Rama led, and it followed.
They were all crazy. She ate as much as she could make herself eat, put on clean clothes and packed what she could carry without seeming obvious. Then she went to find Rama.
~~~
It was a longer hunt than she had planned. The light was getting long and people were leaving the streets and the markets when she tracked him down to the master mage’s house.
Umizad’s acolytes had the lamps lit though it was still daylight outside, and were feeding Umizad and Rama and Khalida and Daiyan in the small dining room that opened on the back garden. People here loved gardens, and Umizad’s though small was considered to be very fine.
They weren’t enjoying it tonight. Umizad was getting himself in trouble, and having much too splendid a time doing it.
“I am going with you,” he said to Rama, “and you two”—to Khalida and Daiyan—“will stay here. I’m the connection you need to this world, and they will be my—conduits, is that your word? I love that word. Conduits.”
“Not my word,” Rama said. “I’m older than you, and my death wish is more finely honed. You are not coming with me.”
“Of course I am,” Umizad said. His smile was as terribly sweet as Rama’s could be. “We had better leave before too long. Some of my colleagues aren’t as dense as we would wish them to be. They’ll be catching wind of what you’re up to.”
“Then what will they do? Herd me into another cage?”
“Don’t underestimate them,” Umizad said. “They’re not all idiots, and some of them are very nearly as strong as you. When you call them, they won’t hesitate to answer.”
“If they don’t prevent me from going at all.”
“There is that,” said Umizad. He raised himself laboriously from his chair. “Shall we go?”
63
Aunt Khalida only argued halfway to the death about staying behind while Rama went to get himself killed. Aisha looked at Daiyan and knew why.
She felt sorry for Captain Hashimoto, a little. But that hadn’t ever been going anywhere. This had even less chance, especially if the eater ate them all.
Khalida might not trouble herself about that, but she did care about Aisha going on Ship with Rama.
“This one you don’t get,” she said.
“It’s not for you to say,” he said before Aisha could open her mouth.
He could be cold, but this was iron and old stone. He was turning inward, getting ready for the battle that would probably be the last one he ever fought.
“You bastard,” Khalida said. “You think she has something you can use. What? Her genetics? Some long-hidden power that you can turn into a weapon?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Prophecy was never my gift.”
“Oh, no,” Khalida said. “You don’t get to sidestep and dance merrily off. She’s not going with you.”
Aisha had had enough. “Aunt,” she said. “Just stop.”
Khalida spun on her. She backed up a step, but she kept her glare steady.
“Stop,” she said again. “I’m going. You can’t talk me out of it.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to,” Aisha answered. “If we do this, and we survive, and make it home with proof of what we’ve found, we’ll have what we need. Nevermore will be safe. The expedition won’t have to leave.”
“Child,” Khalida said, and the word was cutting, “politics don’t work that way, either in United Planets or here. It won’t be that simple—any more than he is. He doesn’t care about what you want or what you hope for. He’s using you.”
Aisha refused to let that break or even bend her. Even if it might be true. “So am I using him. I’m doing it for Nevermore, Aunt. There’s no way you can stop me.”
Khalida’s breath hissed, but she couldn’t win and she obviously knew it. She turned her anger back on Rama. “I’ll kill you,” she said. “I’ll rip you apart with my bare hands, if you don’t bring her back alive and in one sane, conscious, functioning piece.”
“I will do my best,” he said.
That was as good as Khalida was going to get. Aisha hugged her aunt, though Khalida was as responsive as one of the beams in the barn.
Aisha’s eyes were blurry. She turned away quickly, before they brimmed over.
~~~
It was a relief to help lift Umizad into the shuttle, while his acolytes stood by with tears running down their cheeks, and watch the hatch close on the darkened field outside of the mages’ city. Except for the acolytes, no one watched them go. No one in this world knew, except the two children in the field and the two women in the city.
The shuttle was already in the air when Aisha dropped into her cradle. Rama had cut himself loose from the people below. She didn’t quite know how to do that, but she tried focusing on the dark bulk of Ship in orbit above them.
Eventually it worked, more or less. Umizad was even happier up here than he’d been in the shuttle before. She let herself be happy with him, and push everything else out of her mind.
~~~
Ship was happy, too, to have Rama back inside it. The others it barely noticed, though it might have sparked faintly when Aisha connected with it.
It was very quiet with only three people on board. They camped on the bridge, rather than scatter to the empty corridors and the deserted quarters and labs and common spaces.
Aisha linked to Ship, as backup for Rama. Umizad, after watching them for a while, made his own link, which was much smoother and subtler than either of theirs.
He didn’t mean to show them up. He was a psi master; this was a thing he’d been trained to do since he was younger than Aisha.
Someday, Aisha thought, she would have training like that. She’d find a way to get it.
She caught herself. There wasn’t going to be a someday. What was out there would eat them all. If they were lucky, they would damage it enough first that it never ate another gate or world or soul.
Her eyes came to rest on Rama. He was completely focused on Ship and on the thing out there. Everything else had slipped away.
She’d seen that expression when he did katas. Perfect intensity. Everything in body and mind fixed on what he meant to do.
The eater was nearly free of its prison. She could almost see it, almost get a glimpse of what it really looked like.
She caught herself. There was no way a human mind could contain what that thing was. It was like a neutron star, it was so compressed and constrained by this space that was too infinitely small for its real self.
And yet a human device had trapped it. It was an accident, which Aisha understood all too well. But it gave her a little hope that they could, maybe, do something besides die trying.
“Courage,” Umizad said.
His voice sounded different. In the space Aisha was in, halfway between the physical body and Ship’s web, he wasn’t ancient at all. He was a sturdy person, not tall but square and solid, with a plain and unremarkable face, and a hint of wickedness in his smile. His hair startled her: it was curly and thick and goldy-red.
For an instant she saw an even younger version of him in what looked like a stableyard, scowling at a mountain of manure that he’d been ordered to move, and eyeing the grossly inadequate cart and shovel that he’d been given for the job. He wasn’t a power in the world then. He didn’t even know he was a mage.
He did know he had a mountain to move, and he was angry and frustrated and life was horribly unfair. He threw all of that at the mountain, for pure spite, because he knew nothing would come of it. And the mountain blew apart. Th
e results were stinking and filthy and glorious.
Aisha laughed. Her terror hadn’t grown any less, but its grip on her had loosened.
She met Umizad’s eyes. They were the same no matter what face he wore. They had always made her feel warm.
“Humans tell stories,” he said, “because the universe is so vast and they so small. This is a story of a thing that we can imagine without actually understanding. It tangled itself in a web we wove.”
“Some webs can’t ever be untangled,” Aisha said.
“But we have to try.”
She shivered. Much of that was her own fear, but Ship was feeling it, too. Though it went willingly where Rama asked, it knew what was ahead of it. It recognized the eater.
Stories. Ship had a story, too: a thing that ate its kind. Which, when it thought of them, it saw as much larger and older and stronger than itself. Sometimes they came out between universes, and this thing, or its relatives, hunted and ate them.
Rama spoke quietly across the jangle of fears. “We can’t kill it. Anything we do will only feed it, or make it more furious, or both. I want to try something else. I’ll need your fears, all of you, and your anger. And, when the moment comes, your connections with the world we left behind.”
“What—”
Aisha stopped. Ship twitched. Space pulsed.
The eater was free.
“Now,” Rama said. Quiet. Calm as ever.
Aisha sucked in the deepest breath she’d ever taken in her life, then let it go completely. All her anger. All her fear. All her grief and guilt and homesickness. Everything. Outward, at that thing that covered itself in absolute darkness.
Everything. Hundreds, thousands poured their terror through her, and through Umizad.
There was a story. Older than Rama, as old as Earth and Nevermore. A beast, a monster, a dragon, made of darkness and elemental fire. A warrior came to fight it: young or old, king or commoner, woman or man, it was different with every telling.
The warrior always had a weapon. They were that weapon. Sword or spear or rifle or laser cannon. Whatever they most needed to be.
The beast opened its jaws wide to swallow them, flame them, destroy them with deadly venom. Rama looked into its one eye, or two, or a multitude. What he saw there made him laugh with pure exhilarating terror.
