Forgotten Suns (37 page)

She had that expression now. “You belong on the bridge,” she
said, “Captain.”

“I belong wherever I’m needed,” he said. “The ship knows
where to go. The bridge crew has nothing to do but watch the monitors and wait
for emergence.”

“I don’t need you here,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Have you any scientific training at all?”

“That depends on your definition of science.”

In a vid, they’d keep fighting till one of them grabbed the
other and the kissing began. That wasn’t going to happen here. Not in a
thousand years. Or six thousand.

Dr. Ma closed her eyes. She seemed to be counting at least
that far, to calm herself down. “When you hijacked this ship, we had no choice
but to accept it. That places me under no obligation to accept you as anything
but the pirate captain you chose to make yourself.”

“When I rescued this living creature from pain unimaginable,
I only did what I must in order to set it free.”

Even on the other side of the room, Aisha felt the force of
that. Dr. Ma, in front of him, braced as if she stood in a strong gale.

It barely swayed her. “So you say,” she said. “I don’t see
you turning it loose. In fact, it seems you’ve found a way to use it for
yourself.”

“I asked,” he said. “It chose to help.”

“Prove it,” she said.

His white smile lit up the lab. “Ah! Science!”

“Always,” she said.

“I’ll teach you to ride it,” he said. “Then you’ll have your
proof.”

Aisha bit her lips before she burst out laughing. He had
trapped Dr. Ma perfectly. Now she had to do what he wanted, to get the proof
she said she needed.

Dr. Ma saluted him. “Well played, sir.”

He bowed to the compliment. “I will need your help, and the
help of some of your colleagues. The links you’ll need can be made, I’m told,
but they won’t be simple, and they’re not the usual configurations.”

“That’s not my specialty,” she said.

“No, but you can advise as to whose it is.” Rama was as
polite as ever, but he wasn’t going to let up.

It was obvious that he didn’t need her to tell him anything.
But he wanted her to.

She was too curious—too much a scientist—to keep resisting
him. She made an exasperated face, but she gave him what he asked for.

~~~

She came to the first lesson, too. Aisha had more than
half expected to see everybody there, but it was just Rama and Dr. Ma, Kirkov, the
scientist named Robrecht who used to be MI, and Aunt Khalida and, not
surprising but not welcome either, Lieutenant Zhao.

Not Lieutenant any more. The Corps was broken and he was a
deserter. Or kidnapped—it didn’t matter which.

Just Zhao, then. Pale and much too still, with hands that shook
when he wasn’t paying attention.

“Are you sure you can do this?” Aisha asked him when they
were all together in a smaller space just off the bridge.

He stared at her as if he barely recognized her. “No,” he
said. “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I can’t, either.”

“You can,” Rama said. “You will.”

He stood in front of a set of screens. They weren’t showing
anything that made sense. Ship’s web had the same feel to it: vague, sort of
empty, but not really.

Waiting.

The ship was aware of them. Aisha didn’t know if she should
call it that, but she couldn’t think of anything else. It liked being
Ship
, as long as it got to choose when
the tiny creatures inside it tried to make it do things.

It was like a horse that way. Intelligent, very. Focused on
eating and moving and someday making new ones. When humans asked it to carry
them places, it was just as happy to do that, if they let it eat as much as it
needed, and swim the deep seas under space, which it also needed.

Rama had taken its pain away. That was like rescuing a horse
from a bad owner. It looked to him for the things that made it feel good. It
took starstuff out of him, a little, the way a horse would take sugar from a
human’s hand: because it was sweet, and if it did more of what he wanted, it
could have more of the sweet.

Humans who were not Rama couldn’t give it that, but Rama,
with the techs who were still telling one other that what he’d asked them to do
was
not possible
, had rigged Ship’s
web to feed it small sparks of hydrogen and helium when the person at the helm
needed or wanted to offer a reward.

The screens in the training room were the old backup screens
from the bridge. In place of slave circuits, they connected with the ship’s
neural network through thin filaments that looked like human nerve cells. Ship
had grown them, and insulated them. Rama didn’t say so, but Aisha knew that if
anyone tried to slave the ship to their commands ever again, the loop would
feed straight back into the pilot’s own head.

That was what had happened to the Corps in Araceli. He hadn’t
done a thing to them—just given them what the ship felt. The raw feed. No
filters.

Ship was comfortable now, happy to be swimming through the
deep sea, and curious about the humans who one by one, shakily, tried touching
it through the web. Each time, the screens lit up, not showing anything yet,
just light. Clear and bright for Aisha and Robrecht and Kirkov. Darker for Aunt
Khalida, with a shimmer in the back of it, like moon on water. Deep gold for
Dr. Ma: striking and beautiful.

Zhao was last. His face was pale; his lips were tight. His
hands shook. He knew, Aisha thought. One wrong move and he’d go the way of the
rest of the Corps.

She watched him almost decide to do it. To finish it. Then
he wouldn’t have to hurt any more.

“Focus,” Rama said. His voice was soft and surprisingly
gentle. “Think of light. No more. No less. Just that.”

Zhao’s face twisted. He lashed out with his mind, and near
flattened Aisha—like the worst headache she’d ever imagined. Like a spike
through the skull.

She only got the edge of it. Rama took it head-on. He
hissed, but held still. The screen behind him blazed so bright it blinded.

Ship kicked: a snap of protest; a wave across the screen,
dark shot with stars. Zhao went down without a sound.

Rama hauled him up and slapped him back to what senses he
had. When he could stand on his own feet, Rama let him go. “Grieve as you
please. Hate me at your leisure. Slit your own throat if you must. But spare
this creature that consents to carry us.”

Zhao jerked as if he’d been shot. Which in a way he had:
straight to the center of his guilt.

“Again,” Rama said. “Properly this time.”

He was sullen, but he did it. His light was softer than
Aisha’s, which surprised her. He was trying not to hurt the ship again.

“Good,” Rama said.

He asked as much as Zhao could stand to give, and a little
bit over. As they set to learning how to access the screens and then how to ask
Ship to do simple things, he did the same to all of them. Aisha, too.

They each had a screen, and they each keyed it in whatever
way felt right. For some it was like a straight web connection. Aunt Khalida
made it like a pilot’s console.

Aisha set her screen for ship’s web, because that seemed
simplest, but when she closed her eyes, what she saw and felt was a horse like
one of the herd on Nevermore.

That hurt in ways she completely hadn’t expected. She missed
Jinni suddenly, with a pain like grief. It barely helped to tell herself she was
doing what she had to do, and she had every intention of going back home when
she was done. When she’d made sure there was a home to go back to.

The twisting in her gut didn’t care about that. Behind her eyelids
she saw the long rolling grassland and the bitter-blue sky. She rode a horse
she didn’t know, big and glistening black. The mane on its neck swirled and
streamed like a solar storm.

It was a strong horse, with a mind of its own. It wanted to
run through the endless grass. It was happy to carry her, but it wasn’t
particularly interested in doing what she asked it to do.

Other horses crowded around her. The field was full of them,
grazing and dancing and mating and dreaming. They ran in herds or wandered off
alone.

The one she rode felt like a young thing, old enough to ride
but not much more, a little awkward and not as confident as the others. It was
bright and curious and eager to explore, which was how it had surfaced from its
native space where it had, and been beached and then caught.

Instead of pulling it around when she wanted it to turn, she
started asking it with shifts of weight or turns of her own body. It turned
then because it had to, and she was there to keep it from falling over.

It was more patient than a horse would be, especially with
six other people taking turns poking at it. When Aisha’s screen went down, she
watched the others, trying to see and feel what they were doing.

The sea of grass stayed in the back of her mind, and all the
creatures in it. Subspace was empty, people thought. Void without substance.
Too alien for the human mind to understand. Even computers could barely begin
to give shape to it.

But it wasn’t like that at all. Any more than Ship was a
mindless tube full of holes and compartments, capable of generating breathable
atmosphere and maintaining human-tolerable temperature, but incapable of
feeling anything so sophisticated as pain.

“How did you manage to be so blind?” Aisha asked Zhao while
he waited his turn, too.

“We weren’t looking,” he answered.

She hadn’t expected him to have an actual answer. That
changed how she felt, a little bit. “Not looking in the right places, you mean,”
she said.

His eyes flickered: a yes. “We fell into the trap of
thinking we knew far more than we did. Because we had a set of gifts, a
hierarchy, and a system, we thought that was all there was. We didn’t allow for
the size of the universe. Or,” he said, “the multiverse.”

“I’m sorry,” Aisha said. Not for that, exactly. For
everything.

He understood. His eyelids lowered; his head bowed slightly.
“We did it to ourselves.”

She couldn’t argue with that. Then it was her turn again,
and Ship seemed glad, and she let his sadness slip away beyond the sea of
grass.

“Why?” Khalida asked.

The null was still in shackles. That was petty, maybe, but
Khalida was not moved to take them off.

The cell had been made for this prisoner. It was slightly
smaller than crew quarters, with a bunk grown out of the wall, and a protrusion
like a chair, on which Khalida sat.

The null’s name was MariAntonia. Khalida wanted to render
her nameless in the ancient way, but if there was to be a record, there had to
be ID. Ship’s web gave her what data was to be had: name, rank and position,
performance reviews. No history. Where one should have been was a blank:
Redacted.

Even her past was null.

Maybe Marta knew what was behind the wall. Khalida had no
particular need to know.

“Why did you sell us out to the Corps?”

MariAntonia pulled her knees up to her chest and hid her face
against them. Her shoulders were stiff.

“What did they have on you? Or did they buy you?”

The voice that came out of the rigid knot was both muffled
and defiant. “You’re not MI any more. What are you now, then? Torturer in chief
to a pirate king?”

“Do you wish I were?”

MariAntonia raised her head. “How did he buy you? Or do you
just have a finely honed death wish?”

“I thought I did,” Khalida said. “So they bought you. I hope
they paid a living wage.”

“Or a dying one?”

“I know what I’m atoning for. You?”

The null twitched: half shrug, half raw nerves. “So what’s
the sentence? Death? Worse?”

“As far as I know,” Khalida said, “nobody’s given much
thought to you since you were shut up here. The ship feeds you and sees to your
needs. When it gets tired of that, it will do whatever it pleases.”

Khalida knew what unvarnished truth could do, but
MariAntonia surprised her even so with the vehemence of her reaction. She
looked ready to spit acid. “That’s a lie.”

“You know it’s not.”

“I sold this ship and all its contents to the Corps. Almost
succeeded, too. If it hadn’t been for—whatever that is, out there on the
bridge.”

“I know what he is,” Khalida said. “Now I know what you are.
You bet on the wrong hand. So did the rest of the Corps.”

“I am—not—Corps.”

“Of course you are.” Khalida stood. “If it were up to me I’d
space you. But that’s the ship’s to decide. You might try bargaining with it. I
don’t know if it can understand you, without psi or a working web connection.
If it can, and if you do talk it into letting you go, then you can worry about
the rest of us.”

MariAntonia curled back into her knot again. Defensive
posture, Khalida thought. She was no stranger to it herself.

She should have left well enough alone. That was the residue
of MI: wanting to sound out the prisoner, to extract what truth there was.

There was nothing there. No point in trying to find
anything, except to wonder if some or all of the nulls in stasis had had this
same programming: to turn against their own. If so, she hoped she was far away
when they woke.

~~~

The scientists had come out of their shock at the
hijacking of the ship to find themselves in a kind of heaven. With their
instruments properly calibrated to the ship’s systems, and the ship actively
cooperating with them, they were making discoveries that would, at the very
least, secure their careers for life. Or kill those same careers, if what they
discovered contradicted enough of the accepted wisdom.

Either way, they were gloriously content.

“Were you always a patron of the arts?” Khalida asked Rama
toward the middle of the third shipday in jumpspace.

“Yes,” he said. “And the sciences.”