Forgotten Suns (43 page)

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 between 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.

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.