Forgotten Suns (48 page)

“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.

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.

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.