Forgotten Suns (50 page)

Now Elti was visibly brought up short. Daiyan, not so much;
she had an air of vindication.

“I do understand,” Rama said with an inflection of careful
respect, “why you might be cautious. I was not a tame creature when my own kin
captured and bound me.”

“Nor are you now,” the old man said, “but your dreams taught
you a little. You understand why our people protect themselves. It still
reflects poorly on us. We called you for our great need, and locked you in a
cage.”

“A surpassingly comfortable one,” Rama said.

He rose. Elti and the two children flinched. Daiyan, Khalida
noticed, did not. Nor did the old man, but she had expected that.

Rama circled the table to stand in front of the old man.
Narrow dark eyes met wide and preternaturally clear, even darker ones. Rama
held out his hand: the right, with its—whatever it was. Manifestation of psi,
magic, divine power. Image or projection or his own gods knew what, of the sun
of Nevermore.

The old man blinked. So: he did not know everything. “It has
changed,” he said.

“You’ve seen another?” Rama asked. Breathlessly, maybe.
Hopeful; or apprehensive.

“No.” The old man sounded honestly regretful. “Your last
descendant died to bring us here and to guard against what we fled. We have no
kings or emperors now. We left that on her grave. It’s memory only, and images
in the temples.”

Rama sighed faintly. “Of course; no dynasty endures forever.
A thousand years, was it? That’s a fair run.”

“Very fair,” the old man said.

“And still you remember.”

“We could hardly forget. We keep the time here in the old
way, as we can. Nine hundred years of the world we left, and nine cycles of
this moon as it was once, and nine days of the old world. As was foretold.”

Khalida opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again,
carefully.

“Nine hundred years?” Rama began to laugh. Threw back his
head and roared, until the old man’s acolytes crouched with their arms over
their heads, and the two women braced as if against a gale. Only the old man
sat still and apparently unmoved.

When Rama’s laughter finally died, he stood with tears
running down his face—and they were not all tears of mirth. “Oh, master of
mages,” he said. “Oh, there’s a grand jest of the undying gods. Six thousand
years I slept. Six thousand years of the long dream.”

“Ah,” the old man said. There was a world of meaning in the
sound.

“Strange are the ways of time and the gods,” Rama said.

“It’s physics,” said Aisha. She was all eyes and appetite,
taking in this world as if she would swallow it whole. “Spacetime warps in
between universes. It goes the other way, or it wouldn’t be possible to project
an image into Starsend. So it’s consistent.”

“It serves the gods,” the old man said, “and may save us.
You are not what we feared.”

“He may be worse,” said Elti. “You know what the council—”

The old man ignored her. “Majesty,” he said. “May I ride in
your shuttle?”

He spoke the word in PanTerran, carefully, enunciating each
syllable.

Elti stiffened as if in protest, but no one paid attention
to that, either. “You may,” Rama said.

“Now, then,” the old man said.

The old man’s name was long and complicated. “Most of it
is titles,” he told Aisha as they carried him in a chair through the palace and
out into the unexpectedly chilly night. “The rest is family. One part actually
belongs to me. That part you may have. I am Umizad.”

“And I am Aisha,” she said, trying not to be too stiff. His
version of Old Language was older than the one she knew, but the changes made
sense if she put her mind to it.

“Aisha,” he said.

“There’s more to it,” she said, relaxing a little into the
language, “but that’s the part you can have.”

He bowed in his chair. His smile made him look a great deal
younger and quite mischievous.

“You aren’t supposed to be doing this, are you?” she said.

“No.” He was almost laughing. “We are to keep his majesty
closely caged and strictly limited in what he may know or do. That being the
decision of the council, which is both wise and just.”

“It’s wise enough,” Rama said. He had an end of one of the
chair’s poles on his shoulder—and the shock when he had done that had made him
laugh again so he could hardly hold himself up. “I’m a dangerous animal. I
might eat someone.”

“You do eat souls,” Elti said. Snarled. She was not stooping
to carry anything; she left that to Rama and Daiyan and Khalida and to Umizad’s
acolytes, who shared the end of a pole. Aisha had tried to take that one but
been glared away.

“Not your soul,” he said. “I’m partial to sweeter vintages.”

She almost spat at him. “You should not be alive. You should
have died however many thousands of years ago. You are a monster and an
abomination, and I deplore the necessity that compels us to use you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I am all of that. But you need me.”

“We need you,” she said in utter disgust.

~~~

Umizad in the shuttle was like a little boy, all big eyes
and cries of wonder. It wasn’t an act, Aisha thought. He might be old and his
body was failing, but he had joy. It always filled him; here in this machine
from another universe, it overflowed.

Flying didn’t either surprise or frighten him. He was more
interested in the way Rama operated the controls, and in the screens that
showed the moon and the planet and the space around them, and Ship in its
orbit, dark and ever so faintly gleaming.

With him on board, the shuttle could fly where its pilot
wanted to send it. Which, under Umizad’s instruction, was up into low orbit,
well below Ship but above the atmosphere.

When they were stable in orbit, Umizad still bubbled with
delight, but his face went somber. Though Elti in the cradle behind him looked
ready to strangle him, she didn’t have the courage—or the strength. All she
could do was sit and glower and promise, on all the levels Aisha could sense,
that every word and move would be carried back to the council she was part of.

Neither Rama nor Umizad cared about that. Rama turned in his
cradle to face Umizad. Umizad sat for a long while, studying him inside and
out, while he sat perfectly still.

Finally Umizad said, “Look there.”

His glance pointed to the screen off to his right, the one
that looked toward and past the system’s sun. There were no stars in that
field, and no galaxies. Only perfect blackness.

Space was never an absolute void. It might be empty to human
sight, but it was full of dust and debris and background radiation and
particles both random and not. It even had a smell, like burning metal.

Out there was nothing. Not one thing.

It had a boundary. The shuttle’s sensors weren’t powerful
enough to trace it exactly, but Ship knew. Ship could feel it, and it made Ship’s
skin twitch. Ship needed space to be full of matter and energy; that was how it
lived and fed.

“We made that,” Umizad said. “We brought it here and trapped
it. And there it stays.”

“What is it?” Aisha asked, since nobody else seemed inclined
to.

“We don’t really know,” Umizad answered. “We know what it
does. It eats—everything. All that is.”

“Tell me,” Rama said.

Umizad could do better. He showed them.

It played like a vid inside their heads. Aisha closed her
eyes to see it better, and remembered to breathe while she spun down into a
world both alien and weirdly familiar.

~~~

She’d seen that city in dreams, with its walls intact and
people in its streets. She’d dug up potsherds from its ruins.

Over the vault they’d opened before she left, where Rama’s
statue had waited for them to find it, was—not a temple, exactly. A place where
people like Umizad lived and worked together. Corps headquarters, in a manner
of speaking.

“Mages of gates,” Umizad’s voice said in the air. “They
monitored travel in and out and through, and kept track of the worlds. And,
more occasionally than you might think, dealt with threats to the gates or the
worlds they served.”

Aisha saw the shape of it. She saw the people who did it,
too. She’d seen faces like theirs waiting for the shuttle, and riding in it now.

They came from different parts of this world, studied and
taught here. This was a major city, though not the capital—it had been once,
but not for centuries. It had been here since the tower on the cliff was built,
the fortress with no way in, where the Sleeper was.

In the time of the memory—a memory almost a thousand years
old in this world—there had been no threats to gates for well over a century. The
guardians knew better than to let themselves get slack, but none of them had
any experience of real danger, either.

When it first came, they took it for the return of an old
enemy, a tide of darkness that swallowed gates and conquered worlds. Rama’s
descendants, with the psi masters of his world, had fought it and won—and one
of them had gone all the way to Earth and left a memory there.

So that was true. Aisha wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
That she was part of that family, in a distant and diluted way.

This was her world, too, then—this world her mother had
named Nevermore. What came toward it was something so huge and so destructive
that there was no comprehending it.

In the beginning it came through a gate—drawn to it, maybe,
or sucked into it, from somewhere else. Like Ship, in its way.

It ate the gate, and the world on which the gate had been. Then
it swallowed the rest of the planets in the system, and the star.

One by one and then in threes and fours and tens, gates disappeared.
Where the worlds had been was empty space. Even their stars were gone.

Late one night in a high cold tower on Nevermore, a psi
master—a mage of gates—woke from a dream so terrible his mind was never the
same after. In his dream, the eater of gates had a mind and a will. It ate what
tasted sweet, and what made it happy. Stars were both. The more it ate, the
more it wanted. It was drunk on star-stuff.

That dream was true.

The dreamer led an attack through gates. His army of mages
cornered the eater on a world that was already mostly barren, where the sun had
burned out. They bound it in the star’s cold, dead core.

The dreamer burned out his own mind in binding the eater.
The mages who survived brought back his body and laid it under his tower, and
celebrated the victory across every gate and world that was left.

A generation passed, then two. Nevermore’s mages grew
comfortable again. They waged wars; they made peace. They watched over their
gates and worked their magic and never gave thought to the fallen enemy.

The eater woke. Its bindings had frayed with time and the
absence of magic to keep them strong. They broke when it reared up in its
prison and roared at the stars.

It was starving, and it was enraged. It knew what had
trapped it: powerful psi, which as a creature of energy it recognized as being
like itself. It knew its enemy had come through gates. The same gates that had
trapped it in this universe, and that it had been feeding on.

“Or so we suppose,” Umizad said in Aisha’s mind. “This we
are sure of: It didn’t know who the mages were, or exactly where their world
was in the chain of gates. It went hunting them.”

They had warning. Its hunt was slow; it paused to search
each world, hunting for any sign of psi. It left animals and plants, and
anything sentient that lacked a particular kind of psi—the kind that Nevermore’s
masters had. Anything endowed with that flavor of psi, even the slightest hint
of it, it ripped apart, molecule by molecule, and dined on the fragments.

“Each world it found, it stripped of magic,” Umizad said. “When
it was done, it hunted through the world’s gates one by one, searching for its
next feeding ground. It learned as it went: it began to look for certain shapes
and species. The closer a species was to the people or powers of our world, the
more avidly it hunted, and the more messily it fed.”

Aisha could see. She could feel. She had slipped inside its
thoughts the way she could with Ship.

It was not the same kind of creature as Ship. It couldn’t
be. Ship was bright and open and clean. This was dark, dark, dark.

And huge. Most of it didn’t even exist in that particular
universe. Only its consciousness, the part of it that lived and felt and fed.

It liked pain. Pain was sharp and hot and sweet. It learned
to crave pulling the soul out of a body after it had sucked the body’s psi to a
husk. It left whole worlds full of empty, shriveled bodies. Nothing remotely
human-like survived.

One world tried to communicate with it. They hoped that if
it knew they were fellow sentients, it might go back to eating stars, and let
them be.

Maybe once it might have, but it had the taste of magic now,
and a long memory for the time of its captivity. It had to eat, it wanted to
eat, and this was rich, and easy, hunting.

Fear was the spice that sharpened the sweetness. Any weapon
that might turn on it only fed it.

On Nevermore, everyone knew it was coming. They still had
monarchies, mostly, and tribal rulers, though the mages elected their leaders
from the strongest and the most skilled.

Even with all their wars and squabbles, between the network
of gates all over the planet and the psi masters in even the tiniest hamlet,
their communications were almost as fast and almost as complete as if they’d
had a worldweb. That web conceived a plan.

“We can’t sacrifice an entire world.”

The most powerful of them all had met in the guildhouse in
the old city, in the circular hall that in this age was carved and painted with
images of great mages and great workings and the many wonders of gates. Aisha
could have stopped there, just to marvel at the beauty of the place, but the
half-dozen people seated in a circle spoke of harrowing things.