Forgotten Suns (54 page)

“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?”

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. The 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.

It saw him. The force of its seeing nearly shook him apart.

They held him together, all of them. All through Aisha—even Umizad,
who was meant to be the focus.

She didn’t know how. She couldn’t—

“Steady.” Umizad set the example for her. It felt like a
firm hand in hers, and feet braced squarely against an unyielding floor.

Someone else gripped her other hand—someone far away, under
a shield of atmosphere. Aunt Khalida’s face glimmered behind her eyes, and
Daiyan’s a shadow behind it. They were strong, and perfectly, immovably still.

They kept her from breaking. She held on to Rama with her
mind and will, and to Ship that shuddered all around them.

In the story outside of them all, the warrior leveled his
spear. His armor was made of a million mortal souls. Their psi was his spear,
flashing and twisting like a bolt of lightning.

The beast reared over him. It fought the story it was in; it
tried to be its real self.

He had to keep control.
Focus
,
Aisha willed him and herself. Or prayed.
Focus.

The beast lunged. He struck at it with his spear.

Its laughter shook the sky.
Yes! Yes, smite me!

Rama staggered. His edges frayed. Scales of armor melted
away.

The beast swallowed them. And grew.

Nothing he did could stop it. Or kill it. Or in any way
defeat it. He couldn’t even trap it. Not any more. It was wise to anything a
human could think of.

“Are you?” Rama leaned on his spear. His armor was threadbare
in some places and ragged in others, but it held. The spear crackled and threw
off sparks.

“Catch me if you can,” said Rama.

He turned and ran.

~~~

He ran to the ends of the universe through waves of
shattered spacetime, spurning the nurseries of stars underfoot and sending
galaxies spinning. He was vaster than worlds and stronger than suns. The
universe was barely big enough to hold him.

That was one story.

In another, a warrior on a black antelope with blood-red
eyes—neither stallion nor mare; Ship didn’t do binary—led the beast on a long
chase across endless rolling plains. The beast had wings, but the antelope was
lighter and faster, and when it had to, it could fly.

It was starting to tire. The warrior’s spear was dimming.

The beast never tired. It would catch them when they couldn’t
run any longer. Then it would eat them all.

Rama stopped without warning and whirled to face the beast.
It roared toward him.

He flung the spear.

It missed.

And almost shook apart with the force of Aisha’s shock.

In the third story, the story in which she rode in a living
ship with two mages from Nevermore, Umizad held her up. The wave of psi turned
and lashed through him.

He held on. He was trained. He knew how.

He was old and his body was failing. It couldn’t withstand
that much power. There was no way—

Aisha reached inside herself. She went down so far and so
deep that she knew she might never come up again.

At the very bottom was a tiny spark of light. An image, or a
memory. A familiar room. Familiar faces. Mother, Pater, Jamal. Vikram. Malia.

They sat around the table in the family dining room, eating
and talking. It didn’t matter what they ate or what they said. What mattered
was that they were there.

Khalida came in from the door to the roof, hand in hand with
Daiyan. No one seemed surprised to see either of them. They sat with the others
and joined hands, closing the circle.

That was Aisha’s strength. Those were her anchors. She
rooted herself in them, and gave that strength to Umizad.

Darkness swallowed them. Darkness absolute. Complete absence
of anything at all.

Total sensory deprivation. There was no beast. No universe.
No story. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The darkness split apart. Light flooded over her.
Annihilated her.

Far, far, far down the endless road, a tiny figure struggled
toward her. It was Rama in the ragged remnants of his armor, on a battered and
limping antelope. He had his spear back.

It was broken. Light dripped from it. He raised it.

His arm shook. He was almost done. They all were.

The beast hovered over him. Its wings spanned the world.

He aimed again and loosed the fire. As straight as he could,
as strongly as he could.

Past the beast, again.

The beast laughed and swooped down on him.

The sky split in two.

In Aisha’s story, Ship was completely out of control, diving
into a nursery of stars. This universe they were in was new, so small it had
barely begun to expand. They’d found its center.

Omphalos
, Mother
would say. Navel of the world. Gate of gods and the powers above and below.

Gate.

Ship lurched aside, wrenching every molecule. Parts of it
tore free; it bled solar plasma, long swirls of it dripping down into the gate.

The beast crashed into the singularity. Spacetime twisted.

Rama thrust with the last fading fragment of his spear, direct
to the heart of beast and gate. All the souls in the spear screamed at once,
ripping through Aisha, catching on a single desperate thread of self and psi:
Khalida, who was too damned stubborn and too damned mad to give way.

Umizad reached past Aisha and the straining, struggling
remnant that was her aunt. He was as poor a rag as the spear, but he was
beautifully calm and perfectly focused. He knew exactly what he was doing.