Forgotten Suns (10 page)

She held up her hands to stop his rush of words. He caught
hold of them. “Please,” he said.

Rama never pleaded. Hearing him do it now made Aisha’s
throat hurt, as if she were holding back tears.

The grandmother’s head shook. Her face was sad. “I can’t
tell you. I only know what came down from the first who waited, who stood at
the gates of the dark. ‘If you are what we hoped for, you will know how to find
us.’”

“If I am…” His breath caught. It sounded like a sob. “And if
I am not?”

“Then they are safe from you.”

“It wasn’t fear of me that drove them away.”

“No,” she said. “You were all the hope they had left in this
world.”

“Then I’ve failed them,” he said. “I’m several thousand
years too late.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe there was a reason it took so
long.”

“They’re all gone now. All dead. How could they not be?”

“We still live,” she said.

He had no answer for that. She slipped her hands free of his
and ran them over his face.

He held still. There were tears on his cheeks. She paused at
that. “Demons don’t weep,” she said.

“I’m a very human monster,” he said.

“We all have that in us,” the grandmother said.

He bowed his head. Her hands came to rest on his hair. “I
don’t know where to begin,” he said.

“You will,” said the grandmother.

She seemed sure of that. Rama was not, at all, but for once
he had found someone who could face him down.

Aisha didn’t often remember that this wasn’t really her
world. Just then, the feeling was so strong it made her dizzy.

The others were all born here. Rama, too.

Aunt Khalida and Vikram had spent so much time looking for
him around the worlds, and trying to track him as if he came from Earth or a
world settled by Earth. They hadn’t found anything because there was nothing to
find.

Where he came from on Nevermore, or how, Aisha wasn’t ready
to think about yet. Because the right word, the one that nobody had thought of
because it was impossible, might be
when
.

She’d gone looking for treasure, and after all she’d found
it. But whether it could help her or the expedition, or whether it would, she
didn’t know. All she could do was wait and hope.

~~~

Aisha didn’t remember much about the rest of the day. When
everybody came back to the city, so late the last of the light was dying from
the sky, she went straight to her room.

She was almost too tired to keep her eyes open, but before
she went to sleep, she linked in to the house computer. She and Jamal had made
a back door for the two of them, with a password that let them in.

There were the files Aunt Khalida had saved because they
were so outstandingly useless: the genetic analysis of the person called Rama,
and various data related to it. Aisha stared at them for a long time, till she
stopped trying to make them make sense. Then she knew what they meant.

Her world had tipped over. Malia had grown up with stories
that her grandmother thought were finally coming true. Aisha hadn’t even known
they existed.

And it was her fault.

In the end she made the only decision she could make: to
carry on the way she had been doing. Rama was still Rama, or whatever his name
really was. He hadn’t changed just because she knew more about him.

She was going to learn the rest of it. She promised herself
that as she slipped out of the link. It might not solve Nevermore’s greatest
mystery, but there was a whole world’s worth of stories apart from that. Those
were the ones she would find. Then the expedition would have to stay, because
it finally had something to show Centrum.

At long last the invaders left, lifting off in a bright
and windy morning. The expedition could finally get back to its real work, and
life could settle to a sensible routine.

Khalida had had enough of cataloguing and archiving to last
for a while. She was also, if she admitted it, avoiding the overload of
messages from offworld. She attached herself to the team that was carrying on
with last year’s excavation.

They had cleared the circular floor with its white stone
paving and its remnants of mosaic tiles. Now they were working their way
underneath it, opening up a complex of rooms that the sensors said were there.

No one expected much. Underground crypts and secret chambers
on this world always proved to have been cleaned out thoroughly or else buried
so deep there was no getting into them. But archaeologists were perpetual
optimists, and insatiably curious. At the very least they might find an
interesting floor, or a wall painting with all the people and animals scoured
away.

The entrance was blocked with rubble that took three days to
clear—most of it spent scanning every millimeter to make sure the blockage had
nothing of value in it. Khalida dug in with a pick and shovel, helping to clear
away the last of the bits of broken stone from a flight of stone-carved steps.
Rashid sifted the most interesting remnants beside her, and Marina inched ahead
of them with the scanner.

The scanner showed one large room below, and a smaller one
leading off it. Nothing of any size lived there—a snake or two, the usual crowd
of insects, but no cave bear or plains lion. Not that there would have been.
Animals avoided the city as carefully as most of the tribes did.

There was no gold, either. Nothing metal; no tomb or
treasury. Something did show up in a smaller chamber off the large one, but it
was blurred and ambiguous.

The last few centimeters of rubble took forever to clear and
carry off in baskets. Rashid’s eyes gleamed with excitement, but he had never
rushed an excavation yet, no matter what the temptation.

The sun was straight overhead when one of the interns
carried the last basket off to the rubble heap. The entry stood open. Like most
of the others that they had found in this part of Nevermore, it was wider and
higher than Earth standard, as if designed for people who were over two meters
tall and proportionately broad—though if there ever had been such people, they
were long gone. The tribes tended toward the shorter end of human norm.

This particular doorway was made of stone, and there was a
carving over the lintel, a common motif: the disk of the sun with a halo of
rays. Often it was gilded. Here it was carved simply out of the pale gold
stone.

The steps went down into the dark. The air that wafted up
was cool, almost cold, and smelled of old stone. It was clean: the scanner had
found nothing toxic in it.

Rashid had a biolume ready, the white light with its
faintest hint of green barely visible in the sunlight. Khalida fished hers out
of her pocket and shook it to life.

Marina was already on the stair, going down slowly, testing
each step. Rashid followed. So did Khalida. The others had to wait. If there
were paintings or manuscripts or artifacts made of something other than metal
or stone, they were much too fragile to withstand a sudden invasion of
trampling, breathing, sweating humanity.

Caution first and always. That was Rashid’s mantra.

~~~

The room was huge and surprisingly high. It seemed to
mirror the structure above: a circle of pillars in the same pale-gold stone as
the rest, each pair framing an arch and an empty niche. Statues might have
stood in the niches, but those were gone.

The walls were plain. If they had been painted, they were no
longer. They might have been hung with tapestries once. The floor was a mosaic
of pale gold and white and an occasional fleck of crimson, intricate in its way
and pleasant to look at.

At the far end was a wider arch than the others. Rashid and
Marina were determined to walk completely around the chamber, in case there was
something hidden in a niche or carved on a pillar. Khalida let curiosity lead
her straight to the next room.

It was much smaller, and square. When she amped up her
biolume, she almost bolted back out again.

She caught herself up short. Of course there was no one
sitting there. It was a statue, which must be life size, or near enough.

It sat against the wall in a stone chair. The chair was
starkly simple, carved of pale grey stone, almost silver, with a translucent
sheen. The back was as striking as the rest was plain: yet another gilded sun,
with rays that stretched to the far walls and the ceiling.

The figure in the chair was male, and looked as if it was
carved in obsidian. It was bare above the waist, dressed in a kilt below; the
kilt was painted a vivid and beautiful shade of scarlet. There were gilded
sandals on the feet, laced to the knee, and a massive gilded belt around the
statue’s middle, and a golden torque around its throat. On its head was a
golden lion’s head. It could have been a helmet, or it might have been a crown.

The statue’s arms were weighted with golden ornaments. Its
left hand rested on its knee. The right was lifted, palm outward. Painted on it
was yet another image of the sun in splendor.

Her eyes insisted on taking in the whole, because she was
trained to do that. Finally they let her focus on the thing that was most truly
improbable.

The statue had Rama’s face. It was a perfect likeness, right
down to the fierce curve of the nose and the slight upward tilt to the corner
of the mouth.

Khalida let her breath out slowly. Rashid and Marina were
talking behind her, as excited a babble as she had heard from them. The niches,
it seemed, had inscriptions. Not that anyone could read them, but they were
rare, and they were there.

When it came to rarity, this thing in front of her trumped
them all. She found she wanted to keep it to herself for a few moments more.

It really was remarkably lifelike. Maybe he had been a
priest, if the building was a temple. More likely he was a king. It was
possible he was both.

There were inscriptions everywhere that the statue and the
sun were not: up and down all the walls, over and around the door, even
marching across the floor. Rashid would be beside himself. Khalida would rather
have something she could read.

She backed out of the room—shrine, archive, hiding place,
whatever it was. It felt right to do that. Kings in Earth’s history had not
been fond of subjects who turned their backs. Kings here might have been
different; she tended to think not.

~~~

The statue and its storeroom made Rashid ecstatic. If he
recognized the statue’s face, he said nothing about it. His mind was so full,
it was possible he never made the connection between Vikram’s assistant and the
alien king.

Marina had to be dragged off at sundown and forced to eat
and, Khalida hoped, sleep. Rashid might have camped in the room himself if he
had not had Marina and the Brats to think about.

Khalida lent him a hand, and made sure he ate and slept,
too. The house quieted down slowly. A buzz vibrated through them all, a thrum
of excitement.

As everyone else fell asleep or tried to, she lay in her
room, staring at the ceiling. On an ordinary night she would have fled to the
computer. Tonight she pulled on boots and jacket and stuffed an extra biolume
into her pocket, and went for a walk.

The temple’s site was dark and completely silent. With the
excavation gone underground, there was nothing to see except the sealed door.

She had the code for that. She keyed it, waited for the door
to phase off and let her through, then carefully rekeyed it behind her.

Nothing had changed down here. It had been night underground
for several thousand years.

Rashid or Marina must have left a biolume in the smaller
chamber. It was amped down to a dim glow, gold rather than green.

There were two statues in there. The new one stood upright,
turned toward the left-hand wall.

Then he moved. His hand ran down the written lines. He
murmured words, as if he were reading. They were not in a language she knew.

A shiver ran under her skin. What she had spent most of the
day trying to convince herself was not so, what had brought her here tonight
because she had to make sure she was wrong, was alive and breathing and
standing in front of her.

It was not just the face. Those ornaments, or ones
remarkably like them, were locked in a box in the vault, all but the armlet
with the herd of antelope running in a skein around and around it, the gold
ring with the rayed sun carved on it that looked like a signet, and the torque
that was gleaming now, as if generating its own light.

The person they called Rama never had worn the other two
things while she could see him, but he seemed sincerely attached to the torque.
It must mean something. Rank, prowess—whatever large, heavy, ridiculously
expensive ornaments could mean in a culture.

“Priesthood,” he said, turning toward her.

His voice was soft in the dim golden light. Usually he spoke
without identifiable accent. Now there was a distinct lilt to his speech, which
reminded her of the words he had been reading off the wall.

In the day she might have scoffed, mocked, denied. Tonight
she let it simply be. “Sun cult?”

He nodded.

She tilted her head toward the statue. “That’s your high
priest?”

“No.”

“King?”

His head bent slightly.

“Ancestor?”

That he did not answer.

Physiological age: thirty to forty-five years. Chronological
age...

Stasis, she thought.

There had been no such technology on this world. Before they
all vanished, its people had reached the age of steel and simple mechanical
devices. They never discovered gunpowder or steam or internal combustion. They
never got that far.

Had they needed to?

“What were you?” she asked. “The captain who went down with
his ship?”

“The threat that had to be contained.”