Forgotten Suns (18 page)

She wasn’t ready. She might not ever be.

She twisted free. But she didn’t run away. “Whatever you
think I did, or was, I don’t remember. All I know is what I am now.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t push,” she said.

He shied at that, a little bit shocked, a little bit
offended. She wasn’t about to apologize, except sideways. “Whatever you think
you have to do, just make up your mind to it. Then do it. You can do anything
you set your heart on.”

“Not anything. I am not all-powerful. I’m not a god. No
matter what people said or will say.”

“Oh, no, you’re not a god. But you’re not the normal run of
human, either.”

“Neither are you.”

“I’m starting to think,” said Aisha, “that there is no such
thing as normal. People who try to make just one kind of human the right kind
and get rid of everybody else, or cut them down to the same size, are making a
terrible mistake.”

“You could argue that I’m not human,” Rama pointed out.

“Genetically you are,” she said. “We’ve got all but the
tiniest tiny fraction of bits in the same places. We’re just not from the same
planet. Lots of us aren’t. There’s a hundred inhabited worlds. It’s not just
Earth any more.”

“Or Nevermore.”

“Or anywhere.”

She sat and he knelt, thinking about that. His hands were on
his knees.

She took his right hand and turned it so she could see what
was in it. It was still his own sun, with spots and a flare.

“You know,” he said, “before I went to sleep, or into stasis
if you prefer, it wasn’t like this at all. It was gold, like an inlay in the
skin. Doubters said that was what it was. Somehow in the long years, it
changed. Now it looks on the outside the way it feels on the inside.”

“See?” said Aisha. “Things can change. Even you.”

He laughed. It wasn’t much: just a gust of breath. But it
was real. “You keep waking me up, do you know that?”

“I’m sorry,” said Aisha. “The first time was an accident.
Really.”

“And this one?”

“Well...” she said.

He smiled. She did love his smile, when he wasn’t being
wild.

It made her remember why she was here in the first place.
She went straight to it. “Can you fix Aunt Khalida before we get out of jump?”

That killed the smile. “How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Mend her broken bits. Make her whole
again.”

“I’ve done as much as I can.”

“As much as you can? Or as much as you will?”

“I’ve given her everything she needs,” he said. “The rest is
hers to do.”

“You’re just like the captain,” she said, and it was hard,
because her throat was suddenly tight, “and I’m just a baby, because I think
nobody is doing enough.”

“Oh, no,” said Rama. “Some of us are doing altogether too
much.”

“Including me?”

“You love her. That’s exactly right, and exactly the right
amount. We’re doing what we can for her. Do believe that.”

“But it’s not enough!”

He let those echoes settle down into silence. In it, another
of the huge beasts swam below the ship and sang. Its song was the saddest thing
in any world.

That was why Aisha burst out crying. Rama didn’t say
anything, didn’t laugh at her; didn’t push her away when she held on to him and
bawled.

She’d be horribly embarrassed when she got done with this.
At the moment she didn’t care at all.

Tomiko had never been one to waste time. She was not above
stacking the deck in a game, either. She sent her own morale officer to
evaluate Khalida.

Dr. Sulawayo had the manner polished to a fine art: soft,
quiet, scrupulously non-threatening. Khalida knew from his dossier that he was
barely a decade older than she was, but he had modified his appearance to the
most comforting percentile: wise lined face, dark liquid eyes, pure white hair.
She found it ironic that he looked so much older than the oldest living thing
on the ship.

She tried to imagine Rama wearing the face of age, but her
imagination failed. That species of antique conqueror never grew old.

One day she was going to remember to ask him what his name
really was. Names were important. She was Egyptian; she was born knowing that.

She needed to focus. Dr. Sulawayo was standing in her closet
of a cabin, watching her. She ordered the wall to present him with a place to
sit.

The cabin was scrupulously, clinically clean. So was
Khalida. Her uniform was new, crisp, and impeccable. Her mind might be
ricocheting all over creation, but her physical surroundings would, by Allah,
be perfectly organized.

“Doctor,” she said. “This is a pleasure.”

He smiled. It was genuine; so was he, with all his
modifications. He honestly believed in what he did. “It’s been a little while,
hasn’t it, Captain? I still remember our visit to the tomb of Menes—such a
find; such pride for all of you, that your father was the one to find it.”

Khalida remembered, too, but it was bright and distant, like
someone else’s memory. Everything was like that, that had happened before the
suppurating wound that was Araceli. “Our family does have a certain gift for
archaeology,” she said. “A tropism, I suppose. We’ve been robbing tombs for
millennia. Now it’s not only legal, it’s respectable.”

“Your father argues that your ancestors were not the robbers
but the occupants of the tombs,” Dr. Sulawayo said. “There have been tests,
have there not? Proof of kinship.”

“Just about everyone in Egypt is related to a pharaoh,”
Khalida said, “one way or another. It’s the same in Asia: if you’re not Genghis
Khan’s descendant, you’re a rarity.”

“Genetics,” said Dr. Sulawayo, “are a wonderful thing.” He
smiled at her. “Tell me about Nevermore. Is it as mysterious as it’s reputed to
be?”

Sudden shifts of subject where the psych officer’s favorite
tool. Khalida had enough training herself to have expected this one. “It’s a
planet-sized nature preserve with minimal human inhabitants and an impossibly
large number of ruins. It’s beautiful. It’s driving my brother to happy
distraction. He wants so badly to decipher all the inscriptions—thousands,
millions of them. And no key to them anywhere.”

“Not in the inhabitants?”

“They don’t read. It’s a religious restriction. We don’t
even know which of the different scripts would have belonged to their
ancestors, if any of them did.” But someone did. Someone on this ship. Someone
whom Khalida had no desire to explain to anyone.

“A great mystery,” Dr. Sulawayo said. “Quite wonderful,
wouldn’t you agree? The universe needs unanswered questions.”

“It’s my job,” Khalida pointed out, “technically, to make
sure all questions are answered. That’s what intel is.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Voluntarily?”

Khalida met his calm gaze. “Actually, no. If I tender my
resignation, will you accept it?”

There: she had got him to squirm. It was subtle; he was very
well trained. But she felt it.

She pushed. She did not care if it hurt either of them. “They’re
not going to let you, are they? I’m going back to Araceli if I go in a box,
screaming.”

“Will you do that?”

“Will it make any difference?”

“To me,” said Dr. Sulawayo, “yes. Not only because you were
repaired, and it seems the repair may not have been as successful as Psych
believed. Because we are friends, and I have a personal investment in your
welfare.”

“We were friends,” Khalida said. “I don’t feel it any more.
I don’t feel much at all. Everything before, it’s globed in glass. And here I
am. I’ll shrink to a point in space and disappear. I realize people will
notice, and some will even care, but I? I can’t make it matter.”

He reached toward her. She watched him realize that might
not be the best course of action, debating it inside himself, in the endless
stretch of a time-out-of-time between one second and the next.

He completed the gesture. He took her hands. “Oh, my dear.
This is a gross failure of treatment. Whether it is the fault of the mechanism
or the technicians—no matter. They left you in this state; they let you go.
That is unconscionable.”

She stared at his hands. He had no psi. His touch did
nothing but grant her a small gift of warmth. Trickles of thought came in with
it, worry and fret and gratifying anger and a dangling bit of reminder that he
had another appointment within the hour. Which he could change.

“No, don’t,” she said before she could stop herself.

He let her go. She caught the stab of his guilt. He had no
way to know what she was telling him not to do; of course he would think it was
his touch.

She could correct him. She could tell him why. Then he would
be sure she was insane. She was neutered. She had no more psi than he did. She
certainly had not had it restored by a legend out of an ancient and completely
forgotten tomb.

Stasis chamber. Enchanted tower.

“My dear,” said Sulawayo, “we don’t have the facilities here
for the care you need. I will arrange for it in Centrum. I promise you.”

“Before or after I’m shipped off to Araceli?”

“Before, I hope,” he said.

“You know,” she said, speaking the thought as it came to
her, “I believe I understand why Rinaldi wants me back. He knows I’m as crazy
as he is. Finally, there’s someone who can understand him.”

“Do you believe he caused this?”

She laughed—honestly; that was mirth. “I’m not that far
gone! Whatever went wrong with the repair, it has nothing to do with him. This
is my very own damage.”

“I prefer to blame Psych,” he said. He actually sounded
fierce.

She patted him as if he had been one of the expedition’s
horses. “You do that,” she said.

“We will undo this,” he said. “I promise you. Whatever it
takes, we will do it.”

She sat for a long while after he had gone. On the other
side of the glass, she was astonished and touched and even humbled. She always
had been rich in friends.

~~~

Max and Sonja and Kinuko and John Begay.

“Hand-pick your unit for this one,” said the
Under-Undersecretary for Damage Control and Intraplanetary Affairs. Civilian
clothes, as drab as bureaucracy in Centrum could tolerate, but a dossier that
read like a pirate’s tour of flashpoints in the United Planets. The fact that
she was dispensing the orders, from well above the stratosphere of MI’s
channels, told Khalida just how anomalous, and critical, the situation was.

She sat in her featureless cube in an anonymous office tower
out of Centrum proper, linked in to more feeds than Khalida could count.
Khalida wondered if each of the rest of them had the same sense of being the
Under-Undersecretary’s first and only focus.

“It’s that bad?” Khalida asked.

“They’re all bad,” the Under-Undersecretary said. “This one
is slightly more delicate than usual. Pick a team you can trust implicitly.”

She was stating the glaringly obvious. Khalida suppressed
the first, reflexive retort, as training and field sense woke up and started to
function. Of course this one would be difficult. Psycorps was not only
involved, it was one of the warring parties.

The Under-Undersecretary nodded, following her train of
thought through their mutual web link. “Exactly. Godspeed, Major.”

Easy for her to say from her safe bunker in the heart of
U.P. The link was already cut, and Khalida’s mind had gone straight to the
answer—no question as to who should ship out with her to Araceli.

Max and Sonja, joined at the hip since training camp.
Kinuko, eleventh generation of MI noncoms, dragged kicking and screaming
through officer candidate school and still fighting it, but not quite hard
enough to up and quit. Big, quiet John Begay, exempt from Psycorps testing by a
treaty so old it predated the first starship. Sometimes Khalida wondered…

MI had thrown them together for a routine mission to the
outer worlds, shutting down that earthmonth’s drugs-and-sedition cartel and
slamming the lid on it hard enough to keep it from cropping up again for at
least the next earthyear. They clicked well together: Max and Sonja young
enough to find it all a grand adventure but intelligent enough not to make
idiot decisions, Kinuko absolutely ruthless when it came to facing down the
inevitable opposition, and John Begay a genius at tracking both people and
cargo through the tangle of the outer planets’ web systems.

Araceli on the face of it was a much more standard
intraplanetary political mess, but the Under-Undersecretary’s subliminal
message and the crawling sensation between Khalida’s shoulders promised enough
adventure to satisfy even Max and Sonja.

“Not hardly,” Sonja said the day it all went sideways. “You
think Captain Batshit is telling the truth? Ostia wants to blow up Castellanos?”

The shuttle was prepped, the coordinates set, the weapons
armed. Captain Batshit—Meser Rinaldi to his nonexistent friends and his many
enemies—had requested that Major Nasir command the mission remotely. In his
company. “For protection,” he had said, smiling his too-sincere smile.

Khalida was stretching the limits of her orders by meeting
her team in the crew lounge of one of the shuttle bays in Castellanos’
spaceport. It was deserted except for the five of them; its shields were on
high. MI of course was recording. For internal purposes. As Rinaldi might say.

“I don’t believe a word Rinaldi says,” Khalida said, “but every
other form of intel we can gather indicates that a revolutionary cell in Ostia
is aiming a dirty bomb at Castellanos. We’re ordered to take out the cell by
any means possible.”

“They’re desperate,” Kinuko translated.

“Which ‘they’ do you mean?” asked John Begay. “I don’t like
the smell of this place. There’s enough rot here to reach all the way to the
top.”

“Still,” Khalida said. “A hundred million human lives. A
whole planet, with all its biosphere. Rotten or not, it doesn’t deserve to be poisoned.”