Forgotten Suns (25 page)

“You know that won’t stop them.” He looked up at her in the
hazy light of the dream, scowling just like Pater. “You should have told me you
were leaving.”

“What you don’t know, you can’t suffer for.” That was a line
from just about every pirate vid they’d ever watched together.

She wanted him to laugh, or at least shrug and let it go,
but she should have known better. He hit her, so hard that even in the dream it
stung. “I hope you do blow up. Serve you right. You went away and didn’t tell
me. After we swore to each other. Pirate’s Oath, Aisha. You forgot.”

“I
didn’t
forget.
I was trying to save you!”

“Well, you didn’t.” He stood on the windblown grass, with a
rope in his hand that wound away now into the sky. There were stars in it, and
skeins of suns. “I’ll never trust you again.”

~~~

Aisha woke not knowing where she was. Her head ached, but
not nearly so much as her heart.

Everything around her was strange. The only familiar thing
was the sun roaring and shooting off plasma behind her eyes, and Rama’s voice
saying, “Come and eat your breakfast.”

“I just ate,” Aisha said before her eyes were half open.
Then her stomach crunched, and the web told her she’d slept over half an
Earthday. Her mind might still be remembering dinner, but the rest of her was
ravenous.

By the time she stumbled into the common room, she was
almost capable of making sense. Rama prowled like a big cat. If he’d had a
tail, it would have been twitching.

“What’s wrong?” Aisha asked him.

“Eat,” was all he said.

She opened her mouth to argue, but shut it again. Psycorps
was watching. She tried asking inside, where the sun was. “What is it?”

He didn’t snap her head off, which surprised her somewhat.
He didn’t answer, either. Not exactly. He made her feel instead, and remember.

Lying on the observation deck on the
Leda
during jump. Drifting through absolute nothingness. Feeling
huge bodies moving in the void. Swimming. Singing.

One song out of them all was different. It made her ears
hurt. It tried to tear her heart out of her chest. It was beautiful, and it was
screaming. It was making glory out of agony.

She sucked in a breath and almost choked. It was a wonder
she didn’t fall down. That terrible, beautiful, awful song filled her till her
skin felt ready to crack and split and burst wide open.

Quiet.
It was a
word in Rama’s voice. It was a thing: a cool and soothing wave of blessed
silence.

“That—” she tried to say. “That—”

“Hush,” he said. “Eat.”

Food was the last thing she ever wanted to see, but the
bread and hummus and pickled vegetables had to go somewhere. She ate what was
in the bowl, twitching because she couldn’t say any of the things that her
tongue itched to say. She didn’t dare think them at Rama, either. They tangled
up inside her and lost themselves in the memory of the song.

Something shifted. She felt freer somehow. She could take a
deep breath and not feel as if it stopped halfway down.

Rama stood up straighter. Aisha hadn’t realized how quenched
he’d been until he turned, quick as a cat, and said, “I can keep this going for
a while, but the quicker we move, the better.”

“What—” Aisha said.

“We’re going out,” he said. “Bring whatever you can
carry—but not so much it weighs you down.”

“We might need to fight,” Aisha translated. She wasn’t sure
how she felt about that. She might be excited. Or she might be terrified.

“We will not seek violence,” Rama said, sounding as prim as
Vikram throwing cold wisdom on a hot adventure. Unlike Vikram, he threw a flash
of a grin at it. It looked like light catching the edge of a blade.

The part of Aisha that mostly wanted to be a good daughter
and grow up to be a good archaeologist was wibbling frantically. The rest built
a long, slow burn over that tortured singer—whoever, whatever it was.

“We’re going to rescue it,” she said, though Rama wasn’t in
the room any more. “Aren’t we?”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t need him to.

~~~

Nobody just walked out of a Pyscorps facility. Rama did it—not
working too hard at it, either, as far as Aisha could tell. He had his old barn
clothes on, the hand-me-down Spaceforce trousers and the faded red shirt and
the riding boots that had seen better days. With the torque he’d worn when he
came out of the ruined cliff and a pair of gold earrings that Aisha distinctly
didn’t remember seeing in any of his kit, but she had seen them go into the
vault on Nevermore, he fit right in in the part of the port that she’d been
warned never to go near on any world.

She looked dangerous, she reminded herself. She was all in
black and her face was veiled and she had a pair of swords that she more or
less knew how to use. They were plasteel practice swords, but they had an edge
that could cut.

She could walk like a panther, too; she’d learned it at the
same time she learned to use the swords. The rest was keeping her head up and
her eyes hard and not letting anybody see how badly she wanted to shrink down
and disappear.

People didn’t stare here. They darted glances, or they
carefully didn’t look at all. Minding their own business, their body language
said. Not meaning any harm. Just getting through what they had to get through
in order to stay alive for one more day.

Vids showed the scenery often enough. Dirt and vomit and
bodies in gutters. Most of the bodies were even alive. The dead ones hadn’t
gone too far off yet—the cleaners would come through sooner or later.

Vids didn’t show the smell. Or what was under it, a taste
almost, bitter and harsh and suddenly, overwhelmingly sweet. Aisha wanted to
gag, but her throat had locked. Her whole body was stiff.

Rama walked through crowds and clots of traffic as if they
hadn’t been there. He seemed to know where he was going, which was more than
Aisha could manage. This part of the city she hadn’t mapped on the web, and she
was not likely to try it now. Psycorps would leap as soon as she tried.

As far as Psycorps was concerned, she was linked in to the
schoolbot in the house, studying Old High Marsian. Rama was in his room,
meditating. Or sleeping. Being still. Biding his time.

She could have been happy with that, just now, as they passed
a clot of very dirty people around a very clean one. He looked as lost as Aisha
felt, but he didn’t have Rama to keep him safe.

“They’re going to eat him,” she heard herself say. “Don’t
you think we should—”

Rama ignored her. Aisha slowed down, loosening her left-hand
sword in its scabbard. She knew how deeply stupid it was, but she couldn’t seem
to stop herself.

Rama slapped Aisha’s hand away from the sword and hauled her
forward, half off her feet. Then he let her go.

He wasn’t waiting for her to find her balance. A few more
meters and he’d be gone, and she’d be alone in the back armpit of the port.

That might not be such a bad thing. Even while she thought
it, she staggered after him.

By the time she looked back, she’d gone too far to see what
had happened to the other lost outworlder. Aisha had to hope he’d got away
somehow. Or that it hadn’t hurt too much when he went down.

The city got filthier the deeper they went. Aisha slipped
in blood more than once, and in worse things more than that. She kept her feet
because if she didn’t, and landed in some of the things she tried to step over,
she would want to rip her skin off along with her clothes.

She knew inside that skin that the only safe place here was
directly behind Rama. He didn’t care enough about anything to be afraid. He
didn’t even care if he died. He’d just come back and keep on hunting for the
world he’d lost.

People here could smell fear. They could smell its opposite,
too. They left him alone and stepped wide of his shadow.

When he stopped, she almost ran into him. The street they
were on was narrow and twisty, but it was different from the past dozen twisty
streets they’d been winding down. The pavement was almost clean, and the piles
of garbage seemed to be restricted to the areas around the disposer units.

Somebody cared, here. Or was paid to care. Aisha’s eye ran
down a line of shops with names that didn’t mean anything to her, and signs in
writing that she couldn’t read. The one nearest seemed to sell spices, Old
Earth curios, and, from the smell, high-quality ganja. Which Pater would not be
pleased to know she recognized.

Rama wasn’t paying attention to the shop. The place just
past it looked like either a tavern or a brothel—Pater would not have liked her
to know that, either. It smelled like beer and wine and lower-quality ganja,
and voices babbled out of it.

Another sound wound above the voices. It wasn’t the song
Rama was still following and Aisha was trying not to remember too clearly. It
was much more obviously human, and as clear and pure and strong as it was, it
didn’t feel mechanical at all. It was coming out of a living throat, with a
living mind inside.

“That’s Old Earth opera,” Aisha said. “What is she doing
singing it in—”

“She’s weaving dreams,” Rama said. He turned toward the
tavern.

~~~

Taverns in vids were dark and full of people with strange
mods and stranger addictions. There were mods enough here, and most of them
made Rama look distinctly normal, but the lights were up. Except for the ganja,
most of what went around seemed to be safe enough for a children’s party back
in Cairo.

Rama made his way to a table by the wall, not too far from
the door, but close enough to see the singer, who floated in a hoverchair at
the far end of the room. He sat with his back to the wall, leaving Aisha to
settle beside him.

The singer looked as if she rode in a globe full of stars,
wearing a gown of stars, with stars woven into her abundant black hair. Her
voice was so pure it hurt.

Queen of the Night.
Rama’s voice swam beneath earthly sound, the same way the great shapes swam
through jumpspace. The words woke knowledge in somewhat the same way a web-ping
did: the name of the opera and the character and the song she sang—aria, it was
called.

It was born on Aisha’s home world and not his, but it spoke
to him. Music: sacred song. Songs for the gods, and of them.

His long sleep had taken them away from him. This song, and
this singer, brought them back. All of them. A whole soaring tide of them.

They were part of the other song somehow, the terrible one,
the song of agony. They were a guide. A point of focus. Leading him to the
singer.

“Drinks, meser? Food? Dreams?”

The person speaking to Rama had no discernible gender. Heshe
was blue—blue eyes, blue spikes of hair, skin shading from sea-blue to just
this side of midnight. Hiser features were smooth and round and vaguely
piscine, and hiser movements were smooth and flowing, as if heshe swam through
air like water.

Rama’s eyes were slightly wider than usual, taking in the
sight, but then he relaxed. The person inside was human, and quite ordinary.
There still wasn’t a gender, exactly; more a sense of a body that was one thing
and a mind that was another.

That hurt him, for some reason Aisha couldn’t understand.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to: it was an old hurt, as old as he was, but as
fresh as if it had happened that morning.

He covered it quickly, and said, “Food and drink we’ve had
elsewhere. Dreams, we make for ourselves.”

The blue person giggled behind hiser hand. The fingers were
webbed. “Yes! Yes, we do, don’t we? Drink, then, if you would stay. Directly, meser!”

The blue person didn’t wait for an answer, but air-swam
away. The singer still sang. Her voice never wavered and never seemed to tire.

Aisha was almost sad when the aria ended. She hadn’t
understood a word, but it didn’t matter. Everything she needed to know was in
the music.

The singer floated away into the darkness of holographic
night. Something else took the stage, but Aisha didn’t pay attention. It wasn’t
music; it was a babble of nothing much.

The babble in the room rose to drown it. Aisha only had vids
to go by, to judge the people that crowded around her, but she didn’t think
many of them ran on the high side of the law.

It wasn’t the ones with the extreme mods who made her skin
creep. It was the quiet ones, the ones with their backs to the walls and their
eyes watching, watching.

They were watching Rama. He looked bored now the singer was
gone, leaning back, ignoring all the eyes on him. The more he ignored them, the
more they stared.

“I wouldn’t do that,” someone said gently.

She wasn’t tall, but she held herself so straight that she
seemed to tower over Rama. Without her robe of stars she wasn’t much to stare
at: not young but not old, either, neither fat nor thin, with warm brown skin
that Aisha would bet she had been born with, and a cloud of black hair.

She sat down across from Rama, not caring at all that her
back was to the room. “I know you mean to provoke them,” she said, “and I’m
sure you could take them, singly and together, but this is my house, and I
prefer it clean and quiet. No blood on my walls, meser.”

“What, none at all? Not even a little?”

“Don’t test me,” she said.

She was as gentle as ever, but Rama blinked. “Your song,” he
said. “That was a holy thing.”

“All the more reason not to commit blasphemy in my temple.”

He bent his head to her. She knew how to talk to him—Aisha
was impressed. Nobody even had to tell her what he was. She just knew.

“We’ll give you a glass of whatever you like,” she said, “but
then you’ll leave.”

“Even if I promise to behave myself?”

“Are you capable of it?”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I can try.” He paused. “I need a
place to rest in for a day, two—maybe three. You have rooms, yes? If I convince
you that I won’t destroy them, or you, may I stay?”