Forgotten Suns (5 page)

“Yes,” he said. Then: “There are books still?”

“Books and inscriptions. We’ve never found anything to help
us translate them.”

“I’d like to see them,” he said.

“Even if you can’t read them?”

He shrugged. “I’m curious. That’s all.”

Aisha eyed him sideways. She could tell when a person wasn’t
telling the whole truth. She could also tell when he wasn’t going to answer any
more questions. “They’re in the vault with the rest of the really valuable
finds. I don’t have access to that.”

“Someday you will.”

“Yes,” she said. Refusing to think about what might happen
if the expedition ended next season. “Years from now. After I’ve grown up and
gone to university and got all my degrees. Then I’ll get a key.”

“When you’re terribly old,” he said.

He was teasing her. He must have got over whatever shocked
the breath out of him. “Yes,” she said with a hint of a snap. “When I’m almost
as old as you.”

That shut him up. A little too completely, maybe, but she
refused to feel guilty. It served him right for treating her like a child.

Khalida knew about the Brats’ excursion. She also knew who
had gone with them. If she wanted to think like MI, she could wind herself into
a glorious fit of paranoia.

The person they all called Rama was not about to kidnap the
offspring of the Doctors Nasir and Kanakarides. Whatever he was here for, she was
sure it had nothing to do with the Brats.

He liked them. It was as simple as that. They kept him out
of mischief. As for what he did for them—she had seen the way he moved.
Somewhere, whether he remembered it or not, he had been trained to fight. The
Brats could do worse than attach themselves to a bodyguard.

They came back windblown and loaded down with fish, which by
house rules they had to clean and cook. Rama, too. He was better at it than
they were.

Khalida happened to notice how quiet he was in all the
bubble and babble. She also noticed when she went through the kitchen that he
had the boning knife in his right hand, and it worked as well as the left.
Whatever had been wrong with it when he first came, he seemed to have got over
it.

It was one more odd thing about him, of more than she had
the patience to count. She recorded it, tagged it, and passed on by.

There was still no response to her inquiries. Searches had
turned up nothing. As far as she or Vikram could determine, the man did not
exist.

The latest results were waiting when she came up from dinner,
with Vikram’s tag on them:
Spaceforce
Intel. Can’t get any deeper without setting off alarms.

She had already tried and failed to convince him that they
could hack into Psycorps. That was insane, he said. Which it was, but Khalida
was reaching the point of not caring.

Here was the best Spaceforce could come up with: a deep gene
scan that made no sense at all. He was, according to the scan, distantly but
definitely related to Khalida. He had also, the scan declared, originated on
Nevermore.

She had committed the most basic of all errors: she had
contaminated the samples. She moved to delete the message, but paused. As
humiliations went, it was minor, and it was a useful reminder. There was no
excuse for sloppiness, no matter how distracted she was.

There was a second message attached to the first. That was
even more ridiculous.
Physiological age, thirty
to forty-five years. Chronological age—

“Six thousand years?” Khalida dropped onto her bed and let
out a small, cathartic howl. “Now that’s not my mistake. They should know
better than to test the artifacts instead of the man.”

She kept that, too. The rest was less egregiously wrong but
equally useless. He was not, Spaceforce Medical opined, modified. This was his
original form, as indicated by the genetics.

Vikram had been right, then. Gengineered. The scan was not
set up to speculate as to where or how.

Khalida shut off the feed and pressed her hands to her eyes.
“A mystery on top of an enigma,” she said. “He couldn’t have found himself on a
more appropriate planet.”

She should get up, undress, get ready for bed. She was much
too comfortable to move. Sleep had been harder and harder to come by lately.
Tonight she thought she might manage it. She might even keep the nightmares
down to a statutory minimum.

She lowered her hands. Her arms stung. She did not remember
cutting them.

She sat up and stripped off her shirt. There were scars on
top of scars, up and down her forearms. The new ones crept close to the veins
again, to the deepest and oldest scars, the ones she had almost died of. Would
have, if Max had not been there to—

Max was dead. So were Sonja and Kinuko and John Begay.

Because she made a mistake much worse than contaminating a
genetic sample. Much, much worse. So much worse that she could not let herself
die for it. She had to live. To remember. Because there was no more fitting
punishment.

Her nails were cut to the quick, to keep her from doing what
they tried to do now: claw the skin off, let the blood out.

It was all perfectly reasonable. She had been repaired.
Psych had smoothed over the rough edges, cut away the worst of the mental proud
flesh, lasered off the scars. Just a little therapy, they had told her when
they discharged her, and she would be as fit as she ever was.

All of this—side effects. Normal. Nothing to trigger alarms.
The blood was a nuisance, but when it was all gone, so would she be. Then there
would be no alarms at all.

Fingers closed around her wrists. Their grip was light, but
it was too strong to break.

There was no mistaking whose they were. She raised her eyes
to Rama’s face. “Don’t you know what it means when a door is locked?”

“Yes,” he said.

The lock on this door was nothing to what else he could hack
into. He was wearing the torque she had found on him that first night. “That
was in the vault,” she said.

“It’s mine.”

“Technically,” she said, “it’s the property of the
Department of Antiquities for Ceti quadrant.”

“It belongs to me,” he said.

“So that’s what you are,” said Khalida. “An interstellar
thief. I’d had you down as a mass murderer.”

“I took what was mine.”

He was stubborn. She already knew that. “You’re the thief,”
she said. “I’m the murderer. Do you know how many people died because of me?
Two hundred thousand six hundred and fifty-four. The last four were my direct
responsibility. I looked them in the eyes when I hit the trigger. They knew
exactly what I did to them.”

He said nothing. His face was blank.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “You got the mindwipe. I didn’t
qualify. I acted to the best of my capacity to forestall a greater disaster.
That’s how they put it. Word for word. I appealed. They said,
You performed a service. You also committed
a substantial error. The decision is just. It stands.

“Just,” she said, “but merciful? Not even slightly.”

“Sometimes there are no right decisions,” he said.

“What, are you the wise sage now? How many people have you
killed?”

“With my own hand? Hundreds. By my order? Thousands. More
than you, maybe. I stopped counting.”

She gaped. Then she laughed, sharp and bitter. “Don’t make fun
of me.”

“I never do that.”

“They seeded you with false memories,” she said. “In extreme
cases, that’s what they do. Wipe the mind clean, give it a new set of
programming, drop the result somewhere out of the way. If he survives, he’ll
never know what’s real and what isn’t. If he doesn’t, how convenient.”

“Memories find their way out,” he said. “Even through this
thing you people do.”

“‘You people’? Who do you imagine you are? Some alien
warlord pulled out of a tomb?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“I can’t deal with you tonight,” she said. “Go away. Go to
sleep. Forget I ever said anything.”

“No,” he said.

She would have knocked him down, if he had not still been
holding on to her wrists. Damn, he was strong.

“Sleep,” he said. “Dream peace. For this night, forget.”

That bastard. He was turning her orders back on her. Making
them stick.

“You’re Psycorps,” she said before she slid down into the
dark. “That’s the only thing you can be.”

“Not the only thing,” he said.

She was floating: drifting through infinite space. His eyes
were dark, but they were full of the sun.

A solar-powered man. MI would be all over him when it found
out.

Not from her. MI should have mindwiped her when it had the
chance. She owed it nothing now. Not one thing.

~~~

Rama never mentioned that night. Khalida made sure he
never had occasion to try. She had the rest of the cataloguing to do before
everyone came back. He had stalls to clean and Brats to chase and locks to
hack. But if he stole anything else, Khalida did not know about it.

Most of the antique gold he had come with was safe in the
vault. The torque never did turn up there, nor did one of the armlets and a
ring. Khalida quietly adjusted the inventory to fit. Just as quietly, Rama
appeared wearing none of the articles he had liberated.

He had settled in so seamlessly that unless she stopped to
think, she could not remember this place without him. That was disconcerting in
its way, but so far it managed not to be dangerous. She had him under
surveillance. That was the best she could do.

Intersession was ending, and not just because the chrono
told Aisha so. The summer storms were shorter and weaker, and the heat was
gradually getting less. Some of the nights were almost cool.

Birds had started flying south. The herds of antelope had
come back to the plain. Very soon, the tribes would come back, too, and so
would Mother and Pater and the rest of the expedition.

She hadn’t forgotten her mission. She’d changed tactics. She
had questions to ask the tribes. She might find ways to get hold of a rover,
too. She was still pondering that.

~~~

Aisha and Jamal took Rama out one morning to see the
antelope. It was the schoolbot’s day to be down for maintenance. They could do
what they wanted, as long as they had adult supervision.

That, these days, was Rama. Vikram had the bots out in
force, cleaning cabins and getting them ready for the new crop of staff. Aunt
Khalida was where she usually was, holed up with the computer.

Aisha was worried about Aunt Khalida. She was working too
hard and not sleeping enough, and she bit one’s head off if one said anything.
Pater would talk some sense into her. For sure nobody else could.

But today was a free day, one of the last before everybody
came back. Aisha planned to enjoy it.

The antelope were just beginning to fill up the winter
grazing grounds. There were hundreds now, compared to the thousands that would
pour in later, with the tribes following. Antelope were the best hunting of
all, and they brought smaller animals with them, and birds, enough game to feed
half a world.

Aisha was not out to hunt anything. She just wanted to see.

Jamal had his reader with him. Watching animals was not his
favorite thing, though he was always glad to get out of the house. She thought
Rama might bring his, too, but all he had was his water bottle and a bag full
of lunch.

Aisha’s favorite herd was back already. The old male with
the crooked horn was still alive. He had a dozen babies, most of them striped
dark brown and gold like him, and a band of new wives that he had won from
another male.

Aisha was glad to see him. “He’s old,” she told Rama, “but
he just keeps going on, collecting wives and scars.”

Rama lay beside her in the tall grass. He had a hungry look—not
kill and butcher and roast a fat doe hungry, but as if there was something here
that he wanted so badly it hurt. When some of the babies came bounding and
leaping and mock-sparring over near where they were, he almost forgot to
breathe.

“They’re beautiful,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I think people rode them once. Don’t you think so? They’re
not really shaped like Earth antelope, not in the back. They’re more like
horses. Though the males with their horns might be a problem. They could put
your eye out.”

“Not if you knew what you were doing,” he said.

She had to agree with that.

The old male’s herd moved on after a while, grazing its way
down to the river. A new herd wandered by. This was much smaller. Its male was
young, with horns barely longer than her arm. He had three wives, and just one
baby, which was red with a white foot. He was black, which told Aisha it was
probably some other male’s baby. Blacks didn’t sire reds out of red females.

“Look,” she said. “He just won those ladies. He’s all proud
of himself.”

She looked to see what Rama thought, but he was no longer
beside her. He was up and walking through the grass, not even trying to hide.
She opened her mouth to yell at him, but that would only spook the animals
sooner.

The females were still grazing. The baby was bouncing around
its mother. The male had seen Rama: his head was up, his horns as straight and
sharp as spears.

His eyes were ruby red. Aisha had only seen that once or
twice before, and never in a black. The others were normal brown or amber, and
the baby’s were blue.

Rama walked right up to him. By the time Aisha realized what
he was doing, it was too late to move.

He was talking to the antelope. She was too far away to hear
what he said. The rhythms weren’t PanTerran. They weren’t Old Language, either.
He sounded very polite.

He reached out his hand and laid it on the male’s forehead
between the horns. The male’s head lowered. Aisha sucked in her breath.

The male didn’t spit Rama on his horns and trample him to
death. He lowered his nose into Rama’s palm as if he had been a horse, and
blew. Rama’s other hand rubbed him around the base of the horns and behind the
ears, working his fingers into the thick mane that grew like a horse’s on the
long neck.