Forgotten Suns (53 page)

The scientists needed an interpreter, and pressed Aisha into
service. Khalida could have joined them, but she found herself charged with
ferrying books and scholars to the mages’ city.

That threw her together with Daiyan as often as not. Daiyan
was a mage of rank, and also an aristocrat; when she was not gleaning
information from archives or sending her virtual self across universes, she
served on the council of a federation of cities near the northern pole.

She wore it all easily, an ease that Khalida suspected she
had worked for. She knew where most of the texts Rama needed were kept, and
where the sages and scholars lived, as well as how to persuade some of the more
fearful or the more hostile to venture within the Sleeper’s reach.

“He may be right, you know,” Khalida said as she piloted the
shuttle toward an island in the larger sea. There were storms brewing, and the
winds were treacherous, but nothing that need absorb all of her concentration. “You
probably don’t need him. He’s an atavism—a relic of a state of mind that you’ve
left behind.”

“Have we?” Daiyan asked. Her long body was coiled in the
copilot’s cradle; she looked as boneless as a cat, and as paradoxically
comfortable. “Do you know exactly what he is?”

“No,” said Khalida, “but I have an inkling. He was an
infamous conqueror; he is a psi master of unusual strength. He managed to found
an empire that lasted the better part of a millennium—which is vanishingly
rare. He appears to have a mutation that makes him uniquely qualified to deal with
this thing that brought you all here. I don’t know what that mutation is, or
how it works, but it did breed on, didn’t it? Until the last of his descendants
died trying to do what he’s come here, or been brought here, to do.”

“More than an inkling,” Daiyan said. She bowed in her
cradle, half in amusement, half in respect. “Our ancestors said, and some of us
still say, that he was the son of our sun-god. Maybe it was the sun that caused
him to be what he is. His powers, or his psi as you say, certainly seem to come
from that direction.”

“I’ve heard of stranger things,” Khalida said. “Still. All
of you together, with your combined skills and powers, ought to be able to do
anything that one man can. If that thing out there feeds on stars, and his psi
is keyed to them, can’t you do something similar? If you study him as he
studies you, can you learn to do what he does?”

“With time enough, maybe. I don’t think we have that much
left.”

Khalida had been catching hints of this. She had not been
paying attention. There was too much else to focus on.

Out here, with clouds boiling above and the sea tossing
below, it seemed suddenly both urgent and immediate. “Why? What’s happening?”

Daiyan was as calm as ever. Her voice smoothed the rough
edges of Khalida’s mood, though the words offered no comfort. “When you came
through the wall, it knew. It had been asleep; it woke. It’s working its way
free, now. We’ve tripled the guard on its prison, but the guards are barely
holding on. We’ve lost seven already. Four of them since yesterday morning.”

Khalida searched her face. The lines of it were subtly alien
and yet subtly familiar, as if she had always known them. “It was waking before
we came. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But your coming roused it fully.”

“He’s your bait this time. Your sacrifice, that you hope
will buy you the time and strength to put an end to it forever.”

Daiyan bent her head. She was not ashamed, but she was not
proud, either.

“He knows,” Khalida said. “I’m sure of it.”

“As am I,” said Daiyan. “We’re fools, aren’t we?”

“You’re desperate. You gave up everything, even your world,
for a gamble that might still fail.”

“It didn’t fail,” Daiyan said. “Even if we all die here, we
did what we set out to do. Our only fear is that it might go back where we came
from, and undo it all.”

“Ah,” said Khalida. She had not reasoned all the way through
to that. She should have; it was a failure of training that she had not.

Daiyan brushed a finger down Khalida’s cheek. It felt like a
kiss of cool fire. “I thought he would come alone, or with an army of
blackrobes. I never expected you.”

“Even in dreams?”

“I didn’t believe them.”

“I thought mages were great believers in dreams.”

“That one made me too happy. I was sure it had to be false.”

Khalida’s breath was coming short. “Are you sorry it wasn’t?”

“If we fail, and we all die,” said Daiyan, “I will be.”

The shuttle bucked and yawed. Khalida dived for the
controls. Daiyan reclaimed her hand, but the memory of her touch lingered.

Khalida was too happy. She knew it, just as she knew that
there was no way it could last. But she could not make herself care.

Dr. Ma could have died and gone to Paradise and been in
less bliss than she was on this rogue moon of Nevermore, trying to make sense
out of data that ranged between improbable and impossible. Even more wonderful,
she had to gather what she could through a child translator who did not speak
the language perfectly—and that language was like Old Earth Latin or classical
Mandarin, an artifact as ancient as the Sleeper in his tower.

Aisha could appreciate how she felt. Pater and Mother would
have killed to be here. Aisha was more tired than anything, and her head hurt
with the effort of bringing psi and science together.

Her psi, too. Being surrounded with it made it want to
spread and push and grow. It felt as if it was trying to crack her skull open.

Sometimes she got to sleep. On the third night or maybe the
fourth, she stumbled into the room she’d been given, near the long-disused barn
that the scientists had set up as a laboratory, ready to drop into the
oversized and excessively comfortable bed.

That was not going to happen. Aunt Khalida sat in the chair
by the window with her head resting on her hand. She looked asleep, but her
eyes opened when Aisha stopped in front of her. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did
you have a fight with Daiyan?”

Khalida blushed, which made Aisha want to laugh. But she
didn’t dare. “Daiyan is wrangling mages who have no intention of being
wrangled. I wanted a little quiet.”

“In my room?”

“The wrangle is happening in mine.” Khalida yawned. “I
suppose I could curl up in a corner of the lab. I’ve slept in worse places.”

Aisha was tired. That made her irritable. “Don’t be stupid.
This bed is big enough for six. Just don’t hog all the covers.”

“I promise,” Khalida said.

~~~

“Do you think we’ll ever go home?” Aisha asked Khalida.

Once she was in bed, of course she couldn’t sleep. Her aunt
was awake, too, turned away from her, lying very still.

Khalida rolled over when Aisha spoke. “I don’t know,” she
answered.

One thing about Aunt Khalida. She didn’t soften the truth to
spare the children.

“We aren’t, are we?” Aisha said. That had kept her awake:
that fear, even more than fear of the soul-eater. “This is where we’ll always
be.”

“Not necessarily,” Khalida said. “We are in a different universe,
but Dr. Ma thinks we made a gate when we came through, and that we might have
the coordinates to open it again. Though we can’t do it until that thing out
there is dealt with, because it feeds on gates. We’re purely lucky it didn’t
wake before we closed the gate.”

“We weren’t lucky,” Aisha said. “Rama and Ship were doing
something—shielding, hiding—to make sure nothing caught us. I think Rama knew
what we were coming to. Or guessed. Remember when he talked about a fish in a
pond?”

“And algae,” Khalida said. “I do remember. I wonder…maybe the
thing wasn’t just feeding on gates and stars. It was like our ship: it was in
the wrong place at the wrong time, and a gate caught it. It ate the gate the
way an animal chews off its foot to get out of a trap. But the trap surrounded
it, and eating the gate pushed it through another gate, and on and on. The
harder it tried to get back to wherever it came from, the deeper into the trap
it went. Breaking out into this universe didn’t help. It’s still caught. It can’t
get free.”

“Don’t tell me you feel sorry for it,” Aisha said.

“Think about it,” Khalida said. “If I’m right, it’s squeezed
into this tiny single cell of a universe, and it can’t get out. Of course it
wants to tear up anything that stops it. It went after the people who were in
charge of the gates, and not only did it not manage to destroy them, they made
its situation worse.”

Aisha still wasn’t convinced. “Umizad told us people of
another world tried to communicate. It ate them all.”

“Would you notice if an amoeba tried to talk to you?”

Aisha folded her arms behind her head and frowned up at the
beams of the ceiling. She was annoyed that she hadn’t thought of it herself.
From what everyone had been saying and reading and theorizing, it made sense.

“We should tell Rama,” she said.

“I’m sure he already knows.”

Now Aisha was sleepy, suddenly and almost completely. It let
down her guard so far that she said to the air, “You do know, don’t you?”

It felt as if he was there with them, but he lay in his own
bed on the other side of the house. Aisha heard his voice clearly.

“I haven’t conceived it exactly as you put it together,” he
said. “That it fell through a gate, and the gate trapped it—that it encompassed
universes, and was forced down into a single one—that succession of thoughts I
hadn’t come to.”

“That was our error,” Khalida said: “to think inside the
boundaries of a universe. Even when we allowed for two, we didn’t reckon on something
that belongs outside, that was never meant to shrink itself so small.”

“But if we make a gate big enough for it,” Aisha said, “won’t
we risk blowing this universe wide open? And maybe the other one, too, through
the gate we made?”

“Maybe there’s another way,” Rama said.

“Such as?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He left them with that, closing himself off, leaving silence
where his voice had been.

Aisha should try to get up. She’d put an idea in his head.
God knew how far or fast he might run with it.

She couldn’t force herself to move. She had to sleep. If he flew
off into another universe before she woke up, there was nothing she could do
about it.

~~~

For the second time in as many days, Aisha opened her eyes
to find Rama standing over her. She was sprawled across the bed, still in her
rumpled clothes. There was no sign of Aunt Khalida.

“We’re leaving tonight,” he said.

She sat up blearily. “
We
?”

“You weren’t going to insist?”

“Would you care if I did?”

He didn’t answer. He was gone as if he hadn’t ever been
there. Which in the body, she realized as she woke up a little, he hadn’t been.

Nobody else knew. She stumbled out of bed and got herself as
ready for the day as she could get. She was wanted in the lab; she had to
pretend there was nothing different about this morning than about any of the
others.

It didn’t make sense for him to leave in secret if he wanted
them all to help him with the eater. Unless he wanted to avoid a fuss at the
start. Or had a plan that didn’t include a planetful of psi masters arguing
over what to do.

They were doing that outside the lab this morning. Aunt
Khalida had brought back another shuttleload of sages, wild-eyed and
wild-haired men and women from an island without beach or harbor; it could only
be reached from the air.

Aisha doubted they had anything new to bring Rama, except
entertainment. And maybe understanding.

He was learning what made them what they were. Not just
their psi; their thoughts, and what they wanted, and what they dreamed of.

Their nightmares he already knew. He was one of them. The
eater was another.

Her day in the lab ended early. Dr. Ma was running data that
didn’t need translation, and Kirkov and a handful of mages had a new experiment
set up that involved telescopes and linked screens, focused on the star
nurseries deeper into this universe’s core.

What that had to do with the eater, Aisha didn’t know. It
didn’t matter. She would be gone when the eater’s prison rose over the
mountain.

Ship was ready. It waited in orbit, full and shimmering with
the stuff of stars.

It knew what they were going to do. It was afraid, but it
hadn’t dived into subspace or bolted for the other end of the universe. It was
like the rest of them. Rama led, and it followed.

They were all crazy. She ate as much as she could make
herself eat, put on clean clothes and packed what she could carry without seeming
obvious. Then she went to find Rama.

~~~

It was a longer hunt than she had planned. The light was
getting long and people were leaving the streets and the markets when she
tracked him down to the master mage’s house.

Umizad’s acolytes had the lamps lit though it was still
daylight outside, and were feeding Umizad and Rama and Khalida and Daiyan in
the small dining room that opened on the back garden. People here loved gardens,
and Umizad’s though small was considered to be very fine.

They weren’t enjoying it tonight. Umizad was getting himself
in trouble, and having much too splendid a time doing it.

“I am going with you,” he said to Rama, “and you two”—to
Khalida and Daiyan—“will stay here. I’m the connection you need to this world,
and they will be my—conduits, is that your word? I love that word. Conduits.”

“Not
my
word,”
Rama said. “I’m older than you, and my death wish is more finely honed. You are
not coming with me.”

“Of course I am,” Umizad said. His smile was as terribly
sweet as Rama’s could be. “We had better leave before too long. Some of my
colleagues aren’t as dense as we would wish them to be. They’ll be catching
wind of what you’re up to.”