Forgotten Suns (57 page)

“Life is a grand gamble,” Daiyan said.

She had taken her time leaving the breakfast gathering. She
found Khalida in the room they shared, sitting stiffly on the ledge by the
window. Mountains soared above her and a grand storm piled up over the peaks,
but she barely saw it.

Daiyan’s arm circled her shoulders. Daiyan’s lips brushed
her hair. “If we die, we’ll die together. I plan to live. I expect you to do
the same.”

“I’m out of the habit of that,” Khalida said.

“Then it’s time you got back in.”

Khalida wanted to snarl, but Daiyan would laugh. She pushed
herself away instead, and said, “All right then. Where does this expedition
start?”

“With the rite of the dead,” Daiyan answered, “and a
gathering of mages.”

“Psi masters.”

Daiyan’s smile was her only response.

~~~

They laid Umizad to rest high on the mountain, where the
masters of mages were set in a cave without door or barrier to the wind and the
rain and any animals that fed on the bodies of the dead. The bones of his
predecessors were arranged tidily in niches, skull beside skull and femur
beside femur.

Khalida the archaeologist had much to observe and compare.
Khalida the renegade and lover helped lay the mage’s body on the stone table in
the center of the cave. It was cold and stiff and unexpectedly light.

She was more than a little sorry that they had removed it
from the ship’s strange and beautiful storage chamber. That would have been a
marvel in this place. But tradition was stronger than alien wonders.

Carrion birds were already circling as the mages began their
ritual. That particular chant must serve as a summons, and the interplay of
light and psionically manipulated air only served to keep them from closing in
before the rite ended.

They played his life in the cave, images of Umizad as child
and man, novice mage and journeyman and master. He was older than Khalida might
have believed, though not quite as old as the crossing into this universe. He
had done wonderful things, and terrible things, and one last, splendid, deadly
thing. Now he rested, and they left him to it, descending on foot as they had
ascended, back to the city and the preparations for departure.

~~~

A thousand would go. The
Ra-Harakhte
could hold that many, with the stores they needed. Many
more would have gone, but if this insanity succeeded, and the gate held, it
would only be the first expedition.

Khalida refrained from contemplating the ramifications of
that. She had enough to do with ferrying supplies and then people up to the
ship, and keeping her mouth shut when she was near either Rama or Daiyan.

They were set on this course. So apparently was everyone
else here. She might have suggested that they take a smaller number, and look
less like an army and more like a scouting force, but Rama answered that for
her in her hearing.

Dr. Ma had doubts, too, having to do with cargo mass and
availability of fuel. Rama replied, “The more psi masters we have with us, the
more likely we are to be able to do this. The ship is our life support. Our
propulsion, and our jump drive, is the combined power of all these mages.”

Dr. Ma grimaced. “That word,” she said. “Even realizing it’s
a translation, it makes my head ache. We’re not conditioned to make these
conceptual connections.”

“You’re doing very well,” he said.

He had not comforted her, from the sourness of her
expression. Khalida followed him out of the lab, intending to run through a
stream of questions that various persons had prevailed on her to ask, but a
delegation from one of the cities waylaid him before she could begin.

King or not, he was spending an exceptional amount of time
hearing people out and answering questions and settling disputes. They seemed
unable to help themselves, and he lacked the will or the capacity to refuse.

She had a few hours before the next shuttle run, and no task
urgently demanding she do it. She retreated to her room, with nothing more
elaborate than sleep in mind.

Daiyan was not there. She had her own considerable part in
this adventure, and it ate even more of her time and energy than it did Khalida’s.

Khalida stretched out on the bed. It smelled of the herbs
the cleaning staff sprinkled on it every morning, and faintly of Daiyan: a
little musk, a little sweetness. Slightly but distinctly alien and blessedly
familiar.

She was half asleep already, drifting down to the edge of
dream. Lately she had been dreaming of stars: not the crowded galaxies and
infant stars and vast expanses of undifferentiated dust and gases that made up
this universe, but the stars of home. An older universe, well expanded, mapped
by the peoples who inhabited it, and named in their various languages.

Because she was human and inclined by nature and culture to
perceive herself as the center of it all, she focused on that infinitesimal
part of it which constituted human-inhabited space. Earth-human, she corrected
herself; the stars she mapped carried human names and human designations.

The map from the Ara Celi was part of it. So was the route
through Kom Ombo to Starsend. In her dream there were layers of space, with
truespace in the middle and jumpspace below and…something…above. Skin of the
bubble. Boundary of the universe.

Because she was dreaming, she took it all in without either
doubt or disbelief. She was nearly as vast as the eater of souls, but
infinitely less predatory. She could have been the ship’s elder sister,
swimming through the layers of space, taking it all in and focusing, simply
because she could, on Starsend.

To the senses of her dream, the near-abandoned habitat was a
dim glow of clustered lights. Human minds and human bodies, most so faint as to
be almost dark.

Those would be the nulls in stasis. Their protectors shone
brighter, but they were very few. The one who was brightest lay on the edge of
the inhabited zone, and the quality of the light told her he too was dreaming.

She spoke his name in the dream. “Zhao.”

He roused sluggishly. He had been deep asleep, and his dream
was nightmare: fire and screaming, and unbearable pain, and mind after mind
burning to ash.

He dreamed the fall of the Corps in Araceli. Khalida almost
left him to it, but her dream-self paused. “Zhao,” she said again.

The fire retreated. “Captain Nasir?”

“Lieutenant Zhao,” she said, since they were exchanging
defunct titles.

He focused sharply, suddenly. He was almost awake. “You’re
alive? This really is you?”

“Don’t wake up!” she warned him. “I’m alive. On the other
side of the sky.”

He held on with some difficulty to the state between waking
and sleep, where psi was strongest—or so the mages said. “You survived? All of
you? The thing you followed—is it—”

“Gone.”

He almost lost control and woke. But not quite. “Where are
you? How are you finding me?”

Khalida did not have exact answers for that. “Here,” she
said. She had a hand, she realized, and there was a line in it, a length of
braided rope, like a horse’s lead. “Take this. Don’t let it go.”

He took it. Wound it around his hand, to hold it fast.

If there had been a horse on the other end, that would have
been a very bad idea.

Magic is metaphor.

She heard it in Daiyan’s voice. Daiyan, whom she had found
in dreams.

Her dream was fading. “Don’t let go,” she said, though he
was already far away. “Don’t—let—”

“I’ve got it,” Khalida said.

She stumbled out of bed toward the solar flare that was
Rama, not caring who else was around him. Only after she had spoken did she see
the inner council of this world, and Elti glaring at her for interrupting what
must have been a grand rant.

What Khalida had to say mattered more than any demands or
arguments or objections that these people might be indulging in. “I found the
way,” she said. “I’m hooked on, but I don’t know how long I can hold it.”

Rama was not the rioting fire that he had been. The fight
with the eater of souls had drained him dry. He might recover most of it with
time, but what had come back so far was a quieter strength, with less of the
crazy edge that had got him into so much trouble both before and after he was
locked down in stasis.

He was still a psi master. Training trumped talent, MI’s
instructors never failed to remind recruits. He saw what Khalida gave him to
see.

Once he had it, they all did. Elti’s mouth shut with a click
that seemed to echo in the sudden silence.

“Yes,” he said with deep satisfaction and a distinct sense
of relief. “You have it. Now we can go.”

~~~

No one else could hold the link, though others could feed
Khalida strength. Even with that, she had not been lying. She could not hold it
indefinitely.

Everyone who was already on the ship would go. Anyone who
had not embarked on the shuttles would stay. There was no more time. They went
now, or they never went at all.

Khalida’s life was one departure after another. This might
the strangest. It might also be the last.

She could not both pilot the final shuttle and keep the link
straight in her head. She flew as passenger with Rama in the pilot’s cradle,
and Aisha and Daiyan on either side of her. The shuttle’s hold was full of
supplies and the last few dozen travelers, some still in nightclothes with
their baggage in hasty bundles.

One of those travelers was Elti. That had startled Khalida,
and dismayed her profoundly. Of all things they did not need, that contentious
personage ranked high.

Yet there she was, silent for once and camped by one of the
ports, watching her world drop away below. She had more than enough psi to fill
the berth, and more than enough ambition to hope to rule the homeworld once
they had returned to it.

Khalida could not keep alien politics in her head along with
the link across universes. She shut her eyes and let herself drift back to the
outer edge of dream.

~~~

The
Ra-Harakhte
was ready and eager to fly. It had fed deeply and well, and the addition of so
many psi masters made it frankly giddy. If it had been a horse it would have
been running in mad circles with occasional leaps and twists.

Rama had all he could do to keep it under control. He laid
in the scientists’ course with Khalida’s refinements, paused to be sure it was
locked in, and let the ship go.

It knew the way with a surety that nothing human could
match. It had the taste and the feel of that other universe in it, pulling it
through the edge/surface/interface of this one.

Aisha had been the interface on the way out. She was there
now, quiet, holding steady. She was the key. Khalida was the hand that turned
it, and the lock in which it turned—both at once, interchangeably.

Words were not enough. Searching a worldweb came closer, and
piloting a conventional starship in some ways closest of all. It was a shiver
in the skin and a prickle in the back of the skull, and a dream that lingered
long after the dreamer woke.

The temptation to fly apart in the moment of transition was
even stronger than it had been on the way out. All the universes begged her to
flow into them. She could be everything, and in everything. She could be vaster
than the eater of souls.

“Khalida.”

Daiyan’s voice, soft on the edge of the infinite. Calling
her back to the thread that connected her to one universe of them all, and to
the body in which her vastness was, however briefly and uncomfortably,
contained.

She rode the waves of her name from universe to universe,
into the heart of an almost-sun. The ship dived straight through, sleek as a
dolphin in a sea, and leaped joyfully into open space.

The link still held, the thread of connection that had
brought them through. Khalida adjusted the ship’s course, aiming more directly
toward it.

One of the forward screens in the bridge came alive. Zhao
stared out of it, thin to gauntness but both alive and conscious. Marta stood
behind him; the warm of her smile washed over them all. She opened her mouth to
speak.

The screen went blank. The ship rolled. The course Khalida
had set disintegrated and re-formed, veering away from Starsend. Jump alarms
whooped and shrilled.

In the instant of shock before jump, Khalida felt something
break away from the ship’s web. A dataspurt, directed—

Jump blinded and deafened her. The thread that had bound her
to Zhao snapped, flinging her headlong into the dark.

~~~

Khalida woke in the soundless cacophony of jumpspace. It
seemed unusually full, or else she was unusually sensitive to the things that
swam those incalculable seas.

Memory flooded. She stemmed the tide and sorted the flotsam.

They should be orbiting Starsend. Not in the middle of jump.

What—

She extricated herself from the cradle. The bridge was in
jump mode: deserted, the screens dormant.

All but one. Aisha perched in front of it, absorbed in what
looked like an academic dissertation.

It was, Khalida realized, a collection of writings from the
rogue moon. She was building a guide to the language, and to its writing that
was sometimes a set of ideographs and sometimes an alphabet. Khalida had not
studied it enough to understand the logic behind it.

She was not going to begin now. She knotted her hands
together to keep from hauling the child up and pinning her against the
bulkhead. She armed her voice instead, and blasted Aisha with it.

Gently. “What did you do? What was that databurst you sent?”

Aisha looked up from the screen. Her eyes were wide and
innocent. “I didn’t put us in jump. That was Rama and the mages.”

“The databurst,” Khalida said. “What was it?”