Forgotten Suns (6 page)

Tears ran down Rama’s face. He pressed his forehead to the
antelope’s forehead and cried.

And the antelope let him. He stood the way Jinni stood when
Aisha needed a hug more than anything.

Then Rama did something completely, totally insane. He
caught hold of the hank of mane at the antelope’s withers and swung onto his
back.

That was it. Aisha was done with him. She couldn’t watch him
die.

She couldn’t stop watching, either. The explosion wasn’t any
worse than Lilith had given him. It was the same kind of thing: testing,
feeling him out, getting the balance.

Just the same. Rama rode it the same, too. If anything he was
more comfortable with that big, long neck in front of him and those horns
spearing the sky. They couldn’t put his eye out unless the antelope aimed his
chin straight up, which he wasn’t built to easily do—any more than a horse was.

This was a wild animal. Feral, Mother would say. Mother was
precise with her terminology. Domesticated once, but gone wild for thousands of
years.

Aisha would never have known it to see this one. Rama didn’t
ride long. Just long enough to get the bucks out, get a sensible walk and a bit
of trot, then he slid off and smoothed the black mane and said in Old Language,
“Come.”

The antelope came. So did his wives and his stepdaughter.
They followed the horses—and Jamal wide-eyed and as speechless as Aisha was—away
from the plain and into the city and straight to the corner paddock with the
shedrow shelter, that happened not to have horses in it at the moment.

~~~

Nothing ever surprised Vikram, but Aisha thought he might
be as close to it as he ever got. He took in the new additions, checked that
they had water and hay, then found Rama in the tack room, taking apart one of
the old saddles.

“Horse backs aren’t quite the same,” Rama said when Vikram
came in, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation and not right at the
beginning. “We’ll need to rig the bridle differently, too.”

“You’re planning to ride those things?” Vikram said.

Aisha bit her tongue. It wasn’t her place to say Rama
already had.

Rama smiled at Vikram. “Wouldn’t you like to see me try?”

“Why?” Vikram demanded.

“Why not?”

“Your funeral,” Vikram said, the way everybody did sooner or
later with Rama.

Except Aisha. She had observed that when Rama set out to do
something, he knew he could do it. He never tried anything totally impossible.

“Before you lay me in my tomb,” Rama said to Vikram, “will
you help me with the saddle? I can see what it needs, but I’m not familiar with
this kind of tree. Show me what to do.”

Vikram shook his head, but he sat down on the workbench and
pulled the half-dismembered saddle over toward him and held out his hand. Rama
put the seam ripper in it. A moment longer and their heads were together, wavy
black and steel grey, turning a horse saddle into an antelope saddle.

~~~

Jamal was a menace with a computer. Mother said it, and
she would know. She was fairly dangerous herself.

Aisha caught him the day after Rama brought the antelope in,
pretending to take a nap but actually deep inside the house web. She’d been
looking for Mother’s articles on antelope, but a tweak in a search string led
her to Aunt Khalida’s files and a fragment of code that Jamal hadn’t quite got
around to hiding.

She slipped out of the web as stealthily as she could, ducked
down the hall to his room and sat on him. She was still heavier than he was,
though just barely.

He came out of the web with a lurch and a squawk. “
Hey!
What do you think you’re—”

“What do
you
think
you’re doing?” she shot back. “You know what happens when Aunt Khalida catches
people hacking her files. Do you really want to be locked out of the web for a
tenday?”

“The way you were?” He scowled at her. He’d been practicing
Pater’s patented expression again; it didn’t work as well on his thin boy-face,
and he’d have to grow much more imposing eyebrows. “Do you think she knows what
Rama is up to?”

“Why?”

He pushed at her. She stopped sitting on him and perched on
the end of the bed instead. He sat up and hugged his skinny knees. “You don’t
think it’s weird that he’s training wild antelope to ride?”

“I think everything about him is weird,” she said. “What
were you doing in Aunt Khalida’s files?”

“Nothing.”

He barely looked guilty, which told her all she needed to
know. “You couldn’t get in.”

That stung him. “I would have, if you hadn’t ripped me out.”

“You’re lucky I caught you before she did.”

“I was almost there,” he said, and now his scowl was almost
of Pater proportions. “She has to be running searches to find out who Rama is.
Or what. I want to see what she’s found.”

“She hasn’t found anything,” Aisha said. “You should have
asked. I could have told you.”

“I hate you,” he said mildly.

“I hate you, too.” Aisha fixed him with her firmest stare.
“Look. Whatever happened to Aunt before she showed up here, she’s a right mess.
I don’t think we should cross her any more than absolutely necessary. And that
includes getting caught hacking her personal files.”

“I won’t get caught.”

“No, you won’t. Because you’re not going anywhere near
them.”

“Says who?”

“Says you, if you just wake up to yourself. It’s not worth
getting grounded to come up with nothing, and you know it. If anything does
show up, we’ll find out. One way or another.”

One thing about Jamal: if she pushed hard enough, he
actually stopped to think. He was still scowling, but he’d stopped arguing.

“What Aunt doesn’t know won’t hurt us,” he said. “Fair
enough about the files. But, Aisha, there are
antelope
in the barn. Sooner or later, she’s going to—”

“Make it later,” Aisha said.

~~~

Aunt Khalida might not have found out at all until
everybody came back, except that one day she wandered down past the barn,
looking for something in the staff cabins and not paying attention to anything
else, and walked right through the antelope pen.

She found herself face to horns with the male. It wasn’t a
threat exactly. His stepdaughter was playing with her shadow in the corner, and
Khalida had come between her and the rest of the herd.

Khalida stopped. The baby, encouraged by her mother’s
calling, skittered past. The male backed away, bowed to Khalida, and left her
standing there with her mouth open.

Aisha found that out later. The first she knew of it was a
bellow like a drill sergeant’s, loud enough to lift the schoolbot off its
moorings and set it bouncing against the ceiling.

Aisha had never heard Aunt Khalida in full cry before. It
brought Aisha and Jamal out of the classroom and Vikram out of the cabins, but
she wasn’t calling them.

Rama took his time answering. He had a polishing cloth over
his shoulder and a bridle in his hand.

Once she had him in front of her, Khalida went back to her
normal volume. “I’m sure you can explain this,” she said, jabbing her chin
toward the herd.

“They’re lovely, aren’t they?” he said. “The mares are all
in foal. By spring we’ll have a proper herd.”

“What do we want a herd of antelope for?”

Aisha could feel the thunder rumbling in that. She could see
Rama wasn’t going to do anything to calm it down, too. She butted in with as
much wide-eyed innocence as she could. “It’s an experiment, Aunt. Remember that
paper you and Mother wanted to write about alien riding animals? We’re going to
prove your thesis.”

“The children are,” Rama said smoothly. “I’ll be the
illustration. I’ve adapted a saddle for the stallion, and rigged a bridle.
Would you like to see?”

“You can’t call them mares and stallions,” Khalida said
through clenched teeth. “They’re not horses.”

“No,” he said, “but they were bred for riding. I’ve been
teaching the stallion his basics. See.”

He held out his hand. The male snorted at Khalida and danced
on tiptoe around her, and slid familiarly and comfortably in under Rama’s arm.

He was smaller than the average male of his kind, about as
tall as Jinni, but he was sturdy and well made like Rama, and he was laughing
at Aunt Khalida. Aisha could feel it. It tugged at her lips and made her want
to laugh, too.

Khalida’s eyebrows had gone up. “Basics are turning a wild
animal into a lapdog?”

“Basics are obedience and discipline and”—Rama raised his
arm and sent the stallion out in a circle around them all, tossing his head and
flagging his tasseled tail—“the skills essential to a ridden animal. Correct
gaits and paces. Balance. Ability to carry a rider with ease and grace.”

“First a thief,” Khalida said. “Now a riding master. What
will you turn into next? A starpilot?”

“That’s your skill,” he said. “When I’m done with this
gentleman, he’ll consent to let you ride him. Then you can write your paper
from experience as well as knowledge.”

“Experience is no authority,” Khalida nastily. She stalked
away. Her back was stiff; it got stiffer the more Rama laughed at her.

Still, Aisha thought, most of that was temper. She actually
was fascinated. Give her a day or two to get over it and she’d be out there
with Rama, trying her hand with one of the mares.

Rama had bet on it. He had a second saddle started, and the
bridle in his hand wasn’t a horse bridle. It was made for the wider-set ears
and smaller muzzle of an antelope, without the extra buckle on the side that he
needed to get the headstall over the stallion’s horns. Mares had none, which
made bridling them much simpler.

“You’re evil,” Aisha said approvingly. He grinned at her. He
was as pleased with himself as a male ever was when things were going his way.

Khalida was losing her grip. Walking through a paddock she
had assumed was empty, not even seeing the herd of horse-sized animals until
she was in the middle of them, was worse than idiotic. It was dangerous.

She was damned lucky the animals were, somehow,
domesticated. That needed examination, but not today. Today she had to examine
herself.

She could keep falling apart without any effort to stop it.
She could kill herself. Or she could scrape together what was left and make the
best of it.

Everything should be so simple. MI had run her through
therapy, declared her repaired, and sent her on leave to finish the process.
She had another six tendays to reinstatement. It was fully expected that she
would return to active duty.

What had not been expected was that she isolate herself so
completely. On an actual inhabited planet she would have had ongoing therapy,
constant supervision, and an expectation of complete recovery.

That was why she had come here. She had not wanted to get
through it. She wanted to feel the whole of it. Every corrosive drop of guilt.
Every nightmare.

Now she was seeing things even when she was not asleep.
Hearing voices. Plucking feelings from the air. When she walked through rooms
in the house, she could taste the people who had been in them since they were
built, layer on layer of memories.

That was her mind dissociating. Disintegrating. It was
supposed to be putting itself back together.

She had no appetite for dinner. Jamal pounded on the door
and went away. When Khalida gave way to the jabbing in her stomach, she found a
tray, and dinner still hot inside the tiny stasis field.

She ate a few bites and pushed the tray aside. The computer
pinged at her.
Subspace message incoming,
said the crawl across her vision.

It was from MI. Again. She let it file itself as unread, yet
again. The computer informed her that she had forty-seven unread messages.
Forty-three were from MI in its various incarnations. Most of them were flagged
as urgent.

The computer did not count all the other messages she
deleted as they came in. She considered deleting the ones from MI, but she was
not that far gone. Yet.

The walls of her room closed in on her. Ah, claustrophobia.
It had been a while since she had a bout of that. She should have seen it
coming today when she went on an errand she never had finished, even if she
could have remembered what it was.

The house had quieted down. Everyone was in bed. Khalida
went up the ladder to the roof.

Whether the people of this world had used their roofs as
rooms for sleeping or eating or cooking in hot weather and for growing gardens
all year round, the archaeologists were still arguing. In this house, because
Rashid and Marina had restored it, the roof was an extension of the rooms
below.

The Brats were supposed to tend their mother’s garden up
there with its boxes of vegetables and its row of fruit trees in pots. One
corner, which had a view of the city, had a long table and a crowd of chairs
and benches. The staff had meetings up there in season; they could sit for
hours arguing about this find or that theory.

If Khalida half-closed her eyes, she could see them: Rashid
in his usual spot wearing his usual scowl, Marina up and pacing as she argued,
Shenliu stretched out long and lazy on a bench, and last year’s interns in a
huddle, wide-eyed and too shy to speak.

One of the figures in the vision stayed when she opened her
eyes to the night. The moon was rising, huge and red, with its cratered face
and its white cap: it was winter in the north of the moon, and the icecap had
spread as far as it would go.

Rama leaned on the parapet that rimmed the roof. His head
was tilted back. The moon’s light bathed his face in blood.

Khalida’s first impulse was to turn on her heel and stalk
back into the house. But why should she have to leave? Let him go if he wanted
to be alone.

He did not move, but he knew she was there. She felt him
feeling it, a uniquely strange sensation, like being two people at once.