by Judith Tarr
“Like MI,” Jamal said. “I get it. The less everybody knows, the less there is to find out.”
And, Aisha thought, the less trouble Aunt Khalida would get into for letting a total stranger babysit her brother’s offspring when she was supposed to be doing it. The fact Rama was completely trustworthy in that respect would make no difference whatsoever. Pater was hard line about responsibility, and Aunt had been slacking it.
Everybody had reasons for wanting to keep people in the dark about Rama. “I’ll go tell him who he is now,” Aisha said, and got out of there before anybody could stop her.
They did try. Jamal was loudest. “Hey! It’s your turn to put the dishes in the cleaner!”
~~~
“That’s a good story,” Rama said.
He’d had Jinni saddled, and Lilith too, when Aisha got to the barn. She thanked him for that.
The antelope stallion was not happy. Not in the least. He wanted to go out. He wanted to do the running and the carrying. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. Not because he’d been wild only three tendays before; Rama didn’t worry about such things. The stallion needed more practice carrying weight.
So he stayed with his wives, roaring and ramping and screaming, and Rama and Aisha rode toward the middle of the city. They stopped beside last year’s excavation, the building with the round paved floor that was probably a temple.
While the horses grazed around the broken pillars, Rama and Aisha sat on one that had fallen down, and shared a fruit pastry. Aisha had told him who he was supposed to be once everybody got back, and he smiled. “Walkabout,” he said. “That’s like a journey, yes? Such as a priest would take, to discover the world and himself.”
“People on Dreamtime don’t do priesthood,” said Aisha. “They’re not that formal. They go ’way back, did you know? Thirty thousand Earthyears, more or less.”
He widened his eyes. “That’s old,” he said.
“About as old as anything human gets. When everybody went into space, some of them went walkabout. One way and another, most of those ended up on Dreamtime. Now when the young ones go out, they go all over, but they always head back home. Just like in the old times, when home was an island continent on Earth.”
He nodded. His eyes were dark and as soft as they ever got. “I went walkabout when I was young. Maybe it’s time I did it again.”
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “You can’t leave! You just got here.”
“Did I say I was leaving?”
“You said—” She sucked in air. “Never mind. It was the way you said it. Are you really from Dreamtime, then?”
“No.”
She went still. “You remember, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
His eyes understood. Without stopping to think, she said inside her head, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
He hadn’t said it aloud.
She stilled even more. “I’ve got it, haven’t I? The thing. What Aunt Khalida had. Has.”
He bent his head. Neither of them needed to hear him say it.
“You do, too. Lots of it. Lots and lots. But Psycorps didn’t take you. Did it?”
“It never found me,” he said.
“I wish it would never find me.”
There. She’d said it. She hadn’t been thinking about it. Much. About how the tendays were spinning on, and she was getting closer and closer to the day when Psycorps would come. Because it always came. Even to the remotest places, where a person turned thirteen Earthyears, and the law said she had to be tested.
On populated planets, parents took their offspring to Psycorps stations. In places like this, Psycorps came to them. She had her appointment. It had come in yesterday. She would get a present for her birthday: a Psycorps agent with his testing protocol.
“That’s what they call it,” she said. “Testing protocol. Like who gets to speak first at the summit meeting. Or who gets taken off to a processing center.”
“Is that what they do? Take you away and turn you into sausage?”
She didn’t want to laugh, but she couldn’t help it. “Just about. You get more testing. The more you pass, the more they teach you. Eventually you turn into an agent. Or they decide you won’t work out, and neuter you.”
“Yes,” he said in his throat. “That I have seen. Your aunt was there for a while, wasn’t she?”
“Half an Earthyear,” Aisha said. “She never talks about it.”
“She doesn’t remember.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t want to,” Aisha said. She had to say it, because if she didn’t, it would tear her up inside. “I’m just like her. Everybody says that. I don’t think I’m that bitchy, but I haven’t been through all she has, either.”
“Nor will you,” he said.
“How do you know? Can you see the future?”
“That’s not my gift,” he said. “I’m making you a promise. Psycorps won’t do a thing to you.”
“Look,” she said. “Don’t go killing the agent to save me. That will just make everything worse.”
He bit his lip. It was kind of him not to laugh. “I will not kill the agent. Here,” he said. “Look.”
He held out his hand. He had the sun in it. The real, literal sun. She could see the swirls of superheated gas, and the streams of plasma licking out from the edges, and a spot drifting across the center.
It was an incredible thing. Really incredible—unbelievable. She stretched out a finger, terrified to touch it, but positive that if she didn’t, she would never stop wishing she had.
It didn’t sear the skin off her bones. It was warm, and there was a weirdness to it, a snap and tingle. But mostly it felt like the palm of a hand—as if his skin was transparent, and the sun was underneath.
“Remember this,” he said. “When the agent comes to test you, keep it in your mind, directly behind your eyes. Let it be all you think of.”
“What—” said Aisha. It was hard not to think of it, with it burning and flaming in front of her. “What in the worlds is it?”
“Magic,” he said.
“There’s no such thing,” Aisha said.
“Of course there is. You just call it something different. This, Psycorps would say, is a highly evolved manifestation of psi talent.”
“‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’” said Aisha. “That’s one of the Clarkean Laws. There’s another one, from someone else I don’t remember, that says the opposite is true, too.”
“Is there a law that says psi and magic are essentially the same thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. Can that thing in your hand really help me with the test?”
“One of the things it is is a key,” he said. “It can open any door. It can also lock that door, and keep safe what’s inside.”
“Like me? And the thing inside me?”
“Just like that,” he said.
“I think you might be dangerous,” she said.
“I am,” said Rama.
She wasn’t afraid. She never had been, even when she first saw him, when he looked and was so wild. She took his hand and held it in hers, to cool it a little. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said.
10
The expedition came in on the usual tradeship from Marduk: one of Mother’s family connections. Rashid had done a little trading of his own; the ship would stay in orbit for a tenday, and a flock of tourists would flutter and flap its way around the planet, escorted by genuine xenoarchaeologists.
That was not the first time Rashid had paid his passage in that particular way. It explained the range and apparent excess of Vikram’s preparations. Khalida should have known, but she had had too many other things on her mind.
One of those things proved not to be nearly as fragile as she had expected. When the shuttle came down on the plain outside the city, Rama was ther
e with the rest of them. He watched the ship descend with open fascination and no perceptible fear. He lent a hand with the unloading and the sorting out of people, and helped set up the tents for the guests.
She did not know why she should have expected him to hide in a corner with his arms over his head, babbling about metal birds and fire from the sky. Maybe because she was tempted to do just that. A world occupied by four other humans and an assortment of animals, she could handle. This onslaught taxed her narrow limits.
She had to expand them, and fast. The shuttle offered an opportunity she could not afford to waste.
It came with a pilot and a handful of crew, all of whom were taking a few days’ leave planetside. That first day, in the confusion of unloading, she calculated would be her best chance.
She wandered onto the bridge on the pretext of looking for lost luggage. The pilot was young, bored, and desperate for someone intelligent to talk to—by which she meant, able to talk about ships and flying and the yacht races around Earth system.
The old skills came back fast. So did the sense of familiarity when Khalida sat at the console, leaning back in the chair, arguing the relative merits of solar sails and cosmic-dust propulsion. Well inside of an hour, she had Meichan convinced to take a well-earned break under an actual sky. Meichan set the security locks before she went, but she made the mistake of letting Khalida see what she was doing.
It was blissfully quiet after she left. There were still voices and banging and rumbling of machinery elsewhere on the ship, but those were muted here.
Khalida took a deep breath. There was nothing quite like the taste of ship’s air, with its faintly canned, faintly stale undertone. It made her surprisingly homesick.
The security locks were standard models, childishly easy to hack if one was MI and trained to memorize keycodes on sight.
It all came back in a rush. She would pay later, but not until she had what she came for. The shuttle’s system lay wide open. Through that, she got into the main ship’s system—and that was connected to the worldsweb.
The sheer, overwhelming rightness of being open to the universe again was as much as she could stand. She let it roar on past her while she found her balance. That took a while, but she had allowed for it.
Her MI codes still worked. That had not been a sure thing. She still had her clearances. She set up a flock of proxies and sent them off in carefully random directions while she aimed for the target.
Psycorps was hell to hack. She had had tendays to plot a strategy. The codes she fed in, with search strings embedded in them, were designed to mimic Psycorps’ own internal systems.
Subspace relay was fast, but it was not instantaneous. She filled the time by calling up the flight simulator and running the latest pilots’ testing module.
Both sets of results came up at the same time. She had renewed and upgraded her license, and there was no reference anywhere in Psycorps’ accessible system to a humanoid entity of Rama’s genetic description.
Something else had come up, too. Something that pinged a dummy string, or so she had thought when she coded it—just before the hacker alarms went off.
That ping nearly laid her open to Psycorps’ internal security. A voice pulled her out just before it swallowed her whole. “Have you seen a pink tesser-bag? Sera Lopakhina will die, simply die, if she can’t find it.”
Khalida blinked stupidly at Rama. The weblink had cut off. He was smiling at her, completely oblivious. She pointed at the object he was looking for, which glowed pinkly under the auxiliary console.
It was amazingly pink. He fished it out and held it gingerly, regarding it with a kind of horrified amusement. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that color before. Does she really keep all her baggage in here?”
“Wait till you see what comes out of it,” Khalida said. Her focus was coming back, along with some minimally useful fraction of her intelligence. “We caught a thief once who had stowed a whole shuttle in one of these, complete with cargo.”
“Was it pink?”
“God, no,” she said. “That would have taken hiding in plain sight to a whole new level.”
So, she realized, had he. His accent, his expression, his whole tone and presence, had changed in ways she would never have expected. While she digested that, he tucked the bag under his arm, saluted her with a fair imitation of a Spaceforce snap, and sauntered off the bridge.
She stayed until the pilot finally remembered to come back. Her mind chewed over and over what she had stumbled across while she searched for something else. It was a file label, to which a file should have been attached, but the alarms had triggered before it could download. All she had was the file name, Araceli, and the designation, Operation Incomplete.
She was not quite crazy enough to reactivate the search. She had covered her trail just well enough this time, thanks to pure chance. If she tried it again this soon, she might not be so lucky.
~~~
Dinner that night was a mob. They ate on the roof, where there was table space enough for them all; the Brats, who had done most of the cooking, played host until Marina chased them off to bed. Their protests had the air of a formality: they were worn out.
“I see they didn’t blow up the planet,” Rashid said long after dark. The tourists had been herded to their tents, and the staff and students were either asleep in their cabins or snoring under the table. Rashid and Khalida and Marina sat together under the moon, finishing off the last of the coffee.
Khalida blatantly and selfishly emptied the pot. “You’ve been gorging on it for tendays. I haven’t even seen real coffee since before you left.”
“This time we brought enough to last us,” said Marina.
“We’d have had enough last time if it hadn’t been for greedyguts here,” Rashid said, grinning at Khalida.
She bared her teeth in return, and paused for a long, bitter-blissful sip. When she came up for air, her brother went back to what he had been talking about before. “So you kept Aisha away from the explosives and Jamal from hacking into Spaceforce Central. I salute you.”
“They found other things to get into,” Khalida said.
“Less destructive, at least,” said Marina. She stretched and yawned, looking no older than her daughter, and not much larger, either; but the glance she darted at Khalida was wickedly sharp. “How long did you say the antelope have been in the paddock?”
“Three tendays now,” Khalida said. “Almost four.”
“And they’ve never even tried to take the wall down?” Marina shook her head in wonder. “Who would have thought it?”
“Vikram says we’re not to blame the Brats for that,” said Rashid. “That’s his new assistant’s project.”
“It is,” Khalida said.
“Vikram never mentioned that he felt overworked,” Rashid said.
“He doesn’t,” said Khalida. “But when your old shipmate’s offspring shows up looking for a berth, what do you do?”
“Yes,” said Rashid. “What do you do?”
Khalida knew what he was waiting for. She gave it to him. “He’s clean. No civil or criminal complaints anywhere in the system.”
Nothing at all in the system, but neither of them needed to know that.
Rashid sat back, cradling his mug in his hands. “So I’ve got a new hire to do the paperwork on, and he’ll probably up and take off before I get it all filed.”
“Why bother?” Khalida said. “He’s on walkabout. He’ll earn his keep while he’s here, and the rules won’t let you pay him, just feed him and give him a place to sleep. Vikram can look after him.”
“That’s what Vikram said,” said Rashid. Khalida held her breath, but he did not seem to find it suspicious that they had their story so carefully rehearsed. Marina, who was more likely to smell a lie, had curled up with her head on Rashid’s shoulder and fallen abruptly and deeply asleep.
Khalida observed her with envy. Most people lost that talent when they grew out of childhood.
>
Rashid was still wide awake. His eyes rested on Khalida, clear-sighted in the crimson moonlight. “You’re looking better,” he said.
She shrugged. “It had to happen sooner or later.”
“I’m glad it happened sooner.”
That was as close to sentimentality as anyone in their family was likely to come. Khalida shot it down before it reduced them both to mawkish sobs. “Can’t wait for me to go wandering off again, can you?”
“Just make sure you get everything catalogued before you go.”
“Oh no,” she said. “I’m not staying here for the rest of my life.”
“That’s too bad,” said Rashid. Half of it was mockery, and half of it was not.
Khalida pushed herself out of her chair and kissed the top of his head where the hair was starting to thin. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay till the hordes have blown off down the spaceways. I’ll even help clean up after them.”
11
The first few days after everybody got back were always crazed. The schoolbot stayed on shutdown, and Aisha and Jamal had to help get all the new people settled and deal with the tourists and make sure nobody got into anything they shouldn’t. Mother and Pater were itching to get back to excavating, but the best they could do in the uproar was make sure last season’s work was still there.
To add to the confusion, the tribes had finally followed the antelope to their winter camps. Of course the tourists wanted to take their shuttle and harass the “dear primitives”—that was what they were saying, loudly, as often as they could find someone from the expedition to screech at.
It was never any use to try to explain the difference between a real primitive, if there had ever been any such thing, and a postapocalyptic remnant. The most one got for that was a blank stare and, if one was Aisha or Jamal, a cloying, “Oh, isn’t that darling?”
The parents had the usual plan in place, but that always waited for the tourists’ next-to-last day. Meanwhile everybody suffered, and staff got to take turns leading tours of ruins as far as possible from any tribal camps. The city by the eastern ocean, which was built all in circles, was especially popular—and it took so long to get there by rover that people had to stay overnight.