by Judith Tarr
He had backed her against the wall with nothing more physically forceful than words.
“Your machines are clever and ingenious and occasionally brilliant,” he said, “and your worldsweb would make the sages of my people weep for envy, but you know next to nothing of this thing you call psi, and as for the workings of the mind and the heart, it seems you have forgotten what little of it you ever knew. Machines have failed you, because you are what you are, and your Psycorps so maimed you that the rest could not help but happen. I’ve done what I can, but I have neither the talent nor the training to make you whole. That, you have to do for yourself.”
“How?”
“Piece by piece,” he said. “First believe. Then do.”
“You sound like a bad martial-arts vid.”
“Not all mindless entertainment is false. Some of it is rooted in the truth.”
“You are a bad fantasy vid.” She slid down the wall, squatting on her haunches, and hugged her knees. She could not tell whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
He could be a figment of her imagination, a nightmare like the one he had banished with a word.
He squatted in front of her. He was solid, for a figment. She could hear him breathing. He had a faint scent to him. It reminded her of Nevermore: the smell of earth and grass and rain.
That was alien. He had never had any rankness about him at all, even fresh out of stasis, with a beard to the waist and nails longer than his hands.
“What you suffered is part of you,” he said. “What you did was terrible. But it’s done. You can’t undo it. You can blunt the edges. You can learn to live with it. You can even, if you work at it, be happy.”
“You’re talking to yourself, too, aren’t you?” She blinked away tears that were there for no reason, that she had not even been aware of until they blurred her vision. “What if you have to do it all over again? What if you’re called back to the place where you did all those terrible things, and all the same choices are waiting? What do you do then?”
“Whatever I must,” he said.
“You’re stronger than I am,” Khalida said. “Or colder. I wasn’t brought up to be a warrior king.”
“You are a warrior,” said Rama. “Captain or king, it’s much the same. You do what you have to. You pay for it. You atone if you can. You hold it together, because tomorrow you may have to do it all over again. That’s as much mercy as you get in war.”
“What did you drive your troops with? Scorpion whips?”
“I never drove an army in my life,” he said, flowing to his feet. “I led.”
She glared at the door long after he had stalked out of it. “‘Just get over it,’” she snarled at the memory of him. “If it’s that easy, what are you doing in this age of the universe? Why aren’t you happily dead?”
He could have answered if he chose. The silence had a distinctly mulish quality.
One thing he had done. He had broken the feedback loop. It would come back—Khalida was hardly foolish enough to think it was gone. But she could function again, at least for today. That was worth something, whether she was happy about it or not.
23
“What is your name?” Aisha finally got around to asking Rama. They were nearly done with jump. She’d been lying low, expecting Aunt Khalida to corner her any moment and try to ship her back to Nevermore, but everything had been suspiciously quiet.
Everybody was waiting to get back into real space again, so real life could start up again, along with the worldsweb and all the news and orders and messages that brought with it. The night before that happened, there was captain’s table again, and this time Aisha was included.
She was helping Rama get ready. He never needed help with his clothes, but his hair was so thick and long, and he flat refused to get rid of it. It was like the torque he was wearing tonight: it had come with him from his own world. He wouldn’t let it go.
He said she was good at sorting out all the twists and tangles. He didn’t have the patience himself, if someone else was around to do it. She didn’t terribly mind. It was like curling blue-black silk, and once she got it to cooperate, with help from a brush and a comb and a tube of gel she’d begged off the purser, it looked perfectly presentable.
Meanwhile she had time to ask questions, and he was her captive. “I know your name isn’t Rama, or Krishna, either. What is it really?”
He knew better by now than to twist around and make her have to redo half an hour’s worth of work. “Does it matter?” he asked. “I like my new name. I want to keep it. My old one is best forgotten.”
“Why? Is it ugly? Silly? Would I think it was stupid?”
“No!”
She grinned as she finished weaving plaits and started working them together into a club at his nape. “So what was it?”
“Mirain.” He bit off the word.
“Mirain,” she said, feeling all around it with her tongue. “I like that. It’s nice. What does it mean?”
“It means Firstborn, and it was an old family name, and my mother gave it to me. Are you happy now? Mirain is six thousand years dead. My name is Rama, and I live in this world, where no one has ever heard of the horror that I used to be.”
“You were not a horror,” Aisha said. “I have another name, too, you know. My grandfather wanted to call me Meritamon, which is a very old name in Egypt, but Pater said that was no kind of name for a Muslim. So I’m Aisha. But when I visit Grandfather, I like to be Meritamon.”
“Meritamon,” he said. He put a lilt in it, that was his own original accent. “That is beautiful.”
“It means ‘Beloved of Amon,’” she said. “Amon was one of their sun gods: the great one, the one who ruled the rest. So you see, I can be two people, and have two completely different names. You can, too.”
“Was Meritamon a destroyer of worlds?”
“Of course not. Neither were you.”
“Only because my family stopped me.”
“You would have stopped yourself,” Aisha said.
“No,” he said. “Not by then. The one I loved most in any world was gone. She kept me from losing my grip on humanity. Without her, there was nothing left of me but fire.”
Aisha bound up the last of his braids, but played with them for a while, to keep him talking. “I can see the fire inside,” she said, “but you’re human. I’m absolutely sure of that.”
“That’s because I haven’t been tested yet. No one has tried to provoke me. I can afford to play at being human.”
“You’re not playing at it,” Aisha said with a snap of annoyance. “This is what you are. Not all of it, maybe. But enough.”
“So you hope,” Rama said.
Aisha shook her head, but she’d run out of time to argue. Captain’s table was in ten minutes, and she still had to put on her own clothes.
~~~
Dinner was formal and polite and perfect. They drank from crystal and ate with silver, and the food tasted wonderful.
Even Aunt Khalida behaved herself. She looked a little better, but she was avoiding Rama so carefully that it was obvious. She talked around him, and when she had to look toward his end of the table, her eyes slid past him.
Aisha could understand that. She was doing the same thing to Lieutenant Zhao. But Rama wasn’t anything like Lieutenant Zhao.
Except, Aisha thought, for one thing. Which happened to be the one thing Rama couldn’t let Psycorps know he had. They’d do worse than neuter him. They’d study him till there was nothing left of him.
That was true of too many people in this universe. Rama didn’t seem to care. He had people telling stories, so he could sit back and listen. That was one of the ways he studied the universe he’d woken up in.
People loved to hear themselves talk; Rama could get them going for hours. Aisha had seen him do it on Nevermore, when everybody got together for dinner and stayed on afterwards, drinking coffee and nibbling dessert and falling in and out of friendly arguments.
Thinki
ng about it made her miss it so fiercely that her eyes stung. When she got herself back under control, Lieutenant Zhao was looking right at Rama and smiling, and saying, “What of you, Meser Rama? You must have wonderful stories to tell, from your wanderings through the worlds.”
It was an ordinary enough question, and anybody might ask it. But something about it made Aisha’s head hurt. Lieutenant Zhao was pushing—testing.
Rama didn’t seem bothered by it. “It does fascinate me,” he said, “how many stories are the same from world to world. There is always a hero who endures great suffering in order to come to glory, or a villain who causes suffering and in the end pays a high price. Humans of any world, it seems, do insist on justice in their stories, though not always in their rulers.”
“You don’t believe in stories, then, Meser Rama?” Lieutenant Zhao asked.
“I believe in what is real,” Rama said.
“Not everyone has the same definition of reality,” Aunt Khalida muttered.
Aunt Khalida had been going for the wine while other people talked. There were reasons why Pater didn’t let people drink wine or spirits on the expedition, besides being a good Muslim, and this was one of them.
Aisha tried to think of some way to change the subject, but Lieutenant Zhao had already got his teeth in what Aunt Khalida said. “Really? How do you define it, Captain?”
Aunt Khalida looked him in the face. “How do you think?”
That confused him. He blinked. He even seemed a little sorry, though not enough. “There are certain standards that we all agree on.”
“Are there?” She shook her head as if she felt sorry for him. Very, very sorry indeed. “Rama’s wrong. Justice isn’t only for stories. It’s mercy we’re all short of.”
“Stories are meant to be true,” said Captain Hashimoto. “They’re life without the dull parts. All the best and worst: those things go into stories.”
“Usually the worst,” said Aunt Khalida.
“Light and dark are balanced,” Rama said. “One should never outweigh the other.”
The way he said it made Aisha’s skin shiver. The words were full of memory and sorrow and pain.
Aunt Khalida didn’t care. “You would know, wouldn’t you?” she said.
“Too well,” he said.
“The rest of us tell stories,” she said. “You are the story.”
He didn’t answer that. He hadn’t tried to stop her, either. She was getting them both in trouble. Really bad trouble, if Lieutenant Zhao understood even a tenth of what she was saying.
Captain Hashimoto saved them, maybe. “Everyone is a story,” she said. “Sometimes we know what it is when it happens. Sometimes it takes a while.”
She stood up. That was a signal for the final toast. If it came a little earlier than it should, nobody argued with her. There were so many currents swirling around the room, most of the people there must have been baffled. They seemed glad to escape.
~~~
Rama was so good at hiding what he felt that Aisha didn’t think anyone else knew how dark his mood was. Aunt Khalida must; she’d caused it. But she was busy getting reamed by the captain. Aisha could feel that even through the door.
Lieutenant Zhao wasn’t going to let Rama get away. There wasn’t much Rama could do to avoid him, but Aisha didn’t think he wanted to try. When Lieutenant Zhao followed him toward the lift, he paid no attention.
“Meser Rama,” Lieutenant Zhao said. “The hour is early, and I have a bottle of Dreamtime Cabernet in my cabin. It’s already open; jump will turn it to vinegar. Would you care to finish it with me?”
Aisha would have bet Rama would ignore him. She was horribly shocked when he said, “That’s kind of you,” and instead of getting on the lift, went down the corridor toward Lieutenant Zhao’s quarters.
The last thing Aisha wanted to do was get trapped in a ship’s cabin with a Corps agent. She ought to bolt; Rama wouldn’t blame her. But she couldn’t do it.
This was exactly what Rama needed her for. He might not know it and he certainly wouldn’t like it, but that didn’t matter. It had to happen.
~~~
She didn’t get offered any wine, but there was a case of synthorange. “I have a weakness for it,” Lieutenant Zhao confessed.
Aisha wasn’t thirsty. She didn’t much care for synthorange, either. But she took a bottle because it was the polite thing to do.
Rama was doing the same thing with the wine. He must have a plan after all. Aisha shouldn’t have doubted him. She probably shouldn’t have followed him, either. But she had, and so far it was all perfectly harmless.
If she’d ever stopped to think about what a Corps agent’s cabin was like, she’d have said black leather walls and spy screens everywhere, and a jab like a spike into her mind the minute she came inside the door. What she found instead was an ordinary cabin with jump cradles stowed and a bunk and a desk and a hatch into the lavatory. There weren’t any personal things. No pictures or databeads or scattered underwear. No evil machines for scooping out parts of brains.
Not that Lieutenant Zhao needed one of those. He was psi-three. He had one in his brain.
He was trying to use it on Rama. What had got his suspicions up, Aisha didn’t know. She wasn’t Corps. Please God she never would be.
Something had him sniffing around Rama’s edges, and Aisha’s too because she was stupid enough to be here. On the surface it was one of those deadly dull adult conversations that went on and on about nothing. Winemaking, weather, the difference between one glass of strong-smelling red stuff and another. Underneath, Lieutenant Zhao was trying to get inside Rama’s head.
Adults would never just ask what they wanted to know. Lieutenant Zhao must be getting very frustrated. As far as he could possibly see, there was nothing much to Rama but a stream of random thoughts and a taste of wine. He liked his wine sweeter, and not as strong.
Almost too late, Aisha remembered to hide behind the sun. Lieutenant Zhao had come so close she could feel him breathing. Maybe he couldn’t touch Rama, but he could definitely get at her—and the Corps would get her after all.
She lay as low as she could. He was focused on Rama, who was giving him smooth glassy surfaces to slide off.
Lieutenant Zhao said, “Do you know, I’ve found no record of your having been tested for psi. Do you happen to recall the name of the agent who tested you?”
“Should I?” Rama asked.
Lieutenant Zhao shrugged. “People usually do. Mostly they’re terrified of it. A few are actually eager.”
“I don’t believe I would have been either of those things,” Rama said.
“It’s no matter,” said Lieutenant Zhao. “Just curiosity.”
“Why?”
Rama was pushing. It was fair enough considering how Lieutenant Zhao had been doing the same thing, but Aisha wanted to scream at him to stop.
Lieutenant Zhao seemed a bit startled. People didn’t talk back to Psycorps. “It’s just a feeling,” he said. “A hunch, if you like. Sometimes I think we miss the best ones by testing so young. Not all talents mature at the same rate.”
“Whatever I am,” Rama said, “I’ve been since I was a child.”
“Still,” said Lieutenant Zhao. He lowered his eyes; he was sitting down, but he seemed to be shuffling his feet. “I wonder if I might ask permission to test you again. You’re under no legal obligation, of course. Testing is only compulsory for citizens in their thirteenth year.”
“What happens if you find something?” asked Rama.
“I’ll invite you to accompany me for further testing.”
“May I ask where that would be?”
“In the sector we’re about to jump into,” said Lieutenant Zhao, “we would go to Araceli.”
Aisha felt Rama come alert. “That could be interesting,” he said.
She wanted to kick him. One psi agent wasn’t much compared to Rama, but Psycorps had thousands of them. No matter how strong he was, if enough of them got
together, they could swarm over him and drown him.
And they would. The minute they found out what he was, they’d eat him alive. They wouldn’t even leave a molecule for the archaeologists to fight over.
Lieutenant Zhao almost seemed as if he might save the day after all. “I could be wrong,” he said. “Sometimes, especially in jump, we pick up false readings; we think we see things that aren’t there. I hope you won’t be disappointed if you turn out to be perfectly normal.”
Rama shrugged and smiled. He was straight out of his mind.
“We can begin now,” Lieutenant Zhao said. “It won’t take long.”
That was all Aisha could take. She jumped up. “Rama, you’ve got to go. It’s getting too close to jump.”
“You go,” said Rama, “I’ll be back before the last alarm.”
“But what if you aren’t?” Aisha demanded, not even caring if she sounded desperate. “You can do this later.”
“I’m going to do it now,” Rama said.
That was his iron voice. Nothing Aisha could say would budge him, even if she could have said it in front of Lieutenant Zhao.
She dropped back down into her seat. “It’s on your head,” she said.
“But not yours,” said Rama. “Go.”
She stayed where she was. Her heart was hammering and her eyes kept blurring, but she wasn’t moving unless he was. He could take them both down if he was going to do this.
“Not you,” he said.
She hadn’t seen his lips move. She folded her arms and set her chin and showed him who else could be stubborn.
24
Aisha was ready to fight if Lieutenant Zhao tried to send her out, but he hardly seemed aware of her at all. He sat in front of Rama, looking hard at him. Rama looked back calmly.
He was used to people staring at him. He wasn’t either embarrassed or uncomfortable.
After a while Lieutenant Zhao flushed and looked away. “I promise I’ll do you no harm,” he said. He sounded oddly distracted.
“Nor I you,” said Rama. He had that faint smile, the one carved on his statue back on Nevermore.