by Judith Tarr
Between one step and the next, the walls opened. A room formed itself around her. It was the same room in which she had met with Mem Aurelia, or a close facsimile.
That place was nowhere near the part of the city in which she had thought she was. Psi tricks, she thought. She was too tired of it all to be angry.
It was some small consolation that Major Li looked ever so slightly disconcerted. The room was empty. The shields must be up: Khalida’s ears ached faintly.
“This is illusion,” Li said.
“You think so?” Khalida turned completely around. “Suppose she’s right,” she said to the walls. “The game’s up. You’ve trapped us. Now show yourselves.”
The walls said nothing. There was no door; no sign of entry on any side. They stood in a bubble, and there would stay, until their captors were inclined to let them out.
“I don’t think so,” Khalida said. She raised her pistol and took aim straight ahead: one direction being as good as any other.
A coiling in her backbrain brought her half around away from Li, flicked the pistol from kill to stun, and fired into blankness.
The walls melted. She caught a flash, a flicker of shadow, but the living presence she had been sensing was gone.
This must be a warehouse, abandoned for some time, by the thickness of dust on it. Major Li crouched in the middle of it. Her arms were over her head; she rocked back and forth as if in agony.
Khalida knew better than to touch a psi in crisis, but her voice, even at its sharpest, won no response. She dialed down the power in her pistol, aimed and fired.
Li dropped as the shadowy presence had, but stayed solid once she hit the floor. Khalida hauled her up and heaved her over a shoulder.
The unit was halfway to the other side of the sector, and time had gone strange. Khalida would have admitted to half an hour at the most, but the worldweb marked three hours since she entered the building.
She set her teeth. Maybe she was not so tired after all. Maybe she had had enough and more than enough of this world and its tricks and its damned bloody wars.
~~~
Major Li would wake with a killing headache, but she would live. Khalida leaned against the wall waiting for the transport, pistol set back to kill, and drafted her letter of resignation in her head—over and over, in a dozen different ways.
Building and street and, for all she could tell, sector were completely deserted. All the people had drained out of it, sucked like infection from a wound.
The deep sense of unease was back, throbbing at the base of her skull. She meant to ignore it, but the thirteenth iteration of her resignation had turned into a rant. She began to delete it, paused, saved instead—absently, as she moved away from Major Li.
The transport was almost there. Khalida set a finder beacon over the psi agent, laid her spare pistol in the slack hand, and went hunting.
~~~
Alone, without the taint of Psycorps around her, Khalida walked more easily. The thing she hunted had stopped moving. It was close, though still some little distance through the empty streets.
She must be walking outside the world. The city was too densely populated and the web too pervasive to tolerate this kind of emptiness.
Consider the ramifications, she thought. Psi and non-psi, and then a third thing. Psi-null. A thing the psis had made, that was neither psi nor not, but something…other.
Did they need a worldwrecker out of a pirate vid, or even Pele Syndrome, if they had this?
Plots within plots. Wars and enmities twisting on one another like the turns of a tesseract.
Khalida turned and walked through a wall.
~~~
The air was full of stars and singing. Khalida kept walking until the stars went away. She intended to walk until the game ended and she came to whatever point she was meant to come to.
“You must have been an exasperating child.”
Mem Aurelia floated in front of her, a cloud of shimmering pixels.
Khalida walked through that, too. “You’ve hacked the worldweb,” she said. “That I can see. Now let me out. Or am I supposed to die here?”
“We want you alive.”
That was not Mem Aurelia. She was younger and darker and somewhat less tall. Her hair was a cloud of black curls.
The room was ordinary, in the style of Ostia Magna: walls painted with a dreamlike landscape, floor a holomosaic, furnishings available on web command. The woman occupied a woven mat in front of a low table. On the table was a bouquet of stars.
Khalida sent table and stars flying. “No more,” she said. “I’ve been a pawn in every game that’s running on this sinkhole of a world. I’m done. Either settle your war or let the world go to hell. I don’t care which.”
“I think you do.”
“Can you read my mind?”
“You know I can’t.”
“I think you extrapolate. Cross-reference. Hack. Turn worlds into weapons. Psi was going to be the next stage of human evolution. But it’s not the only one, is it? They made you for their use. You’ll use them—somehow. I haven’t found the answer to that yet.”
“You don’t think that’s fair?”
“I don’t know what fair is. I just want to be done with all of you.”
“On that,” the woman said, “we can certainly agree. Shut down Psycorps, rid this world of them, restore our children, and then it will be over. No more war. No more Corps.”
Khalida sighed. “All you want of me is the impossible. Or this world ends.”
“Worlds end. Entropy rules. Do you blame us for saying we’ve had enough?”
No matter how hard she had tried, Khalida was caught in a trap she had been trained strictly to avoid. She must be objective. She must not judge, only adjudicate. Above all, she must not allow herself to fall into sympathy, let alone empathy, with one side of a war.
“I recuse myself,” she said. “I withdraw. I refuse.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Watch me,” Khalida said.
She turned on her heel, but the woman caught her. The hand on her arm was warm and strong.
“I won’t speak of what you owe us,” the woman said. “You did the only thing you knew how to do. This time, you know more. I would like you to know everything. To be able to judge fairly.”
Khalida turned back to her. “I am the last person you want sitting in judgment over you, or trying to negotiate anything either for or against you. I’ve already been used to destroy a city. Now I’m to be held accountable for destroying a world.”
“That, no,” the woman said. “They miscalculated, you know. Invested resources here that can’t easily or feasibly be transferred elsewhere. They need this world.”
“In a negotiation,” Khalida said, “the party that can afford to walk has the upper hand.” She shook her head. “They’re still playing games with me. Setting impossible conditions. They don’t believe they can lose.”
“They can’t afford to.” Finally the woman let her go. “Three days. Then it ends.”
One way or the other.
Khalida felt oddly light. Relieved. There was no possible way to meet Rinaldi’s conditions before the core tap went rogue. Which absolved her of that responsibility. Of all of them, really.
Except one. Her brother’s daughter.
She paused. “You have a name?” she meant to ask.
The room was empty.
More games. More impossibilities. She resisted the urge to spit.
The door, at least, opened, and the city beyond it was the one she knew. The worldweb offered her a map when she asked for it, and a route back to headquarters.
She took it, because there was nowhere else she would rather be. She could think there, in the shielded room. Make arrangements to get Aisha back offworld. Maybe even care enough to find her own way out of this multileveled trap.
33
Rama ran web searches with speed and efficiency that would have impressed even Jamal. Aisha shad
owed him. Maybe he was aware and maybe he wasn’t, but he didn’t block her.
He had the whole planet’s maps and surveys drawn up and one spot marked: the Ara Celi. The Altar of Heaven, which the planet was named for.
Aisha flew with him up the virtual valley, while the datastream ran through, repeating over and over what little anyone knew.
Alien. Old. Older than he was by some disputed number of millennia. It stood on what had been a tableland once, but was a column of granite now; the softer rock around it had eroded away.
It looked like a grotto, a cave in a mountain long since gone. Its walls were thick with carvings so worn they were barely visible. Simulations and enhancements offered suggestions, but it was obvious that no one knew what they really were.
Maybe Rama did. He spoke so suddenly Aisha jumped. “Marta. Plot a course to these coordinates, and arrange transport.”
“That area is restricted,” the not-quite-human voice answered, “and currently closed. The Institute for Psychic Research—”
“I require transport,” he said. Calmly. The code he ran through the web as he spoke made Aisha stare.
“That area is restricted,” the bot repeated.
“But the rest of the planet is not.”
“Approximately thirty-eight percent of the planet’s land mass is restricted, proscribed, banned, or uninhabitable,” the bot said. “Of the sixty-two percent that remains—”
“Transport,” he said. “Hire. Or buy if necessary.”
“Planetary law requires that all visitors be escorted by a licensed guide. Restricted, proscribed, banned, or uninhabitable areas are—”
“Marta,” he said as if to a living person. “If I wanted to be legal or traceable, would I be here?”
“No,” the bot said. Then: “Your illegal and untraceable transport will arrive in one hour.”
Aisha could have sworn the bot’s voice was just a little bit dry. Bots weren’t supposed to have personalities, but that didn’t mean they didn’t.
She was barely making sense, and now she knew when Rama intended to bolt. She slipped out of the web with extreme care.
She was ready when Rama called her out for katas. Ready and packed and as casual as she could possibly be.
He was as easy as Aisha could remember him being, loose and free, but with a snap and power to his movements that told her everything she needed to know. She didn’t try to mirror him. She’d have worn herself out. But she kept up, and she was proud of that.
~~~
He didn’t cut the session short, but he didn’t let it go on past time, either. “You rest,” he said, still light and free, but underneath he felt like the edge of a sword. “Eat. Sleep if you can.”
Aisha bit her tongue before she asked him what he was planning to do. He was going to slip out while she slept. That was as clear as the smile on his face.
He hadn’t needed this place to hide in. He could have gone anywhere. He wanted a safe place to stow Aisha. She’d wake up and find her aunt looking down at her, or someone else from MI, and then she’d be picked up and carried back to Mother and Pater. And that would be it for Nevermore.
She’d thought he knew her better than that. She pretended to be as stupid as he thought she was, yawned and stretched and retreated toward her room.
She couldn’t feel him watching her. He was preoccupied; he’d already forgotten her.
She gave it a few minutes, to be sure. Then she slipped around the back and down toward the street.
A cubby of a room opened just off the outer door, where a guard might sit, watching who came and went. The screens were mostly dead, but Aisha patched together one in the direction that mattered.
The transport was exactly on time, which surprised her a bit. It was a weird hybrid of a thing, half land vehicle, half aircraft, and she suspected it had armor in places where a legal transport wouldn’t have any.
The person who emerged from it was perfectly ordinary and perfectly casual. Nothing furtive about her. She walked past the room Aisha was hiding in, up toward the entry screen and the inner door.
Aisha darted out behind her. The rover had a security lock on it, but Aisha was ready for that. She hit it with Rama’s ident code and a spurt of his voice off the web.
The door opened. Aisha started toward it.
~~~
The world slid sideways. Everything—the air, the buildings around her, the planet underfoot—melted in a deep and singing roar of absolute pain and despair.
It was agony. And she couldn’t die of it. That was the worst part, the part that almost snapped her mind in two. That she had to keep on living, and feeling, and being…
The sun exploded around her. The voice in it was familiar beyond memory of names. “Focus. Focus on me.”
She didn’t have a choice, any more than she’d had to feel—that—
“Focus,” he said.
She fixed her eyes on a single dark point in all the blinding light. Little by little it grew, until she recognized Rama’s face. There was no mistaking that blade of nose.
She was back in her body again, and it ached. Something or someone had thrown her over the edge of a passenger cradle in a vehicle that was mostly a blur. She crawled down into it.
Someone outside was flapping and squawking. The pilot, she thought. She was proud of herself for being able to think that clearly.
Rama slid into the pilot’s cradle, already linked in to the rover’s systems. A shimmer of schematics played across the part of his cheek that she could see.
She must be imagining that. Her insides were still shaking from the awfulness of the mindsong.
The rover took to the air with its pilot flailing and screaming below. The web should have been screaming, too, but Rama had a grip on that.
He didn’t say a word to Aisha. He didn’t throw her out, either. She’d won that round, though she could have done with a little less agony.
The flight plan for the Ara Celi shimmered on the screens, but Rama veered away from it. Aisha could feel the pull in herself, the song that would not stop calling and calling.
He could fight it. He was strong enough. He was flying toward it instead, as straight as time and traffic would let him.
Some of that traffic started howling at them with official rage. He did something—Aisha was too fuzzled to be sure exactly what. Made the rover invisible, maybe. The howling trailed off.
She never had been afraid of Rama, but this made her blink. He honestly didn’t care for laws or rules or anything that existed in this time. It was a nightmare to him, that was all. Nothing about it was real.
She had to make it real to him. Somehow. He was awake because of her. He had to wake the rest of the way.
First she had to wake up herself, and get her body under control, while the singing went on and on on the other side of the sun that shielded her. Out there it was getting louder, and strong enough to hum in the rover’s hull.
She clawed up out of the cradle and staggered to the nearest viewport. They flew in a long arc over the city, angling toward the actual port, where the shuttles landed, and where spaceships built for planetary atmosphere could come and go.
Nobody came in now, though ships and shuttles went out at scattered intervals. It looked as if they were running away from the planet.
Rama brought the rover in low, in between surface traffic and actual, official airspace. He barely cleared the tops of buildings, or skimmed around them, smooth and so fast Aisha had to remind herself to breathe.
The rover shouldn’t have been that fast, even if Rama hadn’t flown it that way. Which told her it really was illegal and probably undocumented, and now stolen. Which made them pirates. Or criminals at least, if anybody caught them.
The port opened up just below them, a sudden stretch of open air and clouded light. Rain spattered the viewports. Whole swaths of landing pads were empty, and those that were occupied had many more ships loading than unloading.
“End times,” Rama s
aid, so sudden after so long a silence that Aisha jumped.
He seemed to be talking to himself, but she could feel his attention on her, wanting her to hear. “Psycorps’ war comes to a head. Culling pirates out of the city; sending the quicker-witted offworld before the cull reaches them. Forcing the enemy’s hand. Hoping they’ll be the first to blink.”
“But they won’t,” Aisha said. “Will they? Not that I understand much at all, but I heard Aunt talking sometimes, and we hacked her files once. The other side can’t give up. It’s at the wall. There’s nowhere to run.”
“Except up and out,” Rama said, “leaving devastation behind.”
“How long?” Aisha asked.
“Days,” he answered.
He sounded calm, but Aisha could feel how tightly he was holding himself in. Whatever he needed to do or see at the Ara Celi, he had to get there before it all went away. And then get away himself, but she couldn’t think about that. Because then she’d have to think about what they were getting away from.
Not to mention that they weren’t heading toward the Ara at all, but toward something somewhere on this hemisphere of Araceli that was screaming and screaming. Something huge; something completely and utterly alien.
“No,” Rama said. His voice was terribly mild.
The song was gone completely. Shut out. Pushed to the other side of a wall so wide and high there was no measuring it.
The rover bucked as if whatever was calling had tried to get hold of it. Rama snapped the controls, first sharply up, then in a steep banking turn.
The screens showed the original flight plan, and a modified one that included the port, and a map of the planet’s surface between the port and the Ara. Rama’s shoulders didn’t relax, but he let out a breath, and so did Aisha.
She wasn’t sure how she felt. Not glad, no. Relieved, maybe. Scared. That more than anything.
And guilty. Because whatever had tried to pull them off course had hurt so much, and been so desperate. She didn’t know what any of them could do, or how, or even why, but still. Something thought it needed them, and they were running away from it.