Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  34

  The Ara might be on the same continent, but there was a great deal of land between it and the port, and most of that had various forms of restricted airspace. Though Rama might not care, whatever he was doing to cloak the rover took energy, and even he had to think about conserving that.

  Aisha helped him plot a course that wouldn’t trigger any alarms—she hoped—but that would get them where they needed to go in as little time and with as little power usage as possible. They’d have to fly through the night; he wasn’t going to stop, still less find a place to sleep.

  She was wide awake, though she knew she should rest as much as she could. She foraged in the rover’s galley, fed herself and bullied Rama into eating with her. Then she noodled through the web, not really knowing what she was looking for—news, she supposed. Warrants out on a pair of rover thieves.

  She didn’t find any warrants, but the web was humming. Sweeps had started in the port. Whoever was in charge of the planet was purging pirates, rounding them up or chasing them offworld.

  Which explained what Aisha had seen and what she hadn’t. Probably no one would have time to run after two nobodies who’d stolen a rover, if they were going for much bigger criminals.

  Probably. She kept the stream going, with flags on anything that might have to do with them or the Ara, and curled up in the cradle and let herself doze.

  ~~~

  They flew through the night and the rain. Cities came and went below, with larger and larger stretches of open country in between. The maps said they were leaving neutral territory and getting closer to land that, officially or not, belonged to Psycorps. On the map it was labeled Castellanos Maior. Greater Castellanos, that meant.

  The warning came out of nowhere, sometime before dawn. “Ten minutes. Ten minutes to power shutdown.”

  Aisha snapped awake. “What— There’s no way! We have more than enough power to get where we’re going.”

  “Not if we’re shut off from the grid.” Rama was as calm as ever.

  “But we’re not supposed to be on the grid.”

  “Evidently we are,” he said under the blare of the rover’s system listing available landing places.

  There weren’t many. The nearest didn’t even try to pretend it wasn’t a Corps station.

  Aisha’s mind wanted to spin and spin in hopeless panic. She’d tried to think of everything. The course she’d helped to set, the hacks she’d used, how could they have—

  Didn’t matter. They were going down, and the Corps would have them. Again. Rama wouldn’t make it to the Ara, and the worldwrecker would get triggered, and it would be all over for Araceli, and Nevermore, too.

  Rama muttered something to himself. It sounded like swearing, but not in any language she knew. He sat back away from the screens, as if he’d let them go. Aisha felt the grid lock on and start to take control.

  The rover bucked once, and the system shut off. Voice, screens, everything. They sat in the dark, with rain rattling on the hull.

  Light grew very slowly. Aisha braced for impact, but the rover was still in the air, and still moving.

  The light came from Rama. It was low, no more than a shimmer. It made the small hairs of her body prickle, and there was a faint hum in her ears.

  That came from him, too. He was singing softly, hardly more than a whisper.

  It felt as if the song was holding the rover up and keeping it on course. Which wasn’t exactly true, or couldn’t be. He was focusing his psi. Letting the music and the words carry them toward the Ara.

  Calling the sun into the sky, too, with long shafts of light under the shield of cloud. In the middle of the song he sighed, and the rover speeded up.

  ~~~

  They left the clouds behind and flew into a bright and rain-washed morning. The country they’d flown into was stark and rugged, broken into deep rifts and crevices, with sudden sharp uprisings of naked stone.

  One of those uprisings stood at the top of a deeper valley than the rest, carved out by a ribbon of river. Aisha recognized it from its virtual image, and the trail of petroglyphs winding up the column, with the deep slot at the top.

  It was bigger than she had imagined, and higher. There was room in the grotto for the rover to land, with space left over to get out and walk the circle and peer at the carvings in the old, old stone.

  The niche in the deepest part was big enough to pose a statue in. Its edge carried an arch of ancient writing, but the rest was plain, rough and barely worked, like an afterthought.

  Rama traced the faded carvings, moving slowly around the grotto. Sometimes he paused.

  The carvings weren’t in any of the styles of writing that Aisha had seen on Nevermore. That didn’t seem to be stopping him. He frowned as he went; his lips moved, as if he had to work out what the letters or characters said.

  The ones that framed the arch were different than the rest, to Aisha’s eye. They looked more like pictures. Dots and circles, and small spiky things in patterns that made her think of—

  “Star systems,” she said aloud. “It’s a map.”

  “Yes.” Rama had been across the grotto, but now he stood beside her.

  Aisha traced the shape of one, and then the one above it. There was a dot between, though when she peered closer, it looked like a tiny spiral. Like a galaxy, but not exactly.

  “Subspace route?” she wondered.

  “Something like that.”

  She frowned at him. He was even more than usually hard to read. As best she could tell, he wasn’t happy. Disappointed, maybe. He hadn’t found what he’d hoped to find. Or not quite what he’d hoped for.

  “This is the way,” he said, following the star systems up and over and down the arch. “It’s as clear as it dares to be. But I can’t—there is no way—”

  “You need a ship,” Aisha said.

  “These aren’t paths for ships,” he said.

  “Then what are they?”

  “Gates,” he said. “Strings of pearls across infinity, each pearl a world, but how the gates were made, or by whom, or for what, no one ever knew.” He let out a sharp breath. “It’s all here. All the signs. The promise—but there’s no gate. It’s gone, if it ever was at all.”

  This was enormous. Aisha couldn’t even measure how huge it was. “Is there one on Nevermore?” she asked.

  “Not any more,” he said. “I fear they’re all gone. All broken. No gates left anywhere.”

  “There has to be one,” Aisha said. “Somewhere, one must exist. Or what is all this for? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It must,” he said. “I’m missing data. Misreading the messages. Not understanding some crucial thing, some key—or it’s somewhere else. Another system. Another world. A new message, a clue—”

  Aisha was still trying to get her mind around it. Gates—like in old stories. Portals from world to world. No need for a ship or a subspace drive. Just step forward and be lightyears away from where you started.

  Rama had honestly expected to find one here. Or a guide to one. What that told her about the world he’d come from, the culture that made him—Bronze Age, Pater had estimated, give or take and allowing for differences between worlds and species…

  Civilization wasn’t just technology. She’d managed to forget that. This living atavism with his golden treasure and his edged weapons was a psi master above anything she’d ever heard of, and now she understood why space travel hadn’t baffled him, either. Ships he hadn’t known or needed, but interstellar travel was nothing new to him at all.

  He thought Psycorps was a pack of amateurs and poorly educated children. Was that what he thought of spaceships, too? Slow and cumbersome and oh, so primitive.

  It would have been humiliating if it hadn’t been so horribly funny. She couldn’t laugh; she was past that. She was even past being scared.

  “So,” she said. “A ship. Navigation systems can process the maps here, and plot courses from system to system. It won’t be instant, but it can be d
one.”

  “It could take years,” he said. “Lifetimes.”

  “Or not.” She tapped a system halfway up the nearer curve of the arch. “This looks like the one we’re in. The one on the bottom, with four others in between—isn’t that Nevermore? So we’ve jumped a handful already. If we figure out how to bypass the rest, and where it’s all leading us—what we’re supposed to find—it could take no time at all. Relatively speaking.”

  “That supposes the map is linear,” he said, “and the way is straight from world to world. And that this”—he stooped and brushed the bottommost swirl of star-dots on the farther side—”is where we’re meant to go.”

  “That’s why we need a ship, and a navigation system. To plot the course and see where it leads.”

  “It can’t be that straightforward,” he said, stubborn. “Or they’d have left all this on Nevermore, and not sent me half across the galactic arm to find it.”

  “So get a ship and run the coordinates,” Aisha said. She could be at least as stubborn as he could.

  “That easily? On a world at war? That may not even be here tomorrow?”

  “Why not?”

  He glared. Then he laughed. “By the good god, child, you’re starting to talk like me.”

  “That’s a bad thing?”

  “Very.”

  “We’d best get at it,” she said. “Can you keep all the maps in your head or do you need web access for that?”

  “It’s here,” he said, but he didn’t tap his head; he touched his chest over his heart.

  Different culture. Different ways of seeing the world, and the worlds.

  “So,” she said. “A ship. Back to the port?”

  “Maybe,” he said. He paused for one last long scan of the Ara, and especially the arch; then he turned toward the rover.

  35

  They had an instant’s warning this time, like a storm wind gathering itself to roar.

  The song that had been silent since they left the port broke over them with such force that Aisha looked wildly around, expecting to see whatever had sung it. Then she realized that the rock underfoot was swaying, and a slow crack spread upward through the carvings in the wall past the arch.

  They both dived into the rover. The hull was no protection from the song, but at least it held together, and the engine fired when Rama hit the controls.

  The rover lurched. Stones rattled on the roof. The Ara was coming down.

  Aisha couldn’t even squeeze her eyes shut, let alone breathe. The passenger cradle strapped her in, jerkily, while the rover lurched again, then leaped forward.

  There was no flight plan. No plan at all except to get out as fast as mechanically possible.

  The Ara Celi buckled and folded and collapsed on itself. The rover tried to go down with it, sucked into its vortex, but Rama extracted every last bit of power out of the straining engine and his own psi, and held it to a rocking, bucking, groaning hover.

  Dust billowed over them, darkened the sun and slowly dissipated. The song still screamed all around them.

  Rama aimed the rover straight at it. Aisha might have squawked—she couldn’t tell; no other sound in the world could penetrate that vast and appalling cry.

  It wasn’t growing louder. It took her a long while to realize that. Little by little, it was starting to fade.

  When Rama tried to turn the rover aside from it, it erupted again. The rover’s hull warped visibly. He wrenched it back in the direction the song wanted him to go.

  ~~~

  Everything was completely out of control. Maybe Rama knew what it was all coming to, but Aisha’s imagination had lost its ability to keep up.

  She ventured a tiny poke at the rover’s web access. It was weak and intermittent, fading in and out, but with a little effort she could make it make sense—enough to get the maps working, and activate the forward screen.

  They were flying away from the port, deeper into Corps territory. The map called it Montecito: a ring of mountain ranges around a wide flat valley.

  The mountains were clear enough, but the valley refused to come into focus. The far west end wouldn’t record at all, except as a blur of mist and rogue pixels.

  Wrestling with the web helped keep her sane. She teased out a set of older maps that showed the valley more clearly.

  Well, she thought. No wonder it was shielded.

  It was a spaceport. Part of it looked like the larger port she’d landed in from the Leda, but the far end was different. Instead of open landing fields and long, wide, high shuttle bays, it held wells for deep-space ships. Those almost never came down into atmosphere, but when they did, they flew under null-g and settled into gravity-controlled cradles.

  It said something for how important this place was, that it had half a dozen of these enormously expensive wells, which meant the tech and the staff and the capabilities that went with them. Psycorps had to have built them, and be using them, too.

  She hacked a connection from the old map to the new one, and then patched it in to an observation satellite that had a tiny spark of bandwidth available. The connection was rough and blurry, but she persuaded it to zoom in.

  Five of the landing wells were empty. The sixth, the one on the very end, looked like a piece of starless space floating above the deep curve of the well.

  Aisha rubbed her eyes. They kept wanting to see the blackness, but when she looked directly at it, all she saw was the shape of a much more ordinary ship in a cradle: long and tubular, with rows of ports like a planetary skyliner.

  Spaceships could look like anything they wanted to. This one was downright boring. No frills or nacelles. No shiny metal or clusters of modules like shimmering bubbles, no wings or struts or solar sails—though those wouldn’t hold up to a planet’s gravity.

  The awful song came from the ship, or from something inside it. It was pulling them in.

  One of the screens in front of Rama came alive, streaming data off the web. Aisha hadn’t done that. Rama had his own hacks going, and she hadn’t even picked up that he was doing it.

  The stream was a lot of official data: ship’s registration, cargo and passenger manifests, flight plans and routes traveled.

  Research vessel Ra-Harakhte, commissioned out of Beijing Nine, assigned to—

  Then like what she’d seen in the well, the stream jumped and lurched and settled, and what it said was completely different.

  Experimental ship, commandeered from scientific expedition, passengers and crew detained, interim commander—

  Pirated. Though since it was the Corps, which could do whatever it wanted, they used that other word. Commandeered.

  The words didn’t matter. All that mattered, and all she could hear or see any more, was the song. She felt as if it had lodged in her bones and set her blood on fire.

  She fought to see through it. The ship wasn’t just sitting there. Things were happening around it. Cars flitting back and forth. Shapes moving on the ground.

  Fighting?

  “Rama,” she tried to say. “Rama, we have to turn around. Or stop. Or something. We can’t—”

  He ignored her. His back was rigid.

  Aisha concentrated on breathing. The rover skimmed the mountaintops and slid down the slopes into the valley, passing over knots and clusters of buildings and the occasional road. Whatever protections the place had—and they must be strong—didn’t seem to see or touch them.

  The screens kept working. The web feed came clearer now they were in the valley. Energy weapons flashed, and knots of struggling figures pushed up against the landing cradle.

  Whatever was in the ship had stopped screaming, but the soft moan of agony made it worse. Rama stopped pretending to operate the controls; he made his way to the rear and dug in a locker back there, coming out with two sidearms and a fistful of charging belts.

  Aisha took the ones he handed her. Her fingers felt numb. She knew how to shoot. Mother had insisted on it, as long as she was going to live on a planet full of w
ildlife and almost empty of humans. The thought of shooting at people made her sick to her stomach.

  “You won’t be shooting anyone unless they shoot first,” Rama said. “Once we’re down and out of the rover, stay behind me. Don’t break; don’t go off on your own. We’ll use the fighting as a cover.”

  “For what?” Aisha demanded.

  “We’re going in,” he answered.

  ~~~

  The rover floated down on the far side of the landing well, away from the worst of the fighting. No one tried to stop it.

  Rama swayed a little getting out: the first sign Aisha had seen that he was pushing his limits. She’d started to think he didn’t have any.

  He got his balance and took a breath, then ran lightly along the edge of the well. The ship loomed over him. It was huge: Aisha couldn’t even see the top, or either end. From where they were, it blocked out the sky.

  The fighting was concentrated on the other side, where the entrance must be. Rama had his eye on something else—cargo port, Aisha guessed, from what she knew of starships.

  This one, close up, wasn’t like any she’d ever seen, with her eyes or on the web. Its hull was a weird, shifting color, like oil on dark water. The ports looked like eyes: the same kind of liquid curve, and the faintest hint of motion.

  That had to be an illusion. The hull curving and flexing toward them—that wasn’t. The well curved with it, irising open directly in front of them.

  Rama never even hesitated. He ran straight in.

  Aisha did stop. It was dark inside except for a faint glow. She couldn’t see anything but Rama’s shape against it, getting smaller as he ran deeper.

  Someone shouted: words she couldn’t catch. A knot of people ran toward her down the length of the ship. A fighter buzzed down on them, blasting them with plasma bolts.

  She fumbled for the pistol Rama had given her. She didn’t have any thought on her head, just a kind of blank Oh, shit.

  He sprang past her, pushing her back toward the ship with one hand while the other swung up and aimed. Above the running people. At the fighter with its Corps logo.