by Judith Tarr
“You don’t know what that is. Does he?”
“Not as far as I can tell.”
“Lovely.” Khalida rubbed her eyes not because they were aching but because they were not. She felt strange.
Alive.
She could leave Rama to it. Let him live or die on his own. The Corps would gut him if it could.
She would gut the Corps if she could. If helping Rama solve his mystery would make that happen, she was glad to do it.
For the first time since her first tour to Araceli, she had a mission she was actually glad of.
That was what was strange. She was happy. It was dark and full of shadows, but there was no mistaking what it was.
“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll take care of communications. You watch him. If he tries to take off without us, don’t let him. He’s going to need backup wherever he goes. No matter what he thinks.”
Aisha nodded. “He has enormous powers, but they’re not unlimited. He does these impossible things, and then he crashes. He’ll never find what he’s looking for if he tries to do it alone.”
“You should go home while you can,” Khalida should have said. The words would not come. If Rashid ever got hold of her, he would throttle her for keeping quiet.
Maybe Marina would, or maybe she would not. Aisha was young, but she knew her own mind. Marina would understand that.
Khalida understood familial duty. She also understood the need to do what was necessary. Rashid was a man, and traditional at that—a long and ancient tradition of protecting the women and children. Regardless of whether the women and children either wanted or needed protection.
None of which Aisha needed to hear. Khalida said instead, “I don’t think he’ll go before the concert. His honor won’t let him, even if his ego would.”
“I’ll watch him anyway,” Aisha said.
“You do that.”
~~~
Aisha went off to be a guard. Khalida had a different kind of guarding to do, once she had worked her way into MI’s web and set the codes that needed to be set.
Whatever Rama had done, he had done it thoroughly. MI was pulling out of the system altogether—calling in scouts and surveillance vessels, shutting down bases. Packing up all their kit and loading it for transport.
“Impossible,” Khalida said through the heavily shielded uplink to the Ra-Harakhte’s web. “Six thousand trained personnel with all their support staff and infrastructure, and another ten thousand shadow ops agents scattered across the system and out into the Great Beyond. All following orders without a word of objection. All—”
The former Lieutenant Zhao had not been visibly pleased to receive her ping, but he was conditioned to be amenable. He heard her out, until she stopped in frustration.
“All chipped,” he said. “Linked to MI’s systems. Connected on the web.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she demanded—angrier than she wanted to be, but unable to help herself. “You’re a psi-three. Beside him you’re a spark in a plains fire, but you understand these things. The kind of manipulation that can move an army—how is he still on his feet? Why hasn’t he burned himself out?”
Zhao sighed over the link. He sounded terribly tired. “This is nothing I have ever heard of, let alone seen, but I can tell you the expenditure of psi was minimal. I barely felt it. It was like a tug on the hem of my mind: enough to notice, but certainly not strong enough to bend my will as he bent theirs.”
“You never knew the ship was in pain, either,” Khalida said. “I don’t know why I expected you to be any different with this.”
He flicked the link from audio-only to visual. She saw the matte darkness of one of the ship’s bulkheads, and a screen full of stars, and almost incidentally, his worn and hollow-eyed face.
“You are not seeing the obvious,” he said. He was trying to be severe, but it was not in him. It came across as prim. “They are all chipped. Connected on the web. He hacked their implants, Captain. It’s no more complicated than that.”
“Those implants are not hackable. There is no way—” Khalida broke off. “All right. Suppose he could do that, and even manage to keep my implants out of it, which implies a level of control that—well.” She hauled herself back on course. “Between what he’s learned from my excessively talented young relations, and what he’s seen of the rebels on Araceli, he might have had examples to follow. But the sophistication of it—it’s downright elegant. It reads as orders from Centrum. Properly formatted, solidly supported, and absolutely incontrovertible. Centrum says withdraw. Therefore they withdraw.”
“‘Theirs not to reason why,’” Zhao said.
She snarled at him, but absently. She had been thinking mind control in the raw sense of psi acting on the human consciousness. This was much more. The Bronze Age warlord had not only taken to cyber technology, he had treated it like a subset of psionics.
That, she could not say to this agent of the Corps. “I’m surprised your people haven’t tried it.”
“It’s banned,” Zhao said, and he seemed honestly horrified.
“That would stop them?”
He blinked. She was pushing, she knew it, but no Corps agent deserved better. “You must have had the same lessons in manipulation that I did. The most effective intelligence agent thinks faster, thinks deeper, and thinks around corners. She steps beyond the tidy box of everyone knows. She stands outside and looks in, and sees what those inside lack the perspective to see.”
More than that, she thought as Zhao frowned, pondering what she had said. The being called Rama was an alien in a universe and a time that meant nothing, that was all new, without ingrained understanding or underlying assumptions. He took the nulls, the Corps, and the web, and turned all their variations on power into a weapon that could empty a system of its military presence.
“Genius,” Zhao said slowly.
For a moment Khalida was sure he had read her mind, but then she remembered to breathe again. If he had, he would never have been so close to calm.
“Really,” said Zhao. “It’s brilliant. He’s run a master con on an entire system’s worth of armed forces, cleared the system for long enough to do what he has in mind, and then he’ll go. By the time United Planets can begin to act, he’ll be long gone.”
“And us with him,” Khalida said.
He peered at her through the link. She could feel him trying to reach into her mind after all: a sensation like a limb going numb, a faint, vaguely uncomfortable tingle. She met it with blankness and the polished surface of a mirror.
He flinched. She hoped, not kindly, that he had a headache. “Aren’t you even a little bit afraid?” he asked with the first hint of temper she had seen in him.
“Of Rama?” She snorted. “Compared to what we had to cope with on Araceli? Not particularly. He doesn’t mean us any harm, unless we get in his way.”
“I wish,” said Zhao, “I could be trusted with the truth. There’s no sign of anyone or anything like him, anywhere within United Planets. Anywhere. He’s not a child; I believe—I know—he’s older than he looks. Where did he come from? How did we never have to contend with him? Because, Captain, the kind of man he is, he would never be content with obscurity. Tides of events swirl around him. He shapes those tides. He makes them turn to his will.”
“Why,” Khalida said, “you’re a poet. And a precog. Aren’t you?”
He bent his head. “It’s not my strongest talent. I don’t see clearly. Shapes, patterns, movement and change: I feel them. This man, this being, whatever he is, is like a shockwave. Where he goes, worlds change. I think—sometimes—they die.”
Across the connection between them, her own familiar files began to stream. Star maps, patterns half-formed, traces of ruins across known and unknown space.
“He didn’t make those,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Moderately,” she answered.
“It’s a riddle,” he said. “Isn’t it? Ther
e has to be a key. A code that opens the—whatever it is. Files. Door. Jump point.”
“You’ve been spying,” she said.
“And thinking,” he said without shame, which surprised her slightly. “That’s my talent. Synthesis. I could help you, if you would let me. If you would trust me.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d have to think about it.”
“That’s fair,” he said steadily. The sadness beneath was not intended to incite pity, she thought. Or no more so than he could help.
~~~
“Did you dream?” Khalida asked. “While you were asleep?”
Rama had not been awake for long. Khalida had camped in his room, with coffee on order for the moment he cracked an eyelid. Which, when she had almost dropped off herself, he finally did.
“I dreamed a panther stalked me. Just as it was about to spring, I woke up.”
Khalida showed him her teeth. “Not just now. Then. When you were asleep in the rock. Did you dream?”
His eyes were the darkest she had ever seen, but they always had a light inside: a brightness in the heart. That brightness went abruptly dark.
“I have a reason for asking,” she said. She gave it to him on the web, or in her mind if he preferred that.
A fragment, a few bytes in the stream of data that Zhao had run past her. A collection of children’s stories from a multitude of worlds. A tale from an all but abandoned world, told by members of a forgotten tribe. How a terrible enchanter, half a demon, had been trapped by his mortal father and his lover and their children, and shut up in stone, and condemned to sleep forever, or until he dreamed his way out.
The light sparked again, as Rama’s brows twitched upward. “A children’s story?”
“Children get the truth when everyone else has forgotten. It’s wrapped in story, but it’s there. Did you dream?”
“Incessantly.”
“Of what?”
“When I wasn’t living my last day over and over?” He sat up, clasping his knees. He looked so young she was almost sucked in, but she was too old in paranoia for that. “I dreamed of suns and stars. Suns in multitudes. Stars wheeling in ranks like armies—galaxies, I know now. Then—nothing.”
“Emptiness?”
“Nothing. No thing. No suns. No stars. Absolute blackness. And then…”
He paused so long that Khalida caught herself leaning forward until she almost fell over. “And then?”
“Light,” he said, “at the utmost end of time. Where the stars have all died or were never born. Except one. With…something…in its heart. Something that I could never see.”
“Never?”
“Not ever,” he said. “Except…”
This time she waited. He had a long, long run of dreams to remember.
When he spoke, it was in his own language, a swift flow of words that gradually resolved into something she could understand. “I was cast into sleep because I saw only light and darkness, and nothing between. Light was perfect; darkness was evil. I was absolutely convinced of it—as only the true believer can be. I nearly brought down half a world.
“I deserved my sentence. But something was out there. Something beyond any of our gods or even our night terrors. Something that would cause our people to empty the world and sweep away a moon, to destroy it. Or,” he said slowly, “to lure it. To draw it away. To trap it, and bind it. Because that was all they could do. Or all they dared do.”
“Because none of them was as strong as you?”
“I doubt it was the strength,” he said, dry as his bones should have been after six thousand years. “I was—I am—a weapon. A mindless, deadly thing. A power that can, and without compunction will, destroy—and not care if it is destroyed.”
“You’re not mindless,” Khalida said.
“Am I not?”
She had nothing to say to that. Instead she focused on another part of this inherently preposterous story. “What is so terrible that it needs the sacrifice of a whole world?”
“Not just one world,” he said. “All those worlds, all those ruins—world after world, star after star. It took them all. Until my people stopped it. Wiping out all trace of who they were, that was part of it. The mystery. The void that beckoned. And beckoning, became a trap.”
She could almost make sense of that. “So—what? They left a trail for you? It’s not just random worlds?”
“Not random at all,” he said. “Each world was a destination, and a point of departure. A gate. We hadn’t mapped them, but we knew of them. After I was gone…I think our world became a nexus. A gathering place, a port—like this place. But not for ships; for worldgates. Then something came through. Something that could only be stopped by destroying them all.”
“Or that destroyed them all, once it had gone through.” Khalida had stopped trying to suspend disbelief; she had proof enough that something was out there, or had been. “If that all happened a thousand years after you went into stasis, why is it so urgent that you find the answer now? You’re no part of whatever it was. You were awakened by accident.”
“Was I?”
“Aisha miscalculated the quantity of explosives. She was only trying to open a door.”
“Yes.”
Khalida throttled back a strong urge to hit him. “My niece has nothing to do with you or your world or your people.”
“Your niece is a strong psi, as you would put it. If it was time, and she was there…”
“I don’t believe in destiny,” Khalida said. “Or in divine will.”
“Or fate, either, I would presume.” Rama reached for the coffee that had been steaming in its mini-stasis field, and grimaced as he drank it. “You are all godless heathen, and my old self would have given you a choice: to be converted to the one true faith, or killed.”
“Really?”
“No.” After coffee there was breakfast: enough for three. He ate it all, methodically. Fueling. Just as the Ra-Harakhte fueled itself for a voyage to the edge of nowhere. “Our kind of holy war was not about conversion. It was about who was demonstrably right.”
“Which you were?”
“Until I was manifestly wrong.”
“Do you think you might be wrong now?”
“I think I have to go where I’m directed to go. I’m no use to this universe otherwise.”
“Everyone is of some use,” Khalida said. “If only to fertilize a field.”
He stared; then laughed. “You would have done well in the world I come from.”
“I am a bit of an atavism, aren’t I?” She stood. “You have an opera to rehearse. I have a set of patterns to stare at, and try to make a little more sense of.”
“Why?”
“Why rehearse? Because you need to know where to stand, and when not to start singing.”
He shook that off. “Why do you help me? What’s in it for you?”
“Knowledge.”
He pondered that. After a while he nodded. “It’s in your blood.”
“Tomb robbing. Since before even you were born.”
“Searching not for gold but for understanding. Yes. Your niece is the same.”
Sudden anger gusted, catching Khalida by surprise. “My niece is nothing like me. She’s clean.”
“Of what?”
Khalida could not bring herself to answer that. She left him sitting there with the empty cup in his hand.
49
Aisha had been capturing and filing all her messages from Nevermore since she came out of jump on the Leda. She hadn’t opened any of them. She knew what they said. She wasn’t sure she could handle the way she’d feel when she finally read them.
Now she’d promised Rama, and she kept her promises. Even when she hated to even think about it.
There were many more messages than she remembered, most from Pater. Nothing from Mother. Only two from Jamal, and one of them was the most recent of all the messages in the file.
They’d probably put him up to it, hoping she’d ans
wer him if she wouldn’t go near them. They were right. He’d filter them anyway, and he might have something to say other than How Dare You and What Were You Thinking and Get Back Home Right Now.
The message was plain data, no enhancements. Just words.
They’ve been freaking since they found out where you went. I know you can’t come back, but you’d better say something to them before they finish ripping my head off and feeding it to me sideways.
I’m on lockdown. I can’t even go outside the house unless somebody goes with me. Not that I mind, really, but they keep trying to restrict my web access, and that I do mind. Did you know we got our hackitude from Mother? Not just from Aunt Khalida? She put an actual tracer on my searchbots. Took me two whole Earthdays to get rid of it.
Aisha had known about Mother and the web, and she suspected that what Jamal had got rid of was just a decoy. But she wouldn’t tell him that. Some things a person had to learn for himself.
Everything’s crazy here. The horses are all impossible without you and Aunt Khalida to keep them in line, and Mother’s too busy with everything else to take the time. The antelope are actually less trouble than the horses. Malia comes and goes and keeps them mostly from climbing walls and breaking down fences. Pater wants to turn them loose, but Mother won’t let him. She still wants to write that paper.
The new interns are an exceptionally incompetent collection of miseducated acephalic organisms, Pater says. U.P. tried to cancel the grant for the season, which just happened to happen after you turned up on the Leda. We’ve been descended on by a shipful of tourists who aren’t, if you know what I mean. I think some of them are Psycorps agents pretending to be Centrum richidiots, and the rest are MI and maybe even black ops. It’s like a vid, with more screaming.
Aisha was almost jealous. Life on Nevermore had never been that interesting when she was there.
Look, Jamal said. Send something, all right? Just so they’ll calm down a little bit.
Which we will.
That wasn’t Jamal. Aisha let go the breath she’d been holding. Mother came through in text, but with her image attached, eyes steady on Aisha as if she could actually see her. Daughter of mine, I won’t tell you anything you don’t already expect, except this. If you need help, or backup, or more advice, good or bad, than you can ever use, send a message with the code I’ve embedded. Direct it to any tradeship in or out of U.P. space. They’ll give you what you ask.