Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  Rama tugged at Aisha’s shoulder. In the open space that had been the roof, a shuttle hovered. A line snaked out of it, glimmering in the dark. Rama caught it in one hand and Aisha on the other arm and swung up into the air.

  Aisha laughed. It was the worst possible place and time to do that, but she was flying through the air on the arm of a pirate. Jamal would be horrendously jealous.

  They arced out over the place where the stage had been. It sank away below the floor of the hall. While she stared, astonished, the floor closed over it with a bone-shaking boom.

  The audience erupted in applause and cheers. Faint underneath it, Aisha heard Jonathan calling from the shuttle: “Here, up!”

  Rama surged as if he’d spread wings. Aisha’s skin prickled all over, almost sharp enough for pain. They flew up the last few meters, and landed lightly inside the shuttle.

  52

  Jonathan turned in the pilot’s cradle and smiled his sweet, serene smile. In a fist-sized cradle above his head, an image of Alexandra floated in a silver bubble. “My dears!” she sang. “Oh, my dears! Wasn’t that glorious?”

  Aisha had no words. She tripped and fell into the cradle nearest the hatch, while Rama claimed the one beside Jonathan.

  The hatch irised shut. The shuttle flew straight up and out through the hollow center of Central.

  Aisha took time to just breathe. Finally she had enough breath to ask, “Marta?”

  “Safe.” Rama sounded like himself—or the self he’d been since Araceli. Calm. Somewhat remote. “She’s making her own way to the ship.”

  Aisha sucked in another handful of breaths. “What just happened down there? What—”

  “We closed a trap,” Rama said. “Before you ask, all the civilians got out. MI is truly done in this system—with all its allies, including some who hadn’t been open about it before. It won’t be following us when we go.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The stare he aimed at her was a little more sincerely there than she’d seen in a while.

  She aimed her own straight back, and the thrust of words with it. “Everything you do makes sure they’ll keep coming after you. You can’t stop them. They won’t ever let go. Now you’ve got this system on their kill list, too. And they will kill it. They won’t have a choice.”

  “We have our own kill list,” Alexandra said. Her voice was as musical as ever, but it had stopped with the soaring sweetness. “We’re fighting our own war. If this hadn’t happened, something else would have. We’ve been waiting. Planning. Hoping. This is a gift, and we are glad to take it. And oh, what a beautiful show we gave our people!”

  “Legendary,” Jonathan agreed.

  The universe was bigger than Aisha could ever understand. She knew that. People were more complicated, too. Which she had to keep reminding herself.

  “Still,” she said. “This is bad.”

  “So is United Planets,” Alexandra said.

  She hated them. Really, deeply hated them. That was another revelation. Aisha slumped back into her cradle and tried to wrap her mind around all of it.

  It wasn’t easy. Her head hurt, again. Bad enough that she had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up.

  While she fought to keep her stomach where it belonged, Jonathan said to Rama, “You’re cleared for immediate departure. Any personnel left behind, we’ll keep safe for you.”

  “As safe as we can,” Alexandra said.

  The shuttle lurched. Aisha started out of her own head.

  They were flying through the middle of the sphere, aiming straight toward Ship’s bay. Another flier had buzzed them—accidentally, maybe.

  It veered off. The shuttle kept going. Jonathan’s face had gone still, but his hands were steady on the controls.

  He was flying on manual—crazy in this tight and crowded space, but what did Aisha know? She wasn’t a pilot.

  All she knew was that they were on their way out of Kom Ombo. System’s web wasn’t saying anything about the concert hall that had turned into a trap, and maybe a tomb. Everything was quiet.

  She had to stop seeing awfulness ahead for this system. She wasn’t precog. She was just scared, and completely out of her depth.

  “My dear,” Alexandra said. She spoke through the top layer of the web, on a tight connection: as private as those things got. “We won’t let harm come to you here. Or to ourselves, either. U.P. has enough troubles of its own to keep it busy for years. It’s not going to come after us at any time soon.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Aisha said.

  “I am always right,” said Alexandra. She was laughing, but not at Aisha. “You will go out there and see things no one of your world has ever seen. I’m jealous.”

  “We’ll report back,” Aisha said, “if we can.”

  “I know.” Alexandra’s web presence was warm, like a smile. “Swim well. Swim far. May the great-toothed ones glide past and the sweet-tasting ones dart into your jaws.”

  That was strange and rather bloodthirsty. Alien. But weirdly comforting. “Stay with God,” Aisha managed to answer. “Stay safe.”

  “Always,” said Alexandra.

  ~~~

  Ship was ready. Its stomach tanks were full; sparks of spare energy ran up and down its sides.

  Those also happened to function very well as shields. They parted just enough to clear a hatch and let the shuttle in, then quickly out again.

  Rama didn’t wait for goodbyes. He was gone almost before there was a space for him to get out of the shuttle, aiming for the bridge.

  Aisha needed to go, but wanted to say something. She couldn’t think what.

  “Go,” Jonathan said. “Quickly.”

  She was barely out of the shuttle before it backed through the already closing hatch and out into Central.

  53

  Khalida had been prepared for a rapid departure, and she knew the ship was capable of entering jump from anywhere it pleased, but she was still taken aback by the speed of the exit from Kom Ombo.

  There was no pursuit that she could detect. The system was quiet. She could almost swear that there was a sense of satisfaction about the ship, as if it had completed a successful hunt and fed well on the quarry.

  The Ra-Harakhte had set a course toward Starsend. The distance was as far as most ships could manage in a single jump, but this was not an ordinary ship. It was fully fueled, strong and, in its alien way, eager.

  Just as they entered jump, she happened to be in her cradle, downloading what amounted to a passenger manifest. The data blurred and stretched and disintegrated into random bits and bytes.

  In the midst of jump they fell into the configurations of a star map. She had almost recognized it when the distortions of jump settled into the dead-air calm of jumpspace.

  The map faded like the memory of a dream. She counted names on the manifest, and hissed half in temper and half in appreciation. Nearly all of the science team had happened to be in Central when the ship left. Only Dr. Ma was still on board, along with Robrecht and Kirkov and one or two of the lab techs.

  Most of the crew had managed to come back in time. The ship had its full complement of immediately useful personnel.

  The nulls in stasis were safe in their bays. So was Marta, who had come in by shuttle somewhat before Rama and retreated to her quarters, apparently to sleep through as much of this jump as she could.

  ~~~

  “Well done,” Khalida said.

  It had taken her some little time to catch Rama away from at least one or two of the crew. She found him in one of the now deserted labs, throwing up star maps on an array of screens.

  The sight of those woke a memory of Khalida’s dream during jump. Not enough to make any sense of; it was a buzzing in the back of her skull, no more.

  At sound of her voice, Rama glanced over his shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

  “You should have left the nulls, too,” she said.

  He zoomed in on one of the maps, bringin
g a triple-star system into planetary orbit. The tangle of planets there sorted into a complex dance of orbit and counterorbit in a nearly empty field of stars.

  “I would have left them if there had been anywhere to put them,” he said as the map’s viewpoint focused on a glorious monster of a gas giant, almost a star in its own right.

  “Don’t dump them there,” Khalida said.

  His lips twitched. He was freer, she thought. Wound up tight still, with all he had ahead of him, but he had an actual destination. A place that was not a distraction or an obstacle.

  “This is a universe of wonders,” he said. The gas giant stayed in focus, but the rest of the star maps merged. The walls had vanished. They stood as if in interstellar space.

  “Is it true,” he asked, “that the universe is not singular? That there are an infinity of them?”

  He was not speaking to Khalida. Dr. Ma came to sit in the middle of the galactic arm, with more distant galaxies scattered like jewels all around her.

  “That is the most widely accepted theory,” she said.

  “It’s never been proved?”

  “Never to anyone’s satisfaction.” Her brow rose slightly. “Is this idle curiosity? Or is there a reason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Not an answer she might have been expecting. Both brows went up. “The mathematics support it. There have been glimpses, hints. But no one has ever managed to penetrate the wall; to enter, reliably and provably, another universe. Or, if that has been done, to return.”

  “Not even your psi masters?”

  “Don’t mock,” she said.

  “What if one didn’t want to enter one of the many? What if one wanted to perceive them all? As we see the stars—in multitudes.”

  “I don’t think the human brain is capable of that,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “It needs a god.”

  “If you believe in such things.”

  Khalida held her breath. The priest of an ancient and forgotten god smiled ever so softly. “What would you call a being that stands above the multiverse?”

  “Most likely nonexistent.”

  “What would your mathematics say?”

  “That the scale may be too vast to calculate.”

  “Even with your infinite numbers?”

  “Yours are different?”

  He had stung her into temper. It was deliberate, Khalida thought. “Doctor, when I was born, we counted in thousands. Stars were the eyes of the gods, and the sun was the greatest of them. We knew more of what you call psi than your Corps has begun to imagine, but our understanding of more practical processes tended to be, in root and branch, practical. The theoretical sciences had barely been thought of.”

  Khalida went still. Of course he had to do this. They all had to know before they went much farther, what they were doing and with whom.

  She might not have chosen to begin with Dr. Ma. Which was why he had done it. Being what and who he was.

  “When you were born?” Dr. Ma asked. “Some ten Earthyears after me? Even if you are longer-lived than the human norm, that hardly begins to—”

  “Six thousand Earthyears,” he said, “and many lightyears from that world. Endros Avaryan, we called it. You would call it MEP 1403.”

  “Nevermore,” Khalida said.

  Dr. Ma took a long time to ponder that. She did not try to deny it or argue with it. When she finally spoke, she was perfectly calm. “All the crew should know.”

  “Yes,” Rama said. “Those that are still with us after Starsend.”

  “Now,” Dr. Ma said. “While there’s still time for a choice.”

  “Yes: to end their voyage. I’ll go on alone.”

  “You plan to leave them behind. As you did with my teams at Kom Ombo.”

  “I don’t need them,” he said, “or any of the rest.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Were you alone before, then? Completely solitary?”

  “Of course not,” Khalida said. Her voice sounded harsh in her own ears, like the scream of a bird of prey over the plains of Nevermore. “He had armies.”

  “That was another world,” he said, “and a time so long dead, there’s none left to remember.”

  “Now there,” said Dr. Ma, “is why you need us. To remember.”

  ~~~

  “Stasis,” Kirkov said. “You had stasis.”

  None of the crew were archaeologists. They were not trying to eat Rama alive for his knowledge of ancient mysteries. They were not denying what he was, either, which Khalida found fascinating.

  Rama sat on a table in the middle of them all, still in the dining hall where he began. Strangely enough, he seemed to be in his element. He had always been different, Khalida thought. Always stared at and set apart.

  “We had stasis,” he agreed. “We had swords and spears, and weapons of the mind that could shatter a world.”

  “And worldgates,” Khalida said. “Passage from world to world, without ships or jumpspace. Whatever emptied the planet had something to do with that.”

  “We think,” Rama said. “And I think…possibly also something to do with the theory of the multiverse.”

  “How do you calculate that?” Kirkov wanted to know.

  Rama shrugged. “Jumpspace is full of life, though maybe not as your science understands it. What if there is life outside the universes? Something so vast it’s beyond our comprehension. Something that feeds on universes.”

  “Universes as plankton?” Dr. Ma was smiling—almost laughing. But not mocking him. “If we’re being fed on, how can we even know? We’re less than molecules. We certainly can’t hope to stop whatever it is. If it is.”

  “Maybe that’s too large a scale,” Rama conceded. He tucked up his feet, eyes brighter than Khalida had ever seen them, leaning toward Dr. Ma. “Maybe it’s only as large as a darter in a pond, and we’re the algae it feeds on. And maybe some of the algae learn to produce toxins that repel or even kill the darter. Maybe that’s what we’re looking at. Or for.”

  “Speculation,” Dr. Ma said. “There could be nothing there.”

  “Something emptied a planet,” Kirkov pointed out. “Something seems to have tripped a timer and pulled you out of stasis. Now something’s dropping clues to lead you on. Do you necessarily need Starsend? Why not just go on past?”

  “It could be a trap,” Dr. Ma said, “or a delusion.”

  “It could.” Rama seemed delighted at the prospect. “Starsend holds a message. I’ll claim that, and I hope decipher it. And then go on. And on.”

  “We,” Dr. Ma said.

  “You could die. In fact it’s quite likely. Or disappear forever, beyond the ends of time.”

  “Recording every step of it,” she said, “and doing my best to understand it.”

  “We’d have called you mad, when I was as young as I look.”

  “What, you had no scientists?”

  “We had philosophers,” he said, “and madmen.”

  “Explorers,” Aisha said. She had been so quiet that Khalida had not even realized she was there. “Adventurers. Conquerors. People who couldn’t stop until they knew what was over the next hill.”

  “Then wept when there were no more?” Rama asked.

  “Did you?”

  “My world was wider than that. I ran out of sanity before I came to the end of it.”

  Khalida watched the crew watch him. None of them looked afraid. Wary, yes, and fascinated. Trying to understand.

  They traveled through space in the bowels of a sentient starship. An ancient king roused out of stasis to chase a myth from one universe into another—that was as likely as any other impossibility.

  “You seem to have run out of madness when you ran out of time,” Zhao said. “Though what is sane, and what is not…who in any world knows?”

  V.

  Stars’ End

  54

  Starsend was what Aisha had expected Kom Ombo to be: an outpost on the edge o
f the abyss. It was a domed city on an ice moon that orbited a gas giant so huge it was almost a star. The star itself glimmered faint and far away.

  It was near enough for Ship to feed on. Ship came in hungry and barely wanted to listen to the microbes inside it, but Rama persuaded it to settle into orbit around the moon.

  There were no other ships. The city was deserted. Its web was shut down, and any beacons that might have marked the system were gone.

  It was all too much like Nevermore. No one here had tried to hide any images, but without the web or any communications system up or running, the only way to access them was by going directly into the city.

  Nobody was stupid enough to say the obvious thing. This was a trap, of course it was. Every vid they’d ever seen said so.

  “I’ll go down,” Khalida said. “Kirkov, Zhao—”

  “And I,” Rama said. He was ever so gentle. “This trap was laid for me. I’ll walk into it, and see how it springs.”

  “I don’t think it is a trap.” Aisha bit her tongue. She hadn’t meant to say that aloud.

  Now everybody was staring at her, and she had to say the rest. “It’s a message,” she said. “With clues in it.”

  “That’s a trap.” Rama was already halfway off the bridge. Aisha shut her mouth and went after him.

  ~~~

  Aunt Khalida insisted on taking point from the shuttle bay into the dome. There were no barriers. The airlocks opened silently, without challenge.

  Life support was on, they’d made sure of that before they went in—and brought breathers in case it shut off unexpectedly. The dome was lit with bioluminescence: colonies of microrganisms deployed overhead and underfoot, brighter in some sectors, dimmer in others.

  The silence was eerie. Even the smells were strange: vacant, empty. No one walked in the streets. No voice spoke, and nothing moved except the reconnaissance party making its wary way across the city.

  Somebody had power, Aisha thought, to be able to do this. The shops were empty. The windows they peered into showed vacant rooms. Everything was gone. Starsend’s people had left nothing behind.