by Judith Tarr
Khalida knew that fall. There was no sign, visual or otherwise, of the guide who had brought them from one universe to another.
The shuttle came down on the long field beside the upper reach of the fall. People waited there: a dozen standing together.
If Rashid could see…
Only one of them was like the tribes who still remained on Nevermore: smaller than the rest, all ivory and gold, with a smooth oval face and wide golden eyes. Three towered over them all, dark and eagle-faced like Rama but as tall as the woman in her dream. The rest were short or tall, brown or bronze.
None was their guide. These were strangers, standing very still, with expressions ranging from somber to grim.
They were afraid. Not of the shuttle; that barely troubled them at all. Of the man who walked out of it, with the rest trailing behind.
He was amused, with a distinct, dark edge.
He halted between the shuttle and the welcoming party, giving them time to get the measure of him. Khalida doubted that any of them could see him clearly through the lens of legend and dire history.
After what felt like a long while, the man in the middle spoke. He was tall though not nearly as tall as the dark ones, with red-bronze skin and narrow dark eyes and proud and somber features, crowned with striking, shoulder-long, fire-red hair. But for that last, he could have been a man of Earth.
“Kalendros,” he said.
That was Old Language, or close enough. A title. Not quite King. Majesty, maybe. With a faint but unmistakable suggestion of Tyrant. Or Royal Monster.
“I see my reputation precedes me,” Rama said. He sounded light, easy. “What do you have for me, then? A war to fight? A dragon to slay?”
“We thought you’d bring an army,” one of the tall ones said. He was young, Khalida thought, and less afraid than the others—maybe because he was still young enough not to know better.
“I did,” Rama answered him, flicking a hand toward the others behind him. “There’s much more to them than meets the eye.”
Khalida realized that she had stiffened and come to attention. She fixed the young giant with a hard, cold stare, as if he had been a particularly callow recruit.
He had the grace to blink and look away. One of the others, square and sturdy and remarkably like a woman Khalida knew from Old Tibet, stepped forward and met Rama eye to eye. She was slightly taller.
They were all psi masters. Khalida could feel the force of it under her skin. That one, the woman who had the least fear of Rama, was the strongest.
She might even be stronger than Rama. Khalida lacked the knowledge to be sure.
“So,” the woman said. “The Sun’s son found his way to the other side of the sky. You’re saner than I expected.”
“And shorter?”
Her lips twitched. “That part of the story came near enough to the truth.”
“It’s a dragon, then, isn’t it? Not a war. You seem remarkably peaceful here.”
“We work at it,” she said. “Come. Majesty. If it pleases you.”
She might be mocking him with the title and the courtesy. She might not. Rama took it calmly either way. “I’m no king in this world. They call me Rama in this age. And you?”
“Elti,” she said.
He bowed slightly. “Elti,” he repeated.
“Come,” Elti said.
~~~
Yes, this was a cage for a predator. It had the amenities of a palace, with of course no machines, but a company of mute and efficient servants. Its walls were made of energy as well as stone—a forcefield maintained by the powers of the mind. Their hosts—she could not quite bring herself to call them captors—were taking no chances.
Rama seemed neither wounded or angry at the mistrust of his own people. He had gone into a kind of trance, light and yet hyperalert, as if his every move was a form of katas.
The archaeologist in Khalida was enthralled by the palace: from architecture to furnishings to frescoes and mosaics and works of art on walls and floors and displayed in niches and courtyards, to whole rooms constructed like galleries in a museum. That maybe was what it had been before it became a monster’s prison: a place not meant for living in, though the beds in the high airy rooms were wonderfully comfortable.
A pair of silent servants led them to one of the galleries, where a table was spread with the makings of a feast. They set out the plates and cups and bowls, bowed the guests to seats at the table, and mutely withdrew.
The food was close enough to the tastes of the tribes on Nevermore that Khalida could guess at some of what was in it. The room was like nothing she had seen on that planet. Sculptures lined the frescoed walls. Human figures of all the kinds and peoples of Nevermore sat and lounged and whirled and leaped, dancing, feasting, making love: as if in stripping their own world of any such thing, they had brought it all here.
It was too frenetic for Khalida’s stomach. She ate what she could of bread and sharp cheese and roasted vegetables and drank a little of the too-sweet wine, then sat back in the elaborately carved chair while the others satisfied less finicky appetites.
Rama could be a delicate eater, too: he took most of his energy from the sun, or from the ship when he was in space. On this night of the moon’s short day, he ate as if he were fueling for a race. Or, she thought, a battle.
No one had much to say. Aisha was the most talkative: she was teaching Kirkov and Dr. Ma bits of Old Language, naming the various items of furniture and describing the most exuberant of the frescoes, color by color and figure by figure.
They were being watched. It began as a prickle in Khalida’s nape and grew to a crawling sensation across her shoulder blades.
Rama ate one last bite and thrust his plate away. Then, quite calmly, he said, “Come out and face us. We’re not animals in your menagerie.”
“No?”
Elti emerged from the shadows, with a much taller shadow behind her.
Khalida’s breath stopped. There was the woman of her dream. Here in the room, in living presence, she was even taller than Khalida had expected. As tall as any of the men who had met the shuttle.
She carried that height well, with easy grace. She wore a long embroidered coat over closely fitted trousers. The coat was open; her breasts were bare, firm and high though she must be at least as old as Rama seemed to be. Her hair was straight and shining and braided down her back; she wore a torque, deceptively plain, made of what must be pure silver.
Khalida had to remember how to breathe, and then to see. There were others with the two women: a man, walnut-brown, very old and withered with sparse white hair, and a pair of young persons helping him hobble into the light and settling him in a cushioned chair.
If the others they had met were psi masters, this was something more. Khalida could barely describe to herself what it felt like to be so close to him. Like waiting for a storm to break. Like standing inside the warp drive of a starship.
Rama sat motionless at the table, relaxed, visibly at ease. Khalida had always known that he was damped down, suppressed; still in large part asleep, lost in a long dark dream.
Now he was waking. He might, she thought, be angry.
Or not. She would hardly know. He was no king or kin of hers.
“No?” The tall woman read Khalida’s thought as easily as if she had spoken it aloud. “Worldgates opened on your world once. One of his descendants, it’s said, met a woman there, a queen.”
“Of course a queen,” Khalida said, not meaning to be cutting, but she could not help herself.
“Why not?” the woman said. “He was a king. Or had been. By then he’d abdicated. Retired to tend his flocks. Until there was a crisis of gates, and he was trapped on the far side of one. You have his blood—his genes, is that your word? Far and far away, but perceptible still.”
Khalida opened her mouth to argue, but memory silenced her. The results of a test. Contamination, she had thought. Maybe, after all, not.
“So that’s how,” Aisha sa
id farther down the table. “It wasn’t just Rama making the connection to come here. It was us.”
“Yes,” the woman said.
She was speaking PanTerran. Khalida had been too focused on her and on what she said to absorb the meaning of that. Now it struck words out of her. “That was you at Starsend.”
“A projection,” she said. “You know firsthand how difficult physical passage is. Mental, however…”
“Daiyan,” Elti said.
It was interesting to see that proud person reined in by an evident superior. Commanding officer? Mother abbess?
“You’ll speak again,” the old man said in Old Language. “Later. Now there must be apologies: to you, majesty, for treating you like a wild beast, and to you, strangers from far worlds, for our lack of courtesy and proper welcome.”
Now Elti was visibly brought up short. Daiyan, not so much; she had an air of vindication.
“I do understand,” Rama said with an inflection of careful respect, “why you might be cautious. I was not a tame creature when my own kin captured and bound me.”
“Nor are you now,” the old man said, “but your dreams taught you a little. You understand why our people protect themselves. It still reflects poorly on us. We called you for our great need, and locked you in a cage.”
“A surpassingly comfortable one,” Rama said.
He rose. Elti and the two children flinched. Daiyan, Khalida noticed, did not. Nor did the old man, but she had expected that.
Rama circled the table to stand in front of the old man. Narrow dark eyes met wide and preternaturally clear, even darker ones. Rama held out his hand: the right, with its—whatever it was. Manifestation of psi, magic, divine power. Image or projection or his own gods knew what, of the sun of Nevermore.
The old man blinked. So: he did not know everything. “It has changed,” he said.
“You’ve seen another?” Rama asked. Breathlessly, maybe. Hopeful; or apprehensive.
“No.” The old man sounded honestly regretful. “Your last descendant died to bring us here and to guard against what we fled. We have no kings or emperors now. We left that on her grave. It’s memory only, and images in the temples.”
Rama sighed faintly. “Of course; no dynasty endures forever. A thousand years, was it? That’s a fair run.”
“Very fair,” the old man said.
“And still you remember.”
“We could hardly forget. We keep the time here in the old way, as we can. Nine hundred years of the world we left, and nine cycles of this moon as it was once, and nine days of the old world. As was foretold.”
Khalida opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again, carefully.
“Nine hundred years?” Rama began to laugh. Threw back his head and roared, until the old man’s acolytes crouched with their arms over their heads, and the two women braced as if against a gale. Only the old man sat still and apparently unmoved.
When Rama’s laughter finally died, he stood with tears running down his face—and they were not all tears of mirth. “Oh, master of mages,” he said. “Oh, there’s a grand jest of the undying gods. Six thousand years I slept. Six thousand years of the long dream.”
“Ah,” the old man said. There was a world of meaning in the sound.
“Strange are the ways of time and the gods,” Rama said.
“It’s physics,” said Aisha. She was all eyes and appetite, taking in this world as if she would swallow it whole. “Spacetime warps in between universes. It goes the other way, or it wouldn’t be possible to project an image into Starsend. So it’s consistent.”
“It serves the gods,” the old man said, “and may save us. You are not what we feared.”
“He may be worse,” said Elti. “You know what the council—”
The old man ignored her. “Majesty,” he said. “May I ride in your shuttle?”
He spoke the word in PanTerran, carefully, enunciating each syllable.
Elti stiffened as if in protest, but no one paid attention to that, either. “You may,” Rama said.
“Now, then,” the old man said.
59
The old man’s name was long and complicated. “Most of it is titles,” he told Aisha as they carried him in a chair through the palace and out into the unexpectedly chilly night. “The rest is family. One part actually belongs to me. That part you may have. I am Umizad.”
“And I am Aisha,” she said, trying not to be too stiff. His version of Old Language was older than the one she knew, but the changes made sense if she put her mind to it.
“Aisha,” he said.
“There’s more to it,” she said, relaxing a little into the language, “but that’s the part you can have.”
He bowed in his chair. His smile made him look a great deal younger and quite mischievous.
“You aren’t supposed to be doing this, are you?” she said.
“No.” He was almost laughing. “We are to keep his majesty closely caged and strictly limited in what he may know or do. That being the decision of the council, which is both wise and just.”
“It’s wise enough,” Rama said. He had an end of one of the chair’s poles on his shoulder—and the shock when he had done that had made him laugh again so he could hardly hold himself up. “I’m a dangerous animal. I might eat someone.”
“You do eat souls,” Elti said. Snarled. She was not stooping to carry anything; she left that to Rama and Daiyan and Khalida and to Umizad’s acolytes, who shared the end of a pole. Aisha had tried to take that one but been glared away.
“Not your soul,” he said. “I’m partial to sweeter vintages.”
She almost spat at him. “You should not be alive. You should have died however many thousands of years ago. You are a monster and an abomination, and I deplore the necessity that compels us to use you.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am all of that. But you need me.”
“We need you,” she said in utter disgust.
~~~
Umizad in the shuttle was like a little boy, all big eyes and cries of wonder. It wasn’t an act, Aisha thought. He might be old and his body was failing, but he had joy. It always filled him; here in this machine from another universe, it overflowed.
Flying didn’t either surprise or frighten him. He was more interested in the way Rama operated the controls, and in the screens that showed the moon and the planet and the space around them, and Ship in its orbit, dark and ever so faintly gleaming.
With him on board, the shuttle could fly where its pilot wanted to send it. Which, under Umizad’s instruction, was up into low orbit, well below Ship but above the atmosphere.
When they were stable in orbit, Umizad still bubbled with delight, but his face went somber. Though Elti in the cradle behind him looked ready to strangle him, she didn’t have the courage—or the strength. All she could do was sit and glower and promise, on all the levels Aisha could sense, that every word and move would be carried back to the council she was part of.
Neither Rama nor Umizad cared about that. Rama turned in his cradle to face Umizad. Umizad sat for a long while, studying him inside and out, while he sat perfectly still.
Finally Umizad said, “Look there.”
His glance pointed to the screen off to his right, the one that looked toward and past the system’s sun. There were no stars in that field, and no galaxies. Only perfect blackness.
Space was never an absolute void. It might be empty to human sight, but it was full of dust and debris and background radiation and particles both random and not. It even had a smell, like burning metal.
Out there was nothing. Not one thing.
It had a boundary. The shuttle’s sensors weren’t powerful enough to trace it exactly, but Ship knew. Ship could feel it, and it made Ship’s skin twitch. Ship needed space to be full of matter and energy; that was how it lived and fed.
“We made that,” Umizad said. “We brought it here and trapped it. And there it stays.”
“What is it?” Ai
sha asked, since nobody else seemed inclined to.
“We don’t really know,” Umizad answered. “We know what it does. It eats—everything. All that is.”
“Tell me,” Rama said.
Umizad could do better. He showed them.
It played like a vid inside their heads. Aisha closed her eyes to see it better, and remembered to breathe while she spun down into a world both alien and weirdly familiar.
~~~
She’d seen that city in dreams, with its walls intact and people in its streets. She’d dug up potsherds from its ruins.
Over the vault they’d opened before she left, where Rama’s statue had waited for them to find it, was—not a temple, exactly. A place where people like Umizad lived and worked together. Corps headquarters, in a manner of speaking.
“Mages of gates,” Umizad’s voice said in the air. “They monitored travel in and out and through, and kept track of the worlds. And, more occasionally than you might think, dealt with threats to the gates or the worlds they served.”
Aisha saw the shape of it. She saw the people who did it, too. She’d seen faces like theirs waiting for the shuttle, and riding in it now.
They came from different parts of this world, studied and taught here. This was a major city, though not the capital—it had been once, but not for centuries. It had been here since the tower on the cliff was built, the fortress with no way in, where the Sleeper was.
In the time of the memory—a memory almost a thousand years old in this world—there had been no threats to gates for well over a century. The guardians knew better than to let themselves get slack, but none of them had any experience of real danger, either.
When it first came, they took it for the return of an old enemy, a tide of darkness that swallowed gates and conquered worlds. Rama’s descendants, with the psi masters of his world, had fought it and won—and one of them had gone all the way to Earth and left a memory there.
So that was true. Aisha wasn’t sure how she felt about it. That she was part of that family, in a distant and diluted way.