Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  This was her world, too, then—this world her mother had named Nevermore. What came toward it was something so huge and so destructive that there was no comprehending it.

  In the beginning it came through a gate—drawn to it, maybe, or sucked into it, from somewhere else. Like Ship, in its way.

  It ate the gate, and the world on which the gate had been. Then it swallowed the rest of the planets in the system, and the star.

  One by one and then in threes and fours and tens, gates disappeared. Where the worlds had been was empty space. Even their stars were gone.

  Late one night in a high cold tower on Nevermore, a psi master—a mage of gates—woke from a dream so terrible his mind was never the same after. In his dream, the eater of gates had a mind and a will. It ate what tasted sweet, and what made it happy. Stars were both. The more it ate, the more it wanted. It was drunk on star-stuff.

  That dream was true.

  The dreamer led an attack through gates. His army of mages cornered the eater on a world that was already mostly barren, where the sun had burned out. They bound it in the star’s cold, dead core.

  The dreamer burned out his own mind in binding the eater. The mages who survived brought back his body and laid it under his tower, and celebrated the victory across every gate and world that was left.

  A generation passed, then two. Nevermore’s mages grew comfortable again. They waged wars; they made peace. They watched over their gates and worked their magic and never gave thought to the fallen enemy.

  The eater woke. Its bindings had frayed with time and the absence of magic to keep them strong. They broke when it reared up in its prison and roared at the stars.

  It was starving, and it was enraged. It knew what had trapped it: powerful psi, which as a creature of energy it recognized as being like itself. It knew its enemy had come through gates. The same gates that had trapped it in this universe, and that it had been feeding on.

  “Or so we suppose,” Umizad said in Aisha’s mind. “This we are sure of: It didn’t know who the mages were, or exactly where their world was in the chain of gates. It went hunting them.”

  They had warning. Its hunt was slow; it paused to search each world, hunting for any sign of psi. It left animals and plants, and anything sentient that lacked a particular kind of psi—the kind that Nevermore’s masters had. Anything endowed with that flavor of psi, even the slightest hint of it, it ripped apart, molecule by molecule, and dined on the fragments.

  “Each world it found, it stripped of magic,” Umizad said. “When it was done, it hunted through the world’s gates one by one, searching for its next feeding ground. It learned as it went: it began to look for certain shapes and species. The closer a species was to the people or powers of our world, the more avidly it hunted, and the more messily it fed.”

  Aisha could see. She could feel. She had slipped inside its thoughts the way she could with Ship.

  It was not the same kind of creature as Ship. It couldn’t be. Ship was bright and open and clean. This was dark, dark, dark.

  And huge. Most of it didn’t even exist in that particular universe. Only its consciousness, the part of it that lived and felt and fed.

  It liked pain. Pain was sharp and hot and sweet. It learned to crave pulling the soul out of a body after it had sucked the body’s psi to a husk. It left whole worlds full of empty, shriveled bodies. Nothing remotely human-like survived.

  One world tried to communicate with it. They hoped that if it knew they were fellow sentients, it might go back to eating stars, and let them be.

  Maybe once it might have, but it had the taste of magic now, and a long memory for the time of its captivity. It had to eat, it wanted to eat, and this was rich, and easy, hunting.

  Fear was the spice that sharpened the sweetness. Any weapon that might turn on it only fed it.

  On Nevermore, everyone knew it was coming. They still had monarchies, mostly, and tribal rulers, though the mages elected their leaders from the strongest and the most skilled.

  Even with all their wars and squabbles, between the network of gates all over the planet and the psi masters in even the tiniest hamlet, their communications were almost as fast and almost as complete as if they’d had a worldweb. That web conceived a plan.

  “We can’t sacrifice an entire world.”

  The most powerful of them all had met in the guildhouse in the old city, in the circular hall that in this age was carved and painted with images of great mages and great workings and the many wonders of gates. Aisha could have stopped there, just to marvel at the beauty of the place, but the half-dozen people seated in a circle spoke of harrowing things.

  The one who had just spoken was younger than the others. He reminded her of Zhao: earnest and pretty, and near tears with the awfulness of what the rest wanted to do.

  “We don’t have a choice,” one of his elders said. Half her face was beautiful, as if carved in bronze. The other half was burned away. She fixed him with one dark eye and one milky white. “This is the penance we pay for all the worlds that died because our ancestors were not the great saviors they wanted to be. There is no other way, and no other hope.”

  “What hope is that?” the young one cried. “All our people—not only mages; whole tribes and nations of innocents. They’ll all die, and worse than die, if we do this. There won’t even be a ghost left to wander the ruins.”

  “We will save as many as we can,” the tallest and darkest of them said. He was huge, with a beard that spread across his massive chest, and eyes that held all the sadness in the worlds. The deep rumble of his voice vibrated in Aisha’s bones. “We will move them beyond gates for as long as gates are open, which pray the good god will be long enough. No one will stay who has not chosen to stay.”

  The young mage tossed his gold-curled head. “What if it doesn’t work? What if it’s not enough? What if—”

  “We die,” the burned one said. The hand she raised was a claw, the fingers fused together. “We’ll die if we do nothing. I know which I’d rather choose.”

  The council of mages whirled away. Time speeded up; images passed by too fast to catch. But Aisha could see the pattern in them all.

  The mages of Nevermore dangled themselves as bait for the eater of souls. They taunted and teased it with their psi that it so well remembered: darting and out of gates, setting off fireworks of magic on abandoned worlds, and leaving bits of energy like crumbs along a path. Then, just as the eater was about to find them, they snatched the bait out of its jaws. Disappeared. Vanished completely.

  But they always left a hint, a clue, a new trail for it to follow. A trail of gates that led through barren worlds.

  Some were left from the old enemy. Some had simply died. The masters and rulers and educated minds in the web mapped and charted the way.

  The burnt mage died on an airless rock that orbited a near-dead sun. The young one almost escaped—almost made it back alive. But the eater swallowed him just before he passed the gate. Then it ate the gate.

  On Nevermore, most of the ordinary people were gone, taken away to what their leaders hoped was safety: shifting through gates to worlds that could support them—empty worlds or worlds with few inhabitants, where they could make lives for themselves. They had, voluntarily or otherwise, agreed to a terrible and necessary thing: to forget the world they came from, and even more terrible, to give up psi if they had it. To make themselves invisible and inedible to the eater of souls.

  Those who had stayed, who were mostly mages, devoted their lives to removing all evidence of themselves from their world. It took ten years of Nevermore. Ten years of destroying every image and every hint of the human creatures who lived there.

  Out of that whole world, a few thousand psi masters stayed to the end. They moved everything they could to the larger of their moons, the one that was a planet in its own right, with air to breathe and water to drink—both of which they made better and stronger and more plentiful with psi.

  The eate
r came before they were completely ready. Nevermore was empty except for the Sleeper in his heavily shielded tower, and a tribe of warriors born and bred to be nulls, who would wait for him and guard the planet.

  So far the memory or history or whatever it was had been like a vid. It was vivid and close, but Aisha sat outside of it, watching and listening.

  Now she found herself inside. Living it. She floated in the mind of one of the masters: born to the arts and the powers, and raised to fight this most terrible of all enemies.

  They called her the ruler of the country in which the Sleeper slept. She thought of herself as its servant.

  Her deepest name, her true name, was Estari. It came with the memory of a man’s voice, soft and deep, speaking over her head from a father’s height.

  Her mind was as sharp and clear as a castle made of crystal. Aisha saw and felt the kind of person she was, not only the strength but the weaknesses that made her moral and fallible. She was strong and skilled, but she had a temper. She had no patience for people who were slower of mind than she was, a flaw in her character that caused her no end of trouble.

  She took care to show her people only her most calm and confident face. Inside, she was terrified. At night, alone in her high and royal bed, she cried herself to sleep because there was nothing she could do to save her world or her people.

  Rama didn’t cry, that was burned out of him, but like him, she was full of the sun. She was keyed to it, and it fed her and made her strong.

  She didn’t think she was strong enough. She thought the Sleeper might be, but she had some gift of prescience, and it warned her not to disturb him. His time would come.

  She wrote down what she knew of that time, in the book that would go with them on the long chase. Aisha saw her hand with the pen in it, a sharpened reed, simple and perfect: narrow, long fingers, as dark as Rama’s. There was a lightning-tree of a scar across the back, from an old accident with psi and fire-making.

  The alarm went off just then. The eater was coming. It had passed the last gate seeded with sparks of psi—skipping a dozen in between. Which was not good news for such plan as they had.

  They had, by their calculation, a handful of days while the eater fed, before it came through the gate to Nevermore. The queen—no, empress; that was the title she held in this world—no longer trusted that. She stood up in the small crowded workroom, lifted her head and called with all that was in her, mind and body both.

  Everything was as ready as it would be. The last of the people were safe beyond gates. Everyone who was left had trained specifically for this—and each of them had some art or craft that they would need if they survived. Farmers, fisherfolk, artisans. Leaders, too, but even those had functional skills. Hunters. Smiths. Masters and teachers.

  Some of them set wards on the planet. The rest wound the moon in a web of psi, protecting its atmosphere and preserving its gravity. On the empress’ command, they launched it through the gate that they had made.

  Estari didn’t take part of that great working. She was the sentinel, the guardian on the mountaintop. She watched, and held on, and waited.

  What she hadn’t told any of the others—though some surely knew—was that she couldn’t do what she had to do if she rode the moon through the gate. She stepped out of her workroom onto the plains of Nevermore’s northern continent, beside the river that flowed past the Sleeper’s tower.

  It was tall then, and sharp, black stone polished as smooth as glass, with a golden sun on the pinnacle. It had no door or window. The only way in or out was through psi—and it had to be a particular kind, of a particular genetic heritage.

  She had it, but she wasn’t looking to go in. The Sleeper slept, and dreamed, she hoped, of sanity and peace.

  She was all alone in this world except for a handful of bred-warriors wandering far away, and a herd of antelope grazing farther down along the river. Some of those had been tame once, but they had already forgotten.

  There was no grief in her. They’d all done what they knew was necessary. If she succeeded in what she meant to do, the people could come back. The world would be safe.

  If not…

  ~~~

  The eater was too vast to see or even really understand. The best Estari’s senses could give her, even with psi, was the image of an unimaginably enormous sea creature in a cloud of dark ink, with tentacles innumerable, and huge eyes full of cold intelligence, and a beak sharpened on the edges of mortal souls.

  She meant to let it eat her, and then, from inside, alter it. Shift its polarities was as close as Aisha could come to understanding it. Turn it into its own prey, and trick it into feeding on itself.

  She stood alone under the sun that was her father and her lover and her self. She made herself a beacon. “Come and get me! See, I’m sweet, I’m strong, I’m everything you hunger for. Come and swallow me!”

  It came down out of the sun. It was beautiful and terrible and absolutely alien. There was nothing human in it at all—until it ate her whole.

  Her body flared to ash, but her spirit held together by pure indomitable will. The eater staggered, drunk on the splendor of her. She reached through every part of it, and twisted.

  Space warped. Time turned on itself. The eater lunged toward its own extremities, and swallowed them.

  She dared to be glad; to taste a sweetness that was victory. To think that now, at last, she could let go.

  The eater convulsed. She hadn’t gone far enough, or held on long enough. Nor could she. She’d given all she had. There was nothing left.

  Except for one thing. Her plan had failed. The other one, the one all the mages had shared, was still there. With the last disintegrating fragments of herself, she turned the eater toward the gate that was almost shut, and gave it the scent of the mages’ bait.

  60

  “She had weakened it just enough,” Umizad said, “that we were able to stay ahead of it down the track we’d set. We meant to stop at the stars’ end, but it drove us on—and out and through, into this place beyond all places that we ever knew. We bound it here, made a cage for it out of the dark behind the stars. We meant to destroy it, but none of us had the strength, singly or together. With her we might have. But she was gone.”

  They still mourned her, nine hundred of their years later. That mourning tightened in Aisha’s middle and made her throat ache.

  “We were bound here, too,” he said, “out of time and space, on guard over the captive, with no way to kill it, and no hope of finding our way home. None of us is strong enough to do either.”

  “Do you believe I am?” Rama asked.

  “I don’t know,” Umizad said. “I only know what she wrote in the book she left us. That you would wake, and hunt us beyond the edges of the world. That you would have dreamed so long that your soul would have been burned clean, and your heart would be a pure cold thing. Only the pure, she said, can destroy what we brought here.”

  “Pure? Of what? Humanity?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” said Umizad. “She had the malady of seers, which is to speak in riddles.”

  “Because sight is never clear,” Rama said. “I am all too human. I may have dreamed myself to some semblance of sanity, but my flaws have never changed.”

  “Pride and ambition and the conviction that you and only you are right.”

  Rama bent his head. He was almost smiling. “I see what she tried to do. It wasn’t about strength. It was about focus.”

  “Are you saying she lacked it?”

  “She had not had six thousand years and one very long night to concentrate her mind.”

  “Can you do what she failed to do?”

  “Probably not,” Rama said.

  Not only Umizad sagged at that. They all did, even Elti.

  That was his revenge for the way they’d treated him. He let them steep in it for a while. Then he said, “But I will try. I’ll need your library and your best rememberers. And I will need to be free in this world.”
>
  “Are you bargaining with us?” Elti demanded.

  “I don’t bargain,” he said. “That is what I need.”

  “And if we won’t give it to you?”

  He smiled, sweet and wild and gleefully mad. “I’ll take it.”

  She was mad, too, in her way. In all the various ways of the word.

  “You are not our emperor. Do you understand that? You do not rule us. We are not your subjects.”

  “I understand,” he said. “The son of the Sun is dead. I am a pirate captain from a long-forgotten world, and maybe I can finish what the one you loved began.”

  “I suppose you’ll want to be paid,” said Daiyan. Her tone was dry and her expression sardonic. For her, Aisha thought, this was as good as a play on a stage.

  “I owe my world a debt,” he said, “for what I almost did to it. Consider this the payment.”

  Daiyan bowed in her cradle. He’d startled her. She could see him now: not as the monster from the children’s tales, but as a person. The empress’ ancestor, with the same powers and the same bred-in obligations.

  “Don’t let him suck you in,” Elti said, sharp and harsh. “He was the greatest courtesan of his age. He could seduce anyone into anything.”

  “Not anyone,” Rama said with a touch of old, old sadness. “Not quite.”

  ~~~

  Rama brought the shuttle down on the far side of the moon from the cage that had been built for him. That continent was full of cities, built along rivers and chains of lakes, with high mountains like a spine down the middle.

  One city was not the largest, but it was the brightest when Aisha shut her eyes and looked in that other way that was getting easier the more she did it. It was full of psi masters.

  He came down through their layers of defenses, precisely in the middle of the central square. It was dawn here, the sun still hidden behind the mountain wall. Swirls of galaxies shone dim in the brightening sky. Directly above the mountains, the absolute darkness of empty space seemed to swallow the tops of the peaks.

  No welcoming committee waited for them, except for a sleepy person with a cart full of what looked and smelled like fresh-baked bread. She stared at the machine and the people who came out of it, transparently thought about bolting, then got hold of herself.