Forgotten Suns

by Judith Tarr

  It was the sight of Umizad that did it. Elti, too, maybe, but the old man had much more power here than she did. That was obvious even to a complete stranger.

  “Ah,” Umizad said. “Shendi. Are your wares all spoken for? Would you have a loaf or two to spare for hungry travelers?”

  Shendi rolled her cart forward, eyeing the shuttle sideways but not as if she was afraid of it. She hadn’t seen anything like it before.

  Her bread was fresh, and tasted wonderful. Elti had to pay for it, too, which made Aisha unreasonably happy. While Shendi went off to her usual customers, Umizad and Rama and the rest settled down a circle of stone benches around a fountain, to eat their breakfast and wait on what would happen next.

  It wasn’t a market day, Umizad told them, but as the city woke up, people started to fill the streets and the square. They circled the shuttle with curiosity but as little fear as Umizad or Shendi had shown.

  Rama had locked it, which meant no one could get inside. More than one person tried. Some had a fair blast of psi in them, but the shuttle just absorbed it.

  The sun finally rose over the mountain. Rama lifted his face to it and breathed deep.

  Aisha felt it under her feet and all around her, like a fire on her skin. He was drawing the light to him, feeding the way Ship did.

  He did it here because he wanted these psi masters to see. Which, in ones and twos and dozens and hundreds, they did.

  Nobody tried to blast him the way they’d blasted the shuttle. They were completely silent, watching with more than eyes. She couldn’t tell what they were thinking. Some were afraid, that she could feel, but the rest was too complicated to make sense of.

  When the square was full except for a wide open circle around Rama, he lowered his eyes from the sun and scanned them all. “I’ll speak to your council now,” he said.

  “They’re not here,” Elti said. “They’re on the other side of—”

  “They will come,” Umizad said. He was enjoying himself as immensely as ever. “Lord Rama, while you wait, there’s a place where we can go, and be in comfort.”

  “I’ll stay here,” he said, politely but without any yielding in him. “You go; rest. I’ll be sure not to do anything interesting until you come back.”

  Umizad laughed. “That’s a promise to be glad of! But I’ll stay, too. They’ll be here soon enough.”

  Aisha thought he might shame Rama into leaving, but Rama had another answer. In very short order, people had raised a canopy over them and padded the stone benches with cushions and brought water and wine and something dizzyingly sweet.

  “Mead,” Khalida said, plucking the cup out of her hand. “And that’s the last you’ll taste of it till you’re a good few Earthyears older.”

  Food came a little bit after that, a proper breakfast, and then someone with a box, and in it a book that made Elti hiss in outrage. “How dare you—”

  “Who has more right to read the Book of the Empress than the empress’ firstfather?”

  That wasn’t Umizad; it was Daiyan. By which Aisha knew that she’d had something to do with it; and that she was choosing sides. She stared Elti down. Elti’s glare promised consequences—and not pleasant ones.

  Daiyan steadfastly refused to be intimidated. She focused on Rama instead, as he took the book out of the box and opened it, turning the pages slowly, reading bits here and there.

  It was an interesting book. Tall and thin, with pages stitched on the right side. He read it from bottom to top and from back to front. The archaeologist in Aisha took note of what he did, and of the language and alphabet in which it was written.

  With pictures. Drawings in colored inks that seemed to shimmer on the page, as if they wanted to pull free and hover in the air. Her fingers itched to get hold of it, but she sat on them and made herself be patient.

  Everyone watched him. Not with fear, here. Not as if he was a dangerous animal. But not in comfort, either.

  They all knew too much about him, and too little. He was history to them. Seeing him in front of them, alive and breathing and all too real, must be almost unbearable.

  Rama fed on that the way he fed on the sun. Aisha could feel what he was feeling. All the tangled emotions. Some she didn’t have a word for. Sadness so deep it was like happiness. Grief, rage, resignation. Fear—even he could be afraid of what he’d agreed to do.

  Irony, too. His whole life before he slept had been a battle against the dark. There above him, washed out the sun’s light, was the darkest of all darkness. A great enemy beyond anything his earlier self could have imagined.

  He’d let that self go while he dreamed. Learned to see shades between dark and light. Now he needed what he’d been before: the blind belief. The perfect dogma.

  He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t that holy warrior any more. He’d dreamed too long.

  “Are you sure?” Aisha asked him under the surface of her mind.

  He surprised her by not being angry. “I am sure,” he answered her in the same way.

  “I mean,” she said, “are you sure you can’t do it? Maybe it needs you to be complicated.”

  “Pure, she said. I’m not purely anything. Except possibly,” he said with a twist she felt in her middle, “foolish.”

  “She was guessing,” Aisha said, “and prophesying, which is more or less the same thing.”

  He laughed, a ripple of warmth down her spine. “I’m no stronger than she was. But I do have something she didn’t have.”

  “Science.” Aisha felt it unfolding, a kind of dizzy delight, a vision of the universe that bent at right angles to the one he’d be born to—not in a way that broke or denied it, but that made it bigger. Grander. More complete.

  Psi, or magic, had one way of mapping the universe. Science had another. When he put them together, he had something much bigger than either. Something that might make it possible for him to keep his promise.

  “We need Ship,” Aisha said. “And Dr. Ma and the others.”

  “Yes.” He was thinking ahead of her now—but not so far she couldn’t keep up.

  It was dizzying, like a mad gallop across the plains, with war behind and battle ahead and every breath the sweeter because it might be their last.

  Now the plains were fields of stars, and the battle was as wide as universes. Finally, his ancient self said: a battle worthy of me.

  His present self laughed at that, but didn’t argue with it, either. This was what he’d come for. He spread his arms and swept it in.

  61

  Khalida felt the change in Rama like a seismic shift. All the systems that had been damped down suddenly were open wide.

  As far as the eye could tell, nothing had changed. He sat under the canopy while the sun rose higher, reading the book that the psi masters had brought him.

  That Daiyan had brought. Khalida kept her eyes on Rama and peripherally on Aisha who, as the hours wore on, curled up at his feet and seemed to go to sleep, but she was keenly aware of every breath and every shift in Daiyan’s long elegant body.

  She knew exactly what was happening. She also knew how to shut it off.

  She did not want to. That was a choice, clear and conscious. She wanted to feel what she was feeling.

  Training kept her still, and something else, half instinct, half intuition, kept her thoughts deep inside where only she could know. On a world of psi masters, that was a difficult and possibly dangerous exercise, but she had a tropism toward difficult and dangerous.

  She was a pirate at heart. That made her laugh.

  She was catching Rama’s joy that bubbled up and over them all. In her mind she saw him on the plains of Nevermore on the back of his coal-black antelope, no bridle, no saddle, galloping headlong toward an army bristling with spears. He was laughing like a mad thing.

  This was dangerous, the cold deep part of her observed. He had the power to sweep a world along with him. And he would do it, because that was what he was.

  There is no other way.

  T
hat soft inner voice was not Khalida’s, nor was it Rama’s. Khalida caught Daiyan’s eye. In the flush of heat from head to foot, she acknowledged the truth. About Rama, and about Daiyan.

  ~~~

  The council arrived in a most interesting way: riding in bubbles that looked as if they were constructed of air and water, but that had the apparent stability of the Ra-Harakhte’s shuttle. The dozen who had met the shuttle came together. The rest traveled singly or in twos and threes.

  As each bubble touched the paving of the plaza, it melted into the sunlight. Khalida counted fifty personages in all, and not all were psi masters. Some smelled almost purely of politics; others had the carriage of aristocrats whether born or made.

  Rama surveyed them with a perilously bright eye. They advanced warily, in order that spoke of precedence. The handful in front were not the leaders. Those held back a few paces, letting the lesser luminaries serve as a shield.

  They were more afraid now than they had been when they dared to hope that their cage could hold him. Foolish; but Khalida had never had much respect for the political classes.

  When they had come as close as they dared, which was a good ten meters from the edge of the canopy, people emerged from the crowd, carrying chairs and benches. Quietly, without too much evident amusement, they made a sort of gallery, a semicircle focused on Rama.

  It took a while for them to agree on positions. He waited patiently, as he must have done a thousand times in front of such gatherings, with an air that made her skin shiver.

  You do not rule us, Elti had said.

  Maybe. And maybe he had no desire to. But he still ruled. He could not help himself.

  After the dignitaries were seated, and everyone from end to end of the plaza and in the streets beyond had gone silent, Rama left his seat and stepped out into the sun.

  Khalida saw him the way they must see him. A rather ordinary man of one of their nations, much smaller than most, neither beautiful nor ugly, but simply himself. His plain worn clothes in their odd fashion, his antique gold, reminded them that he was not one of them.

  For those with the eyes and the power, he was something else altogether. Something strong; something terrible. Something that they had been fools to try to control.

  He spoke quietly, making no effort to raise his voice. Everyone heard; he made sure of that.

  “I have read your book. I will read more, and think upon it. While I do that, I have a thing to ask of you.”

  They all waited. Some in the council thought of speaking—Khalida saw eyes flicker and jaws clench. But none of them dared.

  “I ask,” he said, “that you give me one gift, and only once. That when I ask, when the moment comes, all of you, all together, give me what strength you have. Not to death—that I will not allow. But as much as you may, without hesitation, without question.”

  “All of us?”

  Elti asked that. Of course. Elti, Khalida had concluded a while since, was this world’s speaker of the truth. The one who said what no else had the spine to say.

  Rama knew that, too. He regarded with her with something very like affection. “All of you,” he said.

  “And if we won’t? Or can’t?”

  He raised his hands. The one that was like anyone else’s. The one that, visibly and perceptibly, was not. “Then you won’t. I will do what I can to keep my promise. If I fail, maybe you’ll find your own way. Maybe that’s what you’re meant to do—having outgrown your need for heroes and conquerors.”

  “Now you’re mocking us,” she said.

  “Isn’t it the truth?”

  “If you fail,” she said, “you’ll go the way of your descendant whom we loved. You’ll be dead in every possible manner.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “Would it matter if I were?”

  “It would to me.”

  “I am afraid.”

  She searched his face, narrow-eyed as if against the sun. Whatever she saw there, she set her lips and turned away.

  “We will give you what you ask.”

  The speaker was one of the council, a woman of indeterminate age and indeterminate nation, round and small and dressed plainly as such things went here. Khalida would have taken her for an aide or a functionary, but Khalida had been trained to see through the façade. This was a power in this world.

  The woman was small enough that when she stood in front of Rama, she had to look up. She had taken the measure of him the moment she arrived, of course, but she allowed herself a proper while to confirm it.

  He allowed her her proper while. He had no discomfort with being stared at. It was the way of every world he knew.

  At length she said, “We have waited for you, and prepared for you. All of us have studied and trained and done everything we may—to help you or destroy you. Whichever is necessary.”

  “Whatever you know of this thing you brought here,” he said, “I would know.”

  “Ask,” she answered, “and it shall be given.”

  He bowed to her. She accepted his respect. She had her own fair share of what made leaders and kings.

  ~~~

  They brought all their knowledge to him, in books or in the minds of people who knew. Or he went to them—in his shuttle for the most part, though he took an almost childlike delight in riding in one of their bubbles that was made of air and water and psi working on them both.

  “Magic!” he said. Which Khalida was willing to concede.

  By the morning of the third day on the moon that had become a world in its own right, Kirkov and Dr. Ma came down from the Ra-Harakhte. The ship remained in orbit, empty but firmly connected to its captain, feeding with rising urgency as he moved closer to fulfilling his promise.

  The scientists needed an interpreter, and pressed Aisha into service. Khalida could have joined them, but she found herself charged with ferrying books and scholars to the mages’ city.

  That threw her together with Daiyan as often as not. Daiyan was a mage of rank, and also an aristocrat; when she was not gleaning information from archives or sending her virtual self across universes, she served on the council of a federation of cities near the northern pole.

  She wore it all easily, an ease that Khalida suspected she had worked for. She knew where most of the texts Rama needed were kept, and where the sages and scholars lived, as well as how to persuade some of the more fearful or the more hostile to venture within the Sleeper’s reach.

  “He may be right, you know,” Khalida said as she piloted the shuttle toward an island in the larger sea. There were storms brewing, and the winds were treacherous, but nothing that need absorb all of her concentration. “You probably don’t need him. He’s an atavism—a relic of a state of mind that you’ve left behind.”

  “Have we?” Daiyan asked. Her long body was coiled in the copilot’s cradle; she looked as boneless as a cat, and as paradoxically comfortable. “Do you know exactly what he is?”

  “No,” said Khalida, “but I have an inkling. He was an infamous conqueror; he is a psi master of unusual strength. He managed to found an empire that lasted the better part of a millennium—which is vanishingly rare. He appears to have a mutation that makes him uniquely qualified to deal with this thing that brought you all here. I don’t know what that mutation is, or how it works, but it did breed on, didn’t it? Until the last of his descendants died trying to do what he’s come here, or been brought here, to do.”

  “More than an inkling,” Daiyan said. She bowed in her cradle, half in amusement, half in respect. “Our ancestors said, and some of us still say, that he was the son of our sun-god. Maybe it was the sun that caused him to be what he is. His powers, or his psi as you say, certainly seem to come from that direction.”

  “I’ve heard of stranger things,” Khalida said. “Still. All of you together, with your combined skills and powers, ought to be able to do anything that one man can. If that thing out there feeds on stars, and his psi is keyed to them, can’
t you do something similar? If you study him as he studies you, can you learn to do what he does?”

  “With time enough, maybe. I don’t think we have that much left.”

  Khalida had been catching hints of this. She had not been paying attention. There was too much else to focus on.

  Out here, with clouds boiling above and the sea tossing below, it seemed suddenly both urgent and immediate. “Why? What’s happening?”

  Daiyan was as calm as ever. Her voice smoothed the rough edges of Khalida’s mood, though the words offered no comfort. “When you came through the wall, it knew. It had been asleep; it woke. It’s working its way free, now. We’ve tripled the guard on its prison, but the guards are barely holding on. We’ve lost seven already. Four of them since yesterday morning.”

  Khalida searched her face. The lines of it were subtly alien and yet subtly familiar, as if she had always known them. “It was waking before we came. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. But your coming roused it fully.”

  “He’s your bait this time. Your sacrifice, that you hope will buy you the time and strength to put an end to it forever.”

  Daiyan bent her head. She was not ashamed, but she was not proud, either.

  “He knows,” Khalida said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “As am I,” said Daiyan. “We’re fools, aren’t we?”

  “You’re desperate. You gave up everything, even your world, for a gamble that might still fail.”

  “It didn’t fail,” Daiyan said. “Even if we all die here, we did what we set out to do. Our only fear is that it might go back where we came from, and undo it all.”

  “Ah,” said Khalida. She had not reasoned all the way through to that. She should have; it was a failure of training that she had not.

  Daiyan brushed a finger down Khalida’s cheek. It felt like a kiss of cool fire. “I thought he would come alone, or with an army of blackrobes. I never expected you.”