by Judith Tarr
It saw him. The force of its seeing nearly shook him apart.
They held him together, all of them. All through Aisha—even Umizad, who was meant to be the focus.
She didn’t know how. She couldn’t—
“Steady.” Umizad set the example for her. It felt like a firm hand in hers, and feet braced squarely against an unyielding floor.
Someone else gripped her other hand—someone far away, under a shield of atmosphere. Aunt Khalida’s face glimmered behind her eyes, and Daiyan’s a shadow behind it. They were strong, and perfectly, immovably still.
They kept her from breaking. She held on to Rama with her mind and will, and to Ship that shuddered all around them.
In the story outside of them all, the warrior leveled his spear. His armor was made of a million mortal souls. Their psi was his spear, flashing and twisting like a bolt of lightning.
The beast reared over him. It fought the story it was in; it tried to be its real self.
He had to keep control. Focus, Aisha willed him and herself. Or prayed. Focus.
The beast lunged. He struck at it with his spear.
Its laughter shook the sky. Yes! Yes, smite me!
Rama staggered. His edges frayed. Scales of armor melted away.
The beast swallowed them. And grew.
Nothing he did could stop it. Or kill it. Or in any way defeat it. He couldn’t even trap it. Not any more. It was wise to anything a human could think of.
“Are you?” Rama leaned on his spear. His armor was threadbare in some places and ragged in others, but it held. The spear crackled and threw off sparks.
“Catch me if you can,” said Rama.
He turned and ran.
~~~
He ran to the ends of the universe through waves of shattered spacetime, spurning the nurseries of stars underfoot and sending galaxies spinning. He was vaster than worlds and stronger than suns. The universe was barely big enough to hold him.
That was one story.
In another, a warrior on a black antelope with blood-red eyes—neither stallion nor mare; Ship didn’t do binary—led the beast on a long chase across endless rolling plains. The beast had wings, but the antelope was lighter and faster, and when it had to, it could fly.
It was starting to tire. The warrior’s spear was dimming.
The beast never tired. It would catch them when they couldn’t run any longer. Then it would eat them all.
Rama stopped without warning and whirled to face the beast. It roared toward him.
He flung the spear.
It missed.
And almost shook apart with the force of Aisha’s shock.
In the third story, the story in which she rode in a living ship with two mages from Nevermore, Umizad held her up. The wave of psi turned and lashed through him.
He held on. He was trained. He knew how.
He was old and his body was failing. It couldn’t withstand that much power. There was no way—
Aisha reached inside herself. She went down so far and so deep that she knew she might never come up again.
At the very bottom was a tiny spark of light. An image, or a memory. A familiar room. Familiar faces. Mother, Pater, Jamal. Vikram. Malia.
They sat around the table in the family dining room, eating and talking. It didn’t matter what they ate or what they said. What mattered was that they were there.
Khalida came in from the door to the roof, hand in hand with Daiyan. No one seemed surprised to see either of them. They sat with the others and joined hands, closing the circle.
That was Aisha’s strength. Those were her anchors. She rooted herself in them, and gave that strength to Umizad.
Darkness swallowed them. Darkness absolute. Complete absence of anything at all.
Total sensory deprivation. There was no beast. No universe. No story. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The darkness split apart. Light flooded over her. Annihilated her.
Far, far, far down the endless road, a tiny figure struggled toward her. It was Rama in the ragged remnants of his armor, on a battered and limping antelope. He had his spear back.
It was broken. Light dripped from it. He raised it.
His arm shook. He was almost done. They all were.
The beast hovered over him. Its wings spanned the world.
He aimed again and loosed the fire. As straight as he could, as strongly as he could.
Past the beast, again.
The beast laughed and swooped down on him.
The sky split in two.
In Aisha’s story, Ship was completely out of control, diving into a nursery of stars. This universe they were in was new, so small it had barely begun to expand. They’d found its center.
Omphalos, Mother would say. Navel of the world. Gate of gods and the powers above and below.
Gate.
Ship lurched aside, wrenching every molecule. Parts of it tore free; it bled solar plasma, long swirls of it dripping down into the gate.
The beast crashed into the singularity. Spacetime twisted.
Rama thrust with the last fading fragment of his spear, direct to the heart of beast and gate. All the souls in the spear screamed at once, ripping through Aisha, catching on a single desperate thread of self and psi: Khalida, who was too damned stubborn and too damned mad to give way.
Umizad reached past Aisha and the straining, struggling remnant that was her aunt. He was as poor a rag as the spear, but he was beautifully calm and perfectly focused. He knew exactly what he was doing.
He pushed.
The beast swallowed the gate. The gate swallowed the beast.
Rama flung the fire of himself at the gate. But Umizad was there first.
He blazed up like a dying star. Stars fed him; galaxies gave him their strength.
The gate collapsed on itself. Ship rode the shockwave outward, helpless as a twig in a flood.
Rama clawed his way up out of his cradle, scraping the last of his psi. He turned Ship, somehow. Aimed it. Dropped, unconscious, dead—Aisha couldn’t tell. She couldn’t move. She could barely think.
She was a pair of eyes and a shred of consciousness. All she knew was that the gate was gone. The beast was gone. The universe—she didn’t know. She might never know.
64
Umizad was dead. Aisha and Rama almost were. The others, down on the moon—she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t reach that far.
She woke with the great-grandmother of a headache and the feeling that her skin was blistering off her bones. When she could make her eyes work, she couldn’t see any sign of burns, but every part of her hurt.
She was breathing air, which meant Ship was alive. She crawled out of her cradle past the cold still shape of Umizad. The captain’s cradle was empty. Rama was gone. Was—
Stupid. He hadn’t flamed into nothingness like his descendant. He was lying beyond the cradle, sprawled on his back, covered in grey ash.
Those had been his clothes. He still had his antique gold—and raw, blistered skin under it.
Aisha dropped down beside him. She was suddenly, ferociously angry. He was not dead. There was no way he could be dead.
She shook him so hard his head rocked on his neck. “Wake up. Wake up, damn you.”
He didn’t move or breathe. She hauled back to deliver a full-bore face-slap.
His hand snapped up and caught her wrist.
His eyes were open. There were galaxies in them. Swirls of suns.
He blinked. The suns sank back into the depths.
Aisha wrenched free. “You couldn’t even die like a decent person.”
“Who ever said I was decent?”
That was Rama. Awake, aware, and as sane as he ever was. He sat up, and reeled.
Aisha caught him. For an instant she was someone else, and he was Rama. Always.
Then she was Aisha again, and memory faded. So did anger. Suddenly she was impossibly tired, and terribly calm.
“We won,” she said, “I think. I
have no idea where we are. Or even if we’re in the same universe we started in.”
“We are,” he said. “That thing isn’t.”
“Is it dead?”
“It can’t die. It won’t come back, either. It’s learned its lesson.”
“You hope.” Aisha pushed herself to her feet. “We need to eat. So does Ship. Then find our way back.”
If there was anywhere to go back to. But she didn’t say that.
Aisha wasn’t going to think about what would happen to the two of them in this universe without a human world or human people. With ship’s stores that were finite. And—
~~~
Rama retreated to his quarters to wash off the ash and put on new clothes. Aisha stayed on the bridge next to Umizad’s body.
It was empty, a shriveled husk, like a leaf in a winter wood. She made herself remember what he used to be before she knew him in this life: not the master mage or the gifted student but the boy in the barnyard, just discovering that he had magic. That was his deepest self, his true self.
“Ship,” she said, not even stopping to think whether it would listen, let alone do what she asked. “Make a cradle for him, please. Keep him whole and safe, until we can bring him home.”
Ship didn’t answer, but the cradle he was in grew and blossomed like a flower, rising on a stem as thick as Aisha’s whole body, till it stopped level with her eyes. Then it grew shimmering petals, pale blue and palest green and the faintest tinge of red-gold. They folded over what was left of Umizad, and went still.
Aisha found her voice, eventually. “Thank you, Ship. Thank you.”
~~~
The bridge was full of Umizad’s memory. Aisha couldn’t stay there, not without losing what control she had left and crying herself dry.
She retreated to the crew’s galley. She hadn’t thought she was hungry, but once she was off the bridge, she realized she was starving.
She rooted in cupboards and bins and coolers, and threw together what she found, more or less at random, the way she used to do with Jamal when it was their turn to cook.
By the time Rama came out of his room, dressed in his gi, she’d eaten about as much as she could stand. He sat down across the table from her and ate everything that she hadn’t devoured.
He didn’t complain about her more creative combinations. Just raised his eyebrows and kept on going.
It was the kind of food she’d made on Nevermore, the kind she hadn’t eaten in ages. At least since Araceli. She’d been missing the food of her own people, and the people, too.
She wanted to go home.
~~~
Ship fed for a whole shipday. Aisha slept through much of it. So, as far as she knew, did Rama. There wasn’t anything else they could do. Until Ship was fueled, nothing much more than life support would work.
When Aisha was awake, she went into ship’s web in search of Aunt Khalida’s navigation protocols. The web was in a knot, with some systems down and others corrupted, but she managed to sort it out bit by bit.
Finally she found the files she wanted. Getting them to open was another adventure. Rama helped with that, emerging from his quarters after she’d started to think he’d collapsed the way he had after he first rescued Ship.
He’d done that alone. For this he’d had all that was left of his people. Whether there still were any, neither of them knew.
He had closed in on himself again. “We should be celebrating,” Aisha said. “The eater is gone.”
“Not till we know the price,” Rama said, even while he sorted out a string of navigation files and got one of the star maps to stop turning itself inside out.
Aisha leaped on it. “There! That’s the orientation we came in at.”
She triangulated maps and observations. That gave them a course to set.
Ship couldn’t jump yet, but it could make fair enough speed swimming through this part of space, which was rich with stellar gases. They had time to rest and get their own strength back.
Two shipdays. Three. Four. Aisha had the web running the way it should, and she had repaired some of the damaged systems. Ship was healing the wounds in its hull, though sometimes, when it itched or the healing tissues stretched, everything inside went strange: the smell of the air, the quality of the light.
She’d thought Rama was finding things of his own to do, till it dawned on her that she hadn’t seen him since the second shipday. She tracked him down to his quarters, in the kind of panic that left her barely able to see where she was going.
He wasn’t lying dead in his bed or hanging from a nonexistent rafter. He sat with his feet tucked up, back straight, hands on knees.
Aisha sagged against the door. His eyes were open, wide and blank. Still, he was breathing. When she stepped into his line of sight, he blinked.
“I can’t find them,” he said.
She knew who he meant. “Because they’re too far?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“I think I burned myself out.”
He was perfectly calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that meant he was screaming underneath.
Aisha shook her head firmly. “That’s not true. You went right into ship’s web, didn’t to use an interface. Your psi is still there.”
“Barely. I can’t see past the hull at all, except through the screens. I can’t find anything out there. I can’t see, or feel, or hear—”
She’d never heard him talk like this. He was shaking: holding on by a thread.
“It will come back,” she said, though she didn’t know if that was true. “You drained the cup, that’s all. It will fill up. A day or two in the sun, a few days’ rest…”
“This is worse. This is scraped down to the bare bone. What if it never comes back?”
“I don’t believe that,” Aisha said. “I refuse to believe it. And even if it’s true, does it matter? You’re alive. You have Ship. We’ll find your people.”
“If they live. If they haven’t all—if I didn’t—”
“Stop.” Aisha caught hold of his hand. It was the one that held the sun. She turned it palm up.
The sun was still there. Dim, clouded, the swirls of plasma sluggish and slow. But it wasn’t gone.
“Look,” she said. “Can you feel it? Is it burning?”
“It always burns.”
“The rest will come back.” She folded the fingers over it and held it in both of her hands. He didn’t pull away, which surprised her. “Ship will help. So will I. And the mages when we find them. Between all of us and the sun, you’ll get yourself back.”
“Is that my self? Is that all I am? That burning thing?”
She would never say so, but he was acting like Jamal. Complete with whiny fit. Which was disconcerting, because she wanted to laugh, and that would not be a good thing at all.
“What did you used to be?” she asked him. “When you were only you?”
“I was—” He claimed his hand back finally, but used it to catch one of hers and pull her closer. He peered into her face. “I was never only anything.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
She’d gone too far. His breath hissed between his teeth.
She pushed just a little bit further. “Maybe it’s time you learned to be a person like anyone else. Nobody out there wants or needs a king.”
He could kill her. He was close enough and strong enough. He could snap her neck before she had a chance to move.
She held herself still. Trusting him. Daring him to get over himself.
He rocked back on his heels. She watched rage chase tiredness past the first unwilling flicker of laughter across his face. “Damn you,” he said, but mildly.
“Come out and eat,” she said. “Ship says we’re almost where we want to go.”
“Ship says?” His brow quirked upward. “It talks to you now?”
“It always did.”
“I don’t think I’m surprised.”
“But you are jealous.”
She danced back out of reach. “It’s your turn to cook. Better make something fast. I’m hungry.”
He lunged after her. She darted ahead of him. He might catch her, and she might get a bruise or two, but it would be worth it. She’d kicked him out of his pity party. With luck he wouldn’t fall back into it before they came to the rogue moon.
65
They circled around from the sun side of the barren planet, into a night that was both emptier and fuller than it had been before. The eater’s prison was gone. The blackness of space was already filling with dust and gases and bits of stars streaming into the void.
Sparks of light glimmered from the moon, tracing the shapes of cities and the lines of rivers. Someone was alive down there.
Aisha couldn’t hear anyone thinking. Ship walled her off from anything that might have come in from outside.
Maybe she was burned out, too. It didn’t matter as much to her as it did to Rama. She’d be better off without it, if she ever made it home. If she didn’t, not much of anything would matter.
~~~
Rama insisted he could pilot the shuttle. Since Aisha had never done it, there wasn’t much choice.
He seemed to have calmed down. His eyes were clear and his hands steady on the controls. The course he laid in took them back the way they came, to the field outside the mages’ city.
They touched down just before sunrise. The field was empty and damp with rain that had fallen in the night. The air smelled rich and green.
Aisha still couldn’t hear anything outside her own head. It was a muffled feeling, like walking around with her ears blocked. What it must be like for Rama, she could hardly imagine.
As they came closer to the city, Aisha started to smell baking bread. At first she was sure she’d imagined it. But it grew stronger. Then she heard someone singing, painfully and blessedly off key.
Rama heard it, too. He lurched forward, then stopped cold.
Aisha didn’t want to leave him, as badly as she needed to see for herself that people were still alive. At least Shendi was, making the day’s bread, which meant there must be people to sell it to.