by Judith Tarr
Khalida refrained from contemplating the ramifications of that. She had enough to do with ferrying supplies and then people up to the ship, and keeping her mouth shut when she was near either Rama or Daiyan.
They were set on this course. So apparently was everyone else here. She might have suggested that they take a smaller number, and look less like an army and more like a scouting force, but Rama answered that for her in her hearing.
Dr. Ma had doubts, too, having to do with cargo mass and availability of fuel. Rama replied, “The more psi masters we have with us, the more likely we are to be able to do this. The ship is our life support. Our propulsion, and our jump drive, is the combined power of all these mages.”
Dr. Ma grimaced. “That word,” she said. “Even realizing it’s a translation, it makes my head ache. We’re not conditioned to make these conceptual connections.”
“You’re doing very well,” he said.
He had not comforted her, from the sourness of her expression. Khalida followed him out of the lab, intending to run through a stream of questions that various persons had prevailed on her to ask, but a delegation from one of the cities waylaid him before she could begin.
King or not, he was spending an exceptional amount of time hearing people out and answering questions and settling disputes. They seemed unable to help themselves, and he lacked the will or the capacity to refuse.
She had a few hours before the next shuttle run, and no task urgently demanding she do it. She retreated to her room, with nothing more elaborate than sleep in mind.
Daiyan was not there. She had her own considerable part in this adventure, and it ate even more of her time and energy than it did Khalida’s.
Khalida stretched out on the bed. It smelled of the herbs the cleaning staff sprinkled on it every morning, and faintly of Daiyan: a little musk, a little sweetness. Slightly but distinctly alien and blessedly familiar.
She was half asleep already, drifting down to the edge of dream. Lately she had been dreaming of stars: not the crowded galaxies and infant stars and vast expanses of undifferentiated dust and gases that made up this universe, but the stars of home. An older universe, well expanded, mapped by the peoples who inhabited it, and named in their various languages.
Because she was human and inclined by nature and culture to perceive herself as the center of it all, she focused on that infinitesimal part of it which constituted human-inhabited space. Earth-human, she corrected herself; the stars she mapped carried human names and human designations.
The map from the Ara Celi was part of it. So was the route through Kom Ombo to Starsend. In her dream there were layers of space, with truespace in the middle and jumpspace below and…something…above. Skin of the bubble. Boundary of the universe.
Because she was dreaming, she took it all in without either doubt or disbelief. She was nearly as vast as the eater of souls, but infinitely less predatory. She could have been the ship’s elder sister, swimming through the layers of space, taking it all in and focusing, simply because she could, on Starsend.
To the senses of her dream, the near-abandoned habitat was a dim glow of clustered lights. Human minds and human bodies, most so faint as to be almost dark.
Those would be the nulls in stasis. Their protectors shone brighter, but they were very few. The one who was brightest lay on the edge of the inhabited zone, and the quality of the light told her he too was dreaming.
She spoke his name in the dream. “Zhao.”
He roused sluggishly. He had been deep asleep, and his dream was nightmare: fire and screaming, and unbearable pain, and mind after mind burning to ash.
He dreamed the fall of the Corps in Araceli. Khalida almost left him to it, but her dream-self paused. “Zhao,” she said again.
The fire retreated. “Captain Nasir?”
“Lieutenant Zhao,” she said, since they were exchanging defunct titles.
He focused sharply, suddenly. He was almost awake. “You’re alive? This really is you?”
“Don’t wake up!” she warned him. “I’m alive. On the other side of the sky.”
He held on with some difficulty to the state between waking and sleep, where psi was strongest—or so the mages said. “You survived? All of you? The thing you followed—is it—”
“Gone.”
He almost lost control and woke. But not quite. “Where are you? How are you finding me?”
Khalida did not have exact answers for that. “Here,” she said. She had a hand, she realized, and there was a line in it, a length of braided rope, like a horse’s lead. “Take this. Don’t let it go.”
He took it. Wound it around his hand, to hold it fast.
If there had been a horse on the other end, that would have been a very bad idea.
Magic is metaphor.
She heard it in Daiyan’s voice. Daiyan, whom she had found in dreams.
Her dream was fading. “Don’t let go,” she said, though he was already far away. “Don’t—let—”
67
“I’ve got it,” Khalida said.
She stumbled out of bed toward the solar flare that was Rama, not caring who else was around him. Only after she had spoken did she see the inner council of this world, and Elti glaring at her for interrupting what must have been a grand rant.
What Khalida had to say mattered more than any demands or arguments or objections that these people might be indulging in. “I found the way,” she said. “I’m hooked on, but I don’t know how long I can hold it.”
Rama was not the rioting fire that he had been. The fight with the eater of souls had drained him dry. He might recover most of it with time, but what had come back so far was a quieter strength, with less of the crazy edge that had got him into so much trouble both before and after he was locked down in stasis.
He was still a psi master. Training trumped talent, MI’s instructors never failed to remind recruits. He saw what Khalida gave him to see.
Once he had it, they all did. Elti’s mouth shut with a click that seemed to echo in the sudden silence.
“Yes,” he said with deep satisfaction and a distinct sense of relief. “You have it. Now we can go.”
~~~
No one else could hold the link, though others could feed Khalida strength. Even with that, she had not been lying. She could not hold it indefinitely.
Everyone who was already on the ship would go. Anyone who had not embarked on the shuttles would stay. There was no more time. They went now, or they never went at all.
Khalida’s life was one departure after another. This might the strangest. It might also be the last.
She could not both pilot the final shuttle and keep the link straight in her head. She flew as passenger with Rama in the pilot’s cradle, and Aisha and Daiyan on either side of her. The shuttle’s hold was full of supplies and the last few dozen travelers, some still in nightclothes with their baggage in hasty bundles.
One of those travelers was Elti. That had startled Khalida, and dismayed her profoundly. Of all things they did not need, that contentious personage ranked high.
Yet there she was, silent for once and camped by one of the ports, watching her world drop away below. She had more than enough psi to fill the berth, and more than enough ambition to hope to rule the homeworld once they had returned to it.
Khalida could not keep alien politics in her head along with the link across universes. She shut her eyes and let herself drift back to the outer edge of dream.
~~~
The Ra-Harakhte was ready and eager to fly. It had fed deeply and well, and the addition of so many psi masters made it frankly giddy. If it had been a horse it would have been running in mad circles with occasional leaps and twists.
Rama had all he could do to keep it under control. He laid in the scientists’ course with Khalida’s refinements, paused to be sure it was locked in, and let the ship go.
It knew the way with a surety that nothing human could match. It had the taste and the feel of tha
t other universe in it, pulling it through the edge/surface/interface of this one.
Aisha had been the interface on the way out. She was there now, quiet, holding steady. She was the key. Khalida was the hand that turned it, and the lock in which it turned—both at once, interchangeably.
Words were not enough. Searching a worldweb came closer, and piloting a conventional starship in some ways closest of all. It was a shiver in the skin and a prickle in the back of the skull, and a dream that lingered long after the dreamer woke.
The temptation to fly apart in the moment of transition was even stronger than it had been on the way out. All the universes begged her to flow into them. She could be everything, and in everything. She could be vaster than the eater of souls.
“Khalida.”
Daiyan’s voice, soft on the edge of the infinite. Calling her back to the thread that connected her to one universe of them all, and to the body in which her vastness was, however briefly and uncomfortably, contained.
She rode the waves of her name from universe to universe, into the heart of an almost-sun. The ship dived straight through, sleek as a dolphin in a sea, and leaped joyfully into open space.
The link still held, the thread of connection that had brought them through. Khalida adjusted the ship’s course, aiming more directly toward it.
One of the forward screens in the bridge came alive. Zhao stared out of it, thin to gauntness but both alive and conscious. Marta stood behind him; the warm of her smile washed over them all. She opened her mouth to speak.
The screen went blank. The ship rolled. The course Khalida had set disintegrated and re-formed, veering away from Starsend. Jump alarms whooped and shrilled.
In the instant of shock before jump, Khalida felt something break away from the ship’s web. A dataspurt, directed—
Jump blinded and deafened her. The thread that had bound her to Zhao snapped, flinging her headlong into the dark.
~~~
Khalida woke in the soundless cacophony of jumpspace. It seemed unusually full, or else she was unusually sensitive to the things that swam those incalculable seas.
Memory flooded. She stemmed the tide and sorted the flotsam.
They should be orbiting Starsend. Not in the middle of jump.
What—
She extricated herself from the cradle. The bridge was in jump mode: deserted, the screens dormant.
All but one. Aisha perched in front of it, absorbed in what looked like an academic dissertation.
It was, Khalida realized, a collection of writings from the rogue moon. She was building a guide to the language, and to its writing that was sometimes a set of ideographs and sometimes an alphabet. Khalida had not studied it enough to understand the logic behind it.
She was not going to begin now. She knotted her hands together to keep from hauling the child up and pinning her against the bulkhead. She armed her voice instead, and blasted Aisha with it.
Gently. “What did you do? What was that databurst you sent?”
Aisha looked up from the screen. Her eyes were wide and innocent. “I didn’t put us in jump. That was Rama and the mages.”
“The databurst,” Khalida said. “What was it?”
“A message,” Aisha answered without perceptible hesitation. “Using Mother’s code. To the nearest tradeship, to come and help the people at Starsend.”
“Help them do what?”
“Whatever they need.”
Khalida sank down in the cradle next to her. “Now I’m embarrassed by what I was thinking.”
“We’re all on edge,” Aisha said. “We’re going to Nevermore.”
“I figured that,” said Khalida. “This ship is wanted from one end of U.P. to the other. Its captain is wanted, if possible, even worse. Best we get in as fast as we can, get the cargo delivered, and then get out. Unless we’re planning to be arrested and charged with every crime the Corps can think of.”
“I cling to optimism.”
Khalida spun. Rama had appeared as he had a habit of doing. He summoned a hoverchair and sat in it.
He tilted his head toward Aisha’s screen. “Amosh, there. Not Elosh.”
Aisha made a face. “I always get those two confused.” She keyed in the correction while Khalida simmered.
Rama smiled at them both. “I have no intention of spending all or even a fraction of my remaining days in the Corps’ custody.”
“You should have thought of that while you were burning your way through United Planets’ space,” Khalida said sourly.
“I regret very little,” he said, “and what I did to the Corps is not in that category.”
“Nor in mine,” Khalida admitted. “We’d better hope they haven’t laid an ambush for us around Nevermore.”
“Why would they? I’m known to be heading outward. If they go hunting origins, they’ll aim for Dreamtime.”
“Or Govinda,” Aisha said. “There’s nothing official to connect him with Nevermore.”
“Unless they’re tracing him everywhere he might be found.”
“You’re MI,” Aisha said. “You’re thinking things through. I don’t think they are.”
“They followed us as far as Kom Ombo,” Khalida said. “Nobody thought they’d do that, either.”
“We disappeared from this universe,” said Rama. “We won’t be reappearing anywhere, or anywhen, that is possible according to what your science thinks it knows.”
“Except Dr. Ma,” Aisha said.
Khalida gave it up. “What will be will be. I hope at least some of your mages can fight.”
“Oh, they can,” Rama said. He sounded as if he relished the thought.
~~~
In the process of thinking things through, Khalida ran head-on into the prospect of several hundred psi masters appearing on Nevermore. When U.P. got wind of that, or MI, or ye gods, the Corps…
Rama could hardly have failed to think of that. He had not let it stop or even slow him. His world had been there millennia before U.P. existed. It belonged to him and to his people. What U.P. thought, or what they might do, he honestly did not care.
“You should,” she said when she could catch him alone. That was hard: the ship was full of his people.
She managed it by tracking him to his quarters on a rare occasion when he would agree to rest. It was cruel and she was merciless and he deserved it.
“A few hundred of you,” she said, “even with what powers your people have, can’t hold against trillions of us.”
“We don’t need to,” he said. “Remember the status of this world designated MEP 1403. A status which, as I understand, Dr. Kanakarides insisted on, and fought for, even to Centrum and the Senate.”
“How did you know that?”
“I know everything that concerns me,” he said.
“Now that I almost believe.”
He bowed slightly and set about undressing.
She got the message. She elected to ignore it. “Nevermore is a restricted planet—a permanent preserve. No one can colonize it or build on it.”
“Except its native peoples. Which,” he said, “we are.”
“Marina didn’t know that. She’s not psi. Or precog, either. What she is is protective. To the death. And you can bet that torque you cling to, that Centrum will come down on us all.”
“She won’t die for us,” Rama said. “I promise you that.”
“You had better keep that promise,” Khalida said.
68
Finally it was happening. The long jump was almost over.
The mages were more than ready. Even for people with their talents, who could spend jump practicing and honing them, jump was a tedious and often maddening place to be. Not because it was a place of madness, but because they couldn’t be outside the ship, exploring and learning and feeling the way Ship did.
Someday, Aisha thought, one of them would figure out how to jump without a ship. They were already talking about it, and asking the scientists questions that half drove
them crazy and half made them dive into their databases in search of progressively more complicated solutions.
Now, with their voyage almost ended, the mages had gone silent. Waiting. Hardly breathing.
She wasn’t breathing all that well herself. What she’d found was so much bigger than she’d imagined, and so much stranger.
That was wonderful and amazing and satisfying. But more than that, she was coming home. Where Mother and Pater were. And Jamal and Vikram and Malia and Jinni and—
“Steady,” Rama said. He’d taken his place to the bridge just before jump, along with the scientists and Aunt Khalida. Daiyan and Elti and a handful of the others had come in with him, who were too curious or too excited to stay in their quarters.
There weren’t enough cradles for them all. She wanted to say so, but the words wouldn’t come out.
The jump alarms went off. The Earthfolk dived for their cradles. Some of the mages did, but most caught hold of struts and screen supports and went on staring at the screens.
Rama wasn’t pretending to need a cradle, either. Aisha had a moment’s temptation to climb out and stand beside him, but she wasn’t that brave yet. She stayed where she was, with the hatch open as always.
The universe warped and then twisted itself straight again. Through the haze of drugs and jump, the mages were completely solid. Rama most of all. As if, while the universe shifted around them, they stayed in one place and one state.
There was a truth in that. About psi. About people from Nevermore.
She made a new note on the long list, to find answers when she could. Now they’d settled into orbit around Nevermore, and the familiar land masses and seas rolled below. They’d come out directly above the planet, not pretending to need open space for jump, any more than they had on Araceli.
Ship sent out its own hail. It had learned to do that while the humans were busy elsewhere. “Research vessel Ra-Harakhte, Tsinghua University, Beijing Nine.”
“Research Vessel Ra-Harakhte,” Nevermore replied. “State your business here.”
That was Vikram’s voice. Ship didn’t answer; it hadn’t learned that part yet.