Forgotten Suns (19 page)

“That might be up for debate,” John Begay said.

“You can refuse the mission,” said Khalida. “Any of you.
I’ll take the heat, and whatever penalties MI slaps on us.”

“No,” said John Begay, and the rest nodded. Good soldiers,
all of them, no matter what their dossiers might say. “It’s highly probable
we’ve been lied to. That doesn’t put the planet in any less jeopardy. We’ll fly
the mission.”

Khalida had known he would say that. The ache in the back of
her skull, the sense of deep and subtle wrongness, had grown stronger, the
closer they came to departure. “You fly,” she said, “but I make the call:
execute, or abort. If it gets bad, it’s on me. My head on the spike.”

Every one of them wanted to argue: faces growing tight, eyes
narrowing. They all knew better. The alarm buzzed. Fifteen minutes to
departure.

Khalida followed them out into the bay. The shuttle waited,
all systems optimal, all clearances granted. Specs for the mission were loaded
into the shuttle’s computer, set to download when it came in sight of the
target.

Khalida knew the substance of them.
Locate target, take over target’s system, disarm target.
With
protocols for various possible modes of resistance, from small-arms fire to
electromagnetic pulse.

Standard procedures. Standard disposition of forces: Max in
the pilot’s cradle, John Begay linked in to the web, Kinuko and Sonja manning
weapons.

Nothing about it felt standard. The universe around her
seemed thin, brittle, as if it could crack at a touch. “Listen to me,” she said
as the team filed into the shuttle. “If anything—
anything
—strikes you as off, get out of there. Don’t stop, don’t
question. Just go.”

Max arched an eyebrow. “Premonition?”

“Political instinct.” Khalida eyed the interior of the
shuttle. Orders be damned, and Rinaldi be triple-damned. She was going.

“Don’t,” Max said. She knew Khalida too well; could always
read her, no matter how she schooled her face to blankness. “Whatever Captain
Batshit is up to, we’re all better off if you’re near enough to stop it.”

“Stop talking sense,” Khalida said. “You’ll ruin your
reputation.”

Max grinned and pulled her in, kissing her until her ears
rang. “Keep the bed warm for me.”

The shuttle powered up. Khalida stepped back away from it.
Hating herself; hating her orders, and the bastard who had laid them on her.

Max was the best kickass shuttle pilot in the quadrant. If
anybody could get out ahead of a dirty bomb, she could.

Unless the intel was off by fourteen minutes, and the bird started
to go up directly below the shuttle, just as it entered Ostia’s airspace.

The bomb could blow right in the heart of Ostia, or on the
way to Castellanos and take out that whole sector of the planet, or hit target
and turn Psycorps’ heart and center to radioactive slag.

Khalida had Max on the comm and the bomb in her sights. One
single, simple command. That was all it took.

She looked into Max’s eyes, and Max understood. She nodded.
Khalida blew her into the next universe.

Over and over and over again.

~~~

“Enough.”

Oh, of course
he
would be there. “What are you?” she asked. “My personal
deus ex machina
?”

“You are giving me a mother of headaches,” said Rama. He was
speaking Arabic. He was also physically there, in her cabin, locks be damned as
usual.

He was unusually ruffled; his eyes were narrowed as if the
light were too bright. Since he could stare directly into the sun with no ill
effects, that was noteworthy.

“Don’t tell me you have a weakness,” she said.

“I have a host of them,” said Rama. “Of which you happen to
be one.”

“Not interested,” she said.

He blinked. He really did look as if the thought had never
occurred to him. Which was insulting in its way.

“I have a habit,” he said with some care, “of trying to mend
what is past mending. I brought a man back from the dead once. He was never especially
grateful, though he did allow as how he had by no means done all he needed to
do in this life. I gave him the room to do it. The second time he died, he made
sure I let him go.”

“That’s very sad,” said Khalida.

“Sad? No. He was the best of friends; of all the allies I
had, he was the closest. He was happy, once he got over raging at me for
violating Nature. He was part of me.”

“I definitely am not part of you,” she said.

“Unfortunately you are. When I mended you, I wove part of
myself into the working. You were so horrendously badly cobbled together, there
was no other way.”

Khalida stared at him. “So I’m not just crazy for myself any
more? I’ve got your crazy, too?”

“That,” he said with a distinct wry twist, “is one way of
putting it.”

She did not need his humor, black or otherwise. “If I kill
myself, will it kill you?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am sure,” he said.

“That’s a relief,” she said. She studied her hands. They
were thinner than they used to be. She had gone down a uniform size. Which was
not a good thing, but there it was. “I am a mess, aren’t I?”

“Yes, and you are wallowing in it.”

That, she had not expected. No kindness; no sympathy. Not
even a leavening of understanding.

“I’m not your morale officer,” he said, “or your brother, or
your lover. I am certainly not the machine-happy fools who ran you through
their standard program and never bothered to verify the results. I am only a
bloody-handed Bronze Age warlord, but it seems even I know more of the science
of the mind than your so-wise Psych Division.”

He had backed her against the wall with nothing more
physically forceful than words.

“Your machines are clever and ingenious and occasionally
brilliant,” he said, “and your worldsweb would make the sages of my people weep
for envy, but you know next to nothing of this thing you call psi, and as for
the workings of the mind and the heart, it seems you have forgotten what little
of it you ever knew. Machines have failed you, because you are what you are,
and your Psycorps so maimed you that the rest could not help but happen. I’ve
done what I can, but I have neither the talent nor the training to make you
whole. That, you have to do for yourself.”

“How?”

“Piece by piece,” he said. “First believe. Then do.”

“You sound like a bad martial-arts vid.”

“Not all mindless entertainment is false. Some of it is
rooted in the truth.”

“
You
are a bad
fantasy vid.” She slid down the wall, squatting on her haunches, and hugged her
knees. She could not tell whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

He could be a figment of her imagination, a nightmare like
the one he had banished with a word.

He squatted in front of her. He was solid, for a figment.
She could hear him breathing. He had a faint scent to him. It reminded her of
Nevermore: the smell of earth and grass and rain.

That was alien. He had never had any rankness about him at
all, even fresh out of stasis, with a beard to the waist and nails longer than
his hands.

“What you suffered is part of you,” he said. “What you did
was terrible. But it’s done. You can’t undo it. You can blunt the edges. You
can learn to live with it. You can even, if you work at it, be happy.”

“You’re talking to yourself, too, aren’t you?” She blinked
away tears that were there for no reason, that she had not even been aware of
until they blurred her vision. “What if you have to do it all over again? What
if you’re called back to the place where you did all those terrible things, and
all the same choices are waiting? What do you do then?”

“Whatever I must,” he said.

“You’re stronger than I am,” Khalida said. “Or colder. I
wasn’t brought up to be a warrior king.”

“You are a warrior,” said Rama. “Captain or king, it’s much
the same. You do what you have to. You pay for it. You atone if you can. You
hold it together, because tomorrow you may have to do it all over again. That’s
as much mercy as you get in war.”

“What did you drive your troops with? Scorpion whips?”

“I never drove an army in my life,” he said, flowing to his
feet. “I led.”

She glared at the door long after he had stalked out of it. “‘Just
get over it,’” she snarled at the memory of him. “If it’s that easy, what are
you
doing in this age of the universe?
Why aren’t you happily dead?”

He could have answered if he chose. The silence had a
distinctly mulish quality.

One thing he had done. He had broken the feedback loop. It
would come back—Khalida was hardly foolish enough to think it was gone. But she
could function again, at least for today. That was worth something, whether she
was happy about it or not.

“What
is
your
name?” Aisha finally got around to asking Rama. They were nearly done with
jump. She’d been lying low, expecting Aunt Khalida to corner her any moment and
try to ship her back to Nevermore, but everything had been suspiciously quiet.

Everybody was waiting to get back into real space again, so
real life could start up again, along with the worldsweb and all the news and
orders and messages that brought with it. The night before that happened, there
was captain’s table again, and this time Aisha was included.

She was helping Rama get ready. He never needed help with
his clothes, but his hair was so thick and long, and he flat refused to get rid
of it. It was like the torque he was wearing tonight: it had come with him from
his own world. He wouldn’t let it go.

He said she was good at sorting out all the twists and
tangles. He didn’t have the patience himself, if someone else was around to do
it. She didn’t terribly mind. It was like curling blue-black silk, and once she
got it to cooperate, with help from a brush and a comb and a tube of gel she’d
begged off the purser, it looked perfectly presentable.

Meanwhile she had time to ask questions, and he was her
captive. “I know your name isn’t Rama, or Krishna, either. What is it really?”

He knew better by now than to twist around and make her have
to redo half an hour’s worth of work. “Does it matter?” he asked. “I like my
new name. I want to keep it. My old one is best forgotten.”

“Why? Is it ugly? Silly? Would I think it was stupid?”

“No!”

She grinned as she finished weaving plaits and started
working them together into a club at his nape. “So what was it?”

“Mirain.” He bit off the word.

“Mirain,” she said, feeling all around it with her tongue. “I
like that. It’s nice. What does it mean?”

“It means Firstborn, and it was an old family name, and my
mother gave it to me. Are you happy now? Mirain is six thousand years dead. My
name is Rama, and I live in this world, where no one has ever heard of the
horror that I used to be.”

“You were not a horror,” Aisha said. “I have another name,
too, you know. My grandfather wanted to call me Meritamon, which is a very old
name in Egypt, but Pater said that was no kind of name for a Muslim. So I’m
Aisha. But when I visit Grandfather, I like to be Meritamon.”

“Meritamon,” he said. He put a lilt in it, that was his own
original accent. “That is beautiful.”

“It means ‘Beloved of Amon,’” she said. “Amon was one of
their sun gods: the great one, the one who ruled the rest. So you see, I can be
two people, and have two completely different names. You can, too.”

“Was Meritamon a destroyer of worlds?”

“Of course not. Neither were you.”

“Only because my family stopped me.”

“You would have stopped yourself,” Aisha said.

“No,” he said. “Not by then. The one I loved most in any
world was gone. She kept me from losing my grip on humanity. Without her, there
was nothing left of me but fire.”

Aisha bound up the last of his braids, but played with them
for a while, to keep him talking. “I can see the fire inside,” she said, “but
you’re human. I’m absolutely sure of that.”

“That’s because I haven’t been tested yet. No one has tried
to provoke me. I can afford to play at being human.”

“You’re not playing at it,” Aisha said with a snap of
annoyance. “This is what you are. Not all of it, maybe. But enough.”

“So you hope,” Rama said.

Aisha shook her head, but she’d run out of time to argue.
Captain’s table was in ten minutes, and she still had to put on her own
clothes.

~~~

Dinner was formal and polite and perfect. They drank from
crystal and ate with silver, and the food tasted wonderful.

Even Aunt Khalida behaved herself. She looked a little
better, but she was avoiding Rama so carefully that it was obvious. She talked
around him, and when she had to look toward his end of the table, her eyes slid
past him.

Aisha could understand that. She was doing the same thing to
Lieutenant Zhao. But Rama wasn’t anything like Lieutenant Zhao.

Except, Aisha thought, for one thing. Which happened to be
the one thing Rama couldn’t let Psycorps know he had. They’d do worse than
neuter him. They’d study him till there was nothing left of him.

That was true of too many people in this universe. Rama didn’t
seem to care. He had people telling stories, so he could sit back and listen.
That was one of the ways he studied the universe he’d woken up in.

People loved to hear themselves talk; Rama could get them
going for hours. Aisha had seen him do it on Nevermore, when everybody got
together for dinner and stayed on afterwards, drinking coffee and nibbling
dessert and falling in and out of friendly arguments.

Thinking about it made her miss it so fiercely that her eyes
stung. When she got herself back under control, Lieutenant Zhao was looking
right at Rama and smiling, and saying, “What of you, Meser Rama? You must have
wonderful stories to tell, from your wanderings through the worlds.”