Forgotten Suns (24 page)

She might have seemed asleep, but even within the shields,
Khalida could feel the force of her regard. “There’s no escaping our enemies,”
she said. “No matter where we go. No matter what we do.”

“You seem to have found ways,” Khalida said.

“Desperation,” said Mem Aurelia.

“You asked for me. Why?”

“Because you understand,” Mem Aurelia said.

“You don’t think I can talk you out of this.”

“No one can.”

“Tell me why,” Khalida said.

“Not in words,” said Mem Aurelia. “Watch.”

Khalida had an instant’s warning: the flash of the download
alert; the ripple in the web that warned of data incoming before it crashed
over her.

It was meant to overwhelm her. She sorted it almost by
instinct, with reflexes that had not, after all, lost their edge. Every city,
every town, every farm and ranch and station, had its own file. Collated,
searched, and sorted, they transcribed a pattern.

She had seen parts of it on the first tour, before she
destroyed Ostia. She had not known how large it was, or how pervasive. It had
seemed to be a matter for an individual and rebellious city-state—not for the
whole half of a planet.

More than half. One thread in the pattern was distinct.
Children of talent and intelligence taken from their families—for schooling,
those who took them said; to better their prospects and those of their towns
and villages. But they never came back. Nor were they heard from, apart from a
handful of bland messages:
Dear Father
and Mother, I am well, I am learning, I am a credit to my teachers.

That set of files linked to another from which the
Classified
seals had been visibly
removed. There were not nearly as many of those, and they were incomplete in
ways that spoke of files truncated or corrupted. But the pattern persisted.

On the surface it was not so different from what Psycorps
did to every child on every world: tested, analyzed, took away those with the
talent to be brought into the Corps. But these were younger, not yet come to
puberty. They had been genemapped at or before birth, again as children were,
and those maps had been flagged.

Not every flag led to a child’s being taken. Only particular
cases. Intelligence of a particular type, at a particular level.

And again, Psycorps bred for psi. That was common and
accepted knowledge. But only, as far as anyone knew, within the Corps.

“Not just for psi,” Mem Aurelia’s voice said through the
cascade of data. “For its opposite. For minds not only blind but locked.
Unreadable; inaccessible. Not just non-psi. Psi-null.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Khalida said.

“This is Psycorps. When has sense ever had anything to do
with them?”

Khalida felt the drawing of kinship, the bond of common
understanding. That was dangerous. She must be objective. That was why she was
here.

“Blind minds,” she said. “Impenetrable walls. Perfect spies.
Perfectly loyal, one would presume.”

“One would,” said Mem Aurelia.

Khalida went perfectly still. Mem Aurelia’s eyes widened
slightly.

Khalida was not going to say it.

There was more than one war. Not only psi against non, but
psi against psi—using the nulls as weapons. But for whom, and against whom?

It was too complicated for Khalida’s damaged mind. She
focused on what was here and obvious and in front of her. Clear violations of
the Compact of Worlds. Use and abuse of human populations without their
consent.

Those populations had chosen to counter that abuse with a
much more blatant violation of Compact. In return for the loss of their
children, they threatened to destroy a world.

“Tell me what else there is,” she said. “What justifies your
ultimatum.”

“Our children—”

“No,” said Khalida. “As terrible as it is, it’s not enough.
United Planets has laws against such things. You have the right to invoke those
laws. Why haven’t you? Why do you see no other choice than planetary suicide?”

“You are an innocent,” said Mem Aurelia. “Don’t you know who
owns United Planets?”

“Psycorps isn’t that powerful,” Khalida said. “Not yet.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think it would like to be,” Khalida said.

Mem Aurelia’s composure was visibly strained. “We are what
they would make of us all—every human on every world. Serfs and slaves, to feed
and breed. They will rule. We will serve. That is what the Corps is for. Has
always been.”

There was a perilous logic in it. Khalida had had such
thoughts herself. Still…

“What good will it do to destroy one world? There are
hundreds of others, and the Corps has its claws in all of them. You won’t be
martyrs. You’ll be criminals, deplored and despised.”

“People will know,” Mem Aurelia said. “Some will think. The
Corps can’t stop every mind from drawing conclusions. If even a few realize
what has been done, and undertake to stop it, maybe—”

“I can assure you,” said Khalida, “that mass suicide—or
massacre—solves nothing.”

“Not if we take the cream of the Corps with us,” Mem Aurelia
said.

“Now who’s the innocent? You’ve given them ample warning.
They’ve gone elsewhere, or made plans to go before the world breaks. You’ll be
dead, and they’ll be safe. All of it will come to nothing.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mem Aurelia.

Her voice was so soft that Khalida barely heard it. It
echoed much louder on the connection between them, a pinprick of data that
unlocked into a pattern of terrible beauty.

As nulls and normals were linked through their implants, so
were psis—not only by their powers of mind but by certain enhancements.
Connections that everyone took for granted. Technology so common, so simple and
so ordinary, that not even a psi stopped to ask who made it, or what that
person or persons might have built into it.

“They will find it,” Khalida said, “if they haven’t already.
Even as we sit here—they know. If they didn’t before, they do now.”

“I don’t think so,” Mem Aurelia said again. “What they’ve
done to our children: as soon as we knew, we developed our own countermeasures.
Try to speak of this, or even think it outside of this link. I do mean that,
Captain. Do try.”

Khalida did not need to. She had her own defenses, and they
had analyzed the nature of the link and reached the appropriate conclusions.

“What good does it do to tell me of it, then?” she asked. “If
I can’t report in full to my superiors, all I have is a grossly unequal
provocation and response, and a finding against you.”

“You’ll find a way,” said Mem Aurelia. “That’s your gift, as
you should know. To think around corners. To see a path where none seems to
exist.”

“And you reach that conclusion how? From the ashes of Ostia
Magna?”

If that was a blow to Mem Aurelia’s serenity, she did not
show it. “Not all perception is measurable as psi. Nor is every non-psi
strictly normal in the Corps’ definition. That too you should know, Captain
Nasir.”

Khalida was past knowing what she knew. She hoped she
excused herself with appropriate politeness. In her mind she was already far
away, curled in a corner, trying hard to think of nothing at all.

The marines took Aunt Khalida away, surrounding her with a
wall of black uniforms and broad upright backs. She wasn’t a small woman, but
they dwarfed her.

Aisha and Rama were not taken prisoner, exactly, but while
Aisha was distracted with her aunt, they acquired their own large and imposing
escort. Instead of marines they had Psycorps—and that made Aisha’s skin crawl
and the sun inside her shoot out a flare that she hoped blinded any of them who
tried to spy on her mind.

They were herded onto a transport, quite a comfortable one
if she had been in any mood to notice. Rama was perfectly calm, inside as well
as out. He still refused to see any danger in these psionic amateurs, no matter
how hard Aisha tried to convince him to be careful. He watched the city go by
outside the transport’s screens, taking it all in with wide clear eyes.

She knew where Psycorps headquarters was. It was the first
thing she’d looked for on the worldweb after she left the
Leda
. They were not going toward it.

That didn’t reassure her as much as it might have. They were
humming down a clean and open street, for a port city, with barriers up to keep
the squatters out, and not too many people loitering on the corners and trying
to look as if they belonged there.

The houses that lined the street had privacy shields as well
as physical walls. When there were shops or places to eat or drink, they were
perfectly tidy. Nobody sprawled out in front or sleeping it off within sight of
the street.

The transport stopped in front of one of the houses, most of
the way down the street. There was nothing exceptional about it at all. It was
just a house, a good bit smaller than the one Aisha lived in on Nevermore, with
a plain brown door and nothing pretty painted or holoed on the wall either
outside or in.

The privacy shields were planetary-prison strength. The two
Psycorps agents who had gone inside with Aisha and Rama lurched when they
crossed the threshold, and one of them looked if he’d have liked to faint. But
he caught himself in time.

Aisha already had psi shields even stronger than that, and
she didn’t have her worldsweb chip yet. The only difference for her between
inside and outside was that the web portal stopped reading
Araceli
and showed the Greek letter psi in flat black—Psycorps’
logo, which made her shiver just to look at it. It was still the same heavily
restricted web.

The house was as painfully ordinary inside as out. They
built them from the same plan on every world that needed a quick and easy way
to store people. Big open room past the entryway, smaller rooms along a
corridor in back, each with its own bath. The kitchen was a wall unit off to
the side of the big room. Another wall was a screen that could be made bigger
or smaller depending on what one wanted it to do, from watching vids to
monitoring the street outside.

The stronger of the two Psycorps agents tried to herd Aisha
away from Rama. “You’ll want to rest,” she said, “and refresh yourself. We’ve
prepared a room for you, if you’ll come with—”

“No,” Aisha said.

Even Rama seemed startled at that. Aisha had surprised
herself, a bit. She was tired of being herded here and there. And she seriously
did not like being captured by the Corps.

The agent visibly swallowed a sigh. “You’ll be perfectly
safe, and you won’t be confined. This house is open to you entirely. It’s only—”

“No,” Aisha said again.

The agent spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “You are
safe. We promise you that.”

“No,” said Aisha for a third time.

The agent’s lips had drawn into a thin line.

Aisha was glad. “I’ll pick my own room. Thank you very
much.”

“Let her be,” the other agent said. He sounded as if he
might like to laugh, if he hadn’t been so tired. “They’re both safe enough,
however they decide to arrange themselves. And we’re late for the meeting.”

That got rid of them both. Aisha was almost sorry—she would
have liked to see what she could get out of the weaker agent. If only to find
out what meeting they were both called to.

The house seemed much bigger without them. There were
spycams everywhere, of course. Probably psi monitors, too, though they wouldn’t
get much.

Rama had wandered toward the kitchen unit and started poking
at it. The vat of pilaf that came out of it was almost as good as Pater’s—which
made Aisha’s throat lock shut.

There really was no going back. Not from here. This was
real. Not a game she was playing. Not a fight she had run away from for a day
or a handful of days, till she crept home and everybody pretended nothing had
happened.

She still knew all the way down that she had to do this for
the expedition, and the family, and for Nevermore. It was the only glimmer of
hope any of them had. That didn’t keep her from wanting, suddenly, to burst out
bawling.

She got no sympathy from Rama, and she didn’t want any. She
put her half-empty plate in the cleaner and left him still eating, and shut
herself in the first sleeping room she came to.

~~~

Aisha lay for a long time in the unfamiliar dimness. The
air’s smell, the way the room felt around her, were subtly alien. This wasn’t
her world or her place. She didn’t belong here. She should never have come.

On the
Leda
,
mostly she’d been in jumpspace, which was its own reality. She’d made herself
not think about what she’d left behind. Told herself she wouldn’t miss Jinni,
or Jamal, or Mother or Pater or Vikram or Malia or—

She could let go here. Nobody who mattered would see.

She cried for a while, till her throat ached and her eyes
burned and her head felt heavy and thick. Sleep ambushed her, with dreams in
it.

She was riding Jinni on the plain outside of the city. Jamal
trudged along beside her, with grass stains on his breeches and a long lead in
his hand, but it wasn’t Ghazal on the other end, it was the antelope stallion.

“Don’t tell me
you’re
trying to ride him,” Aisha said.

“You think I’m crazy?”

Aisha let that hang in the air.

“I’ve been trying to link through to you,” he said. “You
weren’t on Centrum. It took forever to find you. I think I know where you are
in space, but now you’re firewalled so wide and high it’s like a ring of
volcanoes all around you. You aren’t about to blow up, are you?”

“Are you sure you don’t have any psi?” Aisha asked. She didn’t
expect an answer, nor did she get one. “I’m all right. I’m not blowing up. I
don’t plan to, either.”

Her plans might not have much to do with what actually
happened, but he didn’t need to know that. “Tell Mother and Pater,” she said.
“There’s nothing to worry about.”