Forgotten Suns (3 page)

Her head ached. Phantom-psi syndrome. Psycorps had taken what
little psi she had out of her when she was Aisha’s age, declared her fully and
acceptably neutered and free of abilities too defective to develop further.

She could still feel them. Still, when she was tired or
disconnected or close to sleep, reach down into herself and for a few brief
instants know she was whole.

This
was whole,
she told herself. This, now, with all the damage it had taken in the disaster
on Araceli. Normal, human, ordinary traumatic stress, duly and officially
treated. Not some complication of a quarter-century-old procedure for a moderately
common birth defect.

“You,” she said to the blur of her reflection in the window,
“are a right mess.” She pushed herself up, meaning to stagger off to bed, but
as she paused, swaying in the darkened room, she saw shadows against shadow
flitting outside.

The Brats were headed toward the stable. That was enough to
send Khalida in pursuit.

~~~

They did not, after all, steal horses and slip away into
the night. They went on past to the staff quarters, the row of cabins down
along the south wall. Those were deserted: Vikram had an apartment above the
stable, and everyone else was offworld.

Aisha and Jamal had something hidden in Shenliu’s quarters.
Whatever it was, it kept them busy and bickering for close to an hour. Khalida
considered walking in on them, but decided to wait instead and see how long it
took them to finish whatever they were doing.

It was dark and cool in the shadow of the covered porch.
There were no stars tonight; the storms had moved off, but the sky was heavy
with clouds. Khalida breathed the smell of rain.

Every world was different. Here on Nevermore the rain had a
sharpness as in the deserts of Earth, but with an undertone that was alien. She
had yet to put words to it. Spice, a little. Greenness. A faint, cold note,
like wind in empty places.

The Brats came out of the cabin, still bickering. She could
not make sense of the words, nor did she try overly hard. She sat for a while
after they had gone back toward the house and their beds, not sure what she
would or even should do until she found herself in front of Shenliu’s door.

Someone was inside. She could feel the life and warmth in
the darkness behind her eyelids, and hear the rush of breath into and out of
lungs. Human—an animal felt and sounded different.

She opened the door.

The children had left a light on, heavily shaded but bright
enough after the dark outside. Khalida stood over what they had brought home.

It was certainly not what she had expected. If she had had
to guess what he was, she would have guessed Govindan, with a few rather
extreme modifications. But the treasure trove he was loaded down with was
distinctively of this world, and rich enough to widen her eyes. The
xenoarchaeologist in her catalogued and provisionally dated it at some
centuries before the Disappearance—Nevermore’s late Bronze Age, more or less.
The craftsmanship of the belt, the sheer weight and mass of the torque around
his neck . . .

He must have got into a tomb. Or someone had shut him up in
one and left him for years, feeding him just enough to keep meat on his bones.

He burned with fever. When she laid her hand on his
forehead, she recoiled from the heat of his skin.

His head tossed. She reached by instinct to steady it. His
eyes opened.

There was nothing sane about them. They fixed on her face as
if it had been the most fascinating thing in any world. He spoke a running
stream of words in a language she knew just enough of to recognize. It was a
very old ritual language of the tribes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I haven’t studied enough to
understand—”

He went still. His eyes were still completely crazy, but his
voice was soft and steady, and he spoke perfectly comprehensible PanTerran. “A
bath,” he said, “would be a welcome thing. And a razor, if you have one.”

“Not if you’re going to slit your throat with it,” she said.

It was next to impossible to tell, but maybe the corner of
his mouth curved upward. “I will not do that,” he said gravely.

If she had been a suitably modest daughter of the family,
she would have called Vikram to do the honors. But she had not been either
modest or proper in a long time, and Vikram would add complications that she
was not, at the moment, in a mood to face. She ran the bath herself and found a
razor in one of the other cabinets, and a set of shears, too. While she was at it,
she raided the common storeroom for clothes that she hoped would fit, and a few
other useful things.

He was still in Shenliu’s bed when she came back, and still
awake. The pure madness had retreated from his stare, but was still there
underneath.

She knew that madness. She had a fair share of it herself.
She contemplated carrying him into the bath, but although he was weak, he could
walk. He was a little taller than she was: not a big man at all, but well-built
and compact, and surprisingly fit. When he was back to himself, he would be
quite strong.

He had no modesty that she could detect, and nothing like
shame. He acted as if it was perfectly natural for a man to be bathed and
shaved and turned into a civilized being by a woman.

He was much younger than she had thought. Under the thicket
of beard he had a young man’s face, though not exactly a pretty one.
Distinctive, that was the word. Whatever modifications had given him that skin
like black glass, she suspected the features were the ones he was born with.

He had scars, which meant the modifications were years old.
Most were on his arms and chest; there was a deep one in his thigh. His right
hand was a fist; it would not open for any pressure she could put on it. His
fingers and palm must have fused together with some old injury.

He would not let her cut his heavy curling mane, though it
hung clear to his waist. She combed it out as much as she could and twisted it
into a braid as thick as her arm. That contented him, and got it out of the
way.

He was still feverish, and weaker than she liked to see. He
hardly argued when she helped him back to bed, though when she ordered him to
sleep, he said, “I’ve slept enough.”

“You’re sick,” she said. “You need to rest.”

“Not any more,” he said.

She shook her head. If she had to sit on him to keep him
down, she would.

She bullied water into him, and tipped a pana-tab in with
the last of it. He choked and tried to spit it up, but it had already
dissolved. “Stop glaring,” she said. “It will help with your fever.”

“It will not.” He was breathing hard. Panic attack, she
thought. She knew about that, too. Oh, did she. The shakes, the sweats—all of
it.

By the time she realized that he was not panicking, he was
actively sick, it was too late to head off the reaction. She cursed herself
ferociously. Any three-year-old knew not to give medication before asking if
the patient was allergic. Even a pana-tab. Especially a pana-tab, when the
patient had an unknown quantity and variety of modifications.

“Never,” she said. “Never without a scan.
Damn
. If I’ve killed him, I’ll kill
myself.”

With luck he would kill her first. The first assault of
fever laid him flat and kept him deathly quiet. She did what she could: ice
baths, cold cloths, prayer to a God she had stopped believing in when she was
Aisha’s age.

Then came the delirium.

It was daylight by then. She noticed it because the door was
open and the children were standing in it, all eyes and shock.

She gave them something to do: mine the house computer and
the schoolbot and find something, anything, to counteract a severe allergic
reaction. Miraculously, they did as she told them. They were gone before all
hell broke loose.

The convulsions and the raving were easy. Soft restraints,
then hard ones. More cold baths. The bed was soaking wet. If she survived this,
she would have to get Shenliu a new one.

What came after that was harder.

If Psycorps had neutered this one, the neutering had not
taken. He was not only completely unregulated, he had aberrations she had never
even seen.

Most of it had to be illusory—trapping her inside his
hallucinations. He had not really destroyed the whole city and everything in
it, then put it back together again exactly as it was, ruins and excavations
and all.

He had not remade the city, either, as it must have been
several thousand years ago, bright and sharp and new, full of people and
animals, life, light, voices and laughter and song. Giant antelope in saddle
and bridle or drawing wagons or chariots. People of what must have been a dozen
nations, some of whom looked like the tribes she knew, and some were fairer but
most were darker, and all of them were taller. The darkest were the tallest.
They looked like him when she had first seen him, with black eagle-faces and
exuberant beards and a clashing array of ornaments.

That had to be a fantasy. He was certainly no giant.

It was a wonderful dream, vivid and strikingly real. She
could feel the pavement underfoot, and smell the complex smells of a thriving
city, and hear the song a woman sang: a woman with skin like honey and hair
like fire. It was a love song she was singing, and she smiled as she sang, with
warmth that reached across all the hundreds of years.

Such sadness struck Khalida then, such grief and such rage
that it broke her mind apart. She felt it breaking. She felt it healing, too,
as the dream melted around her: wounds knitting, scars fading, places that had
been stripped bare filled up again with light.

Aisha and Jamal brought Vikram in when Khalida collapsed. As
she clawed her way out of whatever had happened to her, she was more than glad
to see that well-worn face with its web of old radiation scars.

During a lull in the delirium, Vikram helped her get the
stranger into the main house. The walls were more solid there, and there was
in-house security—not much by MI standards, but better than nothing.

“We need a name for him,” she said as they finished rigging
the restraints in one of the guest rooms. He, whatever his name was, was
unconscious for the time being. The house medbot had already confirmed that he
was breathing, his heart was beating, and he had a dangerously high fever.

Vikram rubbed his jaw where a flying fist had caught it. “Rama,”
he said. “Call him Rama.”

His expression was odd. So was hers, she supposed. “Rama,
then. We’ll let him tell us what it really is when he comes to.”

If he did. She did not say it. Neither did Vikram.

~~~

On a civilized planet there would have been resources.
Medics; hospitals. The medbot here was programmed for the ills an
archaeological expedition was prone to. It had only the most basic
accommodations outside of that. For what ailed Rama, it was next to useless.

There were no ships within two tendays’ reach of the system.
Vikram had determined that before Khalida even thought of it. Khalida was
almost desperate enough to load the Brats into a rover and order them to fetch
a shaman from a tribe when the storm of delirium stopped.

It was abrupt, and it happened in the deep night. An hour
before, he had been throwing off sparks. When Vikram tried to hold him down, he
was nearly electrocuted.

That, the medbot could treat. Vikram was in his own bed
recovering. Khalida sat at a prudent distance, wide and painfully awake.

The silence grew on her. It was more than a lull. Rama lay
on his back, perfectly still.

She leaped. At the last instant she remembered lightning,
but that was gone. His forehead was cool. He was breathing, deep and slow.

He was asleep. It
was
sleep; the bot confirmed it. He was not in a coma.

The tension ran out of her so quickly her knees buckled. She
did not need the medbot to tell her the fever had broken. There might be brain
damage; he was probably insane. But as far as the bot could tell, he would
live.

~~~

He slept for a day and a night. The bot fed him a glucose
drip, but not—cautiously—anything pharmaceutical.

Khalida woke at dawn. She was restless and irritable and
ready to claw the walls, but she could not bring herself to leave the patient
alone. She curled up in the corner with a reader and a box of databeads,
running through expedition files.

She had most of the finds from the southwestern quadrant of
last season’s dig organized and catalogued when something made her look up.

He was watching her. He seemed perfectly calm. As far as she
could tell, he was sane.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” he replied.

“You’ve been sick,” she said, “but you’re getting better.”

“How long?”

He said it quietly, but it seemed to matter a great deal to
him. “Four days,” she said. “I made a mistake. I gave you something I shouldn’t
have. I wasn’t trying to kill you.”

“Four days,” he said. It was a sigh. “No wonder I’m hungry.”

Probably she should not have laughed, but he actually
smiled, which was a relief. She preferred that to being blasted where she sat.

“Breakfast,” she said. “Let me see what I can find in the
kitchen. Promise you won’t go anywhere.”

“I promise,” he said without irony.

She was ravenous, but she made sure to feed him first. Not
much, and nothing solid—not yet. He obviously was not impressed with the mug of
liquid ration, though he drank every drop.

“Good,” she said. “A meal or two more and we’ll try you on
something you’ll like better.”

“I do hope so,” he said, but he sounded more wry than
annoyed.

She kept a close eye on him, and kept the medbot running. He
showed no sign of a relapse. Toward noon she fed him again. By evening she was
as ready to feed him solid food as he was—and she was beginning to believe that
he had come through intact.