Forgotten Suns (38 page)

He had been pulling galley duty, running the cleaners in the
crew’s mess. It was one of the things he did that made some of them exquisitely
uncomfortable.

Now he was done, but Khalida had stopped him before he went
on to something else. She pulled a pair of cups out of stores, and filled them
with coffee that was hot, fresh, and wonderfully real. She pushed one toward
him as they sat at one of the long tables.

“You’re corrupting me,” he said, grimacing slightly as he
sipped. “Who knew bitter could be bliss?”

“That’s a lesson for all occasions,” she said.

He watched her as she tackled her own cup. After a while he
said, “You’re healing.”

“Scabbing over.”

“Yes.”

She met his dark stare. “You, too.”

She thought he might look away, but he held steady. She
should be afraid, maybe. Knowing what he was capable of.

He was only dangerous if she got in his way. “Did you do
that before, too? Work in the kitchens and give the staff fits?”

It was a risk to ask him that, but she was bored. She would
welcome an argument, even a fight.

He gave her neither. “Sometimes I did. People didn’t expect
it, even more than here. But there were so many more of them, and the world was
so much bigger than this ship. I could go for a whole day, sometimes, without
being recognized.”

“So you looked like everyone else.”

That was transparent. His lips twitched: a flicker of a
smile. “I look like my mother. She looked like her whole tribe. Smaller—that
was her mother’s blood; that lady had been like the people who remain on my
world. It was a state marriage: an attempt at alliance that ultimately failed.”
He drained his cup and set it down. “Old wars. Politics so ancient even I
barely remember them. What they were; why they mattered.”

“Maybe someone remembers,” Khalida said. “Wherever we’re
going, if we find your people—”

“Somehow I doubt they’ll care for the petty details of a
tiny kingdom at the back of beyond, that was a thousand years gone by the time
they abandoned the world,” Rama said.

“They remembered you,” said Khalida.

“Oh, but I was a great monster,” he said. “I’m sure there
were legends. Horrors real and imagined. Nightmares for children and their more
delicate elders.”

“They left a message for you,” she pointed out. “Whatever
they might have thought of you, they believed they needed you.”

“No doubt to kill something,” he said.

“Or save it.”

“I don’t think,” he said, “that that was my reputation.”

There was not much she could say to that. She changed the
subject instead. “Have you figured out where you need to go?”

“Not yet,” he said. “The map from the Ara was left for me, I’m
sure of it, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to read it.”

“It must be keyed to you somehow,” Khalida said, “if it’s
aimed at you.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Tired, she thought. “I may be
thinking too hard. If I could slow down, stop—not lost in the ship; just be…”

“This is as good a place and time as you’ll get,” she said. “Rest,
then let your mind find its way.”

“I don’t think—” He bit back what looked like a snap of
temper. “This place, this space, is not restful. It teems with life, or what
might be life if it were in that other face of the universe. It sings—so many
songs. So many voices. Even when I ward myself, when I go down as far as I
dare, I still hear them.”

That Khalida had not expected. “Here? In jumpspace? But—”

“The space we come from is infinitely quieter,” he said.

“So you can hear the songs.”

Khalida had neither heard nor felt Marta come into the mess.
Rama had: he regarded her without surprise. “You, too?”

“Yes.” Marta fetched her own coffee and sat a handful of
seats down from Khalida, where she could see both of them but not intrude on
their space. “Somewhere in this is a very serious scientific paper on the
hitherto unexplored range and variety of psi. In the space we call normal, I’m
null. Here, there’s so much music I can hardly hear myself think.”

“I can’t hear anything,” Khalida said with what she realized
was a flicker of regret. “Just a little human babble. And the ship. It’s
singing, off and on. Humming to itself.”

“That would be restful,” Rama said. He slanted a glance at
Marta. “You’re not really null—not empty of psi. You have strong natural
shields. What’s beneath is, in its way, equally strong.”

“You can see,” she said. She did not sound completely
comfortable with the thought.

“I can hear,” he said. “When you sing. Music concentrates
what we are.”

“You sang your way to command of this ship.”

“Do you find that objectionable?”

“You know I don’t.” Marta smiled, sweet and deceptively
vague. “Someday you’ll have to tell me your story.”

“So that you can put it to music?”

“Of course.”

“Someday,” he said. “In the meantime, how well can you read
a star map?”

“I’m not a pilot,” Marta said, “but I’ve traveled enough,
and been curious enough, to learn a little. What would you like me to see?”

“Something that I’m missing,” Rama said.

He called up the maps on one of the screens by the far wall.
There was no mistaking where they had come from: the first set of images showed
the Ara with its carvings; then the star maps extrapolated from them.

Marta approached the screen with her face intent. “So. That’s
what you were doing there. Did you deliberately bring it down, once you’d
finished scanning it?”

“No.”

There was no telling if she believed him. She studied the
maps from all angles.

Khalida expected nothing. She went for a fresh cup of
coffee, and thought about wandering off. She had a turn on watch, but not for
another few hours.

Rama stared at the maps as he must have stared at them over
and over since he first recorded them. He must know every dot and symbol, down
to the cracks in the stone in which they were carved.

After a while Marta said, “I can’t see anything useful, but
in Kom Ombo, there are people who may.”

“I had hoped for that,” he said.

“Some of them know me,” she said. “I’ll speak to them for
you, if you like.”

“I would like,” he said.

It had not struck Khalida yet how long his search might be.
Longer than he had left to live, maybe.

He caught the thought: his glance flicked past her. “I don’t
think so,” he said. “If these maps were left for me to find, they were meant to
guide me as straight as may be. Unfortunately, that route is no longer direct.
I’m condemned to take the long way. Still…”

“More direct than jumpspace?” Khalida asked.

He seemed to ignore her. The screen shifted the star maps to
a corner and began to flicker through sets of images. Ancient sites on various
worlds. Remnants of cultures, some of which had survived, while others were
long gone.

There were no apparent connections between them. Some were
alien, some had been some form of human. They were scattered through the United
Planets and in the space beyond.

None of them fit with the star maps from the Ara Celi. As far
as Khalida could tell, they were completely random.

Then each image narrowed and focused. They were different
spaces—rooms, caverns, gatehouses, the gates themselves, and here and the bones
of a ruin. Marks were cut or carved or somehow turned into the substance of the
ruins.

It was the same set of star maps, over and over. Some were
so worn and faded they were barely visible; others were as clear as if they had
been carved within living memory.

The system collated them, matched them, and filled the screen
with the results. There were small differences, minor slips or—

Khalida left the table and moved closer to the screen. “These
are calibrated,” she said. “Oriented to, or from, each system. Which means…”
She shifted her voice to command mode. “Ship. Extrapolate the age of each map.
Then arrange from oldest to newest.”

She held her breath. The image remained unchanged for so
long that she had to breathe after all, and then a dozen breaths more.

The shift at first was almost too subtle to see. Then it
fell into place.

“Now,” she said, “extrapolate. New sequence based on
existing pattern.”

That took longer than the first, but this time she was
prepared. Rama and Marta were perfectly silent, watching.

One by one, the maps fell into place on the screen. Each was
labeled with the name of a system.

Khalida held on to hope for as long as she could. But as the
images piled one on top of the other, she sagged. “It’s completely random.
There’s no pattern.”

“No,” Rama said, slipping past her and stopping almost
inside the screen. It oriented itself to him, wrapping around him, so that he
stood in a globe of nearly identical star maps.

He turned slowly, arm outstretched. The maps turned with
him.

Spiraled.

“This isn’t a map,” he said, “exactly. It’s an itinerary.”

“An itinerary designed by a random generator,” she said with
a touch of bitterness. “It doesn’t go anywhere. It jumps from one end of the
galaxy to another, in no perceptible order.”

“Ship,” he said, “track destinations by jump routes. Add
wormholes and spatial distortions.”

Khalida was holding her breath again. She had fallen into
the error of thinking like a conventional pilot. This was not a conventional
mission. But—“Wormholes? Those were never viable. Once we discovered how to
access jumpspace—”

“—we stopped exploring other options.” Marta had joined them
by the screen. “This is fascinating. May I ask what you’re trying to find?”

“I don’t know,” Rama answered.

“Look,” Khalida said. “Here’s the beginning.”

Nevermore. Of course. Then a succession of worlds in no
apparent order—until the pattern of wormholes and jump routes overlaid it.

Something else appeared over the pattern. A succession of
points, each glowing brightly and then dying away like an ember. One after
another, world by world, ruin by ruin.

The jump alarm went off.

Kirkov had been practicing flying Ship, using the virtual
modules that it had developed to teach the student pilots. Aisha, having
nothing better to do, was half napping in the pilots’ bay, half picking through
a plate of pastries that one of the cooks had been experimenting with.

The jump alarm throbbed straight through her bones. “
Kirkov!
What did you—”

“Nothing!”

It was true, he hadn’t done anything. The lesson had nothing
to do with the alarm. Ship was jumping back into realspace.

Kirkov was already gone, diving for his jump cradle. Aisha
bolted for her own.

Her mind babbled around and around inside itself. Three
days, only three days, was supposed to be a tenday, where are we coming out,
what are we—

Ship gave her calm. It was more than the drugs in the jump
cradle: it was a sense that they were going where they were supposed to go,
there was nothing wrong, everything was the way it should be.

All she could do was accept. And hope Ship was telling the
truth.

~~~

They had come out on the edge of Kom Ombo’s system,
outside the usual lanes of traffic, but still close enough to receive a hail
from system center.

In three days of jump from Araceli.

“We calculated based on our own ships,” Kirkov said. “We
didn’t stop to think that this living creature might be different.”

Which was stupid, Aisha thought but didn’t say. Thinking
human machines were the universal standard.

She hadn’t thought otherwise, either. Till Ship proved how
wrong they all were.

It was amused—that was the best way she could describe the
feeling it sent her. Humans had so much to learn.

It was showing off. Aisha felt Rama step in, soft but firm,
and ease it on course toward the center of the system. Marta answered the hail:
“
Ra-Harakhte
to Kom Ombo. Request
berth at Central.”

The voice on the other end paused, then said, “Marta? Is
that you?”

“Yes, Jonathan,” she said. Aisha could hear the smile.

“You have the shipment, then? Already?”

“Already,” she answered.

He got control of himself—the hint of excited babble
disappeared, and he said crisply, “Sending course heading via datastream.”

While that was busy coming through, Rama pinged Dr. Ma on
the pilots’ stream. “Doctor. Would you like to take us in?”

Aisha held her breath. She more than half expected Dr. Ma to
say she would not. But she came through promptly. “Yes. Yes, I would.”

~~~

They were all on the bridge as the ship made its careful
way toward Central. Dr. Ma had the conn; Rama stood in front of one of the
screens to the side, scanning the system.

It was a cluster of stations and ships and planetoids and
odd bits of space debris that had been turned into habitats. The original
asteroid belt was still mostly there, and mostly occupied, where it hadn’t been
mined out for everything from iron to water.

This was the wildest place Aisha had ever been. Nevermore
was wild, but it was well within U.P. space. Kom Ombo stood on the edge of the
unexplored.

People who ventured past it had no federation of worlds to
help them. They were out on their own, or traveling in relays, running supply
lines back to what civilization there was.

For the edge of nowhere, it was a remarkably crowded place.
Free traders ran in and out. Explorers used it as a base. Bits and pieces of
U.P. showed up here and there: an embassy, a handful of consulates, a military
installation that wasn’t allowed to dominate anyone.

Aisha was sure it tried. It knew they were coming: Ship
caught the ping and routed it to the pilots’ screens. A whole stream of data
unreeled from the ping, a hack that made Aisha widen her eyes in respect.