Forgotten Suns (46 page)

The nulls in stasis were safe in their bays. So was Marta,
who had come in by shuttle somewhat before Rama and retreated to her quarters,
apparently to sleep through as much of this jump as she could.

~~~

“Well done,” Khalida said.

It had taken her some little time to catch Rama away from at
least one or two of the crew. She found him in one of the now deserted labs,
throwing up star maps on an array of screens.

The sight of those woke a memory of Khalida’s dream during
jump. Not enough to make any sense of; it was a buzzing in the back of her
skull, no more.

At sound of her voice, Rama glanced over his shoulder. “Thank
you,” he said. “I think.”

“You should have left the nulls, too,” she said.

He zoomed in on one of the maps, bringing a triple-star
system into planetary orbit. The tangle of planets there sorted into a complex
dance of orbit and counterorbit in a nearly empty field of stars.

“I would have left them if there had been anywhere to put
them,” he said as the map’s viewpoint focused on a glorious monster of a gas
giant, almost a star in its own right.

“Don’t dump them
there,
”
Khalida said.

His lips twitched. He was freer, she thought. Wound up tight
still, with all he had ahead of him, but he had an actual destination. A place
that was not a distraction or an obstacle.

“This is a universe of wonders,” he said. The gas giant
stayed in focus, but the rest of the star maps merged. The walls had vanished.
They stood as if in interstellar space.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that the universe is not singular?
That there are an infinity of them?”

He was not speaking to Khalida. Dr. Ma came to sit in the
middle of the galactic arm, with more distant galaxies scattered like jewels
all around her.

“That is the most widely accepted theory,” she said.

“It’s never been proved?”

“Never to anyone’s satisfaction.” Her brow rose slightly. “Is
this idle curiosity? Or is there a reason?”

“I don’t know.”

Not an answer she might have been expecting. Both brows went
up. “The mathematics support it. There have been glimpses, hints. But no one
has ever managed to penetrate the wall; to enter, reliably and provably,
another universe. Or, if that has been done, to return.”

“Not even your psi masters?”

“Don’t mock,” she said.

“What if one didn’t want to enter one of the many? What if
one wanted to perceive them all? As we see the stars—in multitudes.”

“I don’t think the human brain is capable of that,” she
said.

“Ah,” he said. “It needs a god.”

“If you believe in such things.”

Khalida held her breath. The priest of an ancient and
forgotten god smiled ever so softly. “What would you call a being that stands
above the multiverse?”

“Most likely nonexistent.”

“What would your mathematics say?”

“That the scale may be too vast to calculate.”

“Even with your infinite numbers?”

“Yours are different?”

He had stung her into temper. It was deliberate, Khalida
thought. “Doctor, when I was born, we counted in thousands. Stars were the eyes
of the gods, and the sun was the greatest of them. We knew more of what you
call psi than your Corps has begun to imagine, but our understanding of more
practical processes tended to be, in root and branch, practical. The
theoretical sciences had barely been thought of.”

Khalida went still. Of course he had to do this. They all
had to know before they went much farther, what they were doing and with whom.

She might not have chosen to begin with Dr. Ma. Which was
why he had done it. Being what and who he was.

“When you were born?” Dr. Ma asked. “Some ten Earthyears
after me? Even if you are longer-lived than the human norm, that hardly begins
to—”

“Six thousand Earthyears,” he said, “and many lightyears
from that world. Endros Avaryan, we called it. You would call it MEP 1403.”

“Nevermore,” Khalida said.

Dr. Ma took a long time to ponder that. She did not try to
deny it or argue with it. When she finally spoke, she was perfectly calm. “All
the crew should know.”

“Yes,” Rama said. “Those that are still with us after
Starsend.”

“Now,” Dr. Ma said. “While there’s still time for a choice.”

“Yes: to end their voyage. I’ll go on alone.”

“You plan to leave them behind. As you did with my teams at
Kom Ombo.”

“I don’t need them,” he said, “or any of the rest.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Were you alone before, then? Completely solitary?”

“Of course not,” Khalida said. Her voice sounded harsh in
her own ears, like the scream of a bird of prey over the plains of Nevermore. “He
had armies.”

“That was another world,” he said, “and a time so long dead,
there’s none left to remember.”

“Now there,” said Dr. Ma, “is why you need us. To remember.”

~~~

“Stasis,” Kirkov said. “You had stasis.”

None of the crew were archaeologists. They were not trying
to eat Rama alive for his knowledge of ancient mysteries. They were not denying
what he was, either, which Khalida found fascinating.

Rama sat on a table in the middle of them all, still in the
dining hall where he began. Strangely enough, he seemed to be in his element.
He had always been different, Khalida thought. Always stared at and set apart.

“We had stasis,” he agreed. “We had swords and spears, and
weapons of the mind that could shatter a world.”

“And worldgates,” Khalida said. “Passage from world to
world, without ships or jumpspace. Whatever emptied the planet had something to
do with that.”

“We think,” Rama said. “And I think…possibly also something
to do with the theory of the multiverse.”

“How do you calculate that?” Kirkov wanted to know.

Rama shrugged. “Jumpspace is full of life, though maybe not
as your science understands it. What if there is life outside the universes?
Something so vast it’s beyond our comprehension. Something that feeds on
universes.”

“Universes as plankton?” Dr. Ma was smiling—almost laughing.
But not mocking him. “If we’re being fed on, how can we even know? We’re less
than molecules. We certainly can’t hope to stop whatever it is. If it is.”

“Maybe that’s too large a scale,” Rama conceded. He tucked
up his feet, eyes brighter than Khalida had ever seen them, leaning toward Dr.
Ma. “Maybe it’s only as large as a darter in a pond, and we’re the algae it
feeds on. And maybe some of the algae learn to produce toxins that repel or
even kill the darter. Maybe that’s what we’re looking at. Or for.”

“Speculation,” Dr. Ma said. “There could be nothing there.”

“Something emptied a planet,” Kirkov pointed out. “Something
seems to have tripped a timer and pulled you out of stasis. Now something’s
dropping clues to lead you on. Do you necessarily need Starsend? Why not just
go on past?”

“It could be a trap,” Dr. Ma said, “or a delusion.”

“It could.” Rama seemed delighted at the prospect. “Starsend
holds a message. I’ll claim that, and I hope decipher it. And then go on. And
on.”

“We,” Dr. Ma said.

“You could die. In fact it’s quite likely. Or disappear
forever, beyond the ends of time.”

“Recording every step of it,” she said, “and doing my best
to understand it.”

“We’d have called you mad, when I was as young as I look.”

“What, you had no scientists?”

“We had philosophers,” he said, “and madmen.”

“Explorers,” Aisha said. She had been so quiet that Khalida
had not even realized she was there. “Adventurers. Conquerors. People who
couldn’t stop until they knew what was over the next hill.”

“Then wept when there were no more?” Rama asked.

“Did you?”

“My world was wider than that. I ran out of sanity before I
came to the end of it.”

Khalida watched the crew watch him. None of them looked
afraid. Wary, yes, and fascinated. Trying to understand.

They traveled through space in the bowels of a sentient
starship. An ancient king roused out of stasis to chase a myth from one
universe into another—that was as likely as any other impossibility.

“You seem to have run out of madness when you ran out of
time,” Zhao said. “Though what is sane, and what is not…who in any world knows?”

Starsend was what Aisha had expected Kom Ombo to be: an
outpost on the edge of the abyss. It was a domed city on an ice moon that
orbited a gas giant so huge it was almost a star. The star itself glimmered
faint and far away.

It was near enough for Ship to feed on. Ship came in hungry
and barely wanted to listen to the microbes inside it, but Rama persuaded it to
settle into orbit around the moon.

There were no other ships. The city was deserted. Its web
was shut down, and any beacons that might have marked the system were gone.

It was all too much like Nevermore. No one here had tried to
hide any images, but without the web or any communications system up or
running, the only way to access them was by going directly into the city.

Nobody was stupid enough to say the obvious thing. This was
a trap, of course it was. Every vid they’d ever seen said so.

“I’ll go down,” Khalida said. “Kirkov, Zhao—”

“And I,” Rama said. He was ever so gentle. “This trap was
laid for me. I’ll walk into it, and see how it springs.”

“I don’t think it is a trap.” Aisha bit her tongue. She hadn’t
meant to say that aloud.

Now everybody was staring at her, and she had to say the
rest. “It’s a message,” she said. “With clues in it.”

“That’s a trap.” Rama was already halfway off the bridge.
Aisha shut her mouth and went after him.

~~~

Aunt Khalida insisted on taking point from the shuttle bay
into the dome. There were no barriers. The airlocks opened silently, without
challenge.

Life support was on, they’d made sure of that before they
went in—and brought breathers in case it shut off unexpectedly. The dome was
lit with bioluminescence: colonies of microrganisms deployed overhead and
underfoot, brighter in some sectors, dimmer in others.

The silence was eerie. Even the smells were strange: vacant,
empty. No one walked in the streets. No voice spoke, and nothing moved except
the reconnaissance party making its wary way across the city.

Somebody had power, Aisha thought, to be able to do this.
The shops were empty. The windows they peered into showed vacant rooms.
Everything was gone. Starsend’s people had left nothing behind.

In the middle of the city was the hub from which the streets
ran like spokes. Screens walled it in, and one arched overhead.

They were blank, until Rama came into the center. Then they
came alive.

Aisha jumped like a startled antelope. So did the others.
Even Rama reared back a fraction.

There were screens on screens all around them, and screens
within screens, all showing desolation, and the wreckage of worldgates. World
after world. System after system.

They had an order to them. One after another. In the very
middle, a place Aisha recognized: the tower above Blackroot village.

That image had to have been made long before the village, or
long after it—because who knew? Whoever had done this might be traveling in
time.

It was night there, on the screen, and the stars were
different, too: subtly shifted and changed. Five thousand years’ worth, maybe.
Give or take.

Farther along, closer to Rama, was the Ara Celi still
intact. And farther still, the wheel of stars over the wheel of stone that
Aisha had seen, in virtual form, in Kom Ombo.

Here were Aunt Khalida’s star maps all in order, one by one.
Past the wheel of stone was one more: the gas giant that loomed above the dome
at Starsend.

And then nothing. Absolute blackness. Emptiness deeper than
truespace and jumpspace together.

That was the clue. Aisha bit her tongue. What she was
thinking was so wild, so far off what could possibly be likely, that she wasn’t
even sure she should say it.

A face took shape in the blackness. It was so dark at first
that she thought her eyes were bored and inventing shapes of their own. But
then she realized: it was a face like Rama’s.

The same face she’d seen in Mesera Pereira’s memory—here, at
Starsend.

Aunt Khalida hissed and lurched forward. She recognized it,
too. Though where she might have seen it, Aisha didn’t know.

Dreams
. The voice
in her head had no name or person on it. Just the raw understanding.

Aisha glanced at Rama. His eyelids had lowered and his chin
come up.

“There is no way in but through,” the woman said.

She was speaking Old Language—softened in places and changed
in places, but understandable. There was no life in her voice; it was purely
mechanical.

“Do you know,” Rama said to no one in particular, “how very
much I hate riddles and coy mysteries? Give it to me straight, damn you. Or don’t
give it at all.”

The AI had gone flat and slightly pixelated while he spoke,
as if its programming couldn’t both sustain the image and process the auditory
data. He spun away from it in disgust.

The AI started to sing. The language was older than Old
Language, too old for Aisha to understand; all she could tell was its age, and
that it had the rhythms and timbres of Nevermore. It was a chant, a long slow
roll of syllables like a wave on a shore.

That voice was alive. Rama had stopped, and his shoulders
gone stiff.

The chant ended on the hint of an up note. He answered it
almost angrily, but slowing down as he went on, falling into the same stately
rhythm.

Recitative. Response. The voice in the darkness answered his
answer, and he answered it again. Back and forth.

He turned to face the singer. She
was
alive, but surrounded by a sense of unimaginable distance. “So,”
she said in Old Language. “It is you.”