Forgotten Suns (47 page)

“You doubted it?”

“Not any longer.” She looked him in the eye, dark to dark,
and each with a terrible brightness deep inside. “You know the way. Now come.”

~~~

Aisha knew the way, too. In her bones, along with the
meaning of the chant. It was old, yes, so very old. It was a hymn: to the sun
and to the dark. They were brother and sister in that world, twinborn, back to
back and spirit to spirit.

They were universes, too. Back to back. The gate between
shone overhead, a giant planet with an almost-sun at its core.

“No wonder they all left,” she said as it all came clear.

Rama was halfway gone already, looking so far ahead she
could barely follow. But he heard her. He answered her.

“I leave destruction wherever I go.”

He wasn’t sad about it. He’d left that behind. He was a
little bitter, maybe. A little wry.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “Don’t you go forgetting what
you are.”

“I never forget,” he said. “This is what I am. Destroyer of
worlds.”

“That’s Lord Shiva,” she said with a snap in it. “You’re
going to save what’s left of your world. Remember that.”

“By destroying this planet,” he said, “and taking part of
the system with me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Maybe there’s a way,” Aisha said. “Why don’t you ask your
science people?”

“My—” He almost laughed. “They’re not my people. My people
are out there.”

“Your people are wherever they happen to be. And whoever
they happen to be. Whether you want them or not.”

He opened his mouth. She glared him down. “Do you want to
change something? Be something else? Ask for help. Maybe you’ll get it.”

“Or maybe not.” Dr. Ma frowned out of the screen in front of
him, and Aunt Khalida had an expression that dared Rama to do anything about
it.

“Damn you,” he said to them all impartially. Then: “Well? I
suppose you know what I’m about to do. Can it be done without taking out the
system?”

Another person came up behind Dr. Ma: Robrecht, the
professor who’d been MI once. He’d been keeping quiet and keeping his head down,
but now he said, “Give us the data. Route it to engineering.”

“And while you do that,” Aisha said, “figure out how that
woman showed up in the zocalo at Starsend without breaking the planet. If she
did it, why can’t we?”

“Magic,” Rama said, but he was only half laughing.

“Or projection,” Robrecht said. “A holographic image
projected through the wormhole or gate or whatever you like to call it. If you
can project yourself in the opposite direction—”

“That would be relatively simple,” said Rama. “I have to go
there in the body. What they need me to do will require all of me. If not more.”

“You know what that is?” Aisha asked.

“Don’t you?”

She didn’t, really. Or she didn’t want to.

Until now, this had been an adventure. Inconvenient.
Sometimes dangerous—people shooting, and waging wars. And the Corps doing
terrible things to people and other sentients.

What it hadn’t been, in her mind, was immediately and
personally deadly. Rama was going to try to cross between universes.

He, and whoever went with him, could die. Or worse than die.
Be trapped. Or erased. There was no way to know until it was done.

They were all beyond crazy now. This was real.

The
Ra-Harakhte
orbited the moon called Starsend, which orbited the gas giant called Acheron.
Khalida appreciated the symbolism.

“Was this a worldgate?” she asked Rama after he returned to
the bridge.

“Maybe,” he said.

He paced while the scientists and some of the crew huddled
around a cluster of screens. Their conversation was forbiddingly technical and,
as far as Khalida could tell, getting exactly nowhere.

“Do you know how those were made?”

“No.” He bit off the word.

“Can you guess?”

“No!”
But then,
while she nursed the mental blisters from that blaze of temper: “There were no
gates in the middle of stars. Or almost-stars. They were all on planets. And
no, none of them showed signs of having been constructed from the corpses of
stars. They were just there.”

“They were gates within this universe,” Dr. Ma said. She had
left the latest round of getting-nowhere, retrieved a pot of coffee and was on
her way back. “I gather you didn’t know of any that connected adjacent
universes.”

Khalida held her breath, but Rama seemed to have recovered
his temper. “I was never a master of gates. My arts and talents were elsewhere.
Still…”

“Your masters of gates,” Dr. Ma said when the silence
stretched. “They were psi masters. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Not engineers, then. Not physicists. Though they
manipulated matter and energy. Are we coming at it from the wrong direction?
Should we be addressing this with psionics?”

“Such as we have,” Zhao said. His soft voice was flat. Which
was an improvement over bitter, Khalida supposed.

“We may not have much,” she said, “but you do.” Her eyes
caught Rama. “If you were passing through a gate, how would you go about it?”

He frowned. He was not angry, or not much. “I would walk
through. Because it was already there.”

“Just walk through? Just like that?”

“Not exactly. There were guardians and guides. The places
between could be dangerous—more than jumpspace, though that maybe was because
we didn’t have ships to shield us.”

“You have a ship,” Khalida said. “You have shields.”

“The nulls? Yes, they may protect us. But the planet, the
moon—”

“A gate had two sides,” Zhao said. “Someone guarded either
end, yes? While you went through. Someone must have been keeping the gate from
swallowing the planet around it. Or something.”

“Something,” Rama said. “A structure. Stone. Bones of the
earth—whichever earth it was.” He shook his head. “There’s no stone here. It’s
all gas.”

“Not at Starsend,” Khalida said. “The core is nickel and
iron. Or does cold iron kill magic for you as it used to for us?”

“Only if it’s forged into a blade,” Rama said with the
faintest flicker of humor.

“If you can show us what you know of how gates were
constructed,” Robrecht said in his precise and careful way, “we may be able to
use Starsend as the anchor point. Then when you aim the
Ra-Harakhte
to the core of Acheron, the whole thing will be a gate,
and it should hold stable. Provided, of course, there’s another anchor point on
the other side.”

“I think we have to take that on faith,” Rama said.

“Flying on a guess and a prayer,” said Khalida. “It’s almost
suicidal enough to be worth doing.”

Rama’s eyes glinted. “Almost?”

“We might actually survive,” she said.

“We would hope to,” he conceded. “For the sake of whoever,
and whatever, is on the other side.”

~~~

The engineers and the scientists were in their version of
heaven, creating a structure that might not be possible, for a purpose that no
one precisely understood. Even, Khalida suspected, Rama.

He was going to try to leave them all behind and take the
ship ahead alone. She could tell, looking at him, and seeing how he drew back
little by little from their discussions.

It made a reasonable amount of sense. He had been placed in
stasis alone and would be presumed to have waked alone. Whatever was needed of
him, it must be unique to him.

Still, she persisted in feeling that there was more to all
this. Something else that had not figured into their calculations. The woman in
the zocalo: she was an anomaly. Or, possibly, a key.

Khalida retreated to her cabin. No one took any notice: they
were all focused elsewhere.

She needed quiet, and sleep if she could get it. Once she
had the first, the second was no easier or quicker than she had expected.

She lay on her back, staring at the faintly glistening,
subtly organic arch of the ceiling. It would have shown her starfields if she
had asked, or the sky of any planet in the database, or an arch of branches,
for that matter.

Branches, she thought. Green leaves, long and delicate. A
tracery of flowers as pale as her own Earth’s moon, but these had never grown
under it.

She turned her head. She knew that fall of water, that slant
of yellow sunlight.

That figure kneeling by the water, watching her. Waiting to
be seen.

“How?” she asked.

Of all the things she might have said, it was probably the
most obvious. Or the least.

The answer of course was obvious.

“Magic,” said the woman from the other side of the gate.

She must be a figment of Khalida’s imagination. She was too
much like Rama, even to the wry twist with which she said the word.

“I am quite real,” she said. “Are you?”

“As far as I can tell,” Khalida answered.

“Listen to me,” the woman said. “When you begin, remember
this. Keep it firm in your memory. No matter what you see or think you see, no
matter what seems to happen around you, don’t lose focus. Stay fixed on me.”

“Why? I’m not the one you’ve been waiting for.”

“No?”

She was fading—letting go. Khalida tried to hold the image,
the presence, whatever indescribable thing it was, but it slipped away. All but
the memory. That was perfectly and indelibly clear.

~~~

Khalida only rested for an hour after the dream or vision
passed, but she surprised herself with how refreshed she felt. She made her way
back to the bridge, and found the ship’s whole waking, walking complement
there. Even Marta had emerged from her quarters.

They were all fixed on Rama. Eyes intent; faces grim or
stern or studiously blank. And one almost exalted: Zhao, whose grief had
mutated into a pure and glorious deathwish.

“We will do this,” Rama said. “All the science staff who are
left, and all the crew, will disembark into Starsend, and the nulls with them.
Marta, Zhao, you build the gate between you. When the gate is made, the ship
and I will make the jump—into Acheron, and if the gods will, out beyond.”

“Oh, no,” said Zhao. “No. I’ll be on the ship.”

“You will not,” Rama said. “You are the only psi with any
semblance of training. Without you, there will be no gate. The nulls alone can’t
do it. Marta can’t. It has to be you.”

“It might kill you,” Marta said. She was cool,
dispassionate. “It probably will.”

“And you? And your children?” Zhao looked ready to shatter.

“If you do your part as I’ll show you,” Rama said, “the
power will route into and past them, but not through. They’ll be safe.”

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Zhao said, “or any more
minds to break.”

“Hold to that,” said Rama. “Make it your shield and your
armor. Try not to die, if you please.”

“Yes, do that,” Khalida said. “We’ll be needing you when we
come back.”

Rama’s glance was quite as wild as she had expected. Of
course he had no expectation of returning. This was his suicide mission even
more than it was Zhao’s.

“There is no
we
,”
he said. “I’m leaving all of you here—you, too; you have no training, but you
have power, and you will feed it to this man.”

“I don’t think so,” Khalida said. “You don’t know for sure
where you’re going. I do.”

She had to give him credit: he suppressed the reflex to deny
what she had said. “Do you? How is that?”

“I had another dream,” she said. She gave it to him as best
she knew how—sloppily, she knew; she had no training. Zhao caught it, too, and
Aisha.

Aisha was not surprised. That interested Khalida. Rama
was—and that was also interesting.

She could not tell if he was jealous. Bemused, certainly. Maybe
a little put out. “I see,” he said, “that there is more to this than I thought.
Very well, then. You’re our pilot. As soon as everyone is settled in Starsend,
we go.”

So soon?

That was foolish. It could hardly be soon enough.

Khalida reminded herself to breathe. The woman whose name
she had never thought to ask was waiting.

She might be an AI after all. Or an illusion. A lure or a
trap or an entity long dead and set at the gate to guide the traveler through.

She felt real. She must be. Khalida would accept no other
possibility.

Aisha her mouth shut while everyone sorted out what they
would do and where they would be. She wasn’t going to let herself be left
behind. No more than Aunt Khalida was.

The other one who refused to leave the ship was Dr. Ma. She
and Kirkov were polite but immovable. “Robrecht will take charge of Starsend,”
she said. “We will go. This is our mission as much as yours.”

Rama shrugged. “I’ve never in my waking life done anything
alone. Why would now be any different?”

“Believe me,” Dr. Ma said, “solitude is vastly overrated.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He was more wry than annoyed. He went to help load the nulls
on the shuttle that Robrecht had commandeered from Starsend, and Dr. Ma kept on
collating data in her array of screens.

Aisha stayed on the bridge. Invisibility was her plan, until
they’d left Starsend and headed into Acheron.

She should have known she wouldn’t be that lucky. Aunt
Khalida was supposed to be supervising the loading along with Rama, but she turned
up here instead, dropping into the captain’s cradle and fixing Aisha with a
hard eye.

“I’m not leaving the ship,” Aisha said.

“I didn’t think you would.” Khalida looked tired all of a
sudden. Or dizzy. “Did you know about—her? On the other side?”

Aisha shivered a little. “Not really. Just what I heard in
Central.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true!” Aisha ramped herself down before she squealed
any higher. “I keep thinking she’s family. Which can’t be possible.”

“No,” Khalida said. “No, it can’t, can it?”