Forgotten Suns (8 page)

He bit his lip. It was kind of him not to laugh. “I will not
kill the agent. Here,” he said. “Look.”

He held out his hand. He had the sun in it. The real,
literal sun. She could see the swirls of superheated gas, and the streams of
plasma licking out from the edges, and a spot drifting across the center.

It was an incredible thing. Really incredible—unbelievable.
She stretched out a finger, terrified to touch it, but positive that if she
didn’t, she would never stop wishing she had.

It didn’t sear the skin off her bones. It was warm, and
there was a weirdness to it, a snap and tingle. But mostly it felt like the
palm of a hand—as if his skin was transparent, and the sun was underneath.

“Remember this,” he said. “When the agent comes to test you,
keep it in your mind, directly behind your eyes. Let it be all you think of.”

“What—” said Aisha. It was hard
not
to think of it, with it burning and flaming in front of her. “What
in the worlds is it?”

“Magic,” he said.

“There’s no such thing,” Aisha said.

“Of course there is. You just call it something different.
This, Psycorps would say, is a highly evolved manifestation of psi talent.”

“‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic,’” said Aisha. “That’s one of the Clarkean Laws. There’s another
one, from someone else I don’t remember, that says the opposite is true, too.”

“Is there a law that says psi and magic are essentially the
same thing?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably. Can that thing in your
hand really help me with the test?”

“One of the things it is is a key,” he said. “It can open
any door. It can also lock that door, and keep safe what’s inside.”

“Like me? And the thing inside me?”

“Just like that,” he said.

“I think you might be dangerous,” she said.

“I am,” said Rama.

She wasn’t afraid. She never had been, even when she first
saw him, when he looked and was so wild. She took his hand and held it in hers,
to cool it a little. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said.

The expedition came in on the usual tradeship from Marduk:
one of Mother’s family connections. Rashid had done a little trading of his
own; the ship would stay in orbit for a tenday, and a flock of tourists would
flutter and flap its way around the planet, escorted by genuine
xenoarchaeologists.

That was not the first time Rashid had paid his passage in
that particular way. It explained the range and apparent excess of Vikram’s
preparations. Khalida should have known, but she had had too many other things
on her mind.

One of those things proved not to be nearly as fragile as
she had expected. When the shuttle came down on the plain outside the city,
Rama was there with the rest of them. He watched the ship descend with open
fascination and no perceptible fear. He lent a hand with the unloading and the
sorting out of people, and helped set up the tents for the guests.

She did not know why she should have expected him to hide in
a corner with his arms over his head, babbling about metal birds and fire from
the sky. Maybe because she was tempted to do just that. A world occupied by
four other humans and an assortment of animals, she could handle. This
onslaught taxed her narrow limits.

She had to expand them, and fast. The shuttle offered an
opportunity she could not afford to waste.

It came with a pilot and a handful of crew, all of whom were
taking a few days’ leave planetside. That first day, in the confusion of
unloading, she calculated would be her best chance.

She wandered onto the bridge on the pretext of looking for lost
luggage. The pilot was young, bored, and desperate for someone intelligent to
talk to—by which she meant, able to talk about ships and flying and the yacht
races around Earth system.

The old skills came back fast. So did the sense of
familiarity when Khalida sat at the console, leaning back in the chair, arguing
the relative merits of solar sails and cosmic-dust propulsion. Well inside of
an hour, she had Meichan convinced to take a well-earned break under an actual
sky. Meichan set the security locks before she went, but she made the mistake
of letting Khalida see what she was doing.

It was blissfully quiet after she left. There were still
voices and banging and rumbling of machinery elsewhere on the ship, but those
were muted here.

Khalida took a deep breath. There was nothing quite like the
taste of ship’s air, with its faintly canned, faintly stale undertone. It made
her surprisingly homesick.

The security locks were standard models, childishly easy to
hack if one was MI and trained to memorize keycodes on sight.

It all came back in a rush. She would pay later, but not
until she had what she came for. The shuttle’s system lay wide open. Through
that, she got into the main ship’s system—and that was connected to the
worldsweb.

The sheer, overwhelming
rightness
of being open to the universe again was as much as she could stand. She let it
roar on past her while she found her balance. That took a while, but she had
allowed for it.

Her MI codes still worked. That had not been a sure thing.
She still had her clearances. She set up a flock of proxies and sent them off
in carefully random directions while she aimed for the target.

Psycorps was hell to hack. She had had tendays to plot a
strategy. The codes she fed in, with search strings embedded in them, were designed
to mimic Psycorps’ own internal systems.

Subspace relay was fast, but it was not instantaneous. She
filled the time by calling up the flight simulator and running the latest
pilots’ testing module.

Both sets of results came up at the same time. She had
renewed and upgraded her license, and there was no reference anywhere in
Psycorps’ accessible system to a humanoid entity of Rama’s genetic description.

Something else had come up, too. Something that pinged a
dummy string, or so she had thought when she coded it—just before the hacker
alarms went off.

That ping nearly laid her open to Psycorps’ internal
security. A voice pulled her out just before it swallowed her whole. “Have you
seen a pink tesser-bag? Sera Lopakhina will die, simply die, if she can’t find
it.”

Khalida blinked stupidly at Rama. The weblink had cut off.
He was smiling at her, completely oblivious. She pointed at the object he was
looking for, which glowed pinkly under the auxiliary console.

It was amazingly pink. He fished it out and held it
gingerly, regarding it with a kind of horrified amusement. “I don’t think I’ve
ever seen that color before. Does she really keep all her baggage in here?”

“Wait till you see what comes out of it,” Khalida said. Her
focus was coming back, along with some minimally useful fraction of her
intelligence. “We caught a thief once who had stowed a whole shuttle in one of
these, complete with cargo.”

“Was it pink?”

“God, no,” she said. “That would have taken hiding in plain
sight to a whole new level.”

So, she realized, had he. His accent, his expression, his
whole tone and presence, had changed in ways she would never have expected.
While she digested that, he tucked the bag under his arm, saluted her with a
fair imitation of a Spaceforce snap, and sauntered off the bridge.

She stayed until the pilot finally remembered to come back.
Her mind chewed over and over what she had stumbled across while she searched
for something else. It was a file label, to which a file should have been
attached, but the alarms had triggered before it could download. All she had
was the file name,
Araceli
, and the
designation,
Operation Incomplete.

She was not quite crazy enough to reactivate the search. She
had covered her trail just well enough this time, thanks to pure chance. If she
tried it again this soon, she might not be so lucky.

~~~

Dinner that night was a mob. They ate on the roof, where
there was table space enough for them all; the Brats, who had done most of the
cooking, played host until Marina chased them off to bed. Their protests had
the air of a formality: they were worn out.

“I see they didn’t blow up the planet,” Rashid said long
after dark. The tourists had been herded to their tents, and the staff and
students were either asleep in their cabins or snoring under the table. Rashid
and Khalida and Marina sat together under the moon, finishing off the last of
the coffee.

Khalida blatantly and selfishly emptied the pot. “You’ve
been gorging on it for tendays. I haven’t even seen real coffee since before
you left.”

“This time we brought enough to last us,” said Marina.

“We’d have had enough last time if it hadn’t been for
greedyguts here,” Rashid said, grinning at Khalida.

She bared her teeth in return, and paused for a long,
bitter-blissful sip. When she came up for air, her brother went back to what he
had been talking about before. “So you kept Aisha away from the explosives and
Jamal from hacking into Spaceforce Central. I salute you.”

“They found other things to get into,” Khalida said.

“Less destructive, at least,” said Marina. She stretched and
yawned, looking no older than her daughter, and not much larger, either; but
the glance she darted at Khalida was wickedly sharp. “How long did you say the
antelope have been in the paddock?”

“Three tendays now,” Khalida said. “Almost four.”

“And they’ve never even tried to take the wall down?” Marina
shook her head in wonder. “Who would have thought it?”

“Vikram says we’re not to blame the Brats for that,” said
Rashid. “That’s his new assistant’s project.”

“It is,” Khalida said.

“Vikram never mentioned that he felt overworked,” Rashid
said.

“He doesn’t,” said Khalida. “But when your old shipmate’s
offspring shows up looking for a berth, what do you do?”

“Yes,” said Rashid. “What do you do?”

Khalida knew what he was waiting for. She gave it to him. “He’s
clean. No civil or criminal complaints anywhere in the system.”

Nothing at all in the system, but neither of them needed to
know that.

Rashid sat back, cradling his mug in his hands. “So I’ve got
a new hire to do the paperwork on, and he’ll probably up and take off before I
get it all filed.”

“Why bother?” Khalida said. “He’s on walkabout. He’ll earn
his keep while he’s here, and the rules won’t let you pay him, just feed him
and give him a place to sleep. Vikram can look after him.”

“That’s what Vikram said,” said Rashid. Khalida held her
breath, but he did not seem to find it suspicious that they had their story so
carefully rehearsed. Marina, who was more likely to smell a lie, had curled up
with her head on Rashid’s shoulder and fallen abruptly and deeply asleep.

Khalida observed her with envy. Most people lost that talent
when they grew out of childhood.

Rashid was still wide awake. His eyes rested on Khalida,
clear-sighted in the crimson moonlight. “You’re looking better,” he said.

She shrugged. “It had to happen sooner or later.”

“I’m glad it happened sooner.”

That was as close to sentimentality as anyone in their
family was likely to come. Khalida shot it down before it reduced them both to
mawkish sobs. “Can’t wait for me to go wandering off again, can you?”

“Just make sure you get everything catalogued before you go.”

“Oh no,” she said. “I’m not staying here for the rest of my
life.”

“That’s too bad,” said Rashid. Half of it was mockery, and
half of it was not.

Khalida pushed herself out of her chair and kissed the top
of his head where the hair was starting to thin. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay till
the hordes have blown off down the spaceways. I’ll even help clean up after
them.”

The first few days after everybody got back were always
crazed. The schoolbot stayed on shutdown, and Aisha and Jamal had to help get
all the new people settled and deal with the tourists and make sure nobody got
into anything they shouldn’t. Mother and Pater were itching to get back to
excavating, but the best they could do in the uproar was make sure last season’s
work was still there.

To add to the confusion, the tribes had finally followed the
antelope to their winter camps. Of course the tourists wanted to take their
shuttle and harass the “
dear
primitives”—that was what they were saying, loudly, as often as they could find
someone from the expedition to screech at.

It was never any use to try to explain the difference
between a real primitive, if there had ever been any such thing, and a postapocalyptic
remnant. The most one got for that was a blank stare and, if one was Aisha or
Jamal, a cloying, “Oh,
isn’t
that
darling?”

The parents had the usual plan in place, but that always
waited for the tourists’ next-to-last day. Meanwhile everybody suffered, and
staff got to take turns leading tours of ruins as far as possible from any
tribal camps. The city by the eastern ocean, which was built all in circles,
was especially popular—and it took so long to get there by rover that people
had to stay overnight.

While that went on, the rest of the expedition could finally
start setting up the next round of digging. Some of the Blackroot men came
straggling in to help, hung with amulets and smelling of the smoke they’d
bathed in to keep the curses off. There would be more later; Aurochs and Far
Passes weren’t hopelessly afraid of the ruined city, either, and they had a
great liking for the bolts of cloth and the copper ingots they got in return
for digging in the dirt.

There was no way Aisha could get away to visit Blackroot
camp until everything was set up for the season. She was supposed to be
studying patience.

It helped that she was terribly busy. That morning she was
running back from the staff cabins with a load of laundry for washing in the
main house when she heard a squawk from inside the barn. It sounded as if
someone was getting strangled.