Read Online Forgotten Suns by Judith Tarr - Free Book Online

asked her.
    Aisha was been thinking, too, and noodling around in the
computer, and she knew what to say. “He’s Vikram’s old shipmate’s son, and he’s
from Dreamtime. He’s on walkabout. A tradeship dropped him off here.”
    Vikram rubbed his chin under the curly grey beard. “Now
that,” he said, “is downright plausible.”
    “It is, isn’t it?” Khalida only sounded halfway bitchy. “So
do we change his name? I don’t think there’s anybody named Rama in the
Dreamtime.”
    “Let’s not get any more complicated than we have to,” Vikram
said. “I called him that and he liked it. It stuck.”
    “That’s the truth,” Aisha said.
    “Yes,” said Khalida. “You understand why we’re doing this,
don’t you? As long as we don’t know who he really is, it’s safer to give him a
cover story.”
    “Like MI,” Jamal said. “I get it. The less everybody knows,
the less there is to find out.”
    And, Aisha thought, the less trouble Aunt Khalida would get
into for letting a total stranger babysit her brother’s offspring when she was
supposed to be doing it. The fact Rama was completely trustworthy in that
respect would make no difference whatsoever. Pater was hard line about
responsibility, and Aunt had been slacking it.
    Everybody had reasons for wanting to keep people in the dark
about Rama. “I’ll go tell him who he is now,” Aisha said, and got out of there
before anybody could stop her.
    They did try. Jamal was loudest. “ Hey! It’s your turn to put the dishes in the cleaner!”
    ~~~
    “That’s a good story,” Rama said.
    He’d had Jinni saddled, and Lilith too, when Aisha got to
the barn. She thanked him for that.
    The antelope stallion was not happy. Not in the least. He wanted to go out. He wanted to do the running and the
carrying. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. Not because he’d been wild only
three tendays before; Rama didn’t worry about such things. The stallion needed
more practice carrying weight.
    So he stayed with his wives, roaring and ramping and
screaming, and Rama and Aisha rode toward the middle of the city. They stopped
beside last year’s excavation, the building with the round paved floor that was
probably a temple.
    While the horses grazed around the broken pillars, Rama and
Aisha sat on one that had fallen down, and shared a fruit pastry. Aisha had
told him who he was supposed to be once everybody got back, and he smiled. “Walkabout,”
he said. “That’s like a journey, yes? Such as a priest would take, to discover
the world and himself.”
    “People on Dreamtime don’t do priesthood,” said Aisha. “They’re
not that formal. They go ’way back, did you know? Thirty thousand Earthyears,
more or less.”
    He widened his eyes. “That’s old,” he said.
    “About as old as anything human gets. When everybody went
into space, some of them went walkabout. One way and another, most of those
ended up on Dreamtime. Now when the young ones go out, they go all over, but
they always head back home. Just like in the old times, when home was an island
continent on Earth.”
    He nodded. His eyes were dark and as soft as they ever got. “I
went walkabout when I was young. Maybe it’s time I did it again.”
    The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “You can’t leave! You
just got here.”
    “Did I say I was leaving?”
    “You said—” She sucked in air. “Never mind. It was the way
you said it. Are you really from Dreamtime, then?”
    “No.”
    She went still. “You remember, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    She didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the
answer.
    His eyes understood. Without stopping to think, she said
inside her head, “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome,” he said.
    He hadn’t said it aloud.
    She stilled even more. “I’ve got it, haven’t I? The thing.
What Aunt Khalida had. Has.”
    He bent his head. Neither of them needed to hear him say it.
    “You do, too. Lots of it. Lots and lots. But Psycorps didn’t
take