Forgotten Suns Read Online Free Page A

before all
hell broke loose.
    The convulsions and the raving were easy. Soft restraints,
then hard ones. More cold baths. The bed was soaking wet. If she survived this,
she would have to get Shenliu a new one.
    What came after that was harder.
    If Psycorps had neutered this one, the neutering had not
taken. He was not only completely unregulated, he had aberrations she had never
even seen.
    Most of it had to be illusory—trapping her inside his
hallucinations. He had not really destroyed the whole city and everything in
it, then put it back together again exactly as it was, ruins and excavations
and all.
    He had not remade the city, either, as it must have been
several thousand years ago, bright and sharp and new, full of people and
animals, life, light, voices and laughter and song. Giant antelope in saddle
and bridle or drawing wagons or chariots. People of what must have been a dozen
nations, some of whom looked like the tribes she knew, and some were fairer but
most were darker, and all of them were taller. The darkest were the tallest.
They looked like him when she had first seen him, with black eagle-faces and
exuberant beards and a clashing array of ornaments.
    That had to be a fantasy. He was certainly no giant.
    It was a wonderful dream, vivid and strikingly real. She
could feel the pavement underfoot, and smell the complex smells of a thriving
city, and hear the song a woman sang: a woman with skin like honey and hair
like fire. It was a love song she was singing, and she smiled as she sang, with
warmth that reached across all the hundreds of years.
    Such sadness struck Khalida then, such grief and such rage
that it broke her mind apart. She felt it breaking. She felt it healing, too,
as the dream melted around her: wounds knitting, scars fading, places that had
been stripped bare filled up again with light.

4
    Aisha and Jamal brought Vikram in when Khalida collapsed. As
she clawed her way out of whatever had happened to her, she was more than glad
to see that well-worn face with its web of old radiation scars.
    During a lull in the delirium, Vikram helped her get the
stranger into the main house. The walls were more solid there, and there was
in-house security—not much by MI standards, but better than nothing.
    “We need a name for him,” she said as they finished rigging
the restraints in one of the guest rooms. He, whatever his name was, was
unconscious for the time being. The house medbot had already confirmed that he
was breathing, his heart was beating, and he had a dangerously high fever.
    Vikram rubbed his jaw where a flying fist had caught it. “Rama,”
he said. “Call him Rama.”
    His expression was odd. So was hers, she supposed. “Rama,
then. We’ll let him tell us what it really is when he comes to.”
    If he did. She did not say it. Neither did Vikram.
    ~~~
    On a civilized planet there would have been resources.
Medics; hospitals. The medbot here was programmed for the ills an
archaeological expedition was prone to. It had only the most basic
accommodations outside of that. For what ailed Rama, it was next to useless.
    There were no ships within two tendays’ reach of the system.
Vikram had determined that before Khalida even thought of it. Khalida was
almost desperate enough to load the Brats into a rover and order them to fetch
a shaman from a tribe when the storm of delirium stopped.
    It was abrupt, and it happened in the deep night. An hour
before, he had been throwing off sparks. When Vikram tried to hold him down, he
was nearly electrocuted.
    That, the medbot could treat. Vikram was in his own bed
recovering. Khalida sat at a prudent distance, wide and painfully awake.
    The silence grew on her. It was more than a lull. Rama lay
on his back, perfectly still.
    She leaped. At the last instant she remembered lightning,
but that was gone. His forehead was cool. He was breathing, deep and slow.
    He was asleep. It was sleep; the bot confirmed it. He was not in a coma.
    The tension ran out of