Forgotten Suns by Judith Tarr

herd of horse-sized animals until
she was in the middle of them, was worse than idiotic. It was dangerous.
    She was damned lucky the animals were, somehow,
domesticated. That needed examination, but not today. Today she had to examine
herself.
    She could keep falling apart without any effort to stop it.
She could kill herself. Or she could scrape together what was left and make the
best of it.
    Everything should be so simple. MI had run her through
therapy, declared her repaired, and sent her on leave to finish the process.
She had another six tendays to reinstatement. It was fully expected that she
would return to active duty.
    What had not been expected was that she isolate herself so
completely. On an actual inhabited planet she would have had ongoing therapy,
constant supervision, and an expectation of complete recovery.
    That was why she had come here. She had not wanted to get
through it. She wanted to feel the whole of it. Every corrosive drop of guilt.
Every nightmare.
    Now she was seeing things even when she was not asleep.
Hearing voices. Plucking feelings from the air. When she walked through rooms
in the house, she could taste the people who had been in them since they were
built, layer on layer of memories.
    That was her mind dissociating. Disintegrating. It was
supposed to be putting itself back together.
    She had no appetite for dinner. Jamal pounded on the door
and went away. When Khalida gave way to the jabbing in her stomach, she found a
tray, and dinner still hot inside the tiny stasis field.
    She ate a few bites and pushed the tray aside. The computer
pinged at her. Subspace message incoming, said the crawl across her vision.
    It was from MI. Again. She let it file itself as unread, yet
again. The computer informed her that she had forty-seven unread messages.
Forty-three were from MI in its various incarnations. Most of them were flagged
as urgent.
    The computer did not count all the other messages she
deleted as they came in. She considered deleting the ones from MI, but she was
not that far gone. Yet.
    The walls of her room closed in on her. Ah, claustrophobia.
It had been a while since she had a bout of that. She should have seen it
coming today when she went on an errand she never had finished, even if she
could have remembered what it was.
    The house had quieted down. Everyone was in bed. Khalida
went up the ladder to the roof.
    Whether the people of this world had used their roofs as
rooms for sleeping or eating or cooking in hot weather and for growing gardens
all year round, the archaeologists were still arguing. In this house, because
Rashid and Marina had restored it, the roof was an extension of the rooms
below.
    The Brats were supposed to tend their mother’s garden up
there with its boxes of vegetables and its row of fruit trees in pots. One
corner, which had a view of the city, had a long table and a crowd of chairs
and benches. The staff had meetings up there in season; they could sit for
hours arguing about this find or that theory.
    If Khalida half-closed her eyes, she could see them: Rashid
in his usual spot wearing his usual scowl, Marina up and pacing as she argued,
Shenliu stretched out long and lazy on a bench, and last year’s interns in a
huddle, wide-eyed and too shy to speak.
    One of the figures in the vision stayed when she opened her
eyes to the night. The moon was rising, huge and red, with its cratered face
and its white cap: it was winter in the north of the moon, and the icecap had
spread as far as it would go.
    Rama leaned on the parapet that rimmed the roof. His head
was tilted back. The moon’s light bathed his face in blood.
    Khalida’s first impulse was to turn on her heel and stalk
back into the house. But why should she have to leave? Let him go if he wanted
to be alone.
    He did not move, but he knew she was there. She felt him
feeling it, a uniquely strange sensation, like being two people at once.
    His voice came soft in the bloody light. “I don’t