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you. Did it?”
    “It never found me,” he said.
    “I wish it would never find me.”
    There. She’d said it. She hadn’t been thinking about it.
Much. About how the tendays were spinning on, and she was getting closer and
closer to the day when Psycorps would come. Because it always came. Even to the
remotest places, where a person turned thirteen Earthyears, and the law said
she had to be tested.
    On populated planets, parents took their offspring to
Psycorps stations. In places like this, Psycorps came to them. She had her
appointment. It had come in yesterday. She would get a present for her
birthday: a Psycorps agent with his testing protocol.
    “That’s what they call it,” she said. “Testing protocol.
Like who gets to speak first at the summit meeting. Or who gets taken off to a
processing center.”
    “Is that what they do? Take you away and turn you into
sausage?”
    She didn’t want to laugh, but she couldn’t help it. “Just
about. You get more testing. The more you pass, the more they teach you.
Eventually you turn into an agent. Or they decide you won’t work out, and
neuter you.”
    “Yes,” he said in his throat. “That I have seen. Your aunt
was there for a while, wasn’t she?”
    “Half an Earthyear,” Aisha said. “She never talks about it.”
    “She doesn’t remember.”
    “I’m sure she doesn’t want to,” Aisha said. She had to say
it, because if she didn’t, it would tear her up inside. “I’m just like her.
Everybody says that. I don’t think I’m that bitchy, but I haven’t been through
all she has, either.”
    “Nor will you,” he said.
    “How do you know? Can you see the future?”
    “That’s not my gift,” he said. “I’m making you a promise.
Psycorps won’t do a thing to you.”
    “Look,” she said. “Don’t go killing the agent to save me.
That will just make everything worse.”
    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