Sonia Lyris - Payback

“Many have come to me before with this theory. You are not the first.”

“You do not understand. We have made peace with our enemies. We now look beyond our small, simple disputes to the greater good, the benefit of all living intelligences. Your keys upset this great goal.”

I eased myself into greater light. They squinted against me.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Please, Key Giver. You must hear us.”

“I hear you. I listen for the key you have to ask of me. When you tell me what you seek, I will give you the key.”

They did not sing, for a long moment. They stood like statues.

I am no stranger to great tensions. I waited.

“We are lost,” they said at last. “If there were a key to make you stop giving keys, Key Giver, we would ask that.”

I floated a turn in my chair and dug into my store, to the very bottom, and brought out a box. I recognized the box; I had brought it out before. Infrequently.

I presented it to them.

“Listen,” I said, becoming very bright indeed. “Others have come before you, to ask this same thing of me. They have taken this box and they have opened it and they have used the key inside. Yet still I sit here before you.”

The room smelled of their climbing fear.

“Will this key really do what you say it will do, Key Giver?”

“Yes.”

“And—what will become of you?”

I smiled. “That is not your concern.”

“Then—what has happened to those to whom you gave this key?”

“They perished.”

“You destroyed them?”

“They perished,” I repeated carefully.

“Our race. What will happen to our race if we use this key?”

“Your race will perish, along with the life of this universe.”

After many of their heartbeats had passed, they handed the box back to me.

“That is too high a price to pay.”

“Then I accept the key back. Do you wish to ask for another?”

“We have come to make you stop,” they said. “What else is there to ask for that does not defeat our purpose?”

I blinked, in just the way they would have, to indicate that there was no answer to their question. They sighed as one, and I joined them. We exhaled long and then were silent, as their kind is when grieving, sharing in quiet company moments of great loss.

The one who stood before me now looked very much like the young pale one who had come to me so long ago, the one whose race had sent me tons of metal as a gift and had made songs and poems about me that now ranged across the galaxy. I dipped into the continuum to confirm my guess that he was long dead, and this one was not him. An ancestor, then. The likeness was charming.

I cocked my head at him, to indicate my interest. “Yes?”

He dropped to his knees, put his head to the ground in front of me in a gesture of great reverence.

“We realize the error of our ways, Great One! We see now that the precious metals our fathers and mothers sent you was insulting. We see how even our trite songs and poems tire you. Now we know that you want us to show our gratitude not in things or in song, but in the very essence of our bodies.”

I didn’t understand, not quite, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“You have come to ask for a key?” I asked hopefully.

“We would not so presume. You have already given us the key that saved our race from extinction. What more could we ask from you?”

“Well, anything.”

He shook his head. “We could not so insult you. Now we only seek to glorify you, Great One, in the way that you deserve.”

“I ask no such thing.”

“You would never ask such a thing. We know that. We also know that you are all-seeing. Look, then—look outside your home, into the vastness of space, and see what we have created to honor your glory!”

Dread tickled at my corners. I sent an eye out through the walls into the space around my glittering silver home station.

There, arrayed, were the five spaceships on which this pale creature and his kind had come.

“Yes,” I said to him. “I see your ships.”

He spoke into a device on his wrist. I braced, hoping that he was not signaling for a destructive force to be sent against me. I did not relish the thought of rebuilding my home, as I had been forced to do before in times long past.

Hatches opened in the spaceships, two on each, ten in total. Out of each came unprotected ones of his kind. I watched as they pushed themselves out, toward my station home, arms outstretched as if they were birds in thick atmosphere, not fragile flesh in a vacuum.

They each began a similar series of motions with their arms and legs, in a coordinated dance. I marveled that they could manage this with the complex soup of chemicals that had been put into their blood to keep them from freezing too fast.

In moments, though, their movements became jerky from lack of oxygen and the suffusion of poisons in their systems. Blood came from some of their faces, from eyes and ears and mouth, frothily covering their white features.

They sailed slowly toward my home station, spinning. Some would hit. They would cause no damage, but might smear some of their redness over the silver shell of my home. I did not change their direction, and I did not plan to clean up the mess.

The pale young one before me was still on his knees. His head touched the ground again.

“We give you this dance as a token of our gratitude, Great One. We know we can never repay you for what you have given us, but we will give ourselves in the trying.”

“So you have not come for a key?”

He looked up in confusion, followed by shock that I did not understand, and then that was replaced by despair at his own inability to express himself. He must have been chosen as the spokesperson of his people because of his lineage, not his ability to speak well.

Not that it mattered. I understood him perfectly.

I sighed, so that he would see it and would know that I was sorrowful. Even if he could not understand why.

“If you have not come for a key,” I said, “then I must ask you to leave.”

Outside the bodies spun slowly toward my home.

He stared up. In time, he spoke again. Tentatively at first, then more ardently, saying things he had said before, and, in time, saying new things.

I said nothing to his words, nor to his pleading, nor to his apologies, nor to his agonized whimpers. I watched silently as he wept, and then as he cut himself, spilling some of his own blood on the floor in front of me. I said nothing as he bruised his head on my floor.

In time, he stood, shaking and slumped, and left.

She stood before me, proud and tall, only her skin temperature betraying her tension. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and deep, reflecting the multi-chambered voice box of her kind.

“Great Key Giver, I address you: I have come across great nothingness and fought terrible demons to seek audience with you. Will you see me?”

“I will see you, tall one,” I said, replying in the formal mode of her kind.

She began to groom herself unconsciously, a tension response, then stopped, uncurled, and stood straight.

“Many thousands of years ago, as we notch time,” she began, “there came travelers to the shores of our planet. They claimed benign interest in our ways and joined us in our practices. Long-hved were they, gentle and wise did they seem. They married in threes, and were as devoted to each other as to us. Across generations they stayed with us. In time, we came to regard them as siblings, and we looked on them as kin with great love. Never had such a thing happened to us before, Great Key Giver. We were like children among the sharp rocks.”

“Yes,” I said, to let her know I had heard.

She paused, pretending not to see me, to give silence that I might rest my mind before she continued.