Sonia Lyris - Payback

“Indeed, Great Key Giver, these beings gave us much. We now travel between suns and we join interstellar trade routes. We stand tall among the galaxies, and it is because of them that we can.”

Indeed she stood taller then, the curve to her body stretched up into a line.

“Yes, you do.”

She shot me a grateful look, then went back to her story.

“Key Giver, our alien kindred do, in time, have offspring. They require for each child a living host to feed on. We were to be those hosts.”

A look of pain crossed her face and her tail went rigid.

“Please go on.”

“Suddenly,” she said softly, “we could no longer communicate with them. They had gone into their first breeding season, in all the time since they had arrived, and our words no longer meant anything to them.

“We did many things, Great Key Giver. Among them we sent many of ourselves out to find you. We followed the Trail of Puzzles that leads to you. Then a Giver, a pale one, came to us. Claiming to be your representative, he gave us a key.”

“Someone has misled you, tall one. I have no representatives.”

I felt a tingle somewhere outside me, washing back over me and sucking down again, gone before I could place it. Premonition? Memory?

She bowed her head, confused. “We feared and hoped you would say such, Great Key Giver. This pale Giver claimed to represent your generosity. We petitioned him for help, to save us from our alien kindred. We returned from him with a key. This key.”

She drew out of the folds in her stomach a slim, yellow box. It was the wrong color, and not quite the right shape, but it was otherwise similar to my own.

I must have dimmed. She looked at me a moment, then opened the box. Inside was a crystal, and on it codes.

“It is a formula for a virus that will destroy our alien kindred. We agonized to use it, but as our alien kin began to divide us into camps, some for breeding, some for use as hosts, we made a last effort to fight. We released the virus.”

I knew what had happened. I tilted the bowl of continuum and let the images flow across me. I saw the tall ones’ alien kin begin to fall to the virus and retreat to a ship above the planet.

“They died,” I told her. “But the virus mutated. Your kind also is dying in great numbers. Now your alien kin are attacking you as well.”

“Yes.”

“What do you ask?”

“We ask a key to save our people.”

I reached behind me, brought out a box, and handed it to her. She looked at me with soft eyes, her body curled again.

“What will this key do for my people, Key Giver?”

“It is an anti-virus for the one you were given.”

“What of our alien kin?”

“It will cure them, too.”

“Then we will have the old problem again, will we not, Key Giver?”

“I doubt that it will be the same problem, tall one.” She straightened at my address. “Because the situation is so changed. You are no longer ignorant of what your alien kin are or what they can do.”

For a moment she considered. “Yes. I thank you, Key Giver. The others—the ones calling themselves Givers, they would take no payment. Will you also take nothing in return?”

“No, tall one. Go and save your race.”

She walked up the ramp, very straight and tall. To show her respect, she did not even glance at me again before she left.

The Givers had given her their key. One could even argue that given time their key would result in an outcome where her race no longer had this problem.

I sighed, felt the millennia hanging on me like blood-sucking worms on a bloodbeast.

I remembered those; they had come long ago. Intelligent, peace-loving, blood-sucking worms. They were quickly going through the life on their planet, and had come to me for solutions. They had taken the key I gave them, had used it, and had not insisted on paying me back.

I sat deep, and let the pull of my sigh take me down into the ground that was not ground, into the other universes from where I gained the answers that, in this universe, became keys. There I sat in a deep, long bath.

In time, I told myself, this, too, would become memory.

“Give me the good stuff or I’ll blow your station to quarks!”

The small creature stood before me, in a challenging posture, his few fingers curled around an energy weapon.

“What do you ask or seek?”

“I don’t ask anything. I demand. Tell me where you keep the good stuff.”

I thought of my stores. There might actually be something valuable there. It seemed to me that there was, but it had been a long time and I wasn’t sure.

“I give keys. I give information resources, not physical resources.”

“I do not want your keys. I want something of value.”

“Ask a question. Tell me what you seek.”

He snorted. “I know you and your Givers all too well—don’t pretend that giving garbage and the wisdom of the ages with me—that’s got the value of excrement. I know how Givers collect items of value. You must have plenty.”

“Try a question.”

He pointed the weapon at me.

“Give. Now.”

The weapon would not work on me, nor would the explosives that his ship carried, but confrontation was not my goal.

Someone had, it was clear, hired him to destroy me. The Givers, perhaps. He had come here to take the good stuff before disposing of me.

Outside the station, I glimpsed another seeker beginning docking procedures. I had to speed up this audience.

“I have no time for your threats, little creature of cosmic dust,” I said imperiously. “Ask a question or leave.”

His expression darkened. He spat a curse.

“All right. How do I get into the store rooms where your treasure is kept?”

Finally. I hid my sigh of relief. I reached behind me and drew out a box and handed it to him.

He took it, opened it. “What is this?”

“It is the key you asked for. Your ship’s computer will help you decode it.”

He licked his lips, glanced up at me, the barest hint of uncertainty on his furry face. “But what is it?”

“It is the instructions for unlocking my storeroom.”

He snorted. “You think I am that simple?”

That was not a question I wanted to answer.

“It doesn’t matter what I think, or how simple you might be; you’ve asked for and received a key, and the key will do what you ask.”

His expression told me that he didn’t think he was here for an education. Answers are keys, too, but he didn’t want any of those. As he swore and tensed to draw his weapon, I didn’t offer him any.

He drew and fired. I felt the pulse cover me like a hot blanket, felt it speed up, fly around me, and snap back, crushing him to the floor.

He lay there, unbreathing. The crystal key lay on the ground where the box had fallen to the floor and come open. For a moment, I stared at the tableau and pondered the mysteries that even my keys do not answer.

The newly arrived ship docked, and the occupant was just now finding its way to the passageway that led to my room, where it would, I hoped, simply ask a question.

I cleaned up the mess.

The three arrayed themselves in a triangle, their long limbs crossing each others’ in an aesthetic pattern that I knew meant supplication, but meant supplication with resistance to surrender. Clearly they did not know me. Or perhaps they had had dealings with the Givers. I wondered what message the Givers were handing out these days with their keys.

“We come to ask you to reconsider, Key Giver. Or at least to explain to us the why.”

Something had happened, something not of my making, something beyond my keys. I felt heavy.

“Reconsider what?”

“This.” Two of the twisted limbs handed me a box. It was yellow. A Giver key, not one of mine.