Sonia Lyris: Payback

“What am I reconsidering?”

“Your decision about us. We do not wish to be impertinent, but the planet you have given us is not easy to live on. Already we have lost so many, and we are so few already—”

Their limbs clutched, trembling slightly.

I dipped into continuum to understand.

“You are right, the planet is not suitable for you. But I did not give you this planet. You have been deceived. The Givers are not my representatives.”

Their limbs fluttered in confusion and shock.

“Then…?”

“Then you are free to go where you wish, make food of and war on whomever you like. The Givers are merely another race, like yourselves. Deal with them as such.”

“But they quarantine us! They tell us we are evil because of the sins of our parents. After a thousand years, they say, if we behave to their liking, we may rejoin other races in trade. What shall we do?”

I reached behind myself, into my pouch of keys, but all the boxes I touched slid away from my grasp.

“That is not a question for which there is a key. Please ask again.”

“We have been told that we are evil, that we must mend our ways, but we do not know how. Tell us how.”

Again I reached behind me, into the pouch. Again all the boxes slid away.

“Again, your question has no key. Please try again.”

Their limbs tensed, fluttered.

“We wish to survive. We do not wish to cause hardship to others. We never knew our parents. Who are we? What have we done for which we are being punished?”

This time a key box came to me. For a moment I remembered the tall one, with her soft eyes. Somewhere her kind still lived, tucked away, hidden from the parents of these who stood before me.

I handed them the box.

“What is it?”

“It is the truth about what you are, which you and your kind do not learn until it is upon you. It is the mystery of how you live so long, how you make children, and what it is that the young of your kind feed on. Perhaps when you have understood this key, you will go back to the planet the Givers gave you and there live out your short lives. Or perhaps you will come back here for another key.”

They stood for long moments in silence, digesting my words.

“Thank you, Key Giver.”

The Giver ships arrayed themselves around my station. They had a marvelous set of weapons, sufficient to destroy my home many, many times over. If they used them, even a fraction of them, I would have to rebuild my home, and likely myself as well.

They boarded my station with military precision, destroying unlocked doors and securing empty rooms. Pale, with stiff white uniforms, they poured into my room in a stream, until they nearly filled it.

When she walked in, the likeness was so sharp that it only took me a single whiff of continuum to confirm that she was a distant descendant of the one who had first visited me.

She stepped up close to me, her posture one of confidence and challenge.

“We are here for the Giving,” she said to me, her hands moving in what I gathered was a ritual opening for discussion. Then, in a harsher tone: “We will give you one chance, one chance only, to stop calling yourself Key Giver.”

“Why should I do that?”

“We do not find the title amusing. You insult us and the true Key Giver.”

“What is it you ask or seek?”

Lines of fury appeared in her pale face. She pulled out a small device, pointed it at me.

“Register offender,” she told the device. “Offender of the faith.”

“Behavior?” the device asked.

Her voice dripped with disgust. “Presents itself as Key Giver.”

I was impressed with the device. The artificial intelligence therein would help interpret the rules of their whole, complicated faith. I delved into the software and followed the pathways. Most offenses, I saw, would result in the giving of a key. A Giver key.

Most, but not all.

“Blasphemy,” the device pronounced. “Subject must immediately recant and suffer penance, or be destroyed.”

She nodded solemnly and looked at me.

I decided to try again. “What do you ask or seek?”

Her face began to flush.

“We seek to remove your abominable presence from the great Key Giver’s blessed universe.”

I reached behind me, but no box came to my hand. It was as I suspected; she sought to satisfy conflicting goals.

“There is no key for what you seek. Please try again.”

“You have heard the pronouncement. Recant. Say you are not the Key Giver. Take penance for claiming to be the Great One.”

I reached behind me again. A box came to my hand.

I did not know what this key would contain and I did not look. All would become clear in time. I presented the box to the pale woman.

Startled, she opened the box, frowned, handed it back to a man behind her. “You must recant now, or be destroyed.”

I sparked out in a line, pointing at the box behind her. “Read the key from your computers. You should have no trouble decoding the information.

Behind her, the man put the crystal up to another small device.

“We will,” she said. “We will decode all your impostor keys, once you have accepted our authority.”

“It’s blank,” the man said.

The woman smirked. “Of course it is. He is not a Giver and certainly not the Great One.”

My key was blank? I frowned inside, wondering what this might mean. If there was no answer, then no key should have been possible. But a blank key?

“Do you recant?” she asked.

A blank key. I took a quick sip of continuum. I discovered many things about the woman in front of me and the many races the Givers had influenced, but nothing to explain a blank key.

I wanted time to puzzle out the mystery. I could step away into another universe to create that time, but it would sap my energy here, which would make me less able to withstand her attack, if she gave one. I did not want to have to reconstruct myself in pieces from other universes, not if I could help it.

A blank key must mean that the answer was evident.

“Well? Do you recant?”

Could I? Would it matter if I did?

“Yes,” I said.

Why not?

She blinked in surprise, took a half-step back, then another, to make it seem that she had meant the first. “Then you must accept penance as well.”

“And that is?”

She turned back to whisper to the man behind her. They consulted the computer. Much of the complexity of their religion had to do with penance—penance that would apply to specific and varied races, penance that would provide for the church.

“You must give us all your material wealth. We will insist on making a tour of your entire station.”

Material wealth? It seemed to me that I might have something. Didn’t I have stores somewhere?

“Is that all?”

“And you must stop offering these—” she hurled the box with the blank key to the floor, “disgusting imitations of Giver keys.”

That was easy.

“I accept.”

She eyed me skeptically, but I had agreed to her terms, so she was bound to accept them.

“So be it,” she said. Then to her crew: “Search the station. Take everything.”

I did a quick inventory of the station and found my stores, looking inside to see what I had. There was a large shipment of platinum, covered with dust.

Then I remembered where it had come from. I hid my amusement.

The two stepped inside my chambers and arrayed their long limbs in a simple pattern that meant sorrow and petition. The last time there had been three of them.

“What do you ask or seek?”

“We have read the key you gave us some years ago, great Key Giver. We understand now what we are, and why our kind was banished to a hostile planet. We understand now why the Givers who are not your representatives fear and hate us so. We even hate ourselves. Our parents did not know what they did to their host race. They did not intend harm, but this does not much console us. Key Giver, must we be so? Must we lose all sense and reason to reproduce ourselves?”