Andy smiled. “I can? Then, they’ll stay and be our friends!” All the green people cheered!

“No!” I frowned at him. “It’s wrong, to make people slaves! When Mama left Somalia, people were takin’ prisoners, and they worked like slaves!”

Dromie pulled at his daddy’s green robe. “I was a slave, Daddy! I didn’t like it.”

“Okay. Fis, will you put a provision in our treaty, that I will never take slaves in my colony?”

“Molly takes slaves, but she gives ‘em healing and sets ‘em free! We should do that!” Dromie grinned.

His daddy smiled, big. “Can we have a Rainbow Unwell Colony? Molly can run it. Some of us can learn healing!”

Fis still looked worried. “I will ask.”

Lunares came near. “Have you progs to make a Zheien city, since this colony will be Zheien? We need a place to sit and discuss. King Andy, did you choose your council, or will you organize a different government?”

“Our government was large and complicated. I want, now that we are small, to try the Zheien way. My people, will you appoint nine to represent all of us? Do all of you agree?”

Everyone nodded, that I saw. More came in white streaks of light.

“There are 21 vigintillion of us. I am in contact with every mind, and we all agree. We will have a council of 9 members. Those 9 will govern a council of 9 apiece, and each of those, a council, until all of us are represented. Dromie, will you lead it for me?”

“Daddy, you threw me away.” He looked down. “Then I came back and killed you. I don’t think I was a very good son.” One three-toed foot scraped at the gray dust.

Andy ran over there and hugged him. “I’m sorry I threw you away! I see differently now. All of our people that I exiled, I brought them back. Will you lead my council?”

“I killed you so I could be king! I’m sorry, Daddy. Now I don’t want to be king any more.”

“You made me live again. Now I know lives are important. You taught us all that slavery is bad. Once, I killed everyone, then I learned to take slaves, and now I know that freeing slaves is good! You taught me good things. All our people learned, because of you. Now, all the people we destroyed and all that Rentappenen destroyed are restored. You kept backups.”

Dromie hugged his daddy. “I kept ‘em because I didn’t want Rentappenen to have ‘em. But, Granny taught me people, all people, are important. They’re not just something to keep because I was mad at him. I was mad at everybody because Rentappenen made me a slave. Granny taught me that some people are worth fighting for. When I started waking people up, I listened to them. People like Rentappenen are one of a lot. I didn’t wake up anyone like him.”

They stared at each other and Andy nodded. “You woke a traitor.” He frowned at one of the men, who planted himself in the dust at his feet, face down! “You sent us to help Rentappenen, stripped of our abilities!”

“Pardons! Apologies! The Council Of Padrisa sent me to stop you. If I had not, you destroyed us. I sent you to Rentappenen because you are all weapons! I expected that you would destroy his people as you tried to destroy us!”

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Andy slapped his forehead. Pulled this man to his feet. “Then, I will apologize to you. Yes, we were sent to the Padrisa, to destroy it. I didn’t want to do that. Your diplomats were nice to me, even though they feared me. We only wanted a place to live. They expected us to destroy them. One of the diplomats invited us to his world. But, if we tried to speak, people died. I stopped speaking. They kept coming to us and sitting by us.

“You must understand, we were different before that! I had Dromie and threw him away, because he was weak. One of the women, she took him.

“Dromie showed me that she fed him and kept him alive. He fought people. She still offered him food, so he stopped fighting.

“When I saw him playing with her children, I decided that our mission was wrong. I tried to tell them. They sent 3000 diplomats and all of them died. Then you came and simply showed me that we must leave. You showed me Rentappenen. I assumed I could talk to him.

“So we went to Rentappenen. I now know we should have killed him, and we were stronger then, but I talked to him. He ordered us to prove loyalty. I believed his lies about how strong his forces were. Now I know he lied to us!

“But, I thought, since the Padrisa doesn’t want us, Rentappenen does, so I did as he asked. Dromie was right to kill me and Rentappenen killed the rest of us. Dromie disagreed that galaxies should die so we might live. Rentappenen punished my son for 3 centuries as his slave.

“Dromie witnessed how slaves suffer. They killed him many times but he brought himself back.

“Wslarc told him not to bring our people back, but without us, we could not defeat Rentappenen. We lied to the Council for him. Forced the Laruu to take a form that they could understand. Created a mess.

“Now we are sorry, all of us. Dromie taught us to have love for people. We began as weapons, things made to destroy. People that made us gave us sentience so we could kill better. You might say we evolved. Show yourself. I will not harm you.” Andy put him on his feet.

He turned into a tall man with black fur and pointy ears, like a cat. “I am Tiron, a Laruu, but I traveled to the Padrisa Council, to warn them about Rentappenen. I was a diplomat, so my people decided I would be the one to do this. They wanted me to solve a problem. You. They told me they would listen if I could convince you to fight Rentappenen, because he was a threat to them. This shocked me! Surely he had help from above the Padrisa, to threaten them! I think he was not merely a bored Ctraln, for their Council to know of him! We knew of him because our people rose. Each level they rose to had problems with him and they sent an observer to tell us. I knew of many other threats we could not help, so I thought, here is our chance to do something substantial.

“But our attempts at communication failed! Except for my last effort. I recloned myself as one of you. I am like Dromie, but worse, barely able to function as an Edan, as they now call themselves. It took 3 centuries to teach him Elshar, so we could communicate.

“Yet, Aine, you taught him Earthan in days! More than that, you helped him to care about other beings. This race was 300 levels above the Padrisa, created by another race as a weapon to destroy it. It was also 300 times the size of the Padrisa, what you know as the Virgo Supercluster. They brought people of their level back. Except for the race that created them. I think Rentappenen was one of them. It is fortunate that you found him.”

All this just blew my mind! “But, he found me! I just love little lost things. Mama told me she got lost as a girl. She must’ve been Luna’s age. Wandered out into a battle, at home in Somalia. A bullet hit her arm, and she cried. That battle stopped. Her parents died there. But the soldier that shot her, he felt bad and stopped the men with him. The men on the other side stopped. Because he stopped, they got a medic out there who saved her life. They put all the people who got shot, on both sides, on a truck and took them to a hospital hundreds of miles away in Kenya. It was too late for her parents, but not for the people from her village that got hurt. Some of them recovered enough to care for her in that refugee camp.

“I never forgot Mama’s story. So, I guess this is Mama’s legacy, that her story made me overlook Dromie’s appearance, and just think of him as a lost little boy. I love him ‘cause I lost a son at four because he got lost an’ a car hit him.” During an argument with my sorry husband, who became my sorry ex. I was pregnant with Gwen. When I told Mama, she got so upset, she had a stroke and died, too.

Dromie looked sad. “Daddy, can you help?”