The knowing had eased, and with it, most of the aches and pains the soldier had been carrying since his awakening in this place. The cracked rib had stopped throbbing for the first time in days. The ants had refilled the goblet twice more, and the platter was near to empty. But now the price was there to be paid.

Bayel’s awareness, elsewhere for long hours, had returned, the question implicit.

“It’s hard to know where to start,” he told the ancient awareness. “Which parts to leave out, which to include. Just to say I don’t know doesn’t seem like an answer. Even if I tell you how I came to be where I was, how much would you really have? Without context, it’s just an isolated and incomprehensible event.

“But to provide context? Even the short version seems like it would take forever. Even as I think about it, every piece I could tell you about hangs from another piece, which hangs from two more, which hang....”

He shook his head slowly, taking a deep breath. Nothing for it but to start and see how it went. But where?

“We — my people,” he hesitated. “We’d figured out, finally, how to break free of the well. Oh, right, I guess that wouldn’t mean anything to you. We’d built ships that could break free from the gravity well of the planet and even the sun. Out of the atmosphere and even the pull of the mass of it. Out into the great black between the stars. Free in space.

“But that wasn’t enough, and we were pretty isolated out there on the arm. We chafed and niggled, and eventually figured out how to outrace the light so we could get somewhere that mattered in less than a couple of lifetimes.

“It wasn’t nearly as simple or clean as that, of course. There were things going on— no, I won’t go into the dirty laundry. It isn’t important to the story. But boiled down to its very essence, there it was.”

“So there we were, in our rickety ships staggering blindly out into the great black, more than mostly convinced we were alone in the universe. Filled with pride and arrogance, we were too busy patting ourselves on the back to notice much beyond our own business. Then we met the Lyrrans.

“They’re a silicon life form, you know. Look something like great, translucent mantises. Not exactly —okay, not really even close— but it’s more comfortable to compare strange things to something familiar, isn’t it? The first humans who lived to report seeing one thought they looked kind of like giant mantises and the description stuck. Anyway, we bumped into one another, our two races, at the outer edge of the inner rim. One of our mining teams and one of theirs. I think two Lyrrans and one Terran miner made it out of that hole alive, which —if you’ve ever seen a Lyrran fight— was pretty amazing all by itself. Gives you a whole new respect for those hard vacuum miners.

“The joke was huge.” he chuckled without humor. “After thousands of years of fruitless searching, we’d finally found an intelligent alien species, and within ten minutes of contact, we were already at war with it.

“Funny how it worked out,” he grinned ruefully. “We were that close to the final knell for EarthGov when we ran into the Lyrrans. That close.

“Anyway, from the very ashes of its pyre, EarthGov arose complete.

“Hmm?” he paused at the wave of inquiry that intruded upon his mind. “Oh, right, EarthGov. That dirty laundry I was talking about. How do I describe EarthGov? I read in a book one time that a man named... ah... Thoreau, I think. Better than fifteen hundred years ago he advised that if you ever saw a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. Well, mankind didn’t listen, and EarthGov is what we got out of it.”

Bayel didn’t understand, which was a situation alien to it. Nor would any amount of probing clear the situation up. The man’s thoughts concerning this EarthGov thing were muddled darkness, black to the point of chaos. Nor had he stopped his tale.

“The Lyrrans didn’t yet know where we lived, nor did we know where to find them. We took advantage, and when we work together, we humans, things get done.

“The last phases of our preparations were nearing completion when a ship hove to just out of reach of the spanking new planetary defense grid. Dacot, they called themselves, or something our xenoanthropologists thought sounded like dacot. Ugly, five-armed things that I’ve nothing to compare to. Octopi, maybe, stuck on the end of sea cucumbers. If a sea cucumber scuttled around upright on pseudopodia and had five eyes on stalks. In any case, they’d been at war with the Lyrrans for, near as our translators could tell, a hundred thousand years. They’d come, they said, to tell us where to find their hated enemies so that we could kill some of them.

“EarthGov said thank you very much, and proposed an alliance. And we got our next big surprise. The concept appeared wholly unknown to the aliens. We were ugly bipeds and not Dacot. What could possibly be gained? It didn’t bother them much to have us killing Lyrrans, but to fight alongside? Impossible.

“EarthGov, though, was persuasive, and the galaxy’s first interspecies alliance was formed.

“Time passed and we met others. Peoples of other stars, and there were more than any of us had imagined in our wildest dreams. Some were friendly, some weren’t. Some we allied with, some we ignored. Some we fought.

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“Warfare became a viable and necessary profession once again, and soldiers returned to prominence among the people. We were career soldiers for the most part, whether by choice or necessity. The wars were far-flung and lengthy what with time dilation and the size of the average AO being measured in parsecs.

“With our allies among the outer peoples —that was the officially approved term, outer peoples— and those allied against us, we fought and learned, gained ground and lost. And even with the wars, mankind prospered. Hell, maybe because of the wars. We’re kind of that way.

“Then we found the K’trin’al. Or maybe they found us. Hard to say after so many years, particularly since we couldn’t tell how many of ours were snuffed out before somebody finally survived long enough to sound an alarm.

“Older than we were, most of us, they were a theocracy, with a religion that said they were the chosen of their god, who was the greatest god, and who would brook no other god’s existence. And so again, the fortunes of war shifted, and the whole of known space —friend, enemy, and non-aligned alike— found itself allied against the K’trin’al for our very survival. Even so, it was a near thing for a long while.

“This last war had been raging for something over a hundred years before I was born, the tide of battle shifting back and forth. See, the K’trin’al had been expanding for what the sages among the alliance figured was at least fifty million years, and possibly four or five times that. There were more of them than all the rest of us together there at the beginning.

“Still, they had never encountered an alliance before. That was the thing mankind had brought into space — the ability to work with others who’s bodily fluids you despised for the sake of the common good. There were too many different kinds of us, with too many different kinds of tactics and weapons and technologies all at once, and the K’trin’al couldn’t adjust rapidly enough to cope.

“That isn’t to say we had it all our own way,” he shook his head slowly, absently. “By the end of the first hundred years, the alliance worlds had been bled white of both resources and populace. Terra herself counted seventy percent of her population bearing arms or dead of it. But the K’trin’al were doomed, and everybody knew it.

“They were eventually backed into a single system and englobed by the fleets of a hundred different worlds. Even so, they couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp the concept of surrender or compromise. Instead of accepting terms, they divided their entire surviving populace into killer teams and exploded out of their redoubts all at once, intent upon taking the rest of known space into oblivion with them.

“When the breakout came, it took us by complete surprise. Fortunately, though, that didn’t last long. Our sages had been studying the K’trin’al for too many years not to be able to extrapolate with a high degree of certainty what they’d be up to. As soon as the forward scouts dropped and reported the worlds deserted, the word went out to look to our homes.

“I’d been fighting for better than fifteen years by this time, and was in charge of one of the rapid response teams that made up the bulk of the Terran Expeditionary Force. We were the shock troops of the alliance — always the first into any hot zone, always in the thickest of the fighting. That was why so many Terrans were under arms, you see. Of all the races of all the systems anyone knew, we were the quickest to adapt — the most inventive. The most suited to war.

“We got word and switched from our corvettes to Lyrran despatch flowers. My team phased for home along with fifty or so others while the rest of the RRT battalions divided up and did their best to blanket alliance space.

“Those dispatch flowers,” the soldier shook his head. “They’re deathtraps for non-Lyrrans. Not enough shielding, thin hull plates.... They have a single virtue; Speed. Three guys in my team alone died in transit. No telling how many were lost in the other flowers. Even those of us who survived landed sick enough to—

“But sick or not, we grounded in time to catch the orbital alert beacons tripping and were able to get to the incursion points only a couple of minutes behind the K’trin’al. Like I said... speed.

“It was in a place called Norway that the bunch we were assigned to were going to strike. They’d found —don’t ask me how— a fault deep beneath the surface, down close to the mantle, and were calibrating a sonic cannon big enough to mount on a capital ship to open it up. Our computers let us know about the fault almost instantly, but couldn’t immediately calculate the results of that cannon blast. None of us there had any doubt, though, that the K’trin’al knew.

“We hot-dropped from a pair of alouettes and lost two more guys to the terrain, but we hit them on the fly before they could get set to receive us. It was the bloodiest thing I’ve ever been through, and I’ve been through...” he tapped the metal portion of his face. “A lot.

“The K’trin’al knew they were dead, and their entire species —hell, their entire system— with them, so they were fearless. They were doing the direct bidding of their god, so they were resolute. They had to live only long enough to trigger the cannon, and their whole beings were focused on that single act.”

The soldier paused as he assimilated the pain of recounting his final battle. “I boarded that dispatch flower with an under strength company... seventy-two men. By the time I got near enough to the cannon to launch a demolition charge at it, there were nine of us left standing, and over half of them wounded to one degree or another, I have no way of knowing how badly.

“But even as I launched the charge, the K’trin’al tech triggered the cannon. The initial blast detonated the demolition pack maybe ten meters from me and the whole world vanished.”

The pause this time was longer. “When I woke up, I was here. Wherever here is.”

The awareness that was Bayel remained distracted for long hours absorbing the tale of its lost children. Even for such a one as the oldest, the saga and images the man had conveyed were hard to grasp. Many of the concepts the man took for granted were utterly foreign to it.

Long had Bayel been absent from the first world, having left the youngest children to their own path at the appearance among them of the triple god, sprung mysteriously from their own essence. Perhaps it had been a mistake. When the Great God had given unto Bayel the care of these worlds, no instructions on how to carry out such care had been included, and even such a one as the oldest could err. Perhaps it was time to send fresh roots through the passageway.

* * *

The cathedral of WoodHeart was bathed in silence as the oldest contemplated, for in the grip of the blood of the oldest, the man had projected his tale to all nearby. The wolf bitch was near catatonic at the horror of entire worlds destroying themselves and each other, and even the horse stood with head drooping and tail limp. Far off, at the edge of awareness, a single mage found himself within hearing of the tale and struggled with the half felt and less understood images. Propelled forward by a geas so strong he couldn’t even feel it, nearly running toward WoodHeart alongside the soldiers, he found time to fear this thing he’d foolishly be-termed a simple man.