What was it he had been taught as a child?

   The Prophets reveal but they do not direct. We have to do the work ourselves.

  That was all well and good, he thought, but his work, his life was a thousand years in the future. There was nothing to do here but get off this planet before he and Modan did anything irreversible to the timeline.

  He suddenly remembered Modan. She had to be saved and both of them had to get away from here as soon as possible. If he died somewhere between this moment and that or in some moment yet to come, that must be part of the Prophets’ plan for him and he could only accept it as he had accepted their boon in the shrine so many years ago.

  He still wore the isolation suit. He still had his phasers, and as long as Modan still wore her badge, he could use the shuttle’s sensors to pinpoint her location. A few well-placed shots should scatter these primitives and he would have her away before they could regroup and follow. Easy.

  If he could manage it, no matter what else happened, he might be able to keep her from giving up her life for the Prophets’ vision, as had so many of his friends before.

  The two soldiers were of different factions, each sporting intricate but differently hued tattoos that had been scrawled all over the sides of their carapaces and each bearing a selection of similarly lethal hand weapons.

  Finding Modan, someone so outside their sensibilities that the words they used to describe her could not yet be translated, had caused them to put aside their differences for the moment while they tried to figure her out.

  “You are a fool,” said the one with the green and gold tattooing. “It is obviously a [meaning unknown] sent from Erykon to [possible meaning: test] us.”

  “You dare to claim to know the will of the Maker of the Eye?” said the one with the red and white. “You dare to speak the Maker’s name aloud?!”

  “See its odd appearance?” said the first soldier, her glassy black eyes twinkling in the evening light like a helix of precious stones. “It is not a creature of this creation. It is from Erykon. There is no other explanation.”

  “You are the fool, Tik’ik,” said the other soldier. “Your mind is broken if you think this is anything more than some [possible meaning: birth mutated] animal. How else could you have broken it and brought it to me?”

  “It was in the Shattered Place.”

  “We were in the Shattered Place,” said Kakkakit. “Are we sent by the Maker?”

  “I was sent by my Mater to murder the sisters in your blasphemous clan in quantity,” said Tik’ik. “But you agree that this creature is more important.”

  Kakkakit made a few skeptical clicks with her inner mandibles and began to circle Modan’s prone form, prodding her occasionally with a weapon that resembled a long walking stick with some kind of crystal formation at the top.

  Modan twitched away from the contact and moaned. From his vantage point a couple of meters away Jaza could see that she’d been caught in mid-transition between her humanoid and feral forms. She was still mostly humanoid, but there were spines breaching her suit.

  “I have a solution,” said Kakkakit at last. “We can eat it.”

  “Your brain is broken.”

  “Tell me, Tik’ik,” said the other. “Are you hungry?”

  “Soldiers are always hungry,” she said. “If you had a soul you would know this.”

  “I am as hungry as you,” said Kakkakit, leaning over Modan. “My soul tells me there is food here.”

  “If you touch it,” said Tik’ik, leveling her own nearly identical weapon at Kakkakit, “I will kill you here and now. To harm one of Erykon’s things is to beg the Eye to open again.”

  “The Eye has opened,” said Kakkakit. “We know it is because of your blasphemies. It is our slaughter of your hideous clan and all of the others that has caused it to close again. When the last of you is dead, the Eye will sleep.”

  “Your disgusting clan and all your sisters will be larvae food before the Daystar rises again,” said Tik’ik. “That will please Erykon. This creature is a gift to us for carrying out your destruction.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” said Kakkakit. “Think: If we can eat it, then we know it is just some animal. If it is something sent by the Maker to test us, as you say, or if it is some gift, the Maker will not let us eat it.”

  Tik’ik thought about it, chewing the idea as if it were a small and succulent mammal. “All right,” she said at last. “We will try your plan.”

  Each soldier had a long-handled serrated blade strapped to her back that they now withdrew from their respective sheaths.

  Taking positions at either end of Modan’s body, they raised the blades, which resembled machetes. Before they could bring them down again, twin beams of destructive energy lanced out at them from what seemed to the soldiers like empty air. The machetes dissolved to nothing in their talons, and both soldiers were thrown to the ground.

  They were up again in a flash, this time with guns in hand, firing small metal projectiles in the direction of the beams’ origin. Plants shredded, crystals exploded in every direction while the soldiers continued their lethal barrage.

  Tik’ik was empty first, the nose of her weapon so hot that smoke wafted up from the hole in a lazy undulation. She leaped over to the place she and Kakkakit had just destroyed, hoping to find a body in the broken turf or a blood trail at least.

  There was nothing.

  “What was it?” said Kakkakit. “Is it dead?”

  There was nothing.

  “You see?” Tik’ik said thoughtfully. “It is Erykon’s will that this creature must not be harmed.”

  “This is some trick of your clan’s, I think,” said Kakkakit, slowly and quietly replacing her gun’s empty packet of projectiles with a fresh one. “I will kill you and this creature and eat both your-”

  She never finished. Tik’ik’s clan blade, the small one she kept hidden in the broken part of her carapace, had pierced Kakkakit through the thorax, spewing her juice on the ground and sending the rest of her to Erykon.

  When Tik’ik had retrieved her blade and assured herself that Kakkakit was dead by eating one of her eyes, she stood and said, “I know you are here. I can taste your aura.” When there was no response she continued. “I know this creature belongs to Erykon. I have protected it from harm. It is my wish to know if Erykon desires further service from me.”

  Jaza regarded the creature from the protection of the isolation suit. He had only narrowly escaped death by diving clear when the warriors had opened fire.

  It had been instinct that told him to leap, an animal’s need to continue living, but now that he had done it, now that he had heard the request of this lethally pious creature, he wondered. Why had he not just stood there and allowed their bullets to shred him along with the landscape? Would that not have fulfilled the Prophets’ vision?

  The only answer was that he had to protect Modan, to get her back to the shuttle alive, to make their escape.

  But there was now the problem of Tik’ik.

  She stood there, all innocence despite her skill with murder, waiting for any word from her god as to what she must do next. She reminded him of himself, he realized, and in a fashion that was less than flattering.

  She was a puppet, unable to act in any way beyond what she deemed to be the wishes of Erykon. She was empty of motive, of desire, of anything but the automatic need to follow. Was that truly piety, or had she simply made herself an organic automaton, no more awake to the universe than a screwdriver or a calculator?

   The Prophets do not want us as their toys, his father had told him as a child. They want us to fulfill our lives, to expand our minds and knowledge as far as they can go.

   All right, he thought as realization washed over him. I think I understand.