He told her that he knew a bit about carrying regret around like a stone, and if she would agree to remind him not to do it overmuch, he would certainly remind her.

  She smiled at that and accepted.

  Later he offered to play her some music and she accepted that as well.

  She found him in a dense cluster of the thick vines, decidedly out of uniform and romping wildly with several creatures that reminded her of frogs and of bats and maybe a bit of turtles.

  He roared at one of them for attempting to steal a nut of some kind on which he had been sharpening his teeth and sent it scurrying away into the bush. It returned presently with a small army of its fellows and pelted him into oblivion with an assault of the very same nuts. The scene brought a smile to her face.

  “You should have guessed that would happen,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a counselor.”

  “My counsel is sound,” he said, biting into one of the sweet juicy leaves he’d also recently discovered and getting covered in its sap. “It’s my patients that are sometimes lacking.”

  She laughed again and called him silly. He agreed and said she would do well to occasionally strip down and run naked through a jungle or two.

  She asked him if that was his professional opinion. It was. She was a smart woman, he told her. Therefore her need to play, to just play, was greater than most.

  “You’re awfully free with advice,” she said, “considering your track record.”

  “If you mean Trois,” he said. “I stand on my success. Happy together at last viewing.”

  “What success?” she said. “They fixed the problem themselves.”

  “Time apart reminds the heart,” he said, and clawed his way up the vine to discover the real true nature of the very attractive piece of hanging fruit.

  She laughed at that too and kept her clothes on. But she stayed and watched him for a while.

  He found them together, sitting in happy silence in the shade of several of the low-hanging lilac fronds. They graciously invited him to join them, he graciously accepted, and for some hours the three of them discussed gods and fears and the restorative aspects of going through, sometimes, rather than around.

  Then the sun dipped low and they all had the same other place to be.

  Before they parted, he finally told them with cautious optimism the news he had come to share, clicking his fore-claws as he delivered it.

  They thanked him, watched him go, and after a few tears, they celebrated.

  He found him at dusk, hiking, taking him very much by surprise. Neither of them said a word, only stood there looking.

  Both of them smiled.

  After that they walked along together for a bit. And then the sun dipped even lower and they had the same other place to be.

  They gathered in the place where they discovered his secret home. They never found his bones or any sign of how it had ended for him.

  They never mentioned to the locals who their Oracle had really been, but they knew they couldn’t leave him sleeping there without saying their good-byes.

  Their leader spoke, telling stories of his quick mind and easy ways and the times he played and fell for practical jokes.

  His protйgй attempted to speak, failed to find the words, tried again, failed again, and ended with a promise to live up to expectations.

  His former lover said a few official things about bravery and commitment. She said a few things about faith and what she did and didn’t understand about that. She said one bawdy thing about the placement of ridges and one quiet thing about love. Then she said good-bye.

  Then, one by one, in all their secret ways, his friends said it too.

  They left Orisha the best way that anything can be left: better than they’d found it, freer than its people had allowed themselves to dream, and a little sad to see them go.

Prologue

   “We must move on. Now. Before hearts cool and hands grow tired with waiting. We must move on, downstream, on the great river, which is Life. We have fought the battles and made our peace and all that’s left us is our time and how we fill it.”

  -Excerpted from the Ascension of Makkus, First Sovereign of Ligon II

   The sky was lovely. The Daystar was at its apex, shining its bright benign light down on everything. The other great orb, Erykon’s Eye, continued its slumber and the people below rejoiced. It had been a short war as they went here, lasting only those few days that their god had spewed wrathful fire from above and deadly tremors from below.

  The thousand clans, each with their own notions of how best to serve Erykon and remove any offense from the world beneath the Eye, had done their best to slaughter one another on a nearly unimaginable scale.

  Now all that was done and the survivors had crawled back to their warrens and hives to lick their wounds and learn if enough of their breeder males had endured to rebuild the ranks of their clans.

  It would be some time before any of them tested another clan’s territorial border or tried to raid their food stores or steal their breeders.

  Time was what he needed, and he had it. He knew the Eye wouldn’t wake again for a thousand years, tens of thousands of what the locals called cycles.

  He might live a tenth of that if he took care. Not long, but perhaps long enough to ensure their future.

  His first convert, Tik’ik, was loyal and resolute as she had been from the first day, but, of course, she had the benefit of seeing his magic firsthand.

  She came and went at the times he dictated, bringing news of the clans and of their relations with one another. She never questioned his need for this information or asked why Erykon’s representative never showed himself. She didn’t question. She was devout.

  New apostles would be harder to come by. It was both a help and a hindrance that he could only ever be a disembodied voice to them, a collection of unusual scents, but he had known that going in. One glimpse of his true form and they would tear him to shreds, eat what was tasty, and immediately fall back on their self-destructive and violent ways.

  They would wipe themselves out in a generation if left to their own devices, and, as he had seen that that was not in fact their fate, he would never allow himself to do anything to compromise his ability to save them from the abyss.

  His people had polluted Orisha’s destiny by slamming this graveyard of technology into its surface. It hadn’t been their desire to do this, but it had happened, and now, to ensure that Orisha’s future proceeded as it should, indeed that Orisha even had a future, he would stay and play shepherd.

  He made his home in one of the more intact parts of the crashed remains of the starship, the area they called the Shattered Place. Already the myth of the strange goings-on there had grown. He would do what he could to cultivate that. They needed to fear this place just a little if he was to survive long enough to do them good.

  If nothing else, the insectoids had already proven they had a talent for fear.

  The first steps would be the toughest and the most important. They had to be kept from ever thinking of this place as anything but holy and taboo. They were too smart and inventive a species even to be allowed near this wreck for too long. Anything they built or discovered had to be done without the benefit of the “magical” items they might find here.

  He’d already found a few himself to make his stay slightly more pleasant-random power carts, medical supplies, some interactive novels, bits of undamaged circuitry he would need in case the tricorder ever died. The most significant find was the tool kit, and he considered it a gift from the Prophets.

  He’d left the one in the shuttle for Modan, not knowing what she might find on the other side of her journey back to their own era.