"I'm here to learn."
"We are independent. We have a rich existence. Whoever made us did not give us the need to destroy."
Martin stared at Salamander behind the barrier, empathizing for the first time.
"We are not illusions," Salamander continued. "We have separate existence."
Its reiteration made Salamander even more sympathetic. Martin tried to strengthen his resolve, but in Salamander's words there was also sorrow, as well as frustration and perhaps confusion.
"Do you have the power to destroy us?"
Martin said they did, lying.
Salamander's shoulder knobs touched, jerked back, and its six-fingered hands grew tight on the steel bar.
"What will I tell my kind, that we face extinction when we have extended a hand of information and giving?"
"Ask your superiors," Martin said.
"We seldom confer with our creators. We assume they made us. Some have thought perhaps they didn't make us. You say they didn't."
"I don't want to talk to you any more," Martin said.
Salamander's wall darkened.
* * *
The dark sky, thick blue sea, walls of jagged rock; the white disk on its journey around the sharp headland; the triple tunnel mouths, the dock and gray stone floor, into the darkness. Martin carried his water in a plastic bottle, and felt more prepared this time to withstand the heaviness, the weariness in his blood and behind his eyes.
An hour from leaving the ship, he stood within his skeletal suit deep in the tunnel, before the red circle.
The helix of light within its glimmering cylinder rose from the floor.
"Have you contacted your leaders?" the staircase god asked.
"I have more questions," Martin said.
"Why should your questions be answered?"
"If we're going to go to war against each other, we should know more, shouldn't we?"
"That implies an exchange. What do you offer?"
"I'm giving you another chance to convince me you aren't the enemy we've been hunting for."
The staircase god produced its display of cascading lights and colors, but no voice came from the pillar for long seconds. Martin thought of the Bible in his father's library, and reflected that this was a particularly biblical moment. But he did not feel like a prophet facing the burning bush.
What he did feel was not awe, but fear, and not fear for his life. He feared screwing up. He could just begin to see the scale of the blunders they might make here.
"Why should we make the effort?" the staircase god asked bluntly. Language was a true handicap here; nuances and subtleties could not be expected, and bluntness could not be interpreted as… anything.
"Do you believe we can hurt you?" Martin asked.
"It is possible you can destroy us, despite precautions we might take."
"Then accept my offer. Tell me about your past. I'm here to learn."
"In absorbing the information you have given us, I have tried to understand both those you call humans and those you call Brothers. You did not come from the same star systems; your chemistries differ in reliance on certain trace elements. This told us that your story was not true, and we had no difficulty putting facts together. But it did occur to some of us that your gesture of making a lie, of sending a disguised ship, was magnanimous. Your kinds seem to believe in deliberation before reckless action.
"But surely anything we tell you cannot be convincing. What compelling evidence can we provide? We could rearrange your brains, change you so that the beings on your ship would all believe we are innocent. How would you know the difference between compulsion and compelling evidence?"
"I hope to be able to tell the difference," Martin said.
"Your innocence, your ignorance, reminds me of many of our smaller neighbors that live on planet surfaces. There is an attractiveness, you might say a beauty, to their limited lives and thoughts, but unfortunately, faster and more capable minds can't share such illusions."
"Why did you tell Salamander and his people, all the hundreds of others, that you made them?"
"We did not. They concluded that we are their makers. We have chosen not to contradict their beliefs."
Martin was getting nowhere. Still, he would keep asking questions, keep probing. He could not, for justice' sake, do otherwise.
"Do you remember your makers?"
"No."
"They never met with you after making you?"
"They made us as growing potentials within this world. By the time of our maturity, they had changed, and they have not returned or looked at us, so far as we can sense."
"Why did they make you?"
"We do not know."
Martin looked up again. "Can you understand how frustrated I am, not being able to judge? Not having enough evidence?"
"No."
"What would you have me do?"
"Choose different masters, different guides," the staircase god replied. "It is obvious to me, and to many of our smaller surface species, that you have been poorly informed and poorly led. Those who seek revenge for wrongs committed in ages past are not thinking correctly."
"It's part of a system of justice," Martin said. "If you make machines that kill living planets, you know that you or your descendants will be punished."
"Has this prevented the creation of such machines, and the destruction of worlds like yours?"
"No," Martin admitted.
"Then such a law is useless. Ask yourself if there is only one law, or if others have made other laws; ask yourself why we feel that if there are many joined civilizations of the kind you describe, they must to us seem immature, not capable of judging.
"It seems likely now that you cannot harm our worlds, that you are weaker than we. You are not a threat. Any further discussion is wasted effort."
The vision faded, helix of light and glimmer dropping to the red circle.
Martin's audience was over.
Salamander, frozen throughout the dialog, lifted its crest and advanced a step toward Martin.
"You have talked? Have you what you need?" it asked.
Martin relaxed his clenched fists. An involuntary spasm clenched them again. He sucked in breath, shuddering with frustration and rage.
"Have you what you need?" Salamander repeated. Martin looked at the creature sharply, trying to see behind the barriers of physical form, language, his prejudice. He could not help but conclude that Salamander was not an illusion.
The creature in the Death Valley spaceship had been a kind of prototype of the bishop vultures, designed by the Killers, who also created all these beings now experienced… Creators of whom Salamander knew nothing.
To Salamander, Martin represented a monster as frightening as the neutronium bombs that had whizzed through the Earth had been to his father…
Martin was Death, Destroyer of Worlds.
"I should go back," Martin said.
Salamander advanced again, fingers held up. "You have not enough," it said. "You still think we are guilty."
"No," Martin said. What could he say? Nothing to reassure it; nothing to mislead.
"What can we do to defend ourselves?" Salamander asked, with sufficient ambiguity of meaning to confuse Martin.
"I need evidence that those who built the machines are no longer here," Martin said. "Your superiors either can't or won't supply me with the evidence."
"We know nothing of them," Salamander said. "There will be meetings. We must meet with you again."
"Please take me back," Martin said. In Salamander he recognized a type not so inhuman after all; diplomat, organizer, representative of many interests and individuals. He could not hate Salamander, or by extension, any of the others he had seen.