Звезда Пандоры

“Now you will know this planet’s song,” she said as they approached the sphere. “All it used to sing comes from within its last memory.”

Ozzie almost hesitated. Then he saw the planet floating at the center of the sphere. He peered forward like an eager child.

It wasn’t the image of the planet, it was a ghost just like the aliens who haunted the roadway along the canyon. Long ago it had floated blissfully in space, known to the Silfen who walked their paths through its bucolic forests. Its inhabitants, the jellylike aliens, built themselves a peaceful civilization, advancing their knowledge as did most species. They had even begun to explore their solar system, sending crude ships to land on planets and moons.

Which was when the imperial colonizers arrived. Vast starships plunged into the star system on fusion flames, curving into orbit around this quiet happy world. They had taken decades to cross interstellar space, and were hungry for their prize, a new world on which to reestablish their old empire.

The war of conquest was as short as it was futile. The planetary inhabitants resisted as best they could, modifying their instrument-carrying rockets to assault the huge invaders above their beautiful planet. Some damage was inflicted on the big ships, which goaded the imperialists into fierce retaliation.

In the forests and glades below the Silfen hurried down their paths to regain the peace and freedom denied to those whose home this was. But even the elfin folk whose life was one of happiness and fey interest in the worlds they passed through were troubled by the horrific violence erupting around them. In penance, they watched.

Ozzie was shown the dark armored starships sending their missiles and kinetic projectiles hurtling down onto the planet below. Explosions ripped through the sleeping clouds, distorting the world’s air. Waves of destruction rolled out. Solid ground rippled like water. Oceans rose in rage. Towns and cities were blasted apart. Aliens died in the tens of thousands in the first few seconds. Ozzie knew them. He felt their death. Their grief. Their fear. Their loss. Their sorrow. Their regret as their homes disintegrated. Their bitterness as their children were torn apart before them. Every one of them was there for him to identify and experience. And the deaths multiplied as the empire’s weapons cast this world into smoking, radioactive oblivion before the starships departed in search of new worlds, worlds easier to subdue.

Ozzie fell back from the globe, curling up into a fetal ball as the tears flooded down his cheeks to stain the dead world’s dry sandy soil.

He wept for hours as the terrible anguish of countless deaths soaked through him. He hated it as he had hated nothing in his life before. Hated what was done. Hated the blind stupidity of the imperialists. Hated the Silfen for standing by and doing nothing. Hated the waste of so much life, so much promise. Hated knowing what a better universe it could have been if only the quiet simple aliens whose world this once was had survived and finally met the gaudy flawed human race as the Commonwealth expanded. Hated that such a meeting of unalike minds would never happen.

Late in the afternoon, when his tears had long since dried up, he stopped his pitiful whimpering lament, and rolled onto his back, blinking up at the cloudless sky. Orion and Tochee gazed down anxiously at him.

“Ozzie,” Orion pleaded, his own face close to tears. “Please don’t cry anymore.”

“It’s hard not to,” he croaked. “I was here. I was with every one of them when they died.” He started to tremble again.

“Ozzie! Ozzie, please!”

He felt Orion’s hand grasp his own, in desperate need of reassurance. A boy lost light-years from home, abandoned by his parents, on an adventure that had become a nightmare for too many months. The frail human touch was what he needed not to fall into that black infinity of horror. And how much of an irony was that, the superindependent Ozzie needing someone?

“Okay,” Ozzie said weakly, and gripped the boy’s hand roughly. “Okay, give me a moment here, dude, yeah.” He tried to sit up, only to find his body barely responding. Tochee’s manipulator flesh slid under him, helping to shift him upright. He looked around at the canyon, almost fearful of what he would see. “Where are the Silfen?”

“I don’t know,” Orion said. “They left ages ago.”

“Huh. Finally got something right. I’d kill the bastards if they’d stayed.”

“Ozzie, what happened? What did you see?”

He put a hand up to his forehead, surprised at how hot the skin was, as if he’d come down with a fever. “I saw what happened to this world. Some aliens arrived in starships and… and nuked it to shit.”

Orion gazed around uncertainly. “Here?”

“Yeah. But a long time ago, I guess.” He looked at the ruined palace city, feeling a fresh wave of sadness.

“Why did they show that to you?”