Discretion. Secrecy. That’s why. I suspect the council didn’t want to risk a passing ship noticing a gravitational anomaly when they opened the bridge for me, even if it was a very small risk. They could hide the presence of a bridge in the small gravitational field of Pluto, so that’s what they did.

  They didn’t tear a hole in the surface of the planitesimal. The bridge opened about three meters off the ground, but gravity there is only about eight percent standard, so it was easy to take a run and then leap into the inky void of the bridgehead.

  I passed through, into one of the tunnels the Axiom built with their forgotten science. The tunnel was small, just big enough for me to stretch out my pseudopods without touching the sides. I’ve almost always passed through the bridges in ships, when the tunnels are bigger; I still wonder if the bridges adjust in size, or if you pass through different ones depending on how big you are. I sailed slowly through the weightless space, only passing a few of the rings of lights before the twenty-one seconds of the passage elapsed, and I broke through the dark blot at the end and arrived at my destination.

  Gravity grabbed me – heavy gravity, at least three times human standard, I would guess. I flattened out on a cold metal floor in a brightly-lit cylindrical room even more parsimonious in its dimensions than the bridge had been. If I’d tried to drive a war-drone through with me, it would have been crunched against the walls and probably crushed me in the process. The walls were made of a dull silver-gray metal I recognized as Axiom material, all but unbreakable.

  Several sensors on the ceiling flashed and telescoped and whirred. I raised a pseudopod in greeting. “Hello, Elders,” I said through my voicebox. Among ourselves, the Free usually communicate with pheromones and chromatophores and gestures more than sounds, but wearing a spacesuit made speaking as we did to humans more practical. “I must admit, this is exactly the sort of welcome I was expecting. I trust I look suitably harmless?”

  A bridgehead opened in the floor. I didn’t like that – if they’d been a millimeter off in opening the wormhole, they would have sliced off the ends of my walking pseudopods and compromised the integrity of my suit. But they did it right, and I fell down, my sense of orientation spinning as my body did in the next tunnel.

  This time I ended up in a large spherical cage, weightless. Lights shone in evenly from all sides, hiding the nature of the environment beyond. The mesh of the cage was tight, the holes too small for even someone as flexible as me to squeeze through. There were three corpses in the cage, others of my species, not wearing suits, floating around, their bodies not decayed, so I had no idea how long ago they’d died. My suit sensors told me I was in vacuum. “Hello?” I called. Pointless, since the sound wouldn’t carry without air, but if they were monitoring –

  “Hello, Elder Lantern,” a voice rumbled in my suit comms. “Stand by for decontamination.”

  “What kind of–”

  The lights changed, shifting into the ultraviolet spectrum. (It was a color I can’t really describe to you, Elena. Even though you’re a tetrachromat and see colors with more nuance than most humans, you can’t see into this wavelength. You always noticed the subtle shifts in my body’s colors, though, the ones Callie and the others could barely detect as variations, and you were curious, and learned so much more of the language of the Free than other humans did or could. I wish you could see all the colors I do. I’d love to show you.) Was it some sort of disinfecting light? I don’t know what they were trying to burn away. “Why are there corpses here, Elder?”

  “Where would you prefer we keep them?” the voice said. It presented as male, gravelly, and full of gravitas. The choice of artificial voice can reveal a lot about the speaker, in my species. This one thought everything he had to say was very important. Not a shocking quality in a member of the central council, those keepers of ancient secrets, tenders of ancient flames, harbingers of grim futures. They were always pretty impressed with themselves. “At least in the disinfecting cage they’re sanitary. Prepare yourself for one more journey.”

  Another bridge opened, a few meters away. I waved my pseudopods but only manage to make myself spin. The elder watching chuckled. “You’re our last surviving loyal operative? Oh, dear.”

  I didn’t want to do it, of course, but I reached out, curled two pseudopods around the nearest corpse, and flung its poor body away from me. That propelled me in the direction of the bridgehead.

  “You mustn’t hesitate to use any means to achieve your goals,” the gravelly elder said just before I passed through.

  This bridge was in worse repair than the others, half the lights flickering. After the usual twenty-one seconds, I tumbled out, into a place with gravity again.

  I’d expected to emerge on a space station, or on an asteroid, or in a starfish ship, or maybe just possibly on a moon or planet. What I didn’t expect was to emerge underwater, and in the middle of a submerged city. I spun slowly in the water, looking for signs of life, but I only saw signs of past life. Broken columns of barnacle-encrusted stone rose around me, marking the four corners of an immense square. I was near the center of a plaza, by the base of a statue of some sort of sea creature that might have been a distant cousin of mine: it had the domed body of a jellyfish, dangling fronds from around its perimeter, with tentacles winding down and intertwining from the center of its underside to form the sculpture’s base. Since the statue was five meters high and carved in something like marble, the effect was probably supposed to be impressive, but overall the object just put me in mind of a fringed umbrella.

  “Hello?” I called on my comms. Moving in the water was awkward. I have a muscular mantle cavity I can fill with water and expel through a siphon while swimming, not that I have many opportunities, but that sort of jet locomotion wasn’t possible in my environment suit. I could breathe water, but only oxygenated water, and my suit wasn’t smart enough to analyze an aquatic environment that deeply. My suit did tell me the water was terribly cold, though. Since I couldn’t gracefully launch myself along, I had to settle for filling portions of my suit with air until I achieved neutral buoyancy, then bunching my biggest pseudopods together until they approximated fins or paddles. I spun myself in a slow circle, looking around, and the submerged city extended as far as I could see: a plain of broken buildings, cracked domes, and slumped and eroded statues. Some civilization had lived here, but not for a long time. “Is anyone here?”

  A light came on in one of the ruined structures, a broken hemisphere atop a cube of mostly intact walls, with an arched opening in the front. The light was greenish, and it streamed through the clear water through holes in the dome and positively poured out of the entryway. I paddled my awkward way toward the building, hoping it wasn’t the lair of some immense predator shining a bioluminescent lure. I looked through the door and saw walls shining with blobs of glowing algae (I’ve never heard of algae with an on-off switch, but the galaxy is full of wonders), and various pedestals and pillars.

  I swam through the entryway, and abruptly into air – there was some sort of force field keeping the water out, so I thumped wetly to the floor. I left damp streaks as I explored the interior. My suit told me the air inside was breathable, but I was keenly aware of the billions of liters of water held at bay by an invisible membrane, and decided I’d keep my helmet on anyway. I did open the valves to refresh my air supply, though. My reserves weren’t infinite, and the openings would slam closed in the event of a sudden pressure change.

  I had no idea what this place had been. A temple or a museum would be my guess, but any statues or objects of worship were absent, only empty plinths left behind. Nobody was hiding behind any of the pillars waiting to surprise me. I considered calling out for the council again, but decided to be stubborn instead. Summoning people and then making them wait in uncomfortable circumstances was a basic dominance move, and there was no point in getting upset or trying to hurry the council along. Let them amuse themselves. I’d been patient this long.

  I climbed onto the widest pedestal, arranged myself comfortably, and slithered one of my manipulator pseudopods around in my suit, extracting a nutrient bar and munching on it.

  I like to think my nonchalance annoyed them enough to shorten my period of isolation, because the temple rumbled, and a section of the floor slid aside. A shiny metal pole rose up from the opening until it nearly touched the ceiling. Well then.

  I crawled over to the hole and looked down. Darkness, and water again. I gripped the pole and pulled myself down its length, submerging again. Near the bottom of the pole I broke into air once more, and found another empty room, though this one was rather more modern-looking – in fact, it looked like a corridor from the interior of a starfish ship, submerged beneath the surface. I slid down to the bottom of the pole and waited. The pole retracted into the floor, and the hatch above it swung closed. I relaxed a little, then. Seeing all that water above you is disconcerting.

  “Elder Lantern,” a voice spoke over the ship’s public address system. “You can take your helmet off. Conditions are quite comfortable here. Report to the command module.”

  I did as I was ordered, feeling vulnerable with my head uncovered and my helmet curled in a pseudopod. I walked along the quiet corridor, taking in my surroundings. The layout of the ship was familiar to me, since starfish ships all follow the same basic outline: a round central hub, with between five and eight radiating “arms” containing crew quarters, weapons systems, and the like, and “spokes” of tunnels connecting the arms so it’s not necessary to go all the way to the middle to reach a new arm. The corridors were worn, scratched and grooved, and the walls were scuffed. As I walked past various doors (all closed, and some sealed), I had the eeriest feeling that I’d been to this station before, but I put it down to the basic similarities found among all truth-teller facilities.

  I reached the hub, and made my way to the command center. The bridge of the starfish ship had a dome of transparent material, and it poked up out of the sea floor, providing a view of waving kelp forests and more pillars and structures. I wondered if I’d seen the dome in my initial survey and simply failed to recognize it as distinct from the cityscape around it.

  One of my people sat at the dais in the center of the bridge, dressed in the voluminous dark robes affected by elders of my order. He was surrounded by terminals and floating screens, pseudopods moving busily along the controls. “Greetings, Elder Lantern,” he said, in that gravelly voice I’d heard before. “I am Elder Vandor, first among equals, current leader of the central council of the truth-tellers.”

  I’d hoped to find the whole council here at once, but the leader was a good start. “I am honored in your presence, and renew my pledge of service to you and our cause.” I undulated a pseudopod in query. “What is this place?”

  “This place? It is home. Welcome to World.”

  “World?”

  “Oh, yes. That is what we call this planet.”

  “It’s a bit, ah… it’s an unusual name, Elder.”

  “The humans call their home world ‘Dirt,’ don’t they? I think ‘World’ is rather more poetic.”

  I blinked all seven of my eyes and flushed the color of confusion. “What do you mean by home world, revered one?”

  “I mean, of course… that this is the ancestral home of the Free.”

  I simply stared at him. You know a little of the history of my people, Elena. How the Axiom found us, and changed us, and made us into their servants and slaves. How they exterminated all other sapient races, and made us complicit in that extermination. I have told you the story, passed down through the generations of my sect in neural buds, of the great rebellion, when my ancestors rose up and attempted to defy the Axiom… and of the terrible failure of that rebellion, and the punishments heaped upon us afterward.

  The greatest of those punishments was the destruction of our home world, followed by the systematic eradication of all our history, and even the inherited memories, of that world and its culture – the theft of our past. The loss of our home world and our origins is the psychic wound that fragmented the Free, and has left us scattered all these years later, even though most of us have escaped the shadow of the Axiom. That cultural eradication is the reason we are called Liars, because all of our various tribes and sects have been forced to invent histories, mythologies, and sacred stories to fill that aching chasm where our true origins should be. We make up new truths because our old ones are forever lost.

  And now Elder Vandor told me I was home. That what was lost forever had been regained. My skin flushed through half a dozen colors – a human, I think, would have had tears in her eyes. “Elder. How can this be?”

  “Hmm?” Vandor said. “It’s easy enough. No one knows anything about our home world, though it seems clear our origins were aquatic. We did a survey and found a world that seemed plausible – one where the Cleansing Corps long ago exterminated the local intelligent life, who were close enough to us that we might have plausibly evolved here. So, there you have it: World, our long-lost ancestral home.”

  My colors drained. “Then… it’s a lie.”

  “In the service of a deeper truth! Never forget, we are the truth-tellers, Elder Lantern. That means the truth is whatever we say it is. The other members of the council are scouring the fallen cities of this world to make sure there is nothing to contradict our version of reality. Our new truth will be that the ancient masters told us they’d destroyed our planet, but didn’t go to the trouble of actually doing so – why bother, when they could simply erase our memories, and make us believe they’d committed such a terrible crime? We will say we discovered a secret document in a database on an Axiom facility – it is a beautiful forgery, Elder Curvete made it – revealing the truth, and the location of our home world.”

  “I do not understand,” I said. “Why would you make up such a story?”

  Vandor scuttled down off the dais toward me. “Our world has changed, Lantern, as you well know. The human scourge was more dangerous than we ever imagined. The only sapient life in the galaxy we couldn’t destroy before they achieved interstellar travel! Our greatest failure. For a few hundred years, we thought we had the apes contained. We knew once the old masters rose again, the humans could be dealt with easily – we just had to keep them from stumbling on the truth before that. But stumble they did, and worse, they used the technology of the old masters, and found so many places we’d tried to keep hidden. The humans have destroyed major projects, disrupted plans thousands of years in the making, even murdered some of the Axiom as they slumbered in their long hibernation. They have killed gods, Lantern. The humans wrought so much damage, and all in less than a decade.” He turned the indigo of disappointment. “And all that devastation started in the Jovian system, where you still keep watch on Veritat station.”

  I backed away. “Elder, I was a mere adherent when the humans found the first Axiom technology. We did all we could to stop them, the other members of my sect were killed in the process. Elder Midori only had time to induct me into the most basic of the inner mysteries before succumbing to injuries–”

  “Oh, we know,” Vandor said. “No one is saying you’re at fault. I was just making an observation. It’s remarkable that the only truth-teller station to survive this shadow war is the one where the downfall of our sect began. But that’s all down to your quick thinking, of course. Your… misinformation campaign.”

  “I had no choice, Elder.” I wondered if this was actually my trial, and if summary execution would follow. “By pretending to work with the humans, I hoped to garner useful intelligence, and frustrate their efforts.”

  “You did a remarkably poor job on both counts.”

  “I know. It is my great shame. There was so little I could do without giving myself away and losing whatever small advantage I enjoyed. That is why I reached out so many times to the council for guidance.”

  “We did not deem it safe to reply, before now. We had to… regroup and reconsider. With the Axiom nearly destroyed, we had to ask ourselves: what was the purpose of our sect? We were always only waiting for our rulers to return, and to take us under their protection once again. Now, that inevitable future seems irrevocably lost. Tell me, Elder Lantern. What do you think we should have done, with our original purpose spoiled?”

  “It is not my place to presume to know the right path, wise one.” Humility, and even a little judicious fawning, were always the safest ways to approach the council.

  “True enough.” Vandor was larger than me, and came closer, crowding and looming. “I’ll tell you what we did. We made a new path. May I make a confession to you, Elder Lantern?” His voice was low and insinuating, uncomfortably intimate. Vandor was not on the very short list of people I wanted whispering into my auditory organs.

  “Of course, Elder Vandor.”

  “I have never been a zealot.” He edged back, and raised his tentacles high, his voice rising along with them. “I do not revere the old masters! Not as some of the others on the council do. They have a certain fanatical gleam in their eyes when they speak of the Axiom, have you ever noticed? They have fully internalized the idea that the Axiom deserve to be set above everyone else, because they are better than everyone else – they are the rightful stewards of the galaxy, and even the universe. Only the Axiom are wise enough and capable enough to save us from heat death or the Big Rip or whatever end of the universe inevitably awaits, and so it is a sacred duty for us to guard their works and protect them. That zeal motivates them. Do you know what motivates me?”

  “No, Elder Vandor.” I suspected, though.

  “I am practical,” Vandor said. “The Axiom were the biggest, the strongest, and the scariest. It was inevitable that they would someday return – we knew they were only sleeping, only waiting, not gone – and it would be far better to be seen as a loyal servant, or even a tolerated pet, when they awoke. That was the best hope of survival, not just for me personally, should the Axiom happen to wake during my span of existence, but also for our whole race. So I embraced this role, and excelled in it, and finally rose to this position, first among equals, head of the truth-tellers, protectors of the Axiom. Except...” Vandor looked at me expectantly. “Except what, Lantern?”