“It’s a moral question, isn’t it?”

Pie’s voice trembled as she addressed the Assembly. She swept her eyes over thousands of venerated decision-makers in the cavernous room, each elected to represent a sector of beings. The room wasn’t full; several upper balconies were empty — a testament to the slowly declining population.

“Honorable senators, we discuss practical measures and the safety of our people — our first concern, but there is no law that prevents us from considering moral obligations outside Sudek.”

Far away in the dimness someone cleared her throat. Whispers of conversations began to murmur.

Pie sighed, unable to see the sources of the sounds because of the hovering spotlight that glared into her face. She looked down at her seated assistant, who shrugged and nodded for her to continue.

She turned back to the lectern and its built-in microphone. Glowing holographic numbers beside her indicated her time ticking down. When the clock reached 0:00, her microphone would mute and another senator’s platform would rise for a new speaker’s turn.

“Any of us”, she continued, “if we found a lost child in our corridors, would pause our errands, seeing it as our duty to put off even important tasks in order to help the child. We would see it as our moral imperative, part of our social contract to the whole.” She gestured above and around her with the word “whole”, hoping to indicate the entire range of sentient community.

Only two durns remained on the timer.

Turning the corner on this argument had seemed easy in practice, but now that she looked at the stern and wizened faces of the Twelve Scientists turning to each other at their center table, she felt weak. The Twelve had the power to override even a popular vote in the wider chamber, representing as they did not only all twelve species but also the twelve primary fields of study. Fortunately, they almost never spoke in this chamber; maybe she would avoid their condemnation.

“All of us”, Pie continued, “agree that the moral imperative is weightier if the child is not merely lost, but in grave danger. And stronger still becomes my duty to act if it was I who caused the danger.

“What’s at stake isn’t a single lost child”, Pie went on, allowing her voice to take on an edge that she hoped didn’t sound like desperation. “What’s at stake is an entire planet of sentients. Millions of children. All in grave danger. And we put them there.”

The final durn flicked to zero and the hundred remaining blits began quickly counting off. She tried to ignore the clock, but her voice began to hurry.

“The D.N.F. planet is home to nearly two billion sentients — the descendants of the exiles we placed there — and we know their world is in the path of imminent destruction, the same destruction from which our own ancestors fled so long ago. The good news is we have the power to help. Doing the right thing would require so terribly little of us and would endanger none of us.”

Belatedly, she remembered to tap the visual aid button on her lectern and a rotating hologram flickered into visibility in the vast space above the senators. A single-occupancy craft, its capacity was obvious from the symbols hovering beside it and from the cutaway view of the single bunk and lone seat at the controls.

Thirty blits left.

“Just one of us, a volunteer, can make the journey. Just one of us can carry enough information to save billions of beings from the coming Arggruntig assault. We can warn them of the danger, and teach them how to avoid it. Give them just a piece—”

She kept talking but her microphone wasn’t carrying her voice anymore. Her assistant grimaced; it was considered bad form to be unable to end one’s speech ahead of the timer. Her platform was already sinking back down to its niche on the vast sloping floor, while that of the next scheduled speaker rose to take its place. The counter reset to five durns. Pie’s holograph disappeared.

“It was a fine speech”, her assistant whispered to her dispassionately as the lectern folded into the wall of the platform. He handed her a warm beverage.

The next speaker, and the ones after that, talked of the resources required for national safety, and possibly even repairing a few outlying defense systems that had been broken for centuries. The mantra of them all was: “Sudek first.” No help should go to others while we ourselves have needs.

Pie sighed.

Hours later, the Senate adjourned for various holidays and Pie headed home.

In a secure Senate orb, she floated out along the cramped, low-ceilinged avenues of the old Capitol District, watching the thousands of sentients going about their business. For a brief moment, she was struck by the futility of everything — birth and life, sex and dreams, eating and reading — but she shook off the thought with practiced ease.

At the insta-transport station, she stepped directly from the orb into the blinker pod and placed her palm near the reader. It quickly detected her rank and waived the fee. She blinked to the receptacle in her own sector. Two thousand miles in an instant.

* * *

“They’re not even going to vote on it”, Pie said listlessly to Wam as they sipped drinks on a public veranda overlooking a minor thoroughfare. Here in her own sector, the tubular roads were properly made of metal and the high-ceilinged corridors were organized symmetrically, unlike in the Capital Sector — which was carved from ancient rock and sometimes smelled like it. “It’s so low on their priority list that they just listened to a few speeches and a dozen public comments and then moved to the next agenda item.”

Wam nodded. “Still, you did well, Pie. I watched the whole thing. I’m proud of you.” After a pregnant pause, during which Pie’s eyes slowly rose to meet her friend’s, Wam continued, “But even you have to admit that Sudek has bigger bugs to boil.”

Pie’s face hardened at the casual tone that wrapped the argumentative words. “Bigger than the coming extermination of an entire world’s worth of beings? The top item on their agenda list is ‘Consideration of Establishing a Committee to Begin Investigation of Exterior Damage Parameters’. No one’s lived at the Exterior for five hundred years, and that’s the big worry?”

She blew on the hot drink and sipped more. Before Wam could rebut, Pie added: “Right after my speech, they voted to approve a list of defunct neighborhoods scheduled for closure and resource harvesting. Nineteen more warrens have emptied out and — yay! — we get to recycle or repurpose all their stuff. But two billion Dwil don’t even know we exist or that the Arggruntig are heading their way.”

“They’re not exactly Dwil anymore, though, are they?” Wam wondered aloud. “Not like you and me, I mean.”

It was popular among the Twelve Sentient Species to theorize that the descendants of their exiles weren’t even people anymore.

“I think they are”, Pie said firmly. “They have two arms and legs, just like you and me. And a brain, a mouth, and eyes and ears.”

“Divergent evolution”, Wam insisted. “They acquired mutations we don’t have, and we introduced gene edits that they haven’t even thought of.” She tapped her dark brown scalp, which was shiny and smooth like Pie’s, indicating one easy example — the Dwil in Sudek hadn’t grown hair in many millennia.

Pie knew that much was true. How long can two populations be separate, undergoing change, and still meet the definition of one species? She also knew two other species of exiles on the same planet — at least according to the scouting reports — no longer qualified as sentient.

As if reading her mind, Wam continued: “Those Naraq hunt and grunt in forests — we’ve all seen the documentaries — and the Flo bubble around in the sea. Sure, the Dwil dominated the planet and built tools but would they even recognize a relationship to us. So why should we, to them?”

Pie examined her friend’s face for signs that it was just a rhetorical argument. No, Wam seriously believed this.

“It’s been a hundred thousand years!” Wam exclaimed, as if that clinched it.

“A hundred thousand years since we put them there”, Pie pointed out.

“They’re no concern of ours”, Wam countered. She gestured weakly to a sign floating past.

“Sudek First”, the sign said in Common Language characters.

“More like ‘Sudek Only’ ”, Pie sulked.

“I’m surprised at you”, Wam said, seemingly genuinely surprised, but also unconcerned. “When you were my mind-bender forty years ago, it was you who convinced me to abandon notions like that. You showed me how focusing on Sudek and our lives here was the only sane path.”

Pie remained silent. Wam’s anti-social mental aberration hadn’t been related to wanting to help the exiles. Wam’s problem had been that she wanted the Senate to mandate acceleration of The Next Step, despite resistance among the populace. Wam had become obsessed with the idea that biological creatures were profane, that all sentient beings should transfer consciousness to digital spaces. It had taken Pie several years and multiple procedures to straighten out Wam’s thinking.

Very, very briefly, Pie considered sending a message to Wam’s current mind-bender about this new self-deception. But, no. Self-deception is normal to some degree among all sentient species. Besides, the new mind-bender probably already knew about it.

“Maybe it’s your turn to visit a mind-bender”, Wam suggested caustically when Pie didn’t respond.

A small smile crept onto Pie’s face. “I’m a Senator, remember? It’s required. My mind is fine.”

“But these new opinions, Pie? How far out do you get before the boundaries start looking for you?”

“I’m nowhere near exile territory”, Pie replied, laughing gently. Not that exile was even a thing anymore. “I explored motivations and behaviors for decades, and helped numerous people solidify their commitment to Sudek. I only ever dealt with one person that probably should have been exiled.”

“Is it legal for you to tell me?” Wam suddenly forgot the argument and leaned forward at the scent of new gossip.

“Oh, I won’t identify the person”, Pie said. “But I can tell you what for. It was a non-reality fixation that governed their behavior.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Their actions were prompted by something imaginary”, Pie explained. “It was the weirdest thing. They arbitrarily ascribed consciousness to several inanimate objects — and believed that those objects wanted them to do things.”

“Like what things?”

“Oh, nothing bad. The person told me that a certain asteroid wanted them to change careers — from farming to household repair.”

“Is that so bad?”

Pie stared at her friend. “You’re missing the point, Wam. There’s nothing wrong with changing one’s career. Most of us have five or six careers before we settle in for the long haul. It’s the why. They wanted to change careers because a flock of asteroids told them to. Another time, it was a star, telling them to apply for a parenthood license. See, our society can’t survive if people begin making decisions based on imaginary reasons.”

“But if the decisions are always benign?”

Pie shook her head. “That’s just it, though. Once we allow imaginary sources to guide decisions, then any decision, benign or not, can be justified. If I let it pass, the very next ‘message’ from some galactic object — or perhaps a local dustmote — might have ordered them to kill their supervisor or begin eating personal waste. The law on that point is clear and well supported. The person had to be temporarily confined until I fixed their mind. Under the original laws, they would have been exiled.”

Wam sipped quietly for a moment, then turned back to the original topic. “Your quest, though. What are you going to do?”

“It’s not my quest”, Pie said. “Enough voters agreed with me that I got into the Senate. Sudek can use its power for good — not only for Sudek, but for all the sentient beings of the galaxy. Especially the ones we’re responsible for putting in harm’s way.”

“Now I’m confused”, Wam said, setting down her empty container. A server quickly walked past and scooped it up. “A minute ago you said certain people need to be exiled, but now you’re saying we should bring these exiles back.”

“What? Don’t people logic anymore? I said neither of those things. No one advocates that we should bring the exiles back home.” (Here, Pie noted to herself that no one currently alive was, in truth, an “exile”. The “exiles” in these arguments were the distant descendants of exiles.) “What I am saying is we can warn them. Help them. Let them know we exist. My plan, which numerous people rallied around, was to send a single individual to the D.N.F. exile planet, which really should be called the Dwil exile planet. Bring a presentation on what’s coming and some basic steps out of it.”

Wam’s eyelids fluttered, as if flapping away information she refused to assimilate. Then, “Surely they’re on the brink of solving those problems themselves. The exiled Dwil, I mean.”

Pie sighed. “Don’t you watch the news? Read the reports?”

She thought of her afternoons spent skimming through the voluminous reports delivered by drone every year. All of it building on what she’d learned in school. The D.N.F. reports were typically disappointing and dire, with minor bright spots.

Within a thousand years of initial exile, the Naraq (bipedal like the Dwil but bulkier and hairier) and the Flo (many-limbed aquatic people) had reverted to barbarism and devolved to simple eating and mating.

The Dwil exiles initially seemed in danger of the same. Nominally the same species as Pie and Wam, they had divided into warring tribes and lost literacy. But they’d somehow retained sentience, reestablished the ability to read and write, created art, built complex economies, and made infantile attempts to rediscover science and technology. (They were still far from building gravatic technology, efficient mass-energy conversion, or a star drive.) Instead of unifying for survival and progress, even now the Dwil exiles were divided into hundreds of factions barely avoiding civilization-ending wars and still unable to govern themselves justly.

“I guess I don’t pay it a lot of attention”, Wam admitted. “Teaching my art class has taken a lot of my time.”

“Well”, Pie told her, “the Dwil have neither the means to detect the coming invasion, nor the means to escape it. The Arggruntig conquer a new star system every thousand years or so. Their last move was eight hundred years ago. They’ve eaten that system mostly to shreds and every expert on galactic goings-on predicts another mass-move within the next two centuries. The Dwil have no idea that anyone else in the galaxy even exists, much less the Arggruntig.”

“Wait, I thought they still remembered us? Or at least had legends...” Wam looked confused.

“You’re thinking of the Tray exiles, on an entirely different planet”, Pie said. “The Dwil are only now beginning rudimentary science and history disciplines. Any origin myths they have are twisted — or entirely fabricated.”

“Well, you said it: they have science. So what are you worried about?” Wam wanted to know.

Pie shook her head. “They’re only just now flying in their own atmosphere; they have no idea what’s above it. They don’t have control of gravity or unspace.”

“Oh!” Wam found that news distasteful. “Not very civilized then.”

Pie sighed. “Just forget it.”

* * *

Pie found similar apathy and lack of understanding in conversations with other friends. A year went by before the Senate voted on her proposal — but at least they voted on it.

The final tally was 20,016 to 43.

“It’s as if I suggested eating children or something”, she muttered to herself in her office.

Her assistant perked up. “Which was actually suggested a few centuries ago”, he said. “It received more than a hundred votes.”

“Not helpful”, she told him.

Her sense of urgency grew. The Arggruntig, if they held to their schedule, would move within two hundred years. Pie fully expected to still be alive when it happened — she was only three hundred now. The only bit of hope was that the Arggruntig’s current star system was rockier than most — it might mean a few years reprieve before the first rock-sheathed craft began to bombard the world that now contained two billion of her distant relatives.

She wondered what it would be like to get that news from the drones. Hearing that the D.N.F. exile planet had been invaded would probably crush her. Will I be able to live with myself when that happens, knowing we did nothing? she thought. Probably. Mind-benders were amazing. But will I want to live with myself?

“What if an individual wanted to do something?” she asked one day, sitting in the office of a Naraq senator, one of the few who had voted with her. “Not as a representative of Sudek?”

The female peered at Pie as if suspecting a traumatic brain injury. “In what capacity?” the Senator asked slowly. “Surely you don’t mean broadcasting a warning... That goes against strict Sudek policy, of course, and for very good reason. It would give away our position in the universe.” The Senator shivered at the thought.

Pie looked aghast. “Oh no, of course not! That’s exactly why the Exterior transmission equipment is closely guarded. No, it wouldn’t be reasonable to put my own society in grave danger just to warn another... I’m just looking for the greatest moral good in the outcome.”

The Naraq looked confused. “Then how would one help them?”

Pie shrugged. In a society where personal property was a footnote in history, she had few individual resources. Clothes, mostly, and a shelf of keepsakes from the first half of her life. Her audio-visual memorabilia were stored securely in the community servers along with her medical files and a private journal. The apartment was “hers” only in the sense that it had been assigned to her. It had belonged to a thousand people before her and she expected many thousands more would occupy it after she’d been recycled upon end-of-life.

“I don’t know”, she admitted.

As she left, the hairy Naraq gave her one last piece of advice: “If any citizen is contemplating some illegal action, of course I recommend against it. Remember that the motto of Sudek — Science Saves Lives — is meant to apply to Sudek.”

Pie nodded and walked out, considering the grand history of the society that had bequeathed life to her.

* * *

A million years earlier, twelve sentient species warred over resources, each of their societies in shambles from overconsumption and poor management. The historic accords that ended those wars involved each of the twelve governments bending to a cabal of scientists who offered solutions. Difficult solutions, yes, but workable ones.

On the cusp of building a grand society there on the Outer Rim, the new confederation had discovered the stubbornly destructive Arggruntig nearby, eating one planet at a time. Brief skirmishes made it clear that weapons of war wouldn’t stop the Arggruntig.

“Sudek”, an ancient word for “a dozen”, was the name the scientists gave to their big hope: a large asteroid, hollowed out for habitation and installation of a star drive. Housing the combined knowledge of the Twelve Sentient Species, it also held the healthiest and smartest members of each race. According to plan, Sudek then ran away, thousands of light years away, to avoid the coming Arggruntig consumption. Ship after loaded ship, Sudekians evacuated the populations of their home worlds. Each group of new arrivals built layers of habitations around the original Sudek shell. Sector by sector, Sudek grew, far from the planet-by-planet march of the Arggruntig.

Distant enough to be safe for a hundred thousand years, Sudek built its defenses and continued the steady advance of science. The lasting shame of Sudek, usually unspoken, was the history of the exile planets.

In those early days, exile was promoted as the moral solution to violent crime, less cruel than imprisonment or execution. The Sudekian scientists located habitable worlds, tweaked the ecosystems, and deposited the worst offenders. From Sudek’s point of view, it worked: the population was purged of the most violent tendencies. Eventually, mind-benders became effective at solving anti-social behavior, and thus scientific (and public) opinion shifted — exile was deemed barbaric.

Pie had learned while campaigning for the Senate that there had once been a movement to bring the early exile descendants back to Sudek. Then, they had been just a few generations removed from the original exiles. But the proposal never gained any serious traction.

Sudek continued to monitor each exile planet with automated drone ships. Once a decade or so, a crewed ship was sent out for inspection.

* * *

An emotional slump followed the embarrassing downvote in the Senate; Pie discovered it doesn’t feel good to be in a distinct minority among one’s own people, outvoted by a five hundred to one ratio. Though convinced that her minority held the moral high ground, she was aware that the minority was shrinking and soon would be Pie alone.

Pie looked through the files she’d collected in order to write her speech. She deleted her rough drafts one by one and then eventually her actual speech (an archived copy would remain in the Senate’s servers). She looked at the starship files she’d perused before choosing the simplest blueprint for her visual aid.

Could one person do it?

If the Dwil exile descendants no longer knew their own origins, would they believe one person? What could one tell them? “By the way, I come from a super-advanced society several hundred light years away, and you come from the criminals we dropped off here a thousand centuries ago.”

Wait. Would it be necessary to convince them of that? That wasn’t the point, was it? No, what mattered was giving them the means to escape — or, if they wanted to try, to fight the Arggruntig. “Dear people of a divided and confused world, here are the blueprints to some of our amazing technological feats, discovered over the millennia. Hopefully that’ll help.”

If someone went— Stop the charade, she thought, interrupting her other thoughts. It would be Pie, not “someone”. If she went, the ship that carried her might be proof enough that she had advanced technology. Enough to convince them to listen and learn.

But maybe not. She remembered the Lesson Of The Ortoon.

Back when Sudek was still just a hollow asteroid skipping around the galaxy looking for safe haven, they’d met a handful of other species, one of which called themselves the Ortoon. They were bulbous creatures with tentacles atop their heads and tiny hands under their lipless mouths. They lived in swamps, had no clothes or tools, and barely had a language. Sudek attempted to educate the Ortoon and parent them into advancement. But the Ortoon didn’t want to advance. They liked their warlords and cannibalism and living in their own filth. Sudek moved on.

Pie had difficulty believing that her own relatives, the Dwil exiles, would react the same way. But she couldn’t be certain.

What if she just showed up and broadcast files? Could she modulate Sudek broadcast technology to be receivable and understandable by Dwil receivers? Last she’d heard, the Dwil exiles had learned to broadcast on the electromagnetic spectrum, but as of yet hadn’t invented digital computers. They recorded all data on physically manipulated media like compressed wood pulp and spools of magnetic wire.

What if she couldn’t convince them?

From everything she’d read, the D.N.F. planet was in a constant state of chaos. How could it be otherwise with hundreds of separate societies competing for resources, information, and supremacy? Here in Sudek, it had been a thousand years since the last murder. But it was a daily occurrence on her destination world.

She noticed the word “destination” in her thoughts. Apparently, she had decided to go, and still she couldn’t answer the question: what if she couldn’t convince them?

Eventually, after many nights of tossing and turning and lying to her mind-bender, she decided as follows. The morality of one’s act isn’t predicated upon the outcome. At least not entirely. She’d been taught as a child that both the intent and the result figured into whether an act was moral. In her particular case, the intent was pure — to warn the Dwil exiles and provide them with the means of defense or escape. The outcome, even if bad, could not be as bad as leaving them to certain destruction. And the outcome was almost entirely out of her hands.

As for the ethics of using Sudek resources for the task, that was easier to justify. During her journey, any food she consumed was allotted to her anyway. Any data she copied and distributed would be only a copy. Whatever ship she used, she would return fully recharged. In other words, no actual resources would be used other than what she would use anyway.

Could she get a ship? If she could get a ship, could she operate one?

The hardest part, Pie decided, would be hiding her intentions until she was sure she could carry out her plan. She was already the public face of the now-defunct “save the exiles” campaign, so she must avoid overt acts like enrolling in flight school or wrapping up her personal affairs — anything that would raise red flags.

How to plan — and carry out the plan — without anyone seeing it?

She thought of it like a game of Abbuh, with its twelve-sided board and twenty-one pieces per player, each piece having different abilities. It was plenty difficult with only two players, as she’d learned from playing against Wam, but with a full board of twelve players and 252 pieces, under tournament rules, the strategies involved strained the toughest brains. The trick was to set up both offense and defense while appearing to make only random and amateurish moves so the opponents would never see their defeat in the works.

Fortunately, she had time.

* * *

From her first career as an engineer, Pie still had a copy of a historical treatise on ancient Sudekian technology. It included blueprints and diagrams, from which she chose a gravity manipulator as the thing that would help D.N.F. the most. That discovery meant she didn’t have to be noticed scouring Sudek’s files for current blueprints. Also, the Dwil exiles likely would have the best chance of reproducing the oldest, simplest technology. And, in case her data chips turned out to be useless on D.N.F., she would have to draw the blueprints. She began the work of memorizing every pixel.

She wrote private journal entries about giving up on D.N.F., moving naturally from doubt to despair and then finally to acceptance. This was in case any electronic snoopers got in there. It was difficult to keep two opposing ideas in her head at once, but she wanted her entries to seem genuine.

A century of working as a mind-bender made it easier to manipulate the right people.

She never again mentioned the exiles to friends. When her family brought it up — because they were still proud of her time in the Senate — she waved it off. “The Assembly was right”, she told them. “Sudek’s resources are for Sudek. The exiles are where they are for a reason. There’s nothing to be done.”

She developed relationships with people who worked in the insta-transport system, though she was careful to make the meetings seem accidental. She befriended one and fomented a quarrel involving the other. When the latter was demoted, the former took his place.

As years passed, Pie accepted lovers, then two spouses in succession. With each, she participated fully, and pretended devotion to normality. Each partner, seemingly coincidentally, was employed in or at least trained for specific fields.

Before Wam retired from teaching art, Pie enrolled in a drawing class.

At times, her apartment’s medical component reported to her doctor the newly unpredictable sleep patterns — the guilt of deceit and the mental strain of keeping wall between her outer and inner lives took its toll. Her doctor prescribed exactly what she needed: a peaceful sleep treatment. And later, a different one. Until she found the perfect concoction that would cause almost instant sleep.

She justified her manipulation of certain persons as temporary dishonesty rather than permanent harm.

It balances out if I can save an entire world.

* * *

Seventy years after her Senate speech, she realized she was ready; nothing remained to prepare if she still wanted to go through with it.

Recent drone reports numbered the Dwil exiles at more than six billion now. They had primitive computers and localized space flight. But reports on the Arggruntig indicated only a century remained before their next conquest. Would that be enough time to prepare the D.N.F. inhabitants? There was only one way to find out.

Finally free of her last spouse, and about time to switch careers again, she spent a full day in meditation.

And then she left.

She started with what looked like a shopping trip for art supplies — during which she actually did buy art supplies and put them in the pack she carried. Then she wandered close to the nearby insta-transport station and appeared to misread a sign and take a wrong turn. She ignored the sensation that she was being watched, chalking it up to paranoia.

Quickly, Pie entered a supervisor’s access code into the control panel of the blinker pod, then used a location code she’d carefully memorized. Steeling herself, she stepped out into what must be a hangar, a chamber larger than any she’d seen before. The ceiling was a containment field that supported dark water — the underside of an ocean, she knew.

A lone guard approached her, confusion clouding his face, but her medical device was ready. She sprayed him before he could ask her business. Pie watched in fascination and horror as his eyelids suddenly drooped and he fell slack to the floor. He’ll be fine! she told herself. It balances out!

She moved quickly past the peacefully sleeping body and scanned the arrangements of craft beyond. The long-unused massive starships were farthest away, under the center of the ceiling opening. She ignored those. She trotted past a row of tiny drones, recognizable for their lack of access hatches. Then she came to the single-person ships — built in multiple sizes to fit various species. “This one has to be for Dwil”, she said, and clambered inside.

Finally.

When she reached out to close the hatch, a shout arose. She looked back toward the insta-transport pod from which she’d come. Can they be alerted to me already? she wondered, surprised. Part of her had expected a clean getaway.

But there was Wam, at the pod.

“I knew it!” Wam shouted, pointing, as two guards rushed out of the pod behind her. “I knew you were planning something, Pie! I won’t let you hurt Sudek!”

Pie shook herself out of her shock and pulled the hatch closed.

By the time she activated the craft, the guards were pounding on the outer shell.

Warnings blinked and sounded from the ship as she disconnected it from Sudek’s grid and rose toward the dark waters above. The little she’d learned about flying from her most recent talkative spouse was barely enough. She nicked the edge of the opening while slipping through the containment field, then plunged into the darkness of the sea depths above. Slowly she rose through it, finally seeing the light of whatever sun Sudek orbited, and then up into the air.

Excitement surged through her, mixed with fear, and she shoved the controller. The small craft darted straight up. She imagined it left a streak of broken atmosphere behind it.

A screen showed two craft following her. Already? Damn you, Wam! Pie had never expected her closest friend to be an obstacle. Then it came back to her: Wam usually won their Abbuh games. Every day I plotted, Wam counterplotted, Pie mused.

Pie looked at the gauge screen, which showed distances and strengths of nearby gravity wells — mostly the nearby star — which would affect her Jump. When the slowly moving blue dot — her craft — passed the blue curve, she would initiate the star drive.

She had only read about unspace; soon she would experience it.

Her craft rattled and the computer informed her she’d been fired upon.

“It’s our shared resource!” she screamed, more aghast at the attempt to damage Sudek property than at the danger to her life.

Voices blurted from speakers, pleading, demanding that she decelerate and return. She told the computer to shut off the communicator.

Another rattle. Really more of a jerk this time. The ship complained that some components were damaged. All she cared about just then were life support and the star drive.

The blue dot crossed the blue curve on the Jump screen, and she Jumped.

* * *

Space disappeared, not only from the portals but from all sensors. No gravity wells, no starlight, no pursuers.

Unspace enveloped the small craft. The viewscreen made it look like the inside of a milkshake, but Pie knew it was an illusion caused by the electromagnetic bubble around her ship, the thing that held all the atoms together. Just outside that bubble, beyond the folded fabric of spacetime, atoms were absurd — as was any matter, energy, distance, or time.

The computer began counting down to her exit from unspace. Days to go.

With a gasped sigh of relief, Pie turned from the controls and inspected the rest of the craft. A small bunk/couch, cramped compact lavatory, tiny foodstuffs cabinet, and basic entertainment portal. But in the cabinet she found only two old tubes of foodpaste. The entertainment portal seemed glitchy, so she turned it off.

Opening her pack, which also contained spare clothes and data chips, she extracted the art supplies and began to draw.

* * *

When the craft popped back into space, Pie was gaunt. She hadn’t slept well on the slab of a bunk that had no grav cushioning and the foodpaste tasted like metal. She was tired of having only herself for company.

She demanded instant responses from the computer, which seemed sluggish in her impatience. Eventually it confirmed they were entering the correct star system. The ship worked to course-correct while scanning for unmapped objects — loose rocks and dust, ice fragments, and a few distant comets.

It would take several hours to arrive at the D.N.F. planet, Pie thought. She wished she’d slept. Or could sleep.

Then the computer locked up completely. The sluggishness hadn’t been her imagination.

On one hand, a person who’s lived three hundred years doesn’t panic easily. On the other hand, living in a society as well organized as Sudek rarely gives a person experience with danger.

She performed a full restart, glad that the life support system was independent. The restart did the trick, or seemed to. But then: “Navigation scanners and gravity drive are offline”, the computer told her.

“But I’m heading in the right direction”, she muttered. Not an expert on spacecraft navigation, she at least knew that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. “Maybe they’ll see me? Reel me in?”

She thought of the backward state of technology on the planet she was approaching. It had improved in recent decades, but they still didn’t have a way to rescue her. It was likely they’d never even see the ship as she plummeted past their planet. Maybe they’d look up as she left a burning trail through the atmosphere.

Pie realized that the sentinels who’d fired at her before the Jump hadn’t been trying to hurt her. They’d been trying to disable her ship before she could Jump. And it looked like they’d succeeded except for the timing. It began to sink in that her trip was now a one-way journey.

Only the mission of mercy remained.

“Checking course with visual readings”, the computer told her. After a few seconds, it contradicted her earlier assumption that she was on a path to intersect D.N.F. The most likely outcome, it said, was that the little craft would soon be captured by the gravity well of the outermost gas giant, which star maps called “Eight”.

Now she’d never make it to D.N.F. at all. She would slowly expire, drinking recycled water and breathing recycled air and trying to eat the seat cushions until she starved to death. Now she was panicking. “Maybe in a hundred years, they’ll send out a probe and find my corpse and these old data chips”, she muttered. “And it’ll be too late.”

“Use the escape pod”, the computer suggested helpfully. Pie blinked. She recalled seeing something about that in the diagram of the craft. There was a sliver of a pod just under the floor. Below Pie’s seat, a square illuminated. “Its navigation system is still intact”, the computer went on. “Its charge is enough to put you on the surface of your destination planet.”

Pie took a deep breath.

In her attempts to help the exiles, she’d exiled herself. She wouldn’t have a fancy craft to show off to the people on the surface. Just a burned out escape pod which would look like an odd metal box to the planet’s inhabitants. She’d have the clothes on her back and data chips in her pocket.

She didn’t even know their language. Languages, she corrected herself.

She bent to the illuminated square.

“It’s not even a moral question now, is it? Just a survival question.”

She hoped she could eat something she found on D.N.F., and that their diseases wouldn’t eat away at her. Then, horrified, she wondered whether she, Pie, was bringing some disease that the exile descendants weren’t ready for? She could kill them all just by landing and breathing their air.

“Waste!” she exclaimed, the worst profanity she knew.

She punched the computer, which hurt her hand more than the computer, then utilized the lavatory one last time and took a sip of water. Gulping it hurt her throat. “Good luck out here”, she told the computer, sorry she’d struck it. “Thanks for your help.”

She slipped through the floor’s hatch into the escape pod, which was barely big enough to slide into. She reached back and pulled her pack in with her. There was just enough room for the bag to squeeze in beside her head.

She pressed the button marked “detach”, and the hatch slid closed.

In the pod, there was no screen, no control stick, and no facility for relieving herself. Just canned air and a gravity drive on battery power. A dim light panel above her head illuminated what little space that remained. She hoped the failing computer above had properly transferred across her destination coordinates. She’d have to trust it, because what else could she do?

There was a shudder and a click and then movement. The escape pod only had the gravity drive. There was no separate unit to control interior gravity.

After a few minutes, she decided the weak light panel was the only thing standing between her and an unbent mind. As it was, seven hours in the pod was excruciating. There was no room to bend or twist. She could feel muscles cramping, and there were itchy spots she couldn’t scratch.

About the time she decided the pod had missed the planet, there was a lurch and she cracked her head on the inside wall and lost consciousness. When she awoke, something was screaming, and after some time she realized it was atmosphere burning the outer shell of the pod. She’d made it! Well, maybe. Not yet.

The grav drive alternated between slowing the pod and protecting it from atmosphere outside. She was sweating. It was hotter than a sauna now. And the buffeting threatened to snap her into pieces. The small pack she’d brought saved her head from several bangs on one side.

She went through several mental phases, at each of which she guessed: This is finally insanity, until the next, even less reasonable state came upon her. Then the noise subsided and a thud rattled her insides. She vomited, which made her glad for the lack of food.

In its last act of operational life, the pod hissed and unlocked the hatch.

Many durn passed before Pie willed herself to open her eyes. It was dark; the small light no longer functioned. Then she pushed open the hatch and began wriggling out.

It was cold, colder than she’d ever known. Now those extra clothes made sense. Before she thought to look around, Pie dumped her bag and began stuffing herself into extra layers, wincing at too many sore muscles and aching joints.

When she did look around, there was no warning as nausea and dizziness overtook her. She fainted. She’d never been on the outside of anything. All her life, her world had surrounded her, enfolded her; this world stretched away.

Weakly, she came to again, and observed. It was daytime, almost too bright to see. And those were... mountains, she remembered from early childhood lessons. Those tall, leafy plants, she had seen before, in the wilderness chambers of Sudek.

She’d landed partway up a mountain. She could see incredible distances in every direction, but saw no signs of civilization. Maybe it was the wrong planet after all. Even if it was the D.N.F. planet, how would she know which way to go? She might walk a hundred miles in the wrong direction and starve or freeze to death before finding someone, anyone with whom she could share her memorized knowledge of a gravity manipulator.

As she carefully gathered up the data chips and drawings that had fallen when she dumped her clothes, she saw a tiny creature, smaller than her smallest fingernail, walking past on the ground. Pie wondered if she could eat it or if it would kill her. Hungrier than she had ever been, she was about to decide to eat it.

Then she heard a voice. Two voices, in the distance. Too far to make out words, not that she would recognize any words on this planet. But they sounded like Dwil voices. Certainly they were not gruff and grunty like the Naraq, or fluid and clicky like the Flo. She began to cry, half from relief and half from frustration.

As the voices grew closer, she called out.

“Please help me.” It was weak. “I can save you all”, she whispered. “I can save you all if you help me.”