Nilson slid down the granite slab, ice sputtering away from his boots. At the bottom, he came hard against a tree rooted in the crevice and huffed as it struck him. His hands, bleeding still from the glass, caught on the bark. Wind whistled in the emptiness under him. Below, the grinding churn of broken ice rolling over in the stream echoed up. He wiped frozen sweat from his eyes. The night was black. He could see nothing save in the brief glow of lightning spiking through the clouds above.

Inside the heavy parka, he sweated, and felt chills. Blood seeped from his fingers and froze on the inside of his remaining glove. He pushed his night goggles back into place on his nose. The boulders of the ravine sprang into a slight yellow-green focus. Panting, his breath white in the frigid air, he swung his legs over the lip of ancient stone. There was nothing below, fifteen feet of grooved rock and then boulders and stones wrapped in frost-rime at the edge of the stream.

Arms aching, extended, he dropped onto the stones. His right foot struck square on another sloping boulder, and he rolled down on it, and then, unable to stop, down onto lesser stones, with a crash, into the stream itself. Pitch-black water surged around him. He cried out at the talons of cold that slid into his foot and leg through rents in the padded trousers. His heart hammered, but still he crawled out, pulling his numb legs over stones, feeling the ridges of rock slash the pants to ribbons.
Under an overhang screened with thick brush, now leafless in deep winter, he crawled and curled up. His hands were numb, and his skin felt hot and flushed. He drew a tab out of his breast-pocket and popped it. Heat burned in his throat and on his lips. In the cold, it was a torture, like fire. The side of his mouth began to twitch uncontrollably. Soon the back of his neck and his upper arms were shivering.

But heat spilled out of his stomach and warmed his legs. His hands steadied and he pulled the thin silver sheet of a battle blanket out of the big pouch in the back of his parka. The knife grip, rubber, knurled, was tight in his hand as he sliced the material into long strips and wrapped it around his tattered climbing pants.

A subsonic buzz set his teeth on edge and he slid quickly to the back of the little cave. In his goggled sight, a black shape hissed across the narrow strip of sky that he could see. A muted red glow of the aft engines all that betrayed it.

Nilson had smelled the sharp tang of spilled nutrient fluid first, even as his thumb had turned the unlocking ring on the door to his rooms, and he had backed away. Unbidden tears had blinded him for a moment. The bags of groceries in his arms, he kept, and quickly walked out of the little garden courtyard. Even in the afternoon it was lightly dusted with snow, the limbs and boughs cold and white in the late winter. He paused at the edge of the tunnel into the parking garage and put the groceries down in the alcove where the residents stored mukluks and galoshes.

For a moment, he turned the slim black shape of the magnetic conversion unit over in his hands. He wondered if his purchase had drawn them to him, like Tarlen's flowers had destroyed Thule. He pushed it into the pocket of his long coat. The eyes of the clerk in the electronics shop had been heavy on him when he picked it up. Heart numb, thinking of the smashed incubators; the tiny bodies, once perfectly formed, littering the floor, he ran, crouched, along the long line of aircars to the recharging station at the end of the garage.

There, he opened the service panel with one of the tools from his belt-pouch and shorted the converter cables. The hairs along his arms rose up, even under the heavy coat, and he could feel his eyes dry. Covered by the sudden flood of electro-magnetic garbage, he sprinted back to the tunnel and reached the garden court. There he crouched again in the heavy ivy by the door to his rented rooms.

Quite still, he watched the door slide aside and two young men, also heavily dressed, run out and down to the tunnel ramp. Sweating, even in the cold morning air, Nilson slipped into the house, eyes averted from the short corridor that led to the nursery. A muted thumping sound caught his attention, and he leaned against the wall before turning into the corridor. In-between the thumps, the sound of splashing fluid came.
He stepped to the nursery door.

It was worse than last time, on Asura. The floor was littered with glass, spattered red, tiny bodies twisted and in little heaps. Pink liquid bubbled from a broken hose onto the floor. None of the incubators had been spared. Their glass and plexi covers were broken open, the heavy steel cased units tipped off of the heavy wood trestle-table onto the tiled floor. The words scrawled on the walls he had seen and heard before; those he ignored. The crushed remains of his babies, those he could not.
Nilson gathered them, all eight, six boys and two girls as he had been taught was best to raise. He straightened their little arms and legs, his hands trembling just a little, placing them on towels from the fresher closet and wrapping them up. His neck crawled. The hunters would be back soon. He had little time to flee, but long practice had made him swift.

The searching aircar had passed away above, and now he stepped gingerly from stone to stone, across the grumbling stream and scrambled up the sliding talus and gravel of the far slope. Sometime soon, the dim light of the primary star would begin to seep through the murk, then he could make better time. Now, he just had to keep moving. The hunters were well equipped; they had always been well equipped, better than he or the others.

Aircars would quarter the rough hills behind the city, teams of armed men would push through the thick stands of spine bush and ashfall. They had hunted for a long time, and practice had made them swift as well. They would spread their net wide to catch him. Nilson reached the top of the slope and jogged through a stand of quiet-pine, the long silver needles brushing against his short pale hair. His breath was ragged, and came in puffs, white against the darkness. His legs were lead.

Beyond the pines, the ground cut away in a swale and fell down in ripples to another stream valley. Nilson paused, hunched over, breathing hard in great gasps. The valley below, which he had tramped in summer and spring, was thickly wooded and cut across with stands of gorse and heavy brush. Included in the nature preserve that was centered on Mount Kiweu, it was thick with life. Within it, he would have cover from eyes in the sky, and probes that sought his heat and movement.

The ridge ran to his right, higher and rockier, studded with great granitic spires and reefs of dolomite. He turned and scrambled along the steep slope, scuttling from tree to tree through the mist. Rocks tumbled away under his left boot. It began to snow.

Near one of the looming pillars of etched stone, he felt the buzz again and leapt across a great fissure to land hard and roll down against the rocks. There was a cross current of heated air in the wind and he dropped into a second crevice, his parka catching on the ragged lip as he fell.

There was a pattering, like rain, on the stones above, and rock chips and dust spattered around him. The wind picked up and Nilson could hear, mixed in, the laboring of the aircar fans as it backed into the gusts, edging closer to the rocky slope.
His arms protested, aching with fatigue, but he tore the parka loose and stumbled, falling, down into the crevice. His boot caught, wedged in the bottom were it narrowed. Looking ahead, he could see snow blowing across the opening. A thumping sound came from above. He tugged at the boot, sweat streaming from under his goggles.

Once, when Nilson was young, he had crouched with his father in a sewer main, crying, while the earth shook and vibrated like a drum. The air was burning hot, and filled with smoke.

Distantly Nilson could hear screaming, long and constant, and the long acid hiss of weapons. Thule was dying around them. His father had stoked his hair, yellow-blonde then, gently and rocked back and forth. Nilson remembered his tears like rain.
Later, the hunters had found them, and they had been taken to a camp. By height, the boys were divided, and Nilson had been too little to stay with the other boys his age. Screaming in fear, they had packed him, and other little ones, into a combat car. It had been close, and filled with the sharp smell of metal, sweat and fear. The boys had clung together, crying. There was a school after, but Nilson remembered nothing, only the hand of his father, gentle, when he was afraid.

In the school, they never mentioned Thule, or their parents. The other boys seemed to forget the things that had gone before, losing themselves in a new language, new customs, new stories, even new games to play at recess. Nilson remembered, but he felt himself the only one. In time, the things his father had taught him grew dim and faded like a dream.

Nilson heaved up against his own weight, pinched down on his foot, bearing the boot tight between the stones. The aircar had backed off, he could barely feel the subsonic buzz of its engines against his teeth. His elbows tore and bled against the close rock on either side, but he wrenched free and squirmed forward out of the crack and onto a needle-strewn slope. He rolled down it, crashing through low bushes and then, with a heavy thud, against a tree. He lay, dizzy, sight clouded, for a moment but heaved up and turned left, doubling on his trail, and staggered through the woods. Blood seeped from his torn arms.
The aircar drifted overhead again, and Nilson threw himself to the ground, burrowing in the drifts of snow that lay against the pines. In the cold embrace of the drift, he felt suddenly warm, wrapped in friendly arms. Something crashed through the bracken nearby. His hand gripped the knife, quietly he reversed the blade and held it back against his arm.

His goggles were smeared with frost when he rose from the drift. The sound had not reoccurred. He limped forward, now traversing the slope upwards, striking again for the ridge top. The buzz was distant, but not gone. He fingered the absorptive cloth of the parka, praying that its qualities still held.

In early morning dimness, three sharp tones woke him. He rolled over in the narrow cot in the library. He made enough to rent only two rooms, and neither could he devote solely to himself. The apartment's kitchen now served as the nursery, the bedroom his library and workshop. Nilson shook his head, scrubbing his eyes. He was sleeping worse and worse of late.
He dressed; pale clothes, unremarkable, mirroring the tastes of thousands of other residents of the city. He ran a military issue comb, purchased cheaply, though his hair. He shaved.
The interfax news service nattered in the background while he checked the nursery. Eight incubators rested on a heavy table, filling half of the kitchen. A small generator hummed to itself under the table. Two tanks of recirculated nutrient fluid bubbled and hissed at the end of the room.

Nilson passed from one to another, from left to right, in perfect order as he had done every other morning for the past five months. He cleaned the smooth, machined, surfaces. He polished the fittings. He checked the hoses and the tubes, making sure that nothing leaked, nothing seeped. At each one he paused for a moment, his heart light, a smile creasing his old gray features.

In time, in only a few months, he would be a father. His heart sang when he looked at his babies floating in their warm cocoons. He would be able to raise them, teach them, love them with all his heart. The love his father had shown him, he would pay back a thousand times. His hand gently caressed the top of the incubator.

Again near the top of the ridge, again shuffling through deep snow pierced by long black limbs of buried trees, Nilson tried again to scramble over the rock that now barred him from the summit. His feet were numb, breath more ragged than before. He slumped against the rock face, arms and hands chill and hot in slow pulses. A cracking sound came from above and he froze, long trails of sweat sliding down into his eye. Someone moved on the rock above. He craned his neck back, holding his breath.

A hunter stood atop the boulder, his face masked in heavy weather gear; he too wore a thick parka, and long climbing pants. His right arm cradled the slim black metal shape of a rifle. His left, a sensor rig that now swept in lazy arcs from side to side. Nilson was quite still.

As the first morning trains hissed past on the rails above, Nilson had visited some small shops by the river. The promenade and Settlers Park were empty, only some dirty snow and empty benches to watch over them. The clerk in the druggist has barely been awake enough to process his request for sleeping pills. Lately, he had been having trouble finding sleep, and yielding it up when he had found it. The incubators required constant care and the worry weighed upon him. At another store, he had bought some cheap wax candles. Tomorrow he looked forward to, it was the Father's Day, April the 20th.

He would celebrate it alone, in the library, and light only a few candles. But his heart would remember, and he would take out bright, precious memories of his youth, to turn over and over in his mind. In these later years, with his youth long behind him, they grew brighter and more lovely, like well polished stones.
He had allowed himself some small hope with the Father's Day approaching. Soon he might meet someone that would understand the words committed to his heart, and perhaps he would pass them on, as they had been passed to him. Long ago, all written works had been destroyed, and nothing remained but that passed from hand to hand, spoken heart to heart.
In this way, he had first re-remembered Thule and the long hunt between the stars. An old man had found him, in the cafes and galleries of Isparta, in the university district, and wondered if he was an orphan. Nilson had answered yes, and they had talked a long time.

The old man had been away from Thule when the hunters had found it. Now he worked as a house painter; he called it a traditional occupation and would laugh. He reminded Nilson very much of his father. In the dim district cafes, and in the loft that Nilson shared with another student, the old man passed to him, again, the memories of Thule, the teachings of his father, the things that had been forgotten since he was taken away. Sometimes Nilson had wept, and the old man had sat silent until it passed.

At the old man's urging, Nilson had gone to a doctor and had his hair and eyes returned to their original color. Even such a small thing had made his heart blossom. He felt better, more directed. He had purpose, even a destiny.

The hunters had found the old man a year later, but Nilson was already gone. The interfax service reported that he had been robbed and his money taken. Nilson knew that a small flechette pistol had been placed against the back of his head, just under the ear and fired twice. It was their way.

The hunter turned away and there was the rustling of brush beyond the boulder. Nilson crouched down, his hands curling around a heavy stone. The hunter sidled out of the cove into the long sloping ravine that Nilson had toiled up. The long snout of the rifle swung from side to side. Nilson felt his hands grow hot and he lunged out, swinging the rock up, teeth clenched.
He made no sound and the hunter barely turned in time to catch the blur of the stone before it smashed, tinkling, through his goggles. A meaty crunching sound throbbed up Nilson's arm and he was crashing down onto the hunter. The hunter twisted as he fell and took the brunt of Nilson's charge upon his hip. They rolled down the slope in the snow. Spumes of white spurted up under them. Nilson smashed his left fist into the face of the hunter, feeling bones pop and splinter under his hand. His other swung the rock again and there was a long moment of rolling frenzy as Nilson smashed the rock again and again into the masked face.

At last, at the bottom of the ravine, they came to a halt, held up by a sloping roll of gravel and soil. Nilson crawled aside, his hands dripping with blood. Shuddering, he heaved, but nothing came. His fingers were sticky and he wiped them on his pants, unthinking. His heart was hot and he smiled as he turned back to the groaning body.

"This for my babies..." he whispered, low his throat, and he kept smashing with the heavy stone until the body made no sound at all.

The first memory Nilson held, was of his father, again, holding his hand while a long procession of people walked past, happy and smiling. Young girls paraded by, their fair hair bound up and laced with small white flowers. Nilson remembered that it had been a year-day party, like his own, though for the First Father. It was a happy memory. At night, the townspeople had filed into the forest, to a sunken bowl in a hidden valley. Great lights had arched above them, shining into the dark sky, making a great cathedral of light. Nilson had held his father's hand tight.

Great flags and banners surmounted the huge bowl, and thousands had gathered to celebrate the Day. The planetary Father had stood on a sloping white podium, surmounted with flowers. He had spoken a long time, and everyone had cheered until they were hoarse. Nilson became bored after a while and his father, in the end, carried him home, asleep, in his arms.
Later had he learned that the flowers in the girls hair, rare and precious, had led the hunters to Thule. Four thousand had been ordered by disparate means, but in the end they had all had to come from one place, on one old, almost forgotten planet. The hunters had not forgotten the flowers, though, and had watched there for a long time. Now they were rewarded for their patience and came at last in dark sleek ships to fill the skies of Thule with flame.

The rifle, smooth and dark, lay uneasy, with a greasy feeling in his hand as he trudged, weary, through the dark forest. The first faint palings of dawn were edging the tops of the tall pines. He came to another stream, this one mostly clear of ice, rushing swift with a throaty chuckle through the dark musty wood. He cast up and down the bank, looking for a place to cross.
A ripping sound, like a long cotton sheet tearing, erupted from the far bank and Nilson hurled himself into the water. Behind him, two small maples toppled slowly sideways, their rusted leaves shedding as they fell gracefully into the deep loam of the forest floor. Nilson was swept downstream, the rifle torn from his grasp by the buffeting rocks.

His head struck a rounded stone, pushing forth from a curving roil of water and he spun around in an eddy. Branches hanging low over the war tore at his face, pulling his goggles loose. His hands flailed at them and then caught, even as they passed by. He hung in the dark cold water for a moment.

Running feet paused by the bankside, above him. He clenched his teeth against their rattling. His arms burned. Another hunter, this one taller and wider, slid carefully down the bank. In one hand another of the short-barreled rifles tracked the far bank and the water. A darklight glittered in the other. The hunter waded out into the water, crouched low.

Nilson let go of the branch and felt his feet settle into the thick mud at the bottom of the eddy pool in which he stood. His right hand was shaking hard, but it could still grip the knife. The image of the incubators came across his sight, and he slid soundlessly down into the water. The rushing stream covered the slight rippling as he passed through the pool. The hunter continued to cast his darklight back and forth across the surface of the stream.

Nilson was only feet behind the hunter when his chrono went off with three sharp notes. The hunter spun in place, the narrow barrel of his rifle blurring red hot as thousands of fine steel rods hissed out of it at incredible speed. The knife slashed across the hunter's chest, tearing his parka, spilling a gear strap into the stream. The flechettes sliced Nilson in half and his last thought as his body tumbled into the dark water was of his father's hand, touching his hair.

An old woman, her back slightly bowed with age, her bound-back hair silver and fine, walked through the woods. The first sun had risen a little over the great plain stretching to the sea, and long slanting beams of dawnlight striking under the heavy clouds crossed her path, sparkling with dust. The wood was silent, filled with a deep smell of age and dampness. The needles in the pines above rustled. It was still quite cold. Her hands were gloved in dark leather, and shoved deep in the pockets of her dappled fur coat. She wore a Spaceforce major's insignia on her peaked cap, and a glint of silver at her right ear showed her to be enhanced.

She came down to the stream side with sure steps on the gravel and muddy slope. The last hunter was perched on a cast up log, his battle-mask hanging around his neck, his dark curled hair cropped short. As she came up to his side, he finished carving a deep notch in the wooden stock of his rifle. He stood up as she approached, his long aquiline face weary but elated.

"See, baba," he said, nudging the old man's body with the tow of his combat boot, "I got him. He was quick, but I got him. He got Gai'il, but I got him. See, baba?"

The old woman looked at the face of the young man, spattered with blood. His eyes were bright and his breath short. She swallowed, her throat suddenly constricted.

"Where do we go next, baba, who's next on the list? I heard that this one had friends on Isparta, are we going there?"

She held up a gloved hand, shaking her head.

"No, Da'vi, we are not going anywhere. This one, this old man, he is the last one. We're done, finished."

The words were harder to say than she had thought. She had dreamed of this for years, but now there was a hollowness she had not felt before. Her arms and legs seemed tired now, seeing the body in the stream, spilling blood slowly now into the current. She looked down and saw only an old man, maybe ten, fifteen, years younger than herself, dead. Just dead. She felt numb.

"Done! We're not done! Gai'il is still dead, baba. We're not done until I've paid them back for him." Da'vi was shouting; the old woman looked up. His face was flushed with anger.

"This isn't over, baba, he had friends, he had someone that sold him those incubators, he had people that he talked to! Gai'il is still dead, baba, they have to pay for him!"

The old woman stared at her grandson and her heart was empty.
"Da'vi, he is the last one. All of the others are dead, gone, for many years. His sons and daughters are dead. There are no memories of him, his fellows, anyone. All the books are gone, all the interfax entries, even the gravestones are gone. There is nothing. Nothing. Only the two of us are left, we are the last ones. No one remembers."

Da'vi's face flushed dark, and he loomed over her.

"I remember! Gai'il is still dead, my heart is still cut! All the others, mama, papa, they all have to be paid back! You're just old, you just want to forget and go on. Well, I won't forget, I won't ever forget! You made sure I would never forget!"

He stepped in close and his hate was like a fire, hot on her face. She backed off two steps, her hands once more in her coat pockets. Her face was stone, but tears trailed like silver from her eyes.

"You made us all watch the old movies, watch them put the people into the trucks, watch them herd the people into buildings. You made us watch them feed the furnaces. You made us watch when we were little! You, you, hit us if we cried, told us that we had to be strong enough. Well I am strong enough, strong enough to kill them all, every last one."

He turned back to the log, bending down to pick up the rifle and sling it over his shoulder.

"You're old," he said as he turned around, "you've forgotten."

The old woman was a stone, standing still in a deep forest. She remembered the hot wind rushing out of the dying cities of Thule, the deep breath filled with the roasting smell of flesh that filled her heart with joy. Her heart was pitch and ruin now.

"Da'vi," she said, as he reached the top of the bank, "I love you very much. I am very proud of you, and Gai'il and all our family. You have made us all very proud."

Da'vi stood for a moment at the top of the bank. She climbed up next to him. Her back of her hand brushed the side of his face, catching on tears.

"I love you," she said and placed a small black pistol against the side of his head, just behind the ear. Da'vi turned too late, and she shot him twice. He fell heavily to the sandy loam. She stared down at him, and now she wept openly.

After a long moment, the old woman took a thin metal vial from her inner coat pocket and sprayed the body from one end to the other with the aerosol. She turned away then, as it began to break down, and did the same to the old man in the stream. The rifles she slung over her own back and trudged back up the slope to the aircar.

It spun up out of the tall pines into clouds heavy with rain and snow, gusts of ice and hail spattering on the curving windows. The cockpit was close and warm, filled with the muted humming of machinery and the dull glow of night-displays. She throttled the fans to high lift and soared up through roiling dark cloud.

"A thousand years of hate is long enough, Da'vi," she whispered to herself and slid the control stick over in one deft motion. The aircar swung smoothly sideways through the murk and into the soaring granite spire of Kiweu peak, blossoming red and gold and yellow for a moment, lighting up the dim clouds. The debris fell, trailing fire and smoke, into the snows below.