Nightmare journey

more discounted until at last Lady Nature and the Ruiner engaged in direct, mortal combat, battling back and forth across the face of the Earth, warring for the possession of human souls.
    Tedesco laughed. Or perhaps he coughed. Jask could not be sure, for the bruin's face was blank when he looked up.
    “Go on,” Tedesco said.
    “At last,” Jask said, “the world was little more than ruin, with most of mankind destroyed or tainted. Lady Nature, disappointed in us, left behind only a residual piece of Her power to watch over us as. She fled to another part of the universe to begin new work. The Ruiner, having stalemated Her, pleased with that and eager to locate Her and do damage to Her new work, also left behind a fragment of himself in order to maintain the balance of power established here between him and Lady Nature. We've been struggling, in the thousands of years since, to maintain Lady Nature's original creations and to enlarge our enclave populations so that, in time, She may find us worthy, once more, of Her close attention.”
    Tedesco stared at a scintillating splotch of chartreuse that vaguely resembled a dragon's head and played in the wall behind Jask. He said, “But your enclave populations are declining.”
    “Only temporarily.”
    “Constantly,” he disagreed.
    Jask was plainly dejected, his head held low between his frail shoulders, his body a mass of sharp angles as his bones pressed against his thin padding of flesh like struts against a tent skin. He said, “Perhaps we simply aren't worthy of Her renewed interest.”
    “And perhaps she doesn't even care,” Tedesco said.
    “She must care!” Jask snapped. But his emotional response was only momentary; he subsided into apathy again, staring at his knees. “It isn't for Her to care-not until we've erased our past sins and have proven that we are proper receptacles for Her grace.”
    Tedesco considered all of this for a moment, looked away from the green walls and studied the diminutive Pure. “I don't believe in any god or goddess,'' he said, his voice low and gruff. “But if I did, I don't suppose I could fancy one that was as fickle as yours.”
    Jask said, “I didn't expect you to believe it.”
    “Why? Because I'm-tainted?”
    “Yes.”
    “So are you.”
    “But I wasn't always this way.”
    “That hardly matters,” Tedesco said. He smiled slightly and added, “So far as I can see, Lady Nature is an unforgiving bitch goddess. You'll be on the outs with that one until the last day of your life-and perhaps even after that.”
    Jask said nothing.
    “Will you listen to my story now? It's much easier to swallow than yours, much more detailed than yours without all these vaguely defined gods and their cosmic brawls.”
    Defensively Jask said, “No one can understand Lady Nature or the Ruiner well enough to define them crisply. Could a nonsentient forest animal define you or me? Surely you can understand that the higher life form of Lady Nature and the Ruiner is all but incomprehensible to us lesser creatures.”
    Tedesco sighed and said, “Will you listen? And will you think about what I tell you?”
    “It will all be lies,” Jask said.
    “Do you honestly think I would deceive you?”
    “Not purposefully.”
    Tedesco grinned. “Ah, then you believe me deceived myself, or even mad.”
    “Or both,” Jask said ruefully. “But I'll listen.”
    Tedesco sat straight up, leaning away from his rucksack. “First of all, there is no Lady Nature or Ruiner. Never was. Never will be.”
    Jask said nothing, but he was clearly disbelieving.
    Tedesco said, “Approximately a hundred thousand years ago, men first learned how to build machines that would fly. They had accomplished much before this time, though the deeds of those eras are utterly lost to us now. The cataclysms in between have erased so much of the old records. Actually preflight eras don't interest us much, for it was with the development of the flying machines that mankind bloomed like a flower. In less than a century they had graduated from flights within their own atmosphere to trips to the moon and the establishment of colonies on several other nearby worlds.”
    “Man has never left this world,” Jask said. “The stars are denied him, because he has never earned them.”
    “I'm not talking about the stars right now,” Tedesco said. “Just the planets, at first. I know that you don't understand me, but that is only because the knowledge of other worlds has long been forgotten. You see, besides the stars, there are nearer