The next few days passed in a blur of activity. Geh!aoa had felt numbed by the deaths of so many in Petra's base, but her spirit was stirred back to life by the intellectual challenge of learning to fly automata, and the moral challenge of finding as many survivors as possible, as quickly as possible.

There were thousands.

Geh!aoa broke down and clicked for a while in private when she realized that.

Many other groups were gone, starved out long before rescue could arrive. But here and there, military bases, farming communities, and the occasional learning-village still held out. When the sensors on the automata found a group alive underground, they first tried radio, and when that almost never worked, they started drawing attention by flying close by repeatedly just after sunset. Once they were noticed, they dropped an alien radio—one of the Goldaskian ones—with a note. Both Nik!eh and Doctor Vik!ah had advised her on how to write the instructions for using the radio.

A team of six fuak!a survivors aboard the Kalash-Quovo set up a compartment where they received call after call on the alien radios. Many of those calling refused to believe that the spaceship was real, but even most of those were at least willing to talk about holding out a few more dozens of days, and what their most dire needs were.

There were many challenges, and a few were disturbing problems.

The fuak!a they found were scattered across Ooafa, and spoke nearly as many languages as there were groups, it seemed. The golem did miraculous work organizing the information pouring in, including setting up chains of translators so that everyone could communicate, at least after a fashion. Fortunately, Kthufu was the third most commonly spoken language on Ooafa, and many groups that had managed to hold out had at least one person with some grasp of it. Petra also was working to learn all the languages, and started being able to help here and there after a while.

Some of the groups were on the verge of collapse. All of them (who believed help was possible) were clamoring for it immediately, and all of them felt that their need was the greatest and most urgent. It was heartbreaking to perform the triage. They were still in a race against time to get enough food produced to keep everyone alive.

Sickness was another problem. They could not afford to get everyone sick at once, so some groups had to be kept isolated. They simply didn't have enough medical resources suitable for fuak!a to help everyone, and a few groups were dying out as they waited for rescuers who were too busy saving others. More than one of the radio operators had to be replaced as the stress got to them.

Geh!aoa did not have that luxury; she was needed to keep things organized. She had tried giving some of the load to Petra, but one had to be very careful with the golem. She had many blind spots, and it was easy to do harm with clumsy instructions.

Another problem was much more insidious. The darkness inside every fuak!a tended to surface in times of need and crisis—not always, but far too often. Some of the people who survived so far, Geh!aoa strongly suspected, had killed a lot of other people in their shelters in order to hoard the food. She could see nothing but disaster if those people were allowed on board the Kalash-Quovo.

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Why must so many evil people be the ones to survive? Geh!aoa spoke with Geh!kin, Zaa!nu, Foh!una, and more—even Nik!eh and Sana Vik!ah—about the problem. At some times, she just needed to be held, and other times, she need to be listened to as she screamed and clicked and ranted.

Doctor Vik!ah had some alien insights into the matter, and asked a lot of strange questions about fuak!a psychology. Most of it transcended species, apparently, but there were a few oddities. Both Nik!eh and the doctor seemed to have a lot of understanding of souls. Even though Nik!eh insisted that he was a very poor person to ask, apparently his world had learned a great deal about the topic in recent years, some of it the hard way, through war and disasters.

Geh!aoa felt the most confident evaluating the people from the learning-village survival centers, so she focused on them first. After much discussion, the first group of a dozen survivors were picked up and brought aboard the Kalash-Quovo. The scholars were overwhelmed; some froze up, and others thrived. Geh!aoa got some much-needed support from people her own age. (It didn't hurt that she would not mind breeding with one or two of them as soon as things settled down a little.)

They kept an eye on the potential troublemakers on the ground, including the marooned Goldaskians. When the fuak!a and Nik!eh first took the ship, Geh!aoa had been in favor of killing them all. Now that she was going through this crucible of her soul, she realized just how important it was to her that they had been merciful, even with the danger it had posed.

The soul of my people needs to be about more than just surviving. We need to be people who deserve to survive...or only the worst of us will make it, and the universe might be better off without us if that were so. Nik!eh killed those he had to...but he spared all that he could, even when he infuriated us by doing so. He spared us the stain on our collective soul.

I think I'll always be grateful to him for that.

* *

It wasn't all grim and sad. Some people had managed to save their children. Others had pets, and they must truly love those animals to share food with them while the world was slowly ending and starvation approached. There might actually be enough angeh left alive to breed and save the species. Geh!aoa was glad; a world without angeh would be a grayer and sadder place. Someday, she dared to hope, they would find a new home, where angeh could romp and play under a sun that did not burn.

There were tales of heroism, too. People had banded together in some places, and Geh!aoa's group was not the only one conducting rescue operations. A few large but empty refuges were nearly self-supporting, after sickness had wiped out a lot of the population. There were tiny crops of ohzo, afa!o, and even some vi'vi plants. That last surprised her but it shouldn't have; some people would do anything to protect their vices.

Then Geh!kin made a discovery that could change everything.

One of the first things they had asked Petra was whether their sun could be healed, restored or stabilized. Petra had responded that she simply did not know how to do it, and had no relevant designs. But Geh!kin had asked the question a different way: whether it was possible to protect Ooafa from the harmful rays of the sun.

The answer was yes.

It would not be easy, and it would not be quick, but apparently, a shield could—in theory—be constructed in space to partially shade their world. It was also not a guarantee; if the sun changed or destabilized further, nothing would be able to save Ooafa. But even the slimmest chance of saving the world had to be seized. Geh!kin was trying to work out how to get started on a project that would be decades in the making, if not centuries.

The arguments over what to create first with Petra's makers was never-ending. They needed everything, and it seemed they needed everything now. They had to choose. The more people they vetted and brought up to the ship, the more opinions clashed.

But they were all united in the goal of saving as many people as possible. Anyone who felt otherwise was left on the ground, and not given priority in the rescue efforts. Perhaps that would help offset some of the darkness in how people had chosen to survive.

The gods knew, they needed all the help they could get.

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