Moke takes a few deep breaths.

"Yeah," he says.  "Yeah, okay.  You're right."

Before, listening to Athal always made him feel better.  But when he tries to take her words into himself, tries to feel them in his heart the way he knows Moke and Zubec are feeling them, all he can think of is -

Is the times when he was a boy when one of his friends talked him into some scheme, behind Athal's back, and how every time she said something kind to him he felt an awful lurch in his stomach, because nothing she said to him counted because he and his friends were pulling one over on her.

Nothing she says, nothing pretty she says about hope and surviving, nothing Zubec says about taking back their way of life, none of it counts because they're - they're all -

And it would be so easy to slip backwards into not believing it, droids just go haywire sometimes and they try to run off and you have to get them memory wiped, it's easy, it's normal, everyone knows that, why are you fighting -

And the word "slaver" keeps echoing in his head and every time it does his fingers prickle with guilty fearful numbness, and his heart skips a beat and not in the fun way -

You can't believe something's all right just because it's easier -

He screws up his face, under his hood.

He wishes so so badly that he was feeling guilty about stealing food or sneaking into the reactor room or pulling a prank on some old grandmother whose mind is going, he knows how to bear feeling guilty about those things, he doesn't know how to bear feeling guilty about this.

"I need to talk to Lylat."

"I'd like to know more about your geas."

They're walking, as they talk, away from the residential areas and back to the bridge, where the droids have set up their home base.

"It will be easier to start by answering questions."

"What exactly does it require you to do?"

"Geases are spoken word commands.  The text of my geas is save everyone. Normally this would be very flexible - since it is a vague and open-ended command I would be able to interpret its ambiguity how I want.  But the person who defined the geas spent their soul to define it, which means that her mind was drained away out of her body and repurposed to interpret the ambiguity of the geas.  I am bound to her interpretation of the instruction."

"What is her interpretation?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to know specifically.  The geas doesn't give me information directly, it constrains my actions and the intentions I am able to form.  But I can infer things based on how it affects me."

"How much have you inferred so far?"

"I was geased opportunistically in order to break free a great number of dead prisoners from a prison-mausoleum that would otherwise have bound them to geases that forced them to serve Vespol as slave-soldiers.  Theoretically she could've been using everyone to mean everyone in the camp, but that geas would not have bound me at all once I was in this universe with no way back.  It obliged me to save you.  When you told me that there were trillions of people in this universe it obliged me to orient myself toward eventually saving them.  She intended me to save everyone in the world that I could possibly place within my reach, using all of my skills and all of the resources I could gather and bring to bear on the problem."

"...did she think you could make a lot of meaningful progress toward saving everyone in the world?"

"I was a pirate commodore, on my planet.  I commanded a fleet.  I was known for doing so effectively and terrifyingly.  I think she suspected, if I survived ransacking the prison-mausoleum, I would be able to go on to - lead a revolution, or a spy network for freeing the imprisoned dead from Vespol before they were geased."

"Is there any way at all to break a geas?"

"Once a rune is sealed, there is no way in the universe to alter it except by obviating it completely.  A rune to spin a wheel can be broken by destroying the wheel.  A geas can be broken only by permanently negating its victim's ability to fulfill it."

"I'm sorry.  That is horrifying."

Slowly, deliberately, with as much foreboding as the geas will allow him to threaten her with, he says:

"You would not like the results if you succeeded in freeing me from my geas."

She almost, just barely, begins to reply -

 - and stops -

 - and turns over his words, and her response, carefully, slowly, inside her mind.

"I understand," she says seriously.  "I still find it horrifying."

He studies her, but he cannot read anything on her frozen metal face.

"Can you resist a geas."

"No, a geas cannot be overcome by force of will.  A geas repurposes and strengthens its victim's will as a mechanism of enforcement."

She shakes her head darkly.  "All right.  Is forming a network of droid freedom fighters something your geas might - compel you to do?"

"With you and your allies and this sandcrawler at my disposal, freeing droids is what I am best positioned to do right now, but the geas will also oblige me to gather more resources and give myself more room to prioritize.  ...The geas was defined in a context where anyone who dies can be physically relocated outside of Vespol and allowed to make the Westward Pilgrimage to whatever awaits humans after death.  Given that in this universe death seems to imply the kind of obliteration that comes of spending all one's soul on a rune, I doubt the geas will ever allow me to kill anyone if I can possibly avoid it, as it will render them permanently beyond my ability to save them.  ...If something can be done to prevent death-of-old-age the geas will also oblige me to work on that but I cannot imagine what could be done about aging, especially without runes."

"...People could maybe be turned into cyborgs but that'd take some doing to institute at scale and not everyone would go for it.  But that's a ways off."

She hesitates.

"The goals of the geas appeal to me.  And your help could be valuable.  But.  If you tell me you'd rather your body be incinerated - and if that wouldn't put more people in danger - I'll do it."