The Devil Delivered and Other Tales by Steven Erikson

empty gaze on William. “Species die, William. And yes, our hand has been in it, as far back as you could think to go.”
    William nodded. “To the days when we all lived in Africa, black-skinned under our wiry hair. The upright primate’s God-given right. Maybe we came from Mars, fleeing the first world we fucked up. Maybe we didn’t. It doesn’t matter. What I want to know is, when did God finally recognize His own face in ours? Fifty million years ago? Five million years ago? A million? When did the light really dawn, Sitting Bull? Answer me that, please.”
    “Do you hold all life sacred, William?”
    “Hell no,” he answered. “HIV-37 sacred? The CFS nanoviral group? Pneumonic plague?” William studied the clouds overhead. “Life isn’t sacred. If it is, we’re all going to hell.”
    Sitting Bull smiled. “We already have, friend. Isn’t that your message?”
    “I have a message? Writing letters from the Hole doesn’t stake any claim to prophecy.”
    “Ahh, I see.” Sitting Bull was nodding. “You have doubts.”
    William pulled a crinkled layer of skin from his left hand and held it up to the sun’s broken light. “I’ve realized something.” He looked at the chief. “Culpability’s not something you grow out of, is it?”
    “Don’t speak to me of regrets, son.” Sitting Bull turned away, scanned the nearby ridge of hills. After a long moment he said, “Those thoughts can consume a soul, William. And in the end, what’s the point? You hold the weasel in your hands until its twisting and squirming is known to you absolutely. The time comes to let it go.”
    “I’m tired,” William said as he released the sheath of skin and watched it flutter away in the breeze. “Tired of seeking enlightenment. I no longer believe in that light turning on in your head. It’s a myth. There’s no discernible process, no sudden eureka. Such realizations are well after the fact, because when it happens, you’re too busy to notice.”
    “Busy?”
    William shrugged. “Preoccupied, then. Those brutal necessities of the flesh, the tortured schisms of the spirit. Busy. Busy screaming, busy bleeding, busy flailing at a host of memories and echoes and dead voices and faces that never were but come to you anyway and you can never, never peel them back.”
    Water dripped from Sitting Bull’s hollow eyes. He ran his weathered, blunt-fingered hand along the barrel of his rifle. “Swift flight, the rifle ball flies unseen, yet strikes at the heart of things all the same. I heard your words to Jack Tree. They broke him.”
    “I know.”
    “We would have slain all the bison. Pte Oyate, Buffalo Nation. In the manner that our ancestors slew all the Bison antiquus, the very first Tatanka. We would have continued to war on our neighbors, and those wars would have grown, and the blood of feuds would run like the river. We would have gutted the horse of our brother, rather than see it run beyond our grasp. But, William, that history would have been ours, and ours alone. You broke us too soon, left us unmindful of the consequences of our own actions, you left us believing the buffalo would once again cover the plains, and you left us with a belief in our hearts that our hands were clean. For this, William, I can never forgive you.”
    “So is Jenine MacAlister right, then? You’re all still children, after all, still unblooded in the ways of inevitability, tottering on the edge of extinction simply because you refuse to adapt, or you’re not able to adapt, because you need guidance in growing up. Am I supposed to believe all that bullshit?”
    Sitting Bull smiled. “Our ways are different, William. They are children, yes, but they are my children. Do you think my eternal guidance insufficient? Think on this, son. We spirits whisper lessons to our children; from all that we have seen and all that we were, we tell our children this one thing: There is no such thing as inevitability.”
    “What makes you so