When Nyubo awoke it was winter. A slate gray winter, more chill than cold, more frost than ice. The world was all slick and silver, diamond roses and platinum daisies.
He remembered. In the chill, dewy whistle of the waking morning, he remembered.
He was not on Earth anymore.
What was this planet, then? Nyubo had not been given a name and now there was no one around to tell him. There was no one around at all. He was alone. For as far as his eyes may see and his feet may travel, he was alone.
He was the first. The very first.
How terrible must he have been?
Nyubo was a killer, though he had never killed for fun or for sport. He had killed because killing was essential to the human experience. Some must kill so that others may appreciate. It was a valid part of the ecosystem of man.
Or so Nyubo had thought. But now he was here, on an unnamed planet. Banished.
They did not kill any more in the ecosystem of man. In the past, they had, Nyubo knew. They said they hadn't, but of course they had. To burn a book or erase a hard drive or white-line half the web was not to undo the past. Truth was truth. Man had always killed. Often for justice, occasionally for righteousness, mostly just for personal betterment. Man killed. And killed. And killed.
Nyubo could not discover why man had stopped killing, nor how man came to pretend he had never killed to begin with. Somewhere, sometime, man changed. And man does not change halfway.
What then to do with one such as Nyubo?
They tried holding Nyubo in cells, but still he found ways to kill. He was determined. Secretly, some admired his tenacity, even as they feared his every waking breath.
They tried restraining and isolating him, but then, should he die, could it be said that they had killed him? This was not tolerable.
The solution, it turned out, was almost perversely simple.
They sent him away.
Now Nyubo was alone on a winter's planet, a quiet land of gentle frost and little else.
He made a shelter, expanded it, fortified it. He sampled the cold, growing things and found what could be eaten and what could not.
He lived. And in between living, he prepared himself.
He made heavy clubs. He sharpened the edges of flat rocks and tied them to the ends of long sticks. He made traps. He discovered poisons.
He waited.
He was the first man on this new Purgatory, but he knew he would not be the last. Man had found a way to kill without killing. To be what they actually were and what they pretended to be, all at the same time.
Nyubo waited.
He did not have to wait long at all.
When the second man in Purgatory arrived, Nyubo was there to greet him.
"I took a woman against her will," said the man that night as they dined together. "I deserve this punishment and more."
Nyubo smiled, but said nothing.
"And you?" said the man. "What are you being punished for?"
Nyubo shook his head. "Me? I'm not being punished at all."
It took the man a moment, but he understood well enough. That night he slipped away. Nyubo gave him until morning, then gathered his tools and followed him into the cold, crystalline wilderness.
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