Ellimist Chronicles Read online

  For Michael and Jake

  And for Kelsey Harper

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  FIRST LIFE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  SECOND LIFE

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  THIRD LIFE

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  END GAME

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  EPILOGUE

  SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  The human child called to me. The human child was dying, and nothing I could do within the rules of the game would change that fact.

  The human child, one of those who called themselves Animorphs, asked me to explain. In that final moment, the human wanted to know: Was it all worth it? The pain, the despair, the fear. The horror of violence suffered, and the corrupting horror of violence inflicted, was it all worth it?

  I said I could not answer that. I said that the battle was not yet done.

  “Who are you?!” the child raged. “Who are you to play games with us? You appear, you disappear, you play with us, you use us, who are you, what are you? I deserve an answer.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You do. To this question I will give all the answer I know. And when you know me, you will ask another question. And I will answer that question, too. And then …”

  My full name is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger, Forty-one. My chosen name is Toomin. I like the sound of the word, which is all the reason you need for a chosen name.

  My “game” name is Ellimist. Like Toomin, it doesn’t mean anything in particular. I just thought it sounded breezy. Never occurred to me when I chose the name that it would follow me for so long, and so far.

  The Pangabans were an interesting race well adapted to their unusual world. They lived beneath an eternally gray, clouded sky. They had never seen their own sun clearly, had no notion of stars or other planets. This was particularly ironic because their own planet was in fact a moon that orbited a much larger planet well suited to life.

  Had they been blessed with an occasional break in the clouds they might have become a very different race. It is hard to imagine that any species could have lived beneath the sky-filling arc of the main planet, with all its obvious lushness, and not become obsessed with a desire to learn space travel.

  But the Pangabans knew nothing of this, nothing at all of anything beyond their own damp and gloomy world.

  The Pangabans were six-legged, which is a common enough configuration. They carried their heads high above the slender, muscular body that was little more than a junction of the six long legs.

  They were skimmers. Their feet were large, webbed, and concave, which allowed them to walk on the water that covered most of the planet aside from a few soggy islands. They fed by lowering a sort of net from their body down into the water and trolling for microscopic plants and animals of which there was an abundance.

  They were intelligent. Not Ketran intelligent, perhaps, but self-aware. They knew who they were. Knew that they existed. Had a language. A culture, mostly involving amazing water dances, feeding rituals, and a religion that centered on belief in underwater spirits that either gave them food or witheld food.

  DNA analysis indicated a potential for development. The Pangaban world received a decent dose of radiation, nothing deadly, just enough to cause a respectable rate of mutation. And despite their awkward physiques and the limitations of their planet’s natural resources, I believed they could be brought to a level of technology equal to, say, the Illaman Confederation.

  There was one possible problem: The main planet around which the Pangabans revolved was populated by an aggressive species of four-legged, two-handed rodents called the Gunja Wave. The Gunja Wave were primitive creatures, only dimly self-aware. But their DNA held promise, too. And their aggressiveness might give them an edge if the two races ever collided.

  Still, I had an instinct. I memmed my friend Azure Level, Nine Spar, Mast Three, Right-Messenger Twelve. His chosen name is Redfar. His “game” name is Inidar.

  “I’ll take the Pangabans, if you choose to accept.”

  “Gladly,” he memmed back. “You underestimate the value of sheer aggression. You’re an idealist, Ellimist.”

  “Oh? Well, step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.”

  Inidar laughed. The laugh worried me a bit. He seemed very confident. But I wasn’t going to show him my own doubts. “Shall we immerse?” It was the ritual challenge of the game.

  “On the other side,” Inidar agreed, accepting the challenge.

  I checked my real world position, checked to see whether there were any pending memms for me to deal with. I didn’t want to be interrupted. Then I opened the shunt and was all at once inside the game.

  I floated bodiless above the Pangaban world. Drifted above an endless gray-green soup choked with seaweeds and algae and gliding eels that could reach lengths of three miles. I skimmed above one of the mossy islands, brushed one of the squat, stunted, unlovely trees, and found a colony of Pangabans.

  The Pangabans were trolling as always, but also playing at something. A game that involved moving in slow, ever tighter circles around one central individual. Not a complex game, certainly not in comparison with the game I played.

  Still, I was heartened. Surely an ability to conceive and execute a game was a good sign in any species. It was a gentle, slow, and nearly pointless game, but one that could evolve. Games had evolved on other planets, among other peoples, my own people, the Ketrans, being perhaps the preeminent example.

  I wondered what Inidar would do with the Gunja Wave. The essence of the game was minimalism: Do the least thing needed to accomplish a goal.

  I knew the least thing. I knew what I would do. A single, simple movement: I would part the clouds and cause the skies to become ten percent clear on any given day. If I had understood fully, if my instincts were correct, that single change in the parameters would launch a revolution among the Pangabans.

  I slowed, floated, righted, deployed my wings, and settled down to stand upon the water, invisible to the solemn, slow-moving Pangabans.

  I like to feel the texture of the game. I like to be inside it. Only there, only with the alien wind in your wings and the ground beneath your pods (or water, in this case), can you fully know the place. And the place is integral to the species.

  I looked up at the unbroken blanket of gray clouds. I couldn’t let in too much light or the entire ecosystem would collapse. Just a glimpse.

  I felt a thrill of anticipation. The Pangabans were on the verge of an experience they could not even guess at. Their eyes would be opened for the first time. Their universe would expand by a factor of a billion percent.

  I smiled. And I memmed the game core: Part the clouds.

  And the clouds parted.

  It was night. The clouds tore apart, a slow, silent rip. And above the Pangabans the stars appeared. And into that swatch of speckled blackness rolled the planet, all green and blue and orange-scarred.

  Slowly, one by
one, fearful, the Pangabans did what none of their species had ever done before: They looked up.

  They looked up and moaned their gurgling cries.

  I heard Inidar’s memm in my mind. “Shall we accelerate?”

  “Fire it up,” I answered and memmed the game core.

  A hurricane! A hurricane of wind and water and earth and time itself. A swirling madness of change. This was the ultimate moment in the game. We had made our changes and now watched time reel forward.

  I broke out the displays: DNA mutation, climate changes, technology index, population. For the first two hundred thousand years there was very little change. Then I began to spot the DNA differences in sight and body shape. The Pangabans were selecting for longer range vision, for color vision, for neck length.

  And then, all at once, trouble. The algae count was dropping like a stone. It couldn’t be! Increased sunlight almost inevitably means an increase in flora. But it was true, the seas were dying.

  And then, as I stood untouched amidst the hurricane of change, the first of the carnivore eels emerged to attack the Pangabans. The Pangaban population was decimated in a flash of time.

  DNA evolution began to come to the rescue of the Pangabans. They selected for size, downtrending. The smaller were faster, able to evade the eels. Smaller and smaller till the once-towering Pangabans were scarcely larger than one of us Ketrans.

  The eel threat diminished. And now at last came the first fluctuation in the technology index. The Pangabans had learned to make a tool. A weapon, of course. A simple spear that could be used to turn the tables on the eels. In short order Pangabans were hunting and eating the eels. Primitive seine-fishers had become true predators.

  A million years passed and a very different species now crossed the planet’s seas armed with spears and bows. They formed hierarchies dominated by warriors. Their culture shifted ground, favoring a sky god who brought the gift of weapons.

  Yes, yes, it was working well enough. Another million years. Perhaps two, and they would learn to move beyond weapons, to …

  And then, in a flash so sudden it was barely a blip of time, every index went flat. The Pangabans had disappeared. Extinct.

  I cursed and heard Inidar’s memmed laughter.

  I reeled back and slowed the playback speed. There it was: The Gunja Wave, still rodentine, but now walking erect, arrived on the Pangaban world in astoundingly primitive spacecraft and promptly killed and ate the Pangabans. They hunted them to extinction and left the planet devoid of its only intelligent species.

  “Shall we call the game?” Inidar offered.

  I sighed. “What was your move?”

  “Oh, a very small one,” Inidar said. “I increased their rate of reproduction by a very small percentage. This heightened their natural aggression. And I guessed that your move would be to open the Pangaban skies. Population growth pressures, a limited food supply, and the ability to see the Pangaban surface very clearly … my Gunja Wave wanted to eat your species.”

  “Yes, and they did,” I said. “I call the game.”

  “You have to learn to avoid naïveté, Ellimist. It’s not the good and worthy who prosper. It’s just the motivated.”

  “Yes, and you can go surface,” I muttered. “See you at the perches for free flight?”

  “I’m there, Ellimist.”

  I shut down the game and opened my eyes to the real world around me.

  I am a Ketran. My planet is called Ket. I mention this fairly self-evident fact only because of the plans to open our uninet to visiting off-worlders. The time is coming when a uninet publication may be read by an Illaman or a Generational, not necessarily by Ketrans alone. I don’t want to seem chauvinistic.

  Off-worlders are usually astounded by the facts of life on my planet. It’s fascinating to speak with them because they can give you such a new perspective on what seems so normal to us. The earliest Generation 9561s who arrived to investigate Ket failed even to notice us at first. Oh, they noticed the crystals of course, they weren’t blind, but it never occurred to them to look for intelligent life anywhere other than on the planet surface.

  The surface of Ket is quite inhospitable to most life-forms, covered as it is by acid seas, lava flows, and strangle-vines. But Generation 9561 (actually they were Generation 9559, then) were gamely wandering around in environmental suits taking samples when one of their air-skimmers accidentally ran smack into a mast of the Great Southern Polar Crystal and a first contact was made that surprised everyone.

  Life? On a vast crystal floating three hundred miles above the planet surface? Impossible! But then we’d have thought the same if we’d been the first to arrive on their world and found them down amidst the trees and rivers and so on.

  The evolution of my people is obscure. (Interesting how it is often easy to understand the evolution of an entirely different species, and yet be confused by one’s own.) Our scientists are confident that at one time we did inhabit the surface of our world, or at least its less sulphurous seas, but at some point the symbiosis of Ketran and crystal was formed and we simply grew together.

  Now of course, and for at least the last two million years, we have maintained our symbiosis with the crystals. The age of my own home crystal — the Equatorial High Crystal — has been convincingly established as 1.4 million years. Of course that’s half the age of the Seed Crystal, making the EHC one of the newer fully formed crystals.

  The term symbiosis isn’t exactly accurate. We are living and the crystal is not, though it’s hard not to fall into a certain romanticism and imagine that it does have something very much like life. What is sure is that we cannot survive without the crystal, from which we derive our sustenance. And it is just as sure that though the crystals can grow without our help, they cannot survive intact long enough to become as vast as they are. The estimates are that a crystal above half a mile in average circumference will crash. The atmospheric pressures and internal buouyancies will lose the battle to gravity at that point. Certainly the seventy-nine-mile circumference of the Seed Crystal is a result of Ketran symbiosis. How would the great crystals continue to float if not for the lift supplied by hundreds of thousands of Ketran wings?

  There was all sorts of talk on the uninet about using artificial engines to supply the lift needed for our home. These engines would free us from much if not all dock time. Visionaries talk of how we could go from our current one-tenth free-flight time to as much as one-half free flight. In fact, we would no longer need to maintain stations and fly to provide lift at all. We would only need dockage to eat and rest, while the engines would supply all the necessary lift to keep the crystals afloat in the atmosphere.

  But I doubt such an idea will take hold. Deep in our memories we still carry the images, passed down through the millennia, of the terrible crash of the North Tropic Low Crystal. Three hundred thousand years are not enough to erase that memory!

  The mere thought made me nervous. I opened my eyes and turned to look downward. Yes, we still floated high above the Eenos lava swamp. No, the ground was no closer than it had been when I immersed in the game. My docking talons were still firmly attached to my niche and my wings still beat their steady rhythm.

  Azure Level enveloped me, the sharp, jagged structure of protrusions as familiar to me as the lines of my own hands. Through the smoothed and polished masts, spars, and yards I could see the distant frontier of opaque white spars — the new growth area. I was young, I might be chosen to move into the new growth once it had reached its expected violet hue. Then my name would change. That would be strange. And my ups and downs, my neighbors, would all change, too.

  I glanced at Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger Forty-two, my closest “up.” He was a taciturn person, always had been. I’d tried many times to engage him in the games, but he was a serious scientist, one of those visionaries I mentioned. I thought of him as “Old Forty-two,” though I doubt he was much older than me. His chosen name was Lackofa. He pronounced it �
�LACK-uv-uh.” I think it was supposed to be droll.

  “Hey, Lackofa,” I called up, using my spoken voice rather than a uninet memm.

  His head jerked, causing his rather long and artfully unkempt quills to quiver. He blinked unadorned eyes. He peered around at the sky, as though unsure where the sound could have come from. Finally, slowly, reluctantly, he lowered his magenta gaze to me. “Toomin. What is it?”

  “I lost another game.”

  “Ah. Well, I can certainly understand why you would feel the need to inform me personally of a fact that, were I remotely interested, I could learn from the net.”

  I wasn’t put off by his attitude. Neither of us had ever requested reassignment; that was proof of the fact that we got on well enough as neighbors.

  I waited, knowing his curiosity would get the better of him. “All right, why did you lose?”

  “Redfar tells me I’m too much of an idealist.”

  “Mmm. I don’t share the fascination with games,” Lackofa said. “Any game that can be played can be deconstructed. You can always deduce the laws — assuming you pay attention. And once you know the rules that ensure victory, what’s the interest? It’s all software. Software is software is software. Boring.”

  I was peeved at this. It seemed to imply that I wasn’t quite bright enough to understand the game. “Alien Civilizations isn’t just ‘software.’ It’s the most sophisticated game ever released. It has more than a million scenarios.”

  “All of which reflect the thought patterns of the game’s creators. The scenarios are necessarily limited because the underlying assumptions are limited.”

  He was right, of course, but I wasn’t in the mood to accept his smug judgment. I was in the mood to change the subject. “Are you coming to the announcement?”

  “What announcement?”

  “What announcement? What do you mean, ‘What announcement?’ The announcement. Even you know what announcement. They’re announcing the nonessential crew for Mapping Crystal Quadrant Three. The EmCee.”

  “Oh, that. Well, first, I can’t imagine why you would feel the need to fly all the way up to the perch when you can know the results almost as quickly on the net. And anyway, I know I’m going.”