Ellimist Chronicles Read online

  I spun, readied my defenses, still confident that nothing, no matter how unexpected, could really challenge me.

  But the ship that appeared suddenly in normal space was nothing I had ever seen. Nothing that any of my multitude had ever seen.

  This ship was not a ship: It was a planetoid, large enough to be a small moon. And yet it was Z-space capable. Incredible! Impossible! An illusion, it had to be.

  I swept the planetoid with my sensors and I could literally feel the entity’s acquiescence. It invited me to look. It did not care. It did not fear me.

  There were life-forms on the planetoid, perhaps twenty thousand, in a wide array of species, most naturally evolved, but some, I suspected, were experimental. Created.

  But there was only one life-form that truly concerned me: My sensors showed lines of power, raw, snapping power connecting this one creature to all the other life-forms.

  I had not felt fear in so long … I almost did not recognize the emotion. Fear. I feared nothing! I was the Ellimist. In a thousand years I had not encountered anything, anyone to challenge me.

  “The Ellimist,” the creature said with a laugh I heard deep in my mind. “I have seen your handiwork in many places through this galaxy. I am pleased to meet you at last. I’ve been looking for you.”

  I could not see him; he hid his face from me.

  “You know my name,” I said, trying to conceal any slight sign of fear or agitation.

  “Oh, but you’re famous in so many places. The Great Cosmic Do-gooder.”

  “You have the advantage of me,” I said. “I do not know you.”

  Then he showed himself to me. I saw with a shock that he was like me: As much machine as biological. But his biology was entirely different. He was evolved for the surface, or perhaps even for a subterranean life. No wings would ever lift those massive, muscled limbs. And no creature with that single, dominating red eye could ever navigate easily in three dimensions.

  “I am called Crayak. Of course, that’s just my game name.” He laughed a knowing laugh, a ridiculing, belittling sound.

  “You are a gamer?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “No longer,” I lied. “I no longer play a game. I do what I can to make this a better galaxy.”

  “Well, you’ve done a wonderful job of that here,” Crayak said. “I can see plainly what happened: Your clever debris barrier gave them the idea of using nuclear mines. One planet destroyed the other, and, lacking a foe, lacking a challenge, the destroyer itself fell into barbarism and decay. Yes, quite a nice job.”

  It was true. There was no doubting it. Part of me wondered how it was that Crayak could read the signs so well. But mostly a single phrase went round and round in my head: brilliant loser. I had lost. With all the best of intentions, I had annihilated one species and reduced another.

  I lost to Inidar, lost to Wormer, lost to Aguella. I had lost in a different way to Menno: By resisting his call for adaptation I had led the last of my people into Father’s snare. And I had lost to Father, in the end, by becoming Father myself. What was I, after all, with all Father’s victims contained within me? I was but a high-tech version of Father.

  And now I had fallen victim to arrogance. I’d begun to believe in my own moral superiority. My own invincibility.

  “You’ve been following me?” I asked Crayak.

  “Yes.” He waited. He knew what I wanted to ask, but he would make me ask it of him.

  “How many others … like this?”

  “Not many,” Crayak said. “No, often you’ve succeeded admirably. Your solution to the Mamathisk self-annihilation game was brilliant. Subtle. Effective. You redirected them to a life of productive peace. I had to go in and destroy them myself.”

  I had begun to revive a little as he described my success. Then, his last statement.

  “You did what?”

  “I reversed the effects of your meddling,” Crayak said. “The Mamathisk reverted to cannibalism when they experienced repeated crop failures. A plant parasite. Impossible for them to stop. But as you know, cannibalism is a losing adaptation. The Mamathisk are effectively extinct.”

  “Are you mad?!” I cried.

  “No, I don’t think so, Ellimist. I’m just a gamer. Like you. But with a perhaps different philosophy. I don’t play the game to save the species, but to annihilate it. I play the game of genocide. This galaxy has even more potential games within it than the galaxy I left behind. I will cleanse this galaxy of all life, too. Then, when no sentient thing is left alive, I will kill you, Ellimist. That’s my game. Shall we play?”

  How many years, how many decades had I played Father’s games? Losing every game. Until by sheer luck I found the game he could not win.

  I couldn’t afford to lose that way to Crayak. The game pieces had become real beings. We played for real lives. And I played the weaker side: I had to save; he had only to destroy.

  And yet, here is the shameful truth: I needed Crayak as Father had needed me.

  Crayak disappeared into Z-space and I followed him as well as anyone can follow another through that shifting nothingness. I found him waiting for me in a solar system with three inhabited planets. One of those worlds was the Capasin home world. I had avoided ever visiting the Capasin world. I didn’t want to be tempted by notions of revenge.

  Crayak had already been some days in the system. He had laid out his game pieces with terrifying ruthlessness.

  “Here is the game, Ellimist: Three worlds. Each inhabited by a sentient race: Laga, the Folk, and the Capasins. I believe you may know of the Capasins. There are three asteroids strategically placed. Three impacts within the next five minutes of time. Except that one of those asteroids has already been mined and will explode into harmless debris before it can hit — you have my word on that.”

  “The word of a mass murderer.”

  “Yes, but an honest murderer,” he said, and laughed at his own wit. “You have time to reach and destroy one asteroid. Not the other two. If you guess wrong and destroy the mined asteroid then two planets will die. If you guess right and detonate one of the unmined asteroids, only a single world will die.”

  I wanted to rage, to curse the foul beast. No time! No time to cry foul; he would only laugh. Five minutes. Less now.

  All data now! What did I know? The Capasin: civilized but extremely violent when they felt threatened — as they had upon receiving the earliest Ketran broadcasts. The Laga, subtechnological farmers. The Folk, not yet capable of spaceflight but technologically skilled and obsessed by a eugenic vision that motivated them to kill upwards of ninety percent of their own offspring for real or imaginary defects.

  Where was that mine? That was the issue, not which species deserved to survive. The question was, which had Crayak chosen to spare? Would he save the species closest to his own values, or would he spare the least threatening? Which served his needs best: Capasins or the Folk? Who would he keep alive? And what would he expect me to do?

  He would expect me to save the Laga. He would expect me to annihilate that asteroid and thus spare the peaceful farmers. And the Laga would be the species he hated most.

  But, expecting me to save the Laga he would know that I would guess his mind.

  What was the answer?

  Seconds ticking. Time passing. I had to choose or make no play at all. Three massive asteroids twirled through black space, falling toward three planets.

  I lit my engines, moved to position, and opened fire.

  The Capasin asteroid heated, cracked, split. I fired again and again, shattering the remaining large chunks.

  “Blow your mine!” I cried.

  “As I agreed,” Crayak said.

  A huge explosion blossomed, a red fireball against black space. The explosion consumed what was left of the Capasin asteroid.

  Wrong! I had guessed wrong!

  I powered, full speed, to intercept the Laga asteroid. Fast! Faster! Too far to fire with any effect, fire anyway! I aimed, fired, watc
hed my beams impact the distant asteroid. Too far away, and then the asteroid was within the shadow of the planet.

  There are no shock waves in space. I did not feel the impact. But I could see the green and blue planet of the Laga shudder. An amazing, awesome, terrible sight. The planet shuddered. Seemed almost to stop, unimaginable momentum checked. Slowly at first, then faster, a crack appeared, many cracks. The land was ripped apart. The seas drained into these craters, into these chasms. The white hot core of the Lagan world met oceans of cold water and exploded with breathtaking violence.

  The Lagan world blew apart in steam and fire and debris. Blew apart. A faint bluish haze of atmosphere clung to some of the larger chunks, then evaporated.

  Every living creature died.

  I had already turned away, already lit my engines, already calculated the utter impossibility, already knew my own impotence, raced for no reason, with no hope, raced and fired and missed, all the while knowing I did it for my own sanity and no other reason.

  The Folk died more slowly than the Lagans. The asteroid struck a glancing blow. It shocked the planet, ripped away a continent-sized chunk, and flew on past. The damaged planet wobbled wildly. Every structure on the planet was flattened, every seashore drowned, every lake spilled, millions died.

  And yet the Folk lived on.

  “Their orbit is badly destabilized,” Crayak observed. “You can see that they will slip slowly, then faster, wobbling, torn by shattering earthquakes, slide down and down the gravity well, atmosphere boiling away, suffocating, a few surviving in trapped pockets of air till of course they are roasted alive by their own sun.”

  “Some of them can still be saved!” I cried.

  “Yes. And you can stay here and save them, Ellimist. Or you can follow me to the next game. Save a few of these creatures, or perhaps save entire worlds. Your choice. It’s all a part of the game.”

  The next game.

  And the next.

  Game after game, if you could call these bloodbaths games. Each time I played catch-up, always the beast Crayak was there before me, always he controlled the playing field.

  His powers were greater than mine. He toyed with me. Mocked and ridiculed me. Worlds died and the galaxy grew emptier and years passed, centuries, millennia, and always I saved only a few, never all.

  I could never find the winning move. My concern for the innocent wouldn’t let me walk away. Or was it just my ego?

  There had to be another way. I had beaten Father after a long while. There had to be another way.

  How had I beaten Father? By possessing a talent he lacked. But music would not stop Crayak.

  At last I lit my engines in the wreckage of yet another planet and escaped into Zero-space with Crayak’s triumphant howls in my ears.

  No more. No more game. Not until I found a way.

  I flew for a long time, longer than I had ever stayed in Zero-space before. I emerged finally at a far edge of the galaxy, billions of light-years from the populated core of old systems and old planets.

  Out here the skies were darker. Out here even my sensors could not pick up radio or microwave emissions. There was silence out here. Was there even life?

  I surveyed planets and found life, often simple single-celled life, but here and there more advanced forms. On one world I discovered true sentience: a simple, primitive species barely at the dawn of civilization.

  I had been in space for millennia now. Thousands of years had passed since I had defeated Father. Thousands more years since I had last encountered another free, rational, equal being — aside from Crayak, and could he be called rational?

  I was lonely, desperately lonely.

  I no longer had a body in any true sense of the word. I was vastly more machine than creature. And now, in the depths of despair, with disillusion poisoning my mind, with a crushing sense of my own weakness, haunted by guilt, I craved the simplicity and comfort of companionship.

  I wanted a body. I wanted to go down to the planet below and fly or at least walk free.

  It was not difficult, not really. I dispatched one of my drones down to the surface to take a sample of DNA from the sentient creatures down there. With that DNA sample I easily grew a replica body.

  The harder question was how I might inhabit that form. There was no chance, no possibility of using the creature’s own biological brain to store all that I was. My own brain contained hundreds of times the data capacity of that simple organ.

  How to carry myself into the creature? I would have to edit my data. Reduce it down to what mattered most: the ideas, facts, images, memories that were most vital.

  It would mean that, for a while at least, there would be two of me. The complete unabridged Ellimist, and a sort of sketch of myself.

  I spent a year deciding what should and what should not be placed into the limited biological creature I’d cloned. It was a wonderful year. A year of learning. For what could be more deeply educational than poring over all you know and deciding what truly matters?

  In the end what I placed inside the creature was me. Toomin. The Ketran gamer.

  I kept the child me. Strange, but all these years later, all these battles later, it was Toomin I valued most.

  I brought Aguella’s memory: my one great love. And I carried Lackofa with me, too, for his skepticism, his integrity, and his sense of humor.

  And to my surprise I found I could not do without Menno. Rebellion, too, was something I needed.

  I took sketch memories, overviews without detail, intuitions. Strange, but I did not wish to edit out all the terrible things. I could not allow myself to remove the destruction of my home world, or the disaster of crashing the Explorer, or my long captivity under Father. I could not even bring myself to edit Crayak.

  But at last I was done. I poured this abbreviated version of myself into the brain of the clone and all at once I was alive in two places, in two forms simultaneously.

  I looked at myself as my new self looked at me. With eyes and ears and deep-probing sensors I observed the biological me: I was a strong beast standing firmly on four hooved legs. I had a slender upper body, not so much different from my own Ketran torso, but with only two arms and no wings at all.

  The four eyes were familiar but on this creature evolution had invented the wonderful device of movable stalks so that two of the eyes could be aimed in divergent directions.

  I had shaggy blue-and-tan fur and a tail weapon of limited utility. I ate by running, by crushing grasses within my hollow hooves and digesting bulk and nutrients. I had no mouth.

  At the same time I looked at the older, fuller me, the machine-spacecraft me, through two large eyes and two stalk eyes. I seemed vast and overwhelming and complex. I, the new, biological me, stood on an open platform, sheltered only by a force field that held space at bay. The old me was a machine, there was no denying that. I could still see a wizened, aged, desiccated Ketran enmeshed in the gears, so to speak, but the soaring crystal spars and titanium machines and composite engine housings and weapons systems extended now for a mile or more.

  It made me sad, somehow, to really see myself from the outside. In my mind’s eyes I was still a Ketran male. To any other eye I was a terrifying device of unrivaled power.

  The me that was the clone flew down to the planet.

  I landed in a wild, untamed wilderness of tall blue grass and fantastically colored trees. I sent my shuttle back into orbit and tried out my legs.

  Wonderful! With each step I tasted the earth. My nose filled with the scents of flowers, filled my brain. It had been so long since I had smelled anything. The body was supple, swift, strong. The tail could be used to stab at anything approaching me from behind.

  I was no fool; I knew this tail meant there were predators in this ecosystem, but I was not overly concerned. I carried a small beam weapon strapped around my waist and adapted for my physical hands.

  I walked through the forest, pushing and grunting my way through dense thickets, shouldering aside
clumps of grass that would suddenly adhere together and become a virtual wall.

  I had a goal. I had surveyed the planet and knew it well. I emerged from the forest into openness, a field where the grass had been hacked down to form a sort of rough lawn.

  Simple habitations had been created by scooping out shallow bowls in the ground and half-covering them with graceful thatched roofs.

  I stepped into the open. Three of my “fellow” blue-tan creatures were within a hundred yards. Their reaction to me was instantaneous. They charged me at top speed, surrounded me, and twisted around awkwardly to aim their pointed tail blades at me.

  Three stubby blades quivered nervously within a few feet of my vulnerable throat.

  Not quite the welcome I’d been hoping for.

  I held up my hands, palms out, to show that I carried no weapon and meant no harm. But of course this gesture was less meaningful when dealing with a species that carried its weapon in its tail.

  The three creatures flashed a series of complex hand signals at one another. If I’d had my full multitude with me I’d have been able to instantly decipher this gestural language. But I was a more limited me. I could guess but no more.

  I decided to try and copy some of the gestures. The creatures watched but were quickly frustrated. Evidently I was speaking gibberish.

  And now it was becoming more clear that the three were discussing whether or not to kill me outright as a dangerous stranger. Two of them were quite intent on this and made wild, angry gestures. They cavorted, rose on hind legs, and darted their hindquarters toward me, stabbing the air with their tail blades.

  The third, a smaller creature with restless stalk eyes and contrastingly calm main eyes, restrained them, but only with difficulty.

  I could sense quite clearly their emotional states. It wasn’t just the body language. They seemed capable of projecting a sort of basic emotional language by some means I could not discern.

  I said. I said it without thinking, automatically accessing my communications system — a system that was part of my other body, no part of this form.