The Ellimist Chronicles Read online

  But it was more than the loss of illusions that motivated me to play. It was that I had nothing else. Nothing but the game.

  The game and the tiny flicker of undying hope.

  What a sad, desperate illusion. How ludicrous to cling to the hope of escape. And escape to what? Where would I go? What would I be? I was part of Father. There was no Toomin, no Ellimist. There was only Father.

  And yet … I still lived. I still played the game and made my own gaming decisions.

  Father needed me, I had long since recognized that fact. He kept me alive to play. Because though I lost each game, I was his best opponent.

  “I want to play a game,” Father said. He had acquired a new face, his own face, or a facsimile, a sort of “game name.” He took Ketran form, an oldster, a Wise One. He flew to my dock, hovered, and repeated, “Shall we immerse?”

  “On the other side,” I said.

  Father played many games. Many games. I believe he had culled them from a thousand races, all over the galaxy. We had played games not much different than our own old Alien Civilizations. We had simple games of reflex. Killing games. Games of forethought involving the complex movement of pieces on a flat plane or within a cube or within n-dimensional space. Games that were games of games.

  It was all I had. I had begged Father to kill me, to end it. But of course he refused. I had tried deliberately losing, hoping to make the games boring to Father. But Father was patient: He could outwait me. For years, decades, it didn’t matter to him. And in the end I always came back to the game.

  You make what you can of the life you have, I suppose.

  The new game began.

  It was different. Father had acquired some new species.

  I was all at once in a close, dank, almost airless room. At least it seemed airless to me, a Ketran. Though in all fairness I now lived out my life smothered beneath miles of ocean and tethered to a tendril so I was hardly one to complain.

  Nevertheless, it seemed airless. Not a large room, perhaps a hundred feet square. There were creatures, odd, misshapen things that seemed to be an amalgamation of a dozen different races. Faces with two eyes front and a third eye facing back. Their hair was long, running all the way down their spiked backs to the floor. All different colors: green hair and red hair and yellow. Black faces and white and purple. Arms seemed to be almost optional; some had three, others as many as nine.

  They were definitely new. Like no race I’d ever seen before. Father had made a new acquisition.

  I knew instinctively that we were aboard a ship. But it moved. Not the smooth acceleration of a spacecraft. This ship moved up and down and sideways as if it were being buffeted by a storm, or even floating on a watery sea.

  The creatures sat at tables with their individualistic bodies splayed out comfortably. They were enjoying drinks. Perhaps mild intoxicants. And they were watching us.

  We, me and Father in the person of Menno, were performers at one end of the room on a raised platform. We each held a tool of some sort. A long thing, nearly my own body length, a sort of flattened, whimsically shaped board. And stretched along the board were seven taut strings. There was a mouthpiece as well that reached up to where I could, by bending my neck just a little, place it in my mouth.

  Menno grinned at me, a cocky challenge. He placed his mouth around the mouthpiece and blew while strumming his fingers across the strings.

  The result … it was … it was like nothing I’d heard in life or a dream.

  The sounds were not mere sounds. I don’t have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of me I’d long forgotten. The sounds made me think of Aguella. Of home. Of the stars and the sun and the clouds and of all the beauty, sadness, joy, and laughter I’d ever known.

  Menno/Father finished playing and the creatures in the audience emitted honking vocalizations that seemed especially harsh in contrast with the sounds of Menno’s instrument.

  “Your turn,” Menno said.

  I placed my lips as I’d seen him do, and my hands as he had done. And I made sounds. But not the sounds he had made. Mine were harsh and grating and contemptible in my own ears.

  And yet, I could hear, even there, even in my own incoherence, the seed of something. Something.

  The audience favored me with stony silence.

  “That’s game.” Menno laughed.

  “What is this game, Father?”

  “These creatures are called the Unemites. They are not space-faring. I happened to draw a Skrit Na freighter into my web — useless species, the Skrit Na — and aboard their ship they had a Unemite captive.”

  “The game, Father. What is it called?”

  “They call it music.”

  “I can never hope to win,” I said. “I beg you, Father: Release me. I don’t want to play it again.”

  He refused. Of course I knew he would. And I knew this about Father: His one weakness was his cruelty. I could use that. He would force me to play this game a thousand times.

  Step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.

  “Shall we immerse?”

  “On the other side,” I answered.

  The Unemites. The instruments. The hundredth game.

  I had waited. So hard to show just enough improvement to entice Father, to challenge him, without revealing all that I was learning. So hard to lay the foundation of this moment.

  The hundredth game. But the ten thousandth time I had played it in my mind, all alone. The instrument, the adge, as the Unemites called it, had scarcely been out of my thoughts.

  The adge had become a part of me. It was inside me, in my brain, and even if Father ended the game, he could never take the adge from me, never take music from me, never. I owned it. I had become it. And now, this game, the hundredth, I would show him.

  He was Menno, cocky, sure of victory, but wary enough that he had to try harder than he’d have liked to gain the approval of the audience.

  And yet, in a hundred games Father had not advanced. Not an original idea, not a new expression. Ironic at some level: Menno, the real Ketran Menno, had always been an advocate of taking the game to a new level, injecting a wild disregard for convention.

  I smiled to myself. Ah, Menno, you’d be proud of me.

  But it was Aguella who was in my thoughts as I raised the adge’s mouthpiece to my lips. It was Aguella who made the music possible for me, and the lack of an Aguella, or anything like her, that would doom poor Father. You needed love to win at the game of music.

  I played a riff. Menno gaped. The audience sat forward.

  That’s right, Father, I’ve rewritten the rules.

  I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal.

  My adge spoke of every terrible moment of my life. It spoke of the loss of my people. The loss of friends. Losses and losses.

  And yet, though I played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played?

  I could see it in the Unemite faces: They heard the loneliness and in that expression of loneliness found comfort for their own.

  Oh, yes, I had them. I owned them, the audience. I had them through and through and they would go with me wherever my adge led.

  And Father? Oh, it was sweet to see him. Sweet to watch his uneasiness turn to amazement turn to sullen anger.

  The music didn’t touch him. But he could see that I had won. I had won the game so resoundingly, so finally that he could never hope to compete with me again. Not at the game of music.

  “How?” he asked me finally.

  I played a phrase on my adge, and then I did what no Unemite had conceived of doing. I sang. I used my voice, my Ketran voice, to make the sounds that the adge could not.

  The Unemites went mad. The hooting was fra
ntic, manic, insane. Lovely.

  “How?!” Menno/Father demanded, barely concealing the rage.

  “I’m a loser,” I sang in answer. “They called me a brilliant loser, all winners, all winners but me: loser. But only a loser can sing the azures. Only a loser truly sees.”

  I thought that Father would kill me straightaway. But he didn’t.

  I thought he would never play the game of music again, but he tried. And this time he copied much of what I’d done. It didn’t matter. I had a new trick up my sleeve: improvisation.

  I had devised a tactic of improvising in duet. I would offer a musical phrase, play for a few moments, then invite him to pick up the thread and extrapolate.

  Father could not. And his efforts were pitiful.

  For a long time afterward, Father did not approach me. No games of any kind. Nothing but silence. I was left to float, left to gaze out across the grim sea of tethered, invaded bodies. Long-dead Aguella. My muse.

  But everything was changed now. I had music. And even without an adge I was so long-used to living inside my own mind that I could play and compose all the endless days and nights.

  At long last, after years perhaps, Father came to me. He had a new game, a new species. Not music, not anything like it. A simple game of placement and pieces.

  I lost the first four games. I won the fifth. The sixth. The next five games after that. Every game.

  Father raged and twisted the scenario into a nightmare vision. He stormed away and left me to float.

  And surely now he would kill me. He understood what had happened. I had won at music and that free-form, improvisational game had done things to my mind, changed me in ways even I could not understand. I saw in more dimensions. Intuition was close to me now, intimate to me. I trusted my own moves. And conversely, Father had been shaken.

  A year. A new game. A killing game this time. Weapons in a maze.

  I won the first game.

  I won every game.

  Silence from Father. Why did he not kill me?

  I reached out to him, wanted to know his mind. But he made no answer. He had gone far away, he had withdrawn. And yet, I lived.

  And then dreadful hope, that awful emotion that draws us to our doom, began to rise in me. I reached out, reached down my tether, through Father’s own neural net as if it was a biological uninet. I reached for Aguella.

  “Aguella. My love.”

  “Toomin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I alive?”

  “Do you think? Do you see? Do you sense?”

  “I …”

  I could see her dead body, see her through the sun-dappled water. See her through a passing cloud of neon-green fish.

  “My memories, all …” she said. “I feel you, Toomin. Only you. Alive, but … what is happening?”

  So many years, how could my heart still tear apart? How could the pain still be so fresh?

  “You live in my memory, Aguella. But now, here, in this place, you live only when Father touches your neurons, when he raises your memories.”

  “There is no Father, here,” she said.

  “I have made you live again, for this moment. The parts of you that I touch come alive again, Aguella. The memories, the notions, the ideas. But only for the moment.”

  “Then I am dead.”

  “Yes. You are gone, Aguella. This is only the shadow of you, the biological brain, neurons switched on, a biological computer, nothing more.”

  “Let me see. Once more, let me see what I am.”

  “No. No.”

  “Ah.”

  “Aguella. I …”

  Could I ask permission? Of a person dead for decades? It was a mockery. She would give the answer I sought. Her will was long gone, long since flown away.

  “I am making you a part of me, Aguella. Do you understand? I am downloading you, your thoughts, your knowledge. All that you were. Are.”

  “I was always a part of you, and you a part of me.”

  I lowered the barriers between us. Felt the flood of information come into me. Data, that’s all it was, the encoded data that, deciphered, was all that made her Ketran. Her fear, her desire, her love.

  It all became a part of me and even in that terrible moment, that hideous moment when I treated my one love like nothing more than a uninet file, I gloated and thought, Ah, Father, you were a fool to withdraw. Now I’ll come for you.

  I downloaded Jicklet. Lackofa. Menno. One by one I absorbed their minds.

  The other Ketrans, till all the last of the Ketrans were inside me.

  And then others. Alien minds. Alien thoughts. Alien sights. Faster! Generationals. Illamans. Capasins. Skrit Na. More! Faster!

  I was a uninet bug, eating data, spreading, consuming, absorbing. Still I was no more than one percent of Father, but already I was a hundred times myself.

  Daankins, 333’s, the Wurb, the Breets, the Multitude, the Chan Wath. Race after race. I emptied each dead mind into mine, each set of data, no time to look, to see, to open and enjoy, oh no, no time, the race was on, a race to consume, to download and absorb.

  How long till you see it, Father? How long till you spot this new game?

  On and on I roared. And still Father did not feel me, did not sense his growing peril. Why should he? Father had never known a true enemy. He had owned his entire world for his entire evolution. A single life-form that had invented every other that swam in his sea, simply to amuse himself.

  Then, at long last, I felt his unease. Felt his attention. He sent out impulses, racing through his vast network, felt here and there for the cause of the odd, disturbing sensation.

  I showed him nothing. I hid myself. He searched and found only emptiness. Emptiness where there had been captive minds. Where were the Capasins? Where were the Generationals? Where were the Graspers?

  Where were those Ketrans?

  And at long last, as his slow-growing dread emerged, as he began to feel a new emotion, he asked: Where is Ellimist?

  I was half of Father now. We were equal. I stopped my advance.

  “Shall we immerse, Father?” I said.

  “What game?” he demanded.

  “The game, Father. The last game.”

  The last mind I absorbed was Father himself. And when I took him, I took nothing.

  There was no Father. No mind at all. He was nothing but a sponge, in the end. A creature of the simplest biology, an accident of evolution: a predator sponge that linked with its prey. Father was nothing but his victims. And when I had absorbed and cut him off from all of his victims, Father was nothing more than so much seaweed.

  I was Father now. I contained within me all the knowledge of a hundred intelligent races. But I was still Toomin. The Ellimist. I was not content to live here, in this blue moon’s seas. I was born a creature of flight, of open skies.

  I opened my eyes and gazed out through the sea. Out over Father’s hideous crop of the dead.

  I released the tentacle that held me. It took a long time. Tendrils had penetrated me, entered my brain. There was pain, physical pain that I had not felt in decades. And when I was almost free I nearly drowned. The tentacle had supplied all my needs for food and air and had preserved me from aging. Now I strangled, my lungs seized, my stomach heaved. I moved muscles that had not moved in a lifetime.

  I kicked free of the tentacle, free! I opened my wings and flew slowly upward through the water, rose to the surface. Air!

  Free! My face out of the water, untethered, free!

  Could I fly? Could I possibly fly? How to get my wings above the surface? Impossible. Im —

  It came like a tidal wave. A roaring waterfall of sights, sounds, images, ideas, emotions. Overwhelming. I was swept away by it, a free flyer in a hurricane.

  All the minds I had downloaded into mine, they were all there, all crowded now into my own limited Ketran brain. I was a computer running a thousand sims at once. My own body seemed to exist in infinite variations. I had hands, feet, wings, tentacle
s, stingers, prods, claws, feelers; I had eyes of every kind, I could see light all across the spectrum, I could see X rays and cosmic rays and microwaves; I had ears to hear only the deepest bass notes, and ears to hear only the highest pitches, and ears to hear a fuzzball floating on a breeze at a thousand yard’s distance.

  And all of it, all those sense memories, all crammed into my own inadequate body and brain.

  I fought down the rush, the deluge. I surfaced again, me, Toomin, the gamer who called himself Ellimist. I was in control. No, not control. No. All I could do was suppress the waiting onslaught. I couldn’t use it. Couldn’t open the door to it and use it without being overwhelmed.

  I swam, scared now, staggered by what I had done, lost. I swam beneath the bright glowing disc of the planet above, beneath the white and brown moon, beneath the warmth of the distant sun.

  I swam for a long time, but I was not lost. We had often used this moon of Father’s as a game board, Father and I. I knew where each little island lay and in a few exhausting hours I lay prostrate on soggy soil.

  After a while I opened my wings to the breeze and let them dry. The riot in my head was still there, still clamoring. A mob held at bay by flimsy gates.

  When I was dry I took to the air. I flew for the first time in so long that I could not help but cry. I flew on the lift of my own wings, above the almost-endless sea, above the awful crop of the dead that still lay tethered to Father.

  They were deteriorating now, of course. Father no longer kept them safe from age and the rotting effects of the water. He no longer nourished them. They had reached their final deaths. The entire moon was a graveyard.

  I flew and searched. I had never seen the place I was looking for but I knew it existed. Father had let us play across the surface of his world, but there had been blank zones, areas that simply never appeared. What secrets were there in those concealed redoubts?

  I flew and caught a nice tail breeze. I was hungry. Amazing! I was tired. Wonderful! I was free.