The Ellimist Chronicles Read online

  Alone.

  Ahead I saw the outlines of what I had expected to find. A hidden island. Larger than the rest and higher. It was dry compared to the other lands of this moon. It was thickly covered with vegetation, mostly green with some startling swatches of orange and red.

  Here and there, nestled between the trees, were spacecraft. Some had been there so long they were completely overgrown with vines and moss and trees. Some looked like they might have crashed just weeks or at most months before.

  They were huge, and they were small. Dangerous-looking and innocuous. Some bristled with weapons or were painted fantastically. Others were utilitarian boxes.

  All the ships of all the races that had been lured to Father over the millions of years he lay in wait. I had found Father’s trash dump.

  It took a while but I located the Explorer. And I found the Searcher. Searcher was a crumpled, twisted mess. I landed on an undamaged spar and stood there a while.

  The gravestone of my people. The last Ketran now stood vigil at the gravestone of his race.

  Explorer was in better condition. It lay upside down, which was an inconvenience in gravity, but the engines powered up, and the systems worked. She would fly. I could leave Father’s moon.

  And go where?

  I was now as alien as it is possible to be. The only Ketran in a galaxy that, with few exceptions, had never known we existed.

  And I was an alien who contained within himself a multitude. I was filled up with answers to the questions of tens of thousands of relatives and friends on a thousand worlds. I knew where their loved ones had gone, why they had never returned. I was all that was left of Ket, but I was at the same time all that was left of other long-extinct races and of tribes and families.

  I had become a living repository of life in a hundred variations. Life that would remain closed behind the locked doors of my own feeble brain unless … unless I could become something else.

  “You were right, Menno. We must adapt, in the end. Adapt or die.”

  It took thirty more years to do all I needed to do.

  I went through each ship, each wreck, and took what I could use. I burned roads through the jungle and built haulers. I built a sprawling shop with tools that would have made Jicklet drool with envy.

  I dipped into the mass of minds that lived within me. Over time I learned to survive the storm of the multitude, to take what I needed and go on. Jicklet was often there with me. And an engineer named Hadra 232. And a Z-space theorist named Nu. And a hundred other scientists, technicians, theorists, builders, designers, innovators.

  And biologists as well. Lackofa was with me. Others, many others, from other races.

  The work changed shape, mutated, grew like a living thing and in fact became a living thing. For although I was building a ship, I was building so much more. I was building a new race. A race of one. A race of millions.

  I was singular and plural all at once. I was alive and I was a machine. Engines were a part of me. Computers linked directly with my brain and soon the link was forgotten and the line disappeared. Sensors were my senses. I was vast. Vast enough to release the multitude.

  Thirty years, and at last I was ready. I had passed most of a century on the blue moon. It was dying. The air worsened slowly, but that was all right; I no longer needed air. The waters reeked of decay, but I no longer needed to drink. The fish had long since become extinct. But I had saved the dead. And now I opened wide the gate to my multitude, never to close it again.

  All my Ketrans, all my Generationals, my Daankins, my Hayati, my 333’s, my Wurbs and Breets and Gofinickiliasts, my Multitudinals, my Chan Wath, my Skrit Na and Illamans and Capasins and my one Unemite and so many others. Race after race. I emptied each dead mind into my extended brain, my biological-mechanical-synthetic construct, all free again.

  So much knowledge, so much. And yet, when the flood was calmed, only I was truly alive. It was all me. I was still alone.

  I lit my engines and rose from the surface of the dying moon.

  From space I looked back on it. What was fitting? Some races burned their dead, some ate them, some buried them in the ground. Some finality was called for so that the floating bones and exoskeletons and shells of all those honored dead could cease to be grotesque.

  I called on my weapons and I blasted the moon till it broke apart, till the atmosphere was ripped away, till the sea boiled up into the vacuum, till the molten remains spiraled slowly down in the gravity well of the planet and were incinerated on reentry.

  Then I entered Z-space and put a billion miles between myself and that foul place.

  Now what was I to do? I was unique. As alone as only a unique creature can be. I was part of no species. I was part of many species, but there was no hope of companionship there. Who would welcome me into their system? I had become a physical embodiment of the inter-species uninet I used to dream of. I was a library of information from many races. And with my extended body/ship I was powerful beyond reckoning.

  Now what?

  Now what?

  Now what? What is your game now, Ellimist?

  I thought of returning to Ket. But that would only cause me pain. Return to what? To empty skies where my people once lived?

  I flew. In and out of Z-space, in and out of orbits. Time meant nothing to me, I was in no hurry. But the loneliness was another matter. I took refuge in creating subroutines, simulations of people. I tried to talk to them, tried to … But how can you really talk to your own creation? How can you talk to a machine you’ve programmed? It’s an exercise in narcissism. It’s the beginning of madness.

  I knew now why Father had kept me alive. He had long since learned the emptiness of communication without hope of surprise. A Ketran — any sentient species — is only his free will. Freedom and sentience are inseparable. The captive, programmed mind is no mind at all.

  I flew for a long time. Years. Looking. For what? I didn’t know.

  And then, I dropped from Z-space and entered a system where two planets were at war.

  They were technologically advanced, though not capable of Z-space travel yet. They communicated by microwave and laser emissions. They moved across the lands and seas and through the skies of their respective planets. They had suppressed most diseases.

  Two planets in strangely close proximity, no more than a quarter million miles separating them at their closest points. One was called Jall, the other the Inner World. The Inner World was actually in the more distant orbit, but then “inner” may have been a reference to some other factor. Neither Jallians nor Inners were part of my multitude, though the 333’s had knowledge of their existence. I was in a far reach of the galaxy.

  I arrived, invisible to either side. I arrived in the midst of a ship-to-ship battle. In fact, I dropped out of Z-space within twenty miles of being struck by a terrifically powerful Jallian beam that missed its intended target, missed me, and finally, diffused and harmless, slightly warmed the nickel-and-iron surface of a passing asteroid.

  “Well, well,” I said. (I’d long since lost any reluctance to converse with myself.) “I seem to have stumbled into a war.”

  The Jallian ship, a fantastically painted behemoth half a mile long, fired again. This time the beam found its victim. A small, swift Inner ship that looked, with its smooth, swept lines as if it had been designed to move through water, blew apart.

  The Jallian jubilation was short-lived. A swarm of Inner craft emerged from the primitive stealth-state that allowed them to hide from Jallian sensors.

  The Jallian ship fired again and again and annihilated five of the attackers, nearly a third of the total. But then the Inners fired. Their weapons were weaker. The Jallian ship did not blow apart. But the outer skin had been sliced open. Pressurized atmosphere blew out into space. And bodies, too. Writhing figures, helpless.

  I acted before thinking. Acted on pure instinct. I extended a force field between the Jallian ship and the Inner Worlders. Both sides fired. Neither side’s w
eapons penetrated my force field.

  I moved closer and let them see me. How it must have shocked them! Their ships were boxes of steel and titanium and composites. Mine was a living thing: crystal and flesh and composites all melded together, all wrapped in force fields of unchallengeable power. I was a visitor from a future they had only barely begun to glimpse.

  By all rights they should have powered down and waited to learn my pleasure. Far from it. Both sides took less than five minutes to touch me with their active sensors, to feel around me, half-sighted.

  And then the Inner Worlders opened fire. On me! The Jallians used the distraction to fire on the Inners, and in seconds what had been a two-front war became a three-way free-for-all.

  I almost laughed. But the sheer malevolence of these two species was disgusting. I could have destroyed both fleets with a shrug of my wings.

  I stretched out my power and wrapped my fields around them. I drained their power, damped their engines, scrambled their sensors, and left them drifting, helpless through space.

  Then I opened communications.

  “Your war is over,” I announced.

  Two sets of furious faces appeared to me. The Jallians were represented by a multi-armed slug of sorts. She had no name, only a title, a designation. She was Life-giver of the Jain Sea. And indeed she was giving birth as she appeared to my enhanced sight. One after another, small, squirming grubs slid gooey and red from slits arranged in a circle around her middle. The grubs were picked up and carried away by attendants — the type of creatures I’d seen writhing in vacuums just moments earlier.

  Life-giver of the Jain Sea was enraged. “Who are you, nothing, to interfere with me? I speak to a nothing! Obey me!”

  She spoke a strange language, but with the database I had available there were few languages not immediately understandable to me.

  The Inner Worlders had a more pleasing appearance, at least to my sensibilities. For one thing, they were winged, and I had the Ketran prejudice in favor of the flighted. And they had multiple, bright yellow eyes. The one who spoke for them called himself Captain Whee, which had a certain whimsical sound to me.

  Captain Whee was polite, but still managed to convey hostility. “Stranger, please stand away. We have business with the Jallian vermin.”

  “I am unwilling to allow this slaughter to continue,” I said mildly.

  “This is not your concern,” Captain Whee pointed out. “But we do admire your evident technological superiority. Were you to side with us and exterminate the Jallians, we would be happy to ally ourselves with you.”

  “That’s a very gracious offer,” I said dryly. “But I don’t think there’s going to be any exterminating.”

  “Nothing! Disappear, nothing! Avoid my notice!” the Life-giver roared. She could not believe that I refused to obey. It was an arrogance that was perhaps a function of her essential biology. Perhaps it is hard to remain humble when you are known as Life-giver.

  But what was odd, what was surprising and disturbing to me, was my own emotional reaction: I was happy. I was talking to real, living creatures whose every word and motion were not mine to invent.

  From the Jallian planet a second huge ship broke from orbit and vectored at full speed toward us. Moments later the Inner Worlders responded with a virtual cloud of their small, sleek ships.

  Were they intending to attack me or each other? Did it matter? Either was madness.

  It was the game, all over again: Alien Civilizations. No different than any of the many scenarios Wormer or Inidar or Aguella and I had played.

  The question was, How I should play it? I had already pulled a Menno: I had intruded into the game. Made myself a central player, onstage, rather than offscreen.

  And yet I was still drawn to the subtler approach. What would either species learn if I simply annihilated their ships in a display of crude power? And was that really my place?

  I did not ask myself whether it was my business to interfere at all. It was not that I confused game with reality. I simply saw these two objectionable species as fools trapped in a pointless hostility. Didn’t I have the right to intervene? Of course I did.

  I was not Menno, I was Toomin. I was Ellimist: the brilliant loser. But now I knew so much more. My wisdom was deep. My powers were vast. Surely … and then there was the core fact that I was not playing against anyone. No opponent, just the game itself.

  The minimal move, then.

  If this were really a game I would simply alter the orbits of the two planets so that they did not pass so closely. Slow them down or speed them up to matching, opposite orbits. Put their sun between them. They lacked the technology to fight a war across those distances.

  But great as my powers were, they were not that great. And yet I could surely move an asteroid. Or two. Or a hundred.

  The system’s asteroid belt was just beyond the orbit of Inner World. It was a simple calculation, well within my abilities. And I had sufficient brute power in my body/ship.

  I left the two sides to murder each other and withdrew to the asteroid belt. It would take some time: Asteroids are not rocks to be casually flung about. But perhaps the two sides, seeing what I was about, would suspend their battle.

  I used my body/ship to nudge an asteroid, not a large one, out of its orbit. My engines were more than capable. The asteroid slid down the gravity well, vectored to find a new, lower, faster orbit.

  I worked and waited. In a few weeks’ time the two battling worlds had separated by enough to force them to suspend hostilities — a natural part of their conflict. It was only at their nearest approach that the two worlds could reach out and kill the other.

  I waited as my fleet of asteroids hurtled through space. And when the time came I slowed them, braked, nudged them into place. It took the better part of a year.

  And now the two planets were approaching convergence again, and I could see the war preparations in full swing: ships refitting and topping off their fuel.

  I waited till the two worlds were just edging into battle range. And then, one by one, I blew the asteroids apart. Seventy-four asteroids of differing sizes became tens of thousands of meteors of every size. They were a dense, deadly cloud of projectiles that with each orbit would rip up anything that launched from either planet.

  The Jallians and Inner Worlders would be unable to reach each other at least till such time as they developed vastly more capable spacecraft.

  I had created an impenetrable orbital minefield.

  The Jallian war with the Inner Worlders was over. And I had found my mission, my purpose in the galaxy.

  It was as if the galaxy had conspired to make sense of my disjointed, fractured, bizarre life.

  I had been a wastrel Ketran gamer. I had been a survivor of mass destruction. I had been a Z-spaceship-captain. I had been a helpless captive, forced to be a new type of gamer. I had evolved into something the galaxy had never seen before, a melding of many technologies, the minds of many civilizations, all flowing in and through a matrix of music.

  And now that strange resume seemed to match perfectly with a job that needed doing. I would be a peacemaker. And more: I would foster the growth and advancement of species. I would teach them the ways of peace. The massacre of my own people by the Capasins would not be repeated on any other world. Not so long as I was present!

  I flew Z-space, emerged here and there, searching the galaxy, using every bit of my vast trove of knowledge to look, to see, to feel, to learn, to understand. I listened to the music of evolution itself, or so I flattered myself.

  Life was everywhere. A thousand thousand planets teeming with life. Most of it very primitive, but why should that stop me? I could step in early, I could “intrude,” in Menno’s phrase. And yet, I would intrude with exquisite sensitivity and the purest motivations. I would create harmonies. Boldness allied with restraint and a minimalist aesthetic, all in the service of moral certainties: that peace was better than war, that freedom was better than slavery, that kno
wledge was better than ignorance.

  Oh, yes, the galaxy would be a wonderful place under my guidance.

  I flew from star to star, world to world. Here I lifted up a failing race; there I ended a plague; in another place I fed the hungry. A century flew past. And another, and more and more. Time was almost meaningless to me now. My challenges were vast and worthy, they kept my mind engaged. I made friends on many worlds, became an honorary member of a hundred families, clans, tribes, species, races. They spoke of me, of the Ellimist as I had become known, with respect, gratitude, awe.

  And then the day came that I happened by sheer coincidence to find myself within a relatively short distance of the scene of my first triumph. A thousand years had passed since I had stopped the war of Inner Worlders and Jallians.

  Finding myself so near, I returned to savor. To reminisce.

  I returned to find no signs of life on the Jallian world. The planet was sterile, its atmosphere almost gone.

  The Inner World still teemed with life, but I caught no sign of microwave or radio or laser emissions. No satellites orbited the planet. The Inner Worlders were reduced in numbers and existing at a primitive technological level.

  It took only a short while for me to reconstruct what had happened. It was easy enough once I found a single, still-orbiting mine. A primitive device, produced in great numbers by the Inner Worlders. They had launched huge numbers of them, laid them in the path of the onrushing Jallian world. Many of the mines had been annihilated by my meteor cloud. But many had survived, and then survived reentry to explode on contact with the surface of the Jallian planet.

  Even now, a thousand years later, the radiation could be read. Even now the craters could be seen from space.

  Morbidly I went about the work of compiling every detail. More than seven hundred impacts. Seven hundred nuclear explosions.

  “Not such an easy game to win, is it?”

  For a moment I thought the voice was my own. The tone of sarcasm and deprecation mirrored my own self-directed rage. But then my sensors lit up. Something was emerging from Z-space. Something big.