And yet, I saw a subtle relaxation on the part of the creatures. They had “heard” me. Or had at least heard the emotional tone.
I tried again. I was about to say that I was there to help. But no, that wasn’t it anymore.
More rapid hand gestures. Emotions cooled. And then, very suddenly, all three of them spun. I was forgotten. Something was coming from the forest across the clearing. Something large.
It walked on six legs, each as thick as a tree trunk, a knuckling walk. It had a low-slung head that swung from side to side as it walked. The beast was armored with clunky, leatherish plates all down its back.
It was huge but would not have seemed like any sort of threat had I not seen the reactions of the blue creatures. They clearly saw it as a danger. The emotion was all too easy to feel.
Then the beast began to move and I reciprocated their emotion. I would never have believed something so big could move so fast.
More of my fellow blue quadrupeds appeared, rushing up from all angles, racing to cut the monster off before it could reach the cluster of scoops. My three companions attacked as well, headlong, heedless.
I followed at a tearing speed, my hooves kicking up clods of dirt as I ran. The first of my “brothers” reached the monster. The beast killed two effortlessly. It paused to eat, to rip the two martyrs apart and swallow them, all but ignoring the brave stabs of their fellows.
It was a sadly one-sided battle. And I should have stayed out of it. I had not come to fight. But I was, physically at least, one of these creatures, and there would be very little of the companionship I craved, very little learning, very little relaxation so long as they were being massacred.
I drew my handheld beam weapon and shot the monster in the head. It died and fell in a heap.
From that day on I was a welcomed, revered member of the tribe.
They had no name for their race, no special gestural label for their species, only hand-words for their tribe. As far as they were concerned, their planet was irrelevant, their species a useless abstraction. They were this tribe, this group, and no more.
It was I who came up with the hand-word for their race and, for the benefit of my own word-oriented brain, a spoken name as well.
I named them Andalites.
I lived with the Andalites for many years. Happy years, by and large. They were primitive people. Their gestural language consisted of fewer than two hundred words or phrases. They had no art, no science, no agriculture. But they had already evolved from pure grazers, herd members, into distinct individuals. They had potential.
I lived with them, and refused to teach, refused to interfere. On one other occasion I employed my weapon to fend off a monster’s attack. But that was all. Aside from that I was an Andalite, concerned with keeping the fire going, with maintaining the roof of my little scoop, with carefully avoiding overfeeding in dry weather, with tending the trees so they would drop their delicious leaves at harvest time, with all the simple minutiae of daily life.
Most of all, I had friends. I “spoke” with living beings who spoke back, not with the canned, programmed, expected responses of computers or dead memories, but with the wonderful unpredictability of life.
I was no longer lonely. I no longer bore the weight of the galaxy on my inadequate shoulders.
From time to time I would return to my other self in orbit and download all my new experiences and memories. That other me was grateful, eager. That other me savored every detail. Felt the warmth of closeness. A warmth denied me since the death of Aguella and Lackofa.
I married.
Her name was Tree. The Andalites only used a dozen or so names — Tree, Water, Star, Grass, and so on. Probably twenty percent of the females in the tribe were named Tree.
We had a child: Star. But Star died soon after birth of a disease that attacks the Andalite young.
I had watched entire worlds die. I had lost my own race. How could I care so much about this one small, unsteady creature? How could her death cut me so deeply?
The pain was awful. Unbearable. And yet I was glad to learn that I could still feel.
The disease that had killed her was easily curable. The orbiting me took only a few seconds to discover the pathogen and work out simple countermeasures. I had the power to keep any Andalite child from dying of that disease. I could ensure that no other Andalite parent would ever experience that same loss.
I had the power.
I had the power to do it all: to eliminate predators, to wipe out disease, to ensure an adequate food supply, to biologically alter the Andalites so that they …
I had that power. I had used that power before, and ended up annihilating worlds.
And yet, how could I not? How could I not wipe out disease? How could I not stop evil?
“You hide here among these primitive creatures,” I berated myself. “You cower and run from Crayak and do nothing to stop him. You want to solve the easy problems and avoid the larger ones? Is that your morality, Toomin the Ellimist?”
Tree came to me and made the hand-words for “child.”
“You want to have another child?” I signed back, incredulous.
“Yes.”
“But another child may die, too, my wife.”
“Yes.”
“Then why have another child? If not the disease, then the monsters, or a famine. Why have another child?”
“Disease take one,” Tree admitted. Then, with growing defiance, “Monster take one. Famine take one. More children, some live.”
I had another child. And this one did not fall prey to the illness. We named him Flower.
By the time Tree died of old age Flower had become a leader of the tribe. His sister Grass was married herself. Their two siblings, Sky and Water, died. Three of our five children had died, two had lived.
As I helped bury Tree’s body according to the ritual that would allow her spirit to strengthen the grass, I knew my time with the Andalites was over.
I had gone there making sanctimonious noises about learning, never really expecting to learn anything new. And yet from these primitive, precivilized creatures I had learned how to defeat, or at least resist, Crayak.
More children, some live.
For every race Crayak exterminated, I would plant two new ones.
A hundred thousand generations passed and I had seeded life on as many worlds. I was growing “children” faster than Crayak could exterminate them. My travels, and the database of my multitude, had left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of habitable worlds and systems. And in some cases I simply created habitable worlds where only barren land had been: Melting ice caps to release water was one method, introducing oxygen-producing plant species was another.
I had the advantage now. Crayak had to try to find my new species, simple peoples who did not announce their presence with radio emissions. Primitive species hiding amidst the billions of planets.
And, for the first time, I grew a wholly new species. They were invented in my body/ship, created of bits and pieces of DNA. I accented their intelligence. I quashed their aggressiveness.
I called them Pemalites.
To the Pemalites I gave technology. They became an advanced species within a few decades of my creating them. As their creator, I gave them laws: They would never practice violence, and they would conceal their existence as long as possible.
And I gave them a mission: to carry life everywhere.
With all my powers I still could not equal the volume of work done by the Pemalites. They took to the stars in a cloud of ships, carrying plant and animal species with them as they went. They spread life like a benign contagion.
Not even Crayak could find them all. Nor even a fraction of them all. Life was winning the race against death. Good was outrunning evil.
In all that time, millennia, I had not encountered Crayak. But eventually we must meet.
It happened without warning. I emerged
from Z-space in a previously unvisited solar system. A massive jolt hit me before I could so much as switch on my sensors. An energy beam of shocking power.
For a split second I was simply overwhelmed. Every system flickered. Every synapse and connection stuttered. It was a blow that would have killed me ten thousand years earlier.
But I was no longer quite the creature I’d been when Crayak had last seen me. I had followed the same theory for my own survival as I had for the survival of life itself: I had grown, replicated, expanded.
I had broken “myself” into several dozen separate semibiological ships. I was three dozen crystal/ships, all connected, all united by real-time communications on several different levels at once: everything from simple microwave and laser to more subtle connections based on mind-crystal harmonics.
Crayak’s assault annihilated three of my portions. But that was less than a tenth of what now constituted the Ellimist.
Crayak still inhabited his dark, gloomy world. Still surrounded himself with sycophants and toadies. Still possessed the weapons and abilities he’d had. And now his power was not so much greater than mine. If at all.
“It seems I have survived,” I said to him. “Let’s see if you do as well.”
I aimed and I fired with everything I had.
Crayak’s dark planetoid staggered. Huge chunks, chunks the size of mighty mountains, exploded into space.
“You’ve grown,” Crayak sneered.
“And you have not. Life has advantages over death.”
“Only the most temporary advantages, Ellimist. Life is short. Death is eternal.”
“You race from place to place, a fool trying to stamp out a contagion. You’re too slow. Life has outrun you.”
“Life, no. But you, Ellimist, yes, you have complicated my plans. So now, with deep regret, I must end our little game.”
“I see. You lack the courage to play a game you might lose. A coward after all.”
“A survivor, Ellimist.”
He fired.
The battle was on. He fired, I fired. I threw nuclear missiles at him and replaced them swiftly — one of my “portions” contained an arms factory. The missiles exploded against his force field, sapping his power, dumping the radiation of a quasar down on him and his creatures.
He blazed at me with gravity distorters that twisted and turned space itself and bent and broke me.
I struck back with countermeasures to blind and confuse him. And then Crayak turned and ran.
No. He would not escape me. I was going to follow him, hunt him down, and annihilate him.
I chased him into Zero-space. We carried our battle into another system. The two of us orbited a massive star and sucked the energy from it to keep hacking away at each other. We hurled asteroids, we warped the form of space itself, we stabbed at each other with energy beams.
Crayak ran again. And I followed him. The taste of victory was in my mouth, the hunger for revenge and vindication.
I struck at him with beams of energy powered by a star. Unimaginable force. I missed and struck a planet and vaporized an ocean. The species that inhabited that world would not last more than a year on their damaged world.
But there was no time to stop. I told myself I would make it all right when Crayak was dead. I told myself I would come back when Crayak was gone once and for all.
But it was I who ran from the next battle. And the next. Crayak had learned from me. He added to his own powers and so did I.
He ran. I chased. I ran. He chased. And as the battle raged through normal space and Zero-space we each grew. That was the strange paradox of it: We each grew stronger. Each more deadly. Each more accomplished at inflicting pain and damage on the other.
We had become symbiotic at some level. Neither of us could kill the other, neither of us could pull away because now, now after so much time, now the other was even stronger.
The destructive power we now employed annihilated solar systems in their entirety. Civilizations that had barely raised their heads to look at the stars were obliterated. Advanced worlds, arrogant with their space travel abilities watched, helpless, stunned, and were annihilated.
Still Crayak and I grew stronger and more deadly, but if anything, it was I who grew most dangerous now.
There were two lines on a cosmic graph: One was the number of living planets, down and down. Life was failing around the galaxy as the two mad giants rolled here and there and crushed the helpless beneath them.
The other graph line, though, showed my own slow ascension over Crayak.
It was a hideous race to see which would happen sooner: my triumph over Crayak or our mutual destruction of all life in the galaxy.
And then, sheer accident took Crayak and me down a path neither of us had known existed.
Crayak laid a trap for me. He was desperate. Ready to gamble anything. So he began to move with a definable pattern. He deliberately laid the groundwork for me to guess his next move.
It worked. I read his pattern and foolishly ascribed it to exhaustion on his part. Thus it was that I emerged from Zero-space within a few hundred thousand miles of a force that neither I nor Crayak could hope to defeat: a black hole.
I now consisted of four thousand two hundred and twenty portions. I emerged from Zero-space trailing my vast, extended body behind me. The instant I emerged I saw the trap.
Too late!
The pull of the black hole was impossible to fight. I had great power. I did not have this power. My most forward portions fell into that gravity well with no chance at all of escape.
Crayak had laid the trap to perfection.
I shot an order to my other portions: Do not emerge!
Milliseconds from final disaster the remaining parts of me cancelled their descent from Z-space. I was wounded, not killed. But oh, how I was wounded.
I watched helplessly as vast parts of me, including the remnants of the original ship/body, all that was left of the true Ketran me, fell toward that black hole.
I was everywhere at once, lost, turned, twisted. In Z-space, in real space far away as parts of me emerged randomly, and falling into the horrible crushing mouth of the black hole.
I was bits and pieces.
The pain! My connections were across so many levels. It was not just a data stream, it was more than that. Those were my arms and wings there, falling, diminishing, being crushed by gravity.
Those were my eyes and ears spread out through space and nonspace. Stretched.
I felt the connection break down, felt it as if parts of my body were being sawed off. Pain! My mind was closing in, collapsing, no! Fragments. Pieces of me. Distorted cries and shouts of wild disjointed communication.
The universe itself seemed to disintegrate. The stars fell apart, opened themselves up like blossoming flowers. And then … and then …
I seemed to float in a place like nothing I had seen or imagined. All around me I saw massive, twisted lines of pure power, snapping and color-shifting. I saw numbers, deluges of them, I could hear them roaring around my ears. I reached out a vast hand and could run it over the curves of space itself. I could stroke the very curves of space-time.
I saw … I saw everything, the inside, underside, inner, and outer of everything at once.
I lived still.
But where was I?
What was I?
I was within a black hole, within Zero-space, within real space and yet unified into one whole through a medium I could not yet conceive.
I was seeing, hearing, feeling in all places at once. The effect was extreme disorientation.
I tried instinctively to pull my parts together, but I could not. It was impossible that I should still be alive, impossible that I could flap wings that were still in Zero-space, impossible that I should seem to wiggle pods inside a black hole.
I was aware of Crayak, I felt him approach my real-space portions. He was attacking me piece-meal, exploding parts of me with great glee.
I felt physical parts
of me evaporate, burned away by energy beams. And yet my mind was not diminished.
Portions of me were now fully within the black hole, they were crushed to dots, crushed to the size of atoms, destroyed for all intents and purposes.
And yet I lived.
Something was happening. Something …
One by one Crayak annihilated the component parts of me. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. And when nothing was left of me in real space he chased me into Zero-space and squeezed those helpless, inanimate bits of machinery and flesh and crystal out into real space where they could be destroyed.
And still I lived.
How much time had passed? Unknowable. I was no longer within time. I could see time as a series of interwoven strands, a trillion trillion strands of possibility.
Was I dead? Was I in some sort of afterlife?
Dead, no. The dead do not see, and I saw! I saw things no living creature had ever seen before. I was deep within the structure of the universe, I was within the code of creation.
There was nothing left of me, nothing that anyone could see or touch. I was gone, and yet I lived.
I don’t know how long I floated through this eerie, brilliant, wondrous landscape of pure energy and purest beauty. Time was for other creatures. Time’s arrow did not carry me along with it.
I knew nothing of this. I was a mere creature, for all my multitudes, for all my powers, I was, after all, a mere mortal creature.
It was as if one of the primitive Andalites I’d known had suddenly been thrust into the command center of a starship. I was an ignorant savage. An extreme primitive.
But I knew this: As simple and primitive as I might be, I could literally touch and move the vibrating lines of space-time.
Was I grown extremely big? Or had I shrunk to submolecular size? Size meant nothing. There was no size in this place.
I lived, and that was all I knew. I was alive without form, alive without synapses to fire, without food to devour, without limbs to control. I saw without eyes and tasted without tongue and moved with no wings or pods or engines to move me.