The Explorer was a new ship whose design reflected lessons learned in previous encounters with alien craft. Jicklet and her people had been at work on her for five years. The basic materials had been drawn from asteroids and from occasional planetfalls. Jicklet had something of an empire now: a large yet cramped complex of shops, foundries, fuelers, hangers, and repair cradles. Ugly crystal and metal structures formed a clunky, asymmetrical ring around the ship, below the fighter stations and above the engines.
Jicklet handled the engines, the weapons and the small craft. If there was anyone with more power than the commander, it was Head Tech Jicklet. But in her at least, loyalty was not a weak force.
I had toured the Explorer in its various stages of construction and presided at a ceremony of launching. I was familiar with the ship, but it had rested, unused, in its cradle for the last year.
Jicklet was practically vibrating with anticipation.
“Head Tech, I hate to call on you at such short notice. You know, you’re welcome to send one of your subs along if you’re otherwise occupied.”
A joke, of course. No power in the galaxy could have kept her from flying the Explorer’s first mission.
“I think I can make the time,” Jicklet said dryly. “May I ask the mission?”
“That watery moon down there. We want to take a look below the surface without using active sensors.”
“The Explorer will handle it,” she said confidently.
It was a pretty craft, a nice melding of Ketran sensibilities and alien pragmatism. A crate, but largely transparent, with flat-crys panels buttressed by force fields. She was not Z-space capable, designed for O and A: Orbit and Atmosphere. There were swooped wings and massive ion propulsion engines at the back. She was fast, versatile, and heavily armed with our own improved version of the Capasin beam weapon, as well as a number of fire-and-forget explosive homers.
So many weapons. So much killing power.
I put on an approving smile for Jicklet’s benefit, but she’d seen my doubts.
“We’ve come a long way through a dangerous galaxy,” she said.
“A long way,” I agreed. We had lost our world because the Capasins thought we were aggressors when we were not. What was the moral of that story? That we should be prepared for violence at every turn? Right or wrong, that was the lesson we had learned. We would never be unprepared again.
And yet, here we were displaying our readiness for mayhem in every curve of our ship. Were we setting ourselves up for another, even more complete annihilation?
No time for all that. I needed to clear my mind of possible betrayal and possible wrong impressions. Focus on the mission at hand.
“Let’s see what your toy can do, Jicklet.”
We went aboard and docked. We were enclosed but able to see stars in every direction but down. A compromise. Just what Menno had in mind for our race: adaptation. If no planet matched our needs, maybe we should match ourselves to the planet. We had the genetic manipulation techniques to do it in a few generations. We oldsters would live out our lives as pitiful, flightless Ketrans. But our juvies would be born without wings, with sturdier builds, stronger bones, true feet instead of pods, and no docking talons at all.
Was Menno right?
No. Not while I was commander.
The Explorer released its hold on the Searcher and Jicklet lit the engines. The g forces accumulated but the internal force fields supported our weight, even kept the blood from pooling in our extremities.
We raced for the blue moon and used the thin atmosphere for braking. We had to shed nearly all of our speed before we could safely enter the water. The Explorer skimmed at subsonic speeds, just ten feet above the glass-smooth sea.
“Any particular target?” Jicklet asked Aguella.
“Ahead nine miles. That should bring us to an intercept with the phenomenon I observed.”
We crossed the day–night line and Jicklet killed the last of our speed. The ship sliced the water in a shallow angle.
There was an immediate sensation of claustrophobia. One cannot be raised on a floating airborne crystal, spend decades in a ship surrounded by a billion miles of open space, and then feel entirely calm about being plunged into the enveloping sea.
The water closed in all around us, dark, soon nearly opaque. Then, Jicklet keyed the lights and I gasped. A school of thousands of brilliant yellow eels, myriad bars of shimmering light, flew past us, around us.
“Phosphorescence,” Lackofa commented. “That may be all you saw, Aguella: a school of eels.”
“But beautiful eels,” I remarked.
The yellow swarm passed us by and now, no longer blinded by them, I saw wonders of light and motion everywhere. A fish nearly the size of the Explorer with gaping mouth and feathery fins, all bright with neon reds and blues; a creature that looked like an airfoil trailing a tangle of purple tentacles; a flight of seven or eight fish, long, dangerous-looking, brightest pink; and below us a forest of very long tentacles, so long they disappeared down out of sight.
A blur of movement!
The Explorer rocked, tilted sharply, and with a deep, groaning sound, stopped.
“Something has us, Commander!” Jicklet yelled.
She was more concerned than I. It was “her” ship, after all, and she treasured every square inch of it.
“All external lights up. Active sensors on. Weapons to full ready. Jicklet: We’ll give it a jolt of current through the hull if need be.”
“Ready, Commander,” Jicklet replied.
The external lights doubled in brilliance. The water was wonderfully clear but we were still in planetary night and the lights failed to show the full extent of the tendrils or whatever it was that had us wrapped securely. The eels and fish still swam serenely by.
“Sensor readouts coming in,” Aguella said. “Life-form. Carbon-based.” She frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“The creature that has us appears to be quite large. Unless I’m getting false readings I show a continuous nervous-electrical system extending out to the limits of the sensors. This thing extends beyond the horizon. In every direction!”
I did a quick mental calculation, the circumference of the moon, distance to horizon …
“It has to be a sensor glitch,” I said. “Nothing is that big.”
“We’re moving,” Lackofa pointed out quite dispassionately.
I had already felt the motion. We were being drawn lower.
“Okay. Shock the hull,” I ordered.
The lights dimmed as power was diverted into the hull’s metallic components. Anything in contact with us would receive a severe jolt.
“It still has us,” Lackofa pointed out unnecessarily.
“Understood,” I said. “Beam to minimum power. Wide pattern.” I was still calm. I regretted having to take harsher measures. Most likely this life-form was sub-sentient, simply a creature following its instincts. But the ship came first.
“Fire.”
The beam fired. The water absorbed most of the energy, particularly at this setting, but the creature would still feel searing, intense heat.
The water steamed and boiled around us.
“Cease fire. Report.”
“It still has us,” Lackofa said. “A creature this large may not even have pain receptors in an area this small. It may not feel us.”
I nodded. “We’ll have to cut our way out. Beam to tight focus. Mid-power. Jicklet, give us a sweep below the hull. We’ll slice the tentacles off. As soon as we’re free you’d better take us back to atmosphere.”
“Understood.”
The beam fired, a lance of light inscribing a brilliant circle beneath us.
The Explorer shuddered as the tentacles fell away. The ship began to rise.
“Something close!” Aguella yelled.
“Commander!” Jicklet cried.
The monster slammed us head on. I was knocked off my dock. My talons were wrenched and bleeding. Aguella and Jicklet
were still docked but Lackofa was down, out cold. Huge! A flash of monstrous mouth, wide enough to swallow the ship in a single bite.
“Beam to maximum. Fire!”
The vast mouth was lit red. An explosion rocked the fish, its insides, superheated, had blown apart, ripping it open.
Wham!
Wham!
I staggered up. My face was wet with my own blood now.
Wham!
Lights. Blinded. Trying to think, trying to form the order.
“Missiles! Fire!”
No answer.
Wham!
Hammer blows, one after another. The force field maintained hull integrity, but we were bugs inside a bean pod being slammed again and again.
Lights gone. No sound. Silence. I lay broken and battered. Head swirling.
Water rushing in. How? The fields should have …
Something touching me. My face. Touching me, wrapping itself around me and …
I was docked.
Sky. All around me.
The crystal!
I was docked to a crystal. Azure Level. Docked, eyes open, yet in the game. I was playing Inidar. The game scenario involved two alien species, one a wandering nomad race in search of a new home. The other species was a world-sized behemoth. So vast, so all-consuming that it very nearly was the planet.
“I’ll take the Ketrans, if you choose to accept.”
“Gladly,” Inidar memmed back. “You underestimate the value of size and power. You’re an idealist, Ellimist.”
“Oh? Well, step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.”
Inidar laughed.
“Shall we immerse?”
“On the other side,” he answered.
“This isn’t real,” I memmed. “You’re dead, Inidar. You died a long time ago.”
“True enough, Ellimist,” he agreed. “The Capasin killed me. Killed us all. They’re here, too, you know. Would you like to see them?”
“The Capasin? Where? Where is ‘here’?”
“Open your eyes, Ellimist, what do you see?”
“Equatorial High Crystal. But she’s dead too. And Lackofa in the next dock. Is he dead? Am I dead? Or is this some kind of dream? Hallucination?”
“Are those the only choices?” Inidar asked, mocking. “Might it not be a game?”
“It might,” I said. “But whose?”
Inidar laughed delightedly in my head. Then he was gone, and before me, before my eyes, not a uninet memm, but right in front of me appeared the Capasin. The one I had killed.
“Hello again, Ellimist,” he said. There was a gaping, bloody wound in the top of his head and down where the point of the crystal shard had extruded from his throat.
“This is all a trick,” I said.
“Yes. Almost as neat a trick as the way you skewered me. A primitive spear to stop a modern spacecraft. Ouch!”
“What is this game?” I demanded. I was not the juvie I appeared to be, I was commander of the Searcher. I was commander of all that remained of the Ketran people. All that remained.
“Well, whose fault is that?” the Capasin asked as if he’d read my thoughts. “You invent games where you play with the lives of entire species, you cleverly broadcast these games through Z-space without bothering to include the explanation that they are games, just games. And then you’re surprised when someone comes along to squash you like so many parasites.”
“You didn’t exactly wait for explanations,” I snapped. “You slaughtered us.”
The Capasin spread his limp arms in a very Ketran gesture. “It’s what we do. And if you’d had any fortitude you’d have returned and taken your planet back. Instead you wander around lost, looking for a place that doesn’t exist. You’re a cowardly species.”
“Less than a hundred of us in one ship to retake Ket?” I sneered. “You sound like Menno. It was always the radical move with him: Return and fight it out to the death, or adapt and become something entirely new.”
“Yes, and now we see how right I was,” Menno said. He was crowding in beside the dead Capasin, elbowing him aside. “Look where you’ve got us. Do you even know? We’re the game pieces now. Father has us. Father has gathered us here, made us into his toys.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You think it’s all a dream, don’t you, Ellimist? It’s real. Or mostly real. Inidar is a construct, a fake built out of your own memories. So is this one particular Capasin, though there are real Capasins here. And anyway, I’m real enough. In my own way.”
“Why are you here? You should be aboard the Searcher.”
“I was in command, remember? Not you. We saw when you went to active sensors. At that point I ordered the same, no reason not to. So we saw you firing weapons down there. I took the Searcher down to rescue you. Surprised, eh? Surprised that I would try and save your life? Don’t be. How could I abandon you and hope to maintain control of the crew? No one wins the game of assassination. I had to at least try and rescue you.”
“The Searcher can’t penetrate a water environment,” I said suspiciously.
“Father’s reach goes beyond the water,” Menno said. “He controls everything on this moon. We were skimming the surface, trying frantically to fit out one of the fighters to go in after you. And all at once a wall of water — impossible, of course — it rose up from nowhere, a wave a half mile high. And you’re right: The Searcher doesn’t do well in water.”
“Aguella?” I asked.
“Right here,” she said.
“How did you … Are you all right?”
“I was killed, Toomin. We all were. All but you.”
I wanted to laugh. It was ludicrous. She was talking, she was right there now, in front of my face. Hovering in the pure clean air of home.
“Would you like to see the truth, Ellimist?” Menno asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Don’t be so quick to decide. You won’t like the truth.”
“You’re all dead. What can be worse?”
Menno’s smile spread wide.
And all at once the crystal was gone, the sky gone. I was underwater. Underwater but breathing. Something held me. Tentacles. Deep worms, they were inside me! The tendrils grew into me, penetrated me, made me a part of them.
I floated, tethered, in a field of tentacles that spread as far as the eye could see. Menno floated nearby, tethered, penetrated, incorporated. His eyes were closed. His chest had burst open. I could see his insides.
A few feet away — Aguella. My lovely Aguella. Tied. Attached. A dead thing grafted onto the creature called Father.
Lackofa. Jicklet. Bodies, more and more, I twisted to see more and more. They were all around me, some seemingly uninjured, others torn apart by impact wounds or by sudden depressurization.
Everywhere the dead. The last of the Ketran people.
“No, you are the last of the Ketran people, Toomin the Ellimist,” Aguella said.
She was before me once more, hovering, her beautiful face, her … all an illusion. The crystal floated. The people lifted. Far below, the lava rivers ran.
“What do you want with us?” I cried.
“I am Father,” Lackofa said. He was gazing down at me from his dock above. Old Forty-two. “I am the life of this planet. All that is here comes from me, belongs to me, is a part of me. All power is mine.”
I had a sudden, searing glimpse, a compressed data file downloaded at ten times normal speed, like a hundred memms exploding in my head at once. I saw Father. He covered every square inch of the moon, every mile of ocean floor, every tiny island, everything from pole to pole. A billion tentacles all waving and waiting.
We were not Father’s only victims. I saw Generationals and Illamans. I saw Capasins. I saw members of races we had encountered on our long, long search. I saw races no Ketran had ever met. All of them dead. None alive but me, if this was truly life. But it mattered little to Father. Even the dead could be used, kept whole, their soulless brains made t
o function.
How many spacecraft had been drawn to this blue moon? Father was old. He had been old before the first sentient lit his first rocket.
“What do you want with me?” I cried.
Menno said, “It is lonely with only the dead for company. I want to play a game, Ellimist.”
The game was all.
Aguella was gone. Dead. For the first few years — decades? centuries? — Father had brought her to me. She had come and Lackofa had come and Menno had come. All my dead brothers and sisters, my friends, my enemies, my love. All dead. But still Father had given me my home in Azure Level, my old home, with my fellows around me. Inidar was there, and Wormer, built of my own memory.
The pure memories, those that Father created out of my mind, were thin, paltry creatures. They did only what they had always done. It was a shame I had never known them better. If my memories had gone deeper Father could have made them more amusing.
Where Father had the body and brain he could be far more creative. Aguella and I propagated. We had three juvies. But they were sad illusions, partial, incomplete: I had never paid any attention to young juvies. My mind could not create them, write them fully. They seemed to come and go at random. I would remember them and they would appear; I would forget them and they would disappear for hours or days.
Lackofa and I grew old together, old friends. We spent our free time together. Recited the old poems together, talked about the good old days. He grew old. So did I.
Jicklet would come by sometimes. We would run into her at the perches. She was quite the respected person now, under consideration for appointment to the Council.
And Menno? For a while it was Menno I played against in every game. Father would match us together. Father enjoyed watching the interaction of hostilities. Menno and I were so different. But over time our hostility paled, faded. It’s hard to hate a dead person. Even one who seems so vital and alive.
How many games had I played with Father? A thousand? Ten thousand? I tried to refuse, but when I did he simply turned off the illusion of home and I saw who and what and where I was. I was back under the sea, tethered for eternity to the tendril that grew inside me, that reached itself into my brain. I was back amidst the endless forest of tentacles with Lackofa and Menno and poor Aguella still floating, dead but never decaying, never disintegrating, never, never at peace.