I slowed, floated, righted, deployed my wings, and settled down to stand upon the water, invisible to the solemn, slow-moving Pangabans.
I like to feel the texture of the game. I like to be inside it. Only there, only with the alien wind in your wings and the ground beneath your pods (or water, in this case), can you fully know the place. And the place is integral to the species.
I looked up at the unbroken blanket of gray clouds. I couldn’t let in too much light or the entire ecosystem would collapse. Just a glimpse.
I felt a thrill of anticipation. The Pangabans were on the verge of an experience they could not even guess at. Their eyes would be opened for the first time. Their universe would expand by a factor of a billion percent.
I smiled. And I memmed the game core: Part the clouds.
And the clouds parted.
It was night. The clouds tore apart, a slow, silent rip. And above the Pangabans the stars appeared. And into that swatch of speckled blackness rolled the planet, all green and blue and orange-scarred.
Slowly, one by one, fearful, the Pangabans did what none of their species had ever done before: They looked up.
They looked up and moaned their gurgling cries.
I heard Inidar’s memm in my mind. “Shall we accelerate?”
“Fire it up,” I answered and memmed the game core.
A hurricane! A hurricane of wind and water and earth and time itself. A swirling madness of change. This was the ultimate moment in the game. We had made our changes and now watched time reel forward.
I broke out the displays: DNA mutation, climate changes, technology index, population. For the first two hundred thousand years there was very little change. Then I began to spot the DNA differences in sight and body shape. The Pangabans were selecting for longer range vision, for color vision, for neck length.
And then, all at once, trouble. The algae count was dropping like a stone. It couldn’t be! Increased sunlight almost inevitably means an increase in flora. But it was true, the seas were dying.
And then, as I stood untouched amidst the hurricane of change, the first of the carnivore eels emerged to attack the Pangabans. The Pangaban population was decimated in a flash of time.
DNA evolution began to come to the rescue of the Pangabans. They selected for size, downtrending. The smaller were faster, able to evade the eels. Smaller and smaller till the once-towering Pangabans were scarcely larger than one of us Ketrans.
The eel threat diminished. And now at last came the first fluctuation in the technology index. The Pangabans had learned to make a tool. A weapon, of course. A simple spear that could be used to turn the tables on the eels. In short order Pangabans were hunting and eating the eels. Primitive seine-fishers had become true predators.
A million years passed and a very different species now crossed the planet’s seas armed with spears and bows. They formed hierarchies dominated by warriors. Their culture shifted ground, favoring a sky god who brought the gift of weapons.
Yes, yes, it was working well enough. Another million years. Perhaps two, and they would learn to move beyond weapons, to …
And then, in a flash so sudden it was barely a blip of time, every index went flat. The Pangabans had disappeared. Extinct.
I cursed and heard Inidar’s memmed laughter.
I reeled back and slowed the playback speed. There it was: The Gunja Wave, still rodentine, but now walking erect, arrived on the Pangaban world in astoundingly primitive spacecraft and promptly killed and ate the Pangabans. They hunted them to extinction and left the planet devoid of its only intelligent species.
“Shall we call the game?” Inidar offered.
I sighed. “What was your move?”
“Oh, a very small one,” Inidar said. “I increased their rate of reproduction by a very small percentage. This heightened their natural aggression. And I guessed that your move would be to open the Pangaban skies. Population growth pressures, a limited food supply, and the ability to see the Pangaban surface very clearly … my Gunja Wave wanted to eat your species.”
“Yes, and they did,” I said. “I call the game.”
“You have to learn to avoid naïveté, Ellimist. It’s not the good and worthy who prosper. It’s just the motivated.”
“Yes, and you can go surface,” I muttered. “See you at the perches for free flight?”
“I’m there, Ellimist.”
I shut down the game and opened my eyes to the real world around me.
I am a Ketran. My planet is called Ket. I mention this fairly self-evident fact only because of the plans to open our uninet to visiting off-worlders. The time is coming when a uninet publication may be read by an Illaman or a Generational, not necessarily by Ketrans alone. I don’t want to seem chauvinistic.
Off-worlders are usually astounded by the facts of life on my planet. It’s fascinating to speak with them because they can give you such a new perspective on what seems so normal to us. The earliest Generation 9561s who arrived to investigate Ket failed even to notice us at first. Oh, they noticed the crystals of course, they weren’t blind, but it never occurred to them to look for intelligent life anywhere other than on the planet surface.
The surface of Ket is quite inhospitable to most life-forms, covered as it is by acid seas, lava flows, and strangle-vines. But Generation 9561 (actually they were Generation 9559, then) were gamely wandering around in environmental suits taking samples when one of their air-skimmers accidentally ran smack into a mast of the Great Southern Polar Crystal and a first contact was made that surprised everyone.
Life? On a vast crystal floating three hundred miles above the
