“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 to 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
