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.
But it was more than the loss of illusions that motivated me to play. It was that I had nothing else. Nothing but the game.
The game and the tiny flicker of undying hope.
What a sad, desperate illusion. How ludicrous to cling to the hope of escape. And escape to what? Where would I go? What would I be? I was part of Father. There was no Toomin, no Ellimist. There was only Father.
And yet … I still lived. I still played the game and made my own gaming decisions.
Father needed me, I had long since recognized that fact. He kept me alive to play. Because though I lost each game, I was his best opponent.
“I want to play a game,” Father said. He had acquired a new face, his own face, or a facsimile, a sort of “game name.” He took Ketran form, an oldster, a Wise One. He flew to my dock, hovered, and repeated, “Shall we immerse?”
“On the other side,” I said.
Father played many games. Many games. I believe he had culled them from a thousand races, all over the galaxy. We had played games not much different than our own old Alien Civilizations. We had simple games of reflex. Killing games. Games of forethought involving the complex movement of pieces on a flat plane or within a cube or within n-dimensional space. Games that were games of games.
It was all I had. I had begged Father to kill me, to end it. But of course he refused. I had tried deliberately losing, hoping to make the games boring to Father. But Father was patient: He could outwait me. For years, decades, it didn’t matter to him. And in the end I always came back to the game.
You make what you can of the life you have, I suppose.
The new game began.
It was different. Father had acquired some new species.
I was all at once in a close, dank, almost airless room. At least it seemed airless to me, a Ketran. Though in all fairness I now lived out my life smothered beneath miles of ocean and tethered to a tendril so I was hardly one to complain.
Nevertheless, it seemed airless. Not a large room, perhaps a hundred feet square. There were creatures, odd, misshapen things that seemed to be an amalgamation of a dozen different races. Faces with two eyes front and a third eye facing back. Their hair was long, running all the way down their spiked backs to the floor. All different colors: green hair and red hair and yellow. Black faces and white and purple. Arms seemed to be almost optional; some had three, others as many as nine.
They were definitely new. Like no race I’d ever seen before. Father had made a new acquisition.
I knew instinctively that we were aboard a ship. But it moved. Not the smooth acceleration of a spacecraft. This ship moved up and down and sideways as if it were being buffeted by a storm, or even floating on a watery sea.
The creatures sat at tables with their individualistic bodies splayed out comfortably. They were enjoying drinks. Perhaps mild intoxicants. And they were watching us.
We, me and Father in the person of Menno, were performers at one end of the room on a raised platform. We each held a tool of some sort. A long thing, nearly my own body length, a sort of flattened, whimsically shaped board. And stretched along the board were seven taut strings. There was a mouthpiece as
