I opened my eyes and gazed out through the sea. Out over Father’s hideous crop of the dead.
I released the tentacle that held me. It took a long time. Tendrils had penetrated me, entered my brain. There was pain, physical pain that I had not felt in decades. And when I was almost free I nearly drowned. The tentacle had supplied all my needs for food and air and had preserved me from aging. Now I strangled, my lungs seized, my stomach heaved. I moved muscles that had not moved in a lifetime.
I kicked free of the tentacle, free! I opened my wings and flew slowly upward through the water, rose to the surface. Air!
Free! My face out of the water, untethered, free!
Could I fly? Could I possibly fly? How to get my wings above the surface? Impossible. Im —
It came like a tidal wave. A roaring waterfall of sights, sounds, images, ideas, emotions. Overwhelming. I was swept away by it, a free flyer in a hurricane.
All the minds I had downloaded into mine, they were all there, all crowded now into my own limited Ketran brain. I was a computer running a thousand sims at once. My own body seemed to exist in infinite variations. I had hands, feet, wings, tentacles, stingers, prods, claws, feelers; I had eyes of every kind, I could see light all across the spectrum, I could see X rays and cosmic rays and microwaves; I had ears to hear only the deepest bass notes, and ears to hear only the highest pitches, and ears to hear a fuzzball floating on a breeze at a thousand yard’s distance.
And all of it, all those sense memories, all crammed into my own inadequate body and brain.
I fought down the rush, the deluge. I surfaced again, me, Toomin, the gamer who called himself Ellimist. I was in control. No, not control. No. All I could do was suppress the waiting onslaught. I couldn’t use it. Couldn’t open the door to it and use it without being overwhelmed.
I swam, scared now, staggered by what I had done, lost. I swam beneath the bright glowing disc of the planet above, beneath the white and brown moon, beneath the warmth of the distant sun.
I swam for a long time, but I was not lost. We had often used this moon of Father’s as a game board, Father and I. I knew where each little island lay and in a few exhausting hours I lay prostrate on soggy soil.
After a while I opened my wings to the breeze and let them dry. The riot in my head was still there, still clamoring. A mob held at bay by flimsy gates.
When I was dry I took to the air. I flew for the first time in so long that I could not help but cry. I flew on the lift of my own wings, above the almost-endless sea, above the awful crop of the dead that still lay tethered to Father.
They were deteriorating now, of course. Father no longer kept them safe from age and the rotting effects of the water. He no longer nourished them. They had reached their final deaths. The entire moon was a graveyard.
I flew and searched. I had never seen the place I was looking for but I knew it existed. Father had let us play across the surface of his world, but there had been blank zones, areas that simply never appeared. What secrets were there in those concealed redoubts?
I flew and caught a nice tail breeze. I was hungry. Amazing! I was tired. Wonderful! I was free.
Alone.
Ahead I saw the outlines of what I had expected to find. A hidden island. Larger than the rest and higher. It was dry compared to the other lands of this moon. It was thickly covered with vegetation, mostly green with some startling swatches of orange and red.
Here and there, nestled between the trees, were spacecraft. Some had been there so long they were completely overgrown with vines and moss and trees. Some looked like they might have crashed just weeks or at most months before.
They were huge, and they were small. Dangerous-looking and innocuous. Some bristled with weapons or were painted fantastically. Others were utilitarian boxes.
All the ships of all the races that had been lured to Father over the millions of years he lay in wait. I had found Father’s trash dump.
It took a while but I located the Explorer. And I found the Searcher. Searcher was a crumpled, twisted mess. I landed on an undamaged spar and stood there a while.
The gravestone of my people. The last Ketran now stood vigil at the gravestone of his race.
Explorer was in better condition. It lay upside down, which was an inconvenience in gravity, but the engines powered up, and the systems worked. She would fly. I could leave Father’s moon.
And go where?
I was now as alien as it is possible to be. The only Ketran in a galaxy that, with few exceptions, had never known we existed.
And I was an alien who contained within himself a multitude. I was filled up with answers to the questions of tens of thousands of relatives and friends on a thousand worlds. I knew where their loved ones had gone, why they had never returned. I was all that was left of Ket, but I was at the same time all that was left of other long-extinct races and of tribes and families.
I had become a living repository of life in a hundred variations. Life that would remain closed behind the locked doors of my own feeble brain unless … unless I could become something else.
“You were right, Menno. We must adapt, in the end. Adapt or die.”
It took thirty more years to do all I needed to do.
I went through each ship, each wreck, and took what I could use. I burned roads through the jungle and built
