I acted before thinking. Acted on pure instinct. I extended a force field between the Jallian ship and the Inner Worlders. Both sides fired. Neither side’s weapons penetrated my force field.
I moved closer and let them see me. How it must have shocked them! Their ships were boxes of steel and titanium and composites. Mine was a living thing: crystal and flesh and composites all melded together, all wrapped in force fields of unchallengeable power. I was a visitor from a future they had only barely begun to glimpse.
By all rights they should have powered down and waited to learn my pleasure. Far from it. Both sides took less than five minutes to touch me with their active sensors, to feel around me, half-sighted.
And then the Inner Worlders opened fire. On me! The Jallians used the distraction to fire on the Inners, and in seconds what had been a two-front war became a three-way free-for-all.
I almost laughed. But the sheer malevolence of these two species was disgusting. I could have destroyed both fleets with a shrug of my wings.
I stretched out my power and wrapped my fields around them. I drained their power, damped their engines, scrambled their sensors, and left them drifting, helpless through space.
Then I opened communications.
“Your war is over,” I announced.
Two sets of furious faces appeared to me. The Jallians were represented by a multi-armed slug of sorts. She had no name, only a title, a designation. She was Life-giver of the Jain Sea. And indeed she was giving birth as she appeared to my enhanced sight. One after another, small, squirming grubs slid gooey and red from slits arranged in a circle around her middle. The grubs were picked up and carried away by attendants — the type of creatures I’d seen writhing in vacuums just moments earlier.
Life-giver of the Jain Sea was enraged. “Who are you, nothing, to interfere with me? I speak to a nothing! Obey me!”
She spoke a strange language, but with the database I had available there were few languages not immediately understandable to me.
The Inner Worlders had a more pleasing appearance, at least to my sensibilities. For one thing, they were winged, and I had the Ketran prejudice in favor of the flighted. And they had multiple, bright yellow eyes. The one who spoke for them called himself Captain Whee, which had a certain whimsical sound to me.
Captain Whee was polite, but still managed to convey hostility. “Stranger, please stand away. We have business with the Jallian vermin.”
“I am unwilling to allow this slaughter to continue,” I said mildly.
“This is not your concern,” Captain Whee pointed out. “But we do admire your evident technological superiority. Were you to side with us and exterminate the Jallians, we would be happy to ally ourselves with you.”
“That’s a very gracious offer,” I said dryly. “But I don’t think there’s going to be any exterminating.”
“Nothing! Disappear, nothing! Avoid my notice!” the Life-giver roared. She could not believe that I refused to obey. It was an arrogance that was perhaps a function of her essential biology. Perhaps it is hard to remain humble when you are known as Life-giver.
But what was odd, what was surprising and disturbing to me, was my own emotional reaction: I was happy. I was talking to real, living creatures whose every word and motion were not mine to invent.
From the Jallian planet a second huge ship broke from orbit and vectored at full speed toward us. Moments later the Inner Worlders responded with a virtual cloud of their small, sleek ships.
Were they intending to attack me or each other? Did it matter? Either was madness.
It was the game, all over again: Alien Civilizations. No different than any of the many scenarios Wormer or Inidar or Aguella and I had played.
The question was, How I should play it? I had already pulled a Menno: I had intruded into the game. Made myself a central player, onstage, rather than offscreen.
And yet I was still drawn to the subtler approach. What would either species learn if I simply annihilated their ships in a display of crude power? And was that really my place?
I did not ask myself whether it was my business to interfere at all. It was not that I confused game with reality. I simply saw these two objectionable species as fools trapped in a pointless hostility. Didn’t I have the right to intervene? Of course I did.
I was not Menno, I was Toomin. I was Ellimist: the brilliant loser. But now I knew so much more. My wisdom was deep. My powers were vast. Surely … and then there was the core fact that I was not playing against anyone. No opponent, just the game itself.
The minimal move, then.
If this were really a game I would simply alter the orbits of the two planets so that they did not pass so closely. Slow them down or speed them up to matching, opposite orbits. Put their sun between them. They lacked the technology to fight a war across those distances.
But great as my powers were, they were not that great. And yet I could surely move an asteroid. Or two. Or a hundred.
The system’s asteroid belt was just beyond the orbit of Inner World. It was a simple calculation, well within my abilities. And I had sufficient brute power in my body/ship.
I left the two sides to murder each other and withdrew to the asteroid belt. It would take some time: Asteroids are not rocks to be casually flung about. But perhaps the two sides, seeing what I was about, would suspend their battle.
I used my body/ship to nudge an asteroid, not a large one, out of its orbit. My engines were more than capable. The asteroid slid down the gravity well, vectored to find a new, lower, faster orbit.
I worked and waited. In a few weeks’ time
