I waited as my fleet of asteroids hurtled through space. And when the time came I slowed them, braked, nudged them into place. It took the better part of a year.
And now the two planets were approaching convergence again, and I could see the war preparations in full swing: ships refitting and topping off their fuel.
I waited till the two worlds were just edging into battle range. And then, one by one, I blew the asteroids apart. Seventy-four asteroids of differing sizes became tens of thousands of meteors of every size. They were a dense, deadly cloud of projectiles that with each orbit would rip up anything that launched from either planet.
The Jallians and Inner Worlders would be unable to reach each other at least till such time as they developed vastly more capable spacecraft.
I had created an impenetrable orbital minefield.
The Jallian war with the Inner Worlders was over. And I had found my mission, my purpose in the galaxy.
It was as if the galaxy had conspired to make sense of my disjointed, fractured, bizarre life.
I had been a wastrel Ketran gamer. I had been a survivor of mass destruction. I had been a Z-spaceship-captain. I had been a helpless captive, forced to be a new type of gamer. I had evolved into something the galaxy had never seen before, a melding of many technologies, the minds of many civilizations, all flowing in and through a matrix of music.
And now that strange resume seemed to match perfectly with a job that needed doing. I would be a peacemaker. And more: I would foster the growth and advancement of species. I would teach them the ways of peace. The massacre of my own people by the Capasins would not be repeated on any other world. Not so long as I was present!
I flew Z-space, emerged here and there, searching the galaxy, using every bit of my vast trove of knowledge to look, to see, to feel, to learn, to understand. I listened to the music of evolution itself, or so I flattered myself.
Life was everywhere. A thousand thousand planets teeming with life. Most of it very primitive, but why should that stop me? I could step in early, I could “intrude,” in Menno’s phrase. And yet, I would intrude with exquisite sensitivity and the purest motivations. I would create harmonies. Boldness allied with restraint and a minimalist aesthetic, all in the service of moral certainties: that peace was better than war, that freedom was better than slavery, that knowledge was better than ignorance.
Oh, yes, the galaxy would be a wonderful place under my guidance.
I flew from star to star, world to world. Here I lifted up a failing race; there I ended a plague; in another place I fed the hungry. A century flew past. And another, and more and more. Time was almost meaningless to me now. My challenges were vast and worthy, they kept my mind engaged. I made friends on many worlds, became an honorary member of a hundred families, clans, tribes, species, races. They spoke of me, of the Ellimist as I had become known, with respect, gratitude, awe.
And then the day came that I happened by sheer coincidence to find myself within a relatively short distance of the scene of my first triumph. A thousand years had passed since I had stopped the war of Inner Worlders and Jallians.
Finding myself so near, I returned to savor. To reminisce.
I returned to find no signs of life on the Jallian world. The planet was sterile, its atmosphere almost gone.
The Inner World still teemed with life, but I caught no sign of microwave or radio or laser emissions. No satellites orbited the planet. The Inner Worlders were reduced in numbers and existing at a primitive technological level.
It took only a short while for me to reconstruct what had happened. It was easy enough once I found a single, still-orbiting mine. A primitive device, produced in great numbers by the Inner Worlders. They had launched huge numbers of them, laid them in the path of the onrushing Jallian world. Many of the mines had been annihilated by my meteor cloud. But many had survived, and then survived reentry to explode on contact with the surface of the Jallian planet.
Even now, a thousand years later, the radiation could be read. Even now the craters could be seen from space.
Morbidly I went about the work of compiling every detail. More than seven hundred impacts. Seven hundred nuclear explosions.
“Not such an easy game to win, is it?”
For a moment I thought the voice was my own. The tone of sarcasm and deprecation mirrored my own self-directed rage. But then my sensors lit up. Something was emerging from Z-space. Something big.
I spun, readied my defenses, still confident that nothing, no matter how unexpected, could really challenge me.
But the ship that appeared suddenly in normal space was nothing I had ever seen. Nothing that any of my multitude had ever seen.
This ship was not a ship: It was a planetoid, large enough to be a small moon. And yet it was Z-space capable. Incredible! Impossible! An illusion, it had to be.
I swept the planetoid with my sensors and I could literally feel the entity’s acquiescence. It invited me to look. It did not care. It did not fear me.
There were life-forms on the planetoid, perhaps twenty thousand, in a wide array of species, most naturally evolved, but some, I suspected, were experimental. Created.
But there was only one life-form that truly concerned me: My sensors showed lines of power, raw, snapping power connecting this one creature to all the other life-forms.
I had not felt fear in so long … I almost did not recognize the emotion. Fear. I feared
