“The Ellimist,” the creature said with a laugh I heard deep in my mind. “I have seen your handiwork in many places through this galaxy. I am pleased to meet you at last. I’ve been looking for you.”
I could not see him; he hid his face from me.
“You know my name,” I said, trying to conceal any slight sign of fear or agitation.
“Oh, but you’re famous in so many places. The Great Cosmic Do-gooder.”
“You have the advantage of me,” I said. “I do not know you.”
Then he showed himself to me. I saw with a shock that he was like me: As much machine as biological. But his biology was entirely different. He was evolved for the surface, or perhaps even for a subterranean life. No wings would ever lift those massive, muscled limbs. And no creature with that single, dominating red eye could ever navigate easily in three dimensions.
“I am called Crayak. Of course, that’s just my game name.” He laughed a knowing laugh, a ridiculing, belittling sound.
“You are a gamer?”
“Aren’t we all?”
“No longer,” I lied. “I no longer play a game. I do what I can to make this a better galaxy.”
“Well, you’ve done a wonderful job of that here,” Crayak said. “I can see plainly what happened: Your clever debris barrier gave them the idea of using nuclear mines. One planet destroyed the other, and, lacking a foe, lacking a challenge, the destroyer itself fell into barbarism and decay. Yes, quite a nice job.”
It was true. There was no doubting it. Part of me wondered how it was that Crayak could read the signs so well. But mostly a single phrase went round and round in my head: brilliant loser. I had lost. With all the best of intentions, I had annihilated one species and reduced another.
I lost to Inidar, lost to Wormer, lost to Aguella. I had lost in a different way to Menno: By resisting his call for adaptation I had led the last of my people into Father’s snare. And I had lost to Father, in the end, by becoming Father myself. What was I, after all, with all Father’s victims contained within me? I was but a high-tech version of Father.
And now I had fallen victim to arrogance. I’d begun to believe in my own moral superiority. My own invincibility.
“You’ve been following me?” I asked Crayak.
“Yes.” He waited. He knew what I wanted to ask, but he would make me ask it of him.
“How many others … like this?”
“Not many,” Crayak said. “No, often you’ve succeeded admirably. Your solution to the Mamathisk self-annihilation game was brilliant. Subtle. Effective. You redirected them to a life of productive peace. I had to go in and destroy them myself.”
I had begun to revive a little as he described my success. Then, his last statement.
“You did what?”
“I reversed the effects of your meddling,” Crayak said. “The Mamathisk reverted to cannibalism when they experienced repeated crop failures. A plant parasite. Impossible for them to stop. But as you know, cannibalism is a losing adaptation. The Mamathisk are effectively extinct.”
“Are you mad?!” I cried.
“No, I don’t think so, Ellimist. I’m just a gamer. Like you. But with a perhaps different philosophy. I don’t play the game to save the species, but to annihilate it. I play the game of genocide. This galaxy has even more potential games within it than the galaxy I left behind. I will cleanse this galaxy of all life, too. Then, when no sentient thing is left alive, I will kill you, Ellimist. That’s my game. Shall we play?”
How many years, how many decades had I played Father’s games? Losing every game. Until by sheer luck I found the game he could not win.
I couldn’t afford to lose that way to Crayak. The game pieces had become real beings. We played for real lives. And I played the weaker side: I had to save; he had only to destroy.
And yet, here is the shameful truth: I needed Crayak as Father had needed me.
Crayak disappeared into Z-space and I followed him as well as anyone can follow another through that shifting nothingness. I found him waiting for me in a solar system with three inhabited planets. One of those worlds was the Capasin home world. I had avoided ever visiting the Capasin world. I didn’t want to be tempted by notions of revenge.
Crayak had already been some days in the system. He had laid out his game pieces with terrifying ruthlessness.
“Here is the game, Ellimist: Three worlds. Each inhabited by a sentient race: Laga, the Folk, and the Capasins. I believe you may know of the Capasins. There are three asteroids strategically placed. Three impacts within the next five minutes of time. Except that one of those asteroids has already been mined and will explode into harmless debris before it can hit — you have my word on that.”
“The word of a mass murderer.”
“Yes, but an honest murderer,” he said, and laughed at his own wit. “You have time to reach and destroy one asteroid. Not the other two. If you guess wrong and destroy the mined asteroid then two planets will die. If you guess right and detonate one of the unmined asteroids, only a single world will die.”
I wanted to rage, to curse the foul beast. No time! No time to cry foul; he would only laugh. Five minutes. Less now.
All data now! What did I know? The Capasin: civilized but extremely violent when they felt threatened — as they had upon receiving the earliest Ketran broadcasts. The Laga, subtechnological farmers. The Folk, not yet capable of spaceflight but technologically skilled and obsessed by a eugenic vision that motivated them to kill upwards of ninety percent of their own offspring for real or imaginary defects.
Where was that mine? That was the issue, not which species deserved to survive.
