He would expect me to save the Laga. He would expect me to annihilate that asteroid and thus spare the peaceful farmers. And the Laga would be the species he hated most.
But, expecting me to save the Laga he would know that I would guess his mind.
What was the answer?
Seconds ticking. Time passing. I had to choose or make no play at all. Three massive asteroids twirled through black space, falling toward three planets.
I lit my engines, moved to position, and opened fire.
The Capasin asteroid heated, cracked, split. I fired again and again, shattering the remaining large chunks.
“Blow your mine!” I cried.
“As I agreed,” Crayak said.
A huge explosion blossomed, a red fireball against black space. The explosion consumed what was left of the Capasin asteroid.
Wrong! I had guessed wrong!
I powered, full speed, to intercept the Laga asteroid. Fast! Faster! Too far to fire with any effect, fire anyway! I aimed, fired, watched my beams impact the distant asteroid. Too far away, and then the asteroid was within the shadow of the planet.
There are no shock waves in space. I did not feel the impact. But I could see the green and blue planet of the Laga shudder. An amazing, awesome, terrible sight. The planet shuddered. Seemed almost to stop, unimaginable momentum checked. Slowly at first, then faster, a crack appeared, many cracks. The land was ripped apart. The seas drained into these craters, into these chasms. The white hot core of the Lagan world met oceans of cold water and exploded with breathtaking violence.
The Lagan world blew apart in steam and fire and debris. Blew apart. A faint bluish haze of atmosphere clung to some of the larger chunks, then evaporated.
Every living creature died.
I had already turned away, already lit my engines, already calculated the utter impossibility, already knew my own impotence, raced for no reason, with no hope, raced and fired and missed, all the while knowing I did it for my own sanity and no other reason.
The Folk died more slowly than the Lagans. The asteroid struck a glancing blow. It shocked the planet, ripped away a continent-sized chunk, and flew on past. The damaged planet wobbled wildly. Every structure on the planet was flattened, every seashore drowned, every lake spilled, millions died.
And yet the Folk lived on.
“Their orbit is badly destabilized,” Crayak observed. “You can see that they will slip slowly, then faster, wobbling, torn by shattering earthquakes, slide down and down the gravity well, atmosphere boiling away, suffocating, a few surviving in trapped pockets of air till of course they are roasted alive by their own sun.”
“Some of them can still be saved!” I cried.
“Yes. And you can stay here and save them, Ellimist. Or you can follow me to the next game. Save a few of these creatures, or perhaps save entire worlds. Your choice. It’s all a part of the game.”
The next game.
And the next.
Game after game, if you could call these bloodbaths games. Each time I played catch-up, always the beast Crayak was there before me, always he controlled the playing field.
His powers were greater than mine. He toyed with me. Mocked and ridiculed me. Worlds died and the galaxy grew emptier and years passed, centuries, millennia, and always I saved only a few, never all.
I could never find the winning move. My concern for the innocent wouldn’t let me walk away. Or was it just my ego?
There had to be another way. I had beaten Father after a long while. There had to be another way.
How had I beaten Father? By possessing a talent he lacked. But music would not stop Crayak.
At last I lit my engines in the wreckage of yet another planet and escaped into Zero-space with Crayak’s triumphant howls in my ears.
No more. No more game. Not until I found a way.
I flew for a long time, longer than I had ever stayed in Zero-space before. I emerged finally at a far edge of the galaxy, billions of light-years from the populated core of old systems and old planets.
Out here the skies were darker. Out here even my sensors could not pick up radio or microwave emissions. There was silence out here. Was there even life?
I surveyed planets and found life, often simple single-celled life, but here and there more advanced forms. On one world I discovered true sentience: a simple, primitive species barely at the dawn of civilization.
I had been in space for millennia now. Thousands of years had passed since I had defeated Father. Thousands more years since I had last encountered another free, rational, equal being — aside from Crayak, and could he be called rational?
I was lonely, desperately lonely.
I no longer had a body in any true sense of the word. I was vastly more machine than creature. And now, in the depths of despair, with disillusion poisoning my mind, with a crushing sense of my own weakness, haunted by guilt, I craved the simplicity and comfort of companionship.
I wanted a body. I wanted to go down to the planet below and fly or at least walk free.
It was not difficult, not really. I dispatched one of my drones down to the surface to take a sample of DNA from the sentient creatures down there. With that DNA sample I easily grew a replica body.
The harder question was how I might inhabit that form. There was no chance, no possibility of using the creature’s own biological brain to store all that I was. My own brain contained hundreds of times the data capacity of that simple organ.
How to carry myself into the creature? I would have to edit my data. Reduce it down to what mattered most: the ideas,
