It would mean that, for a while at least, there would be two of me. The complete unabridged Ellimist, and a sort of sketch of myself.
I spent a year deciding what should and what should not be placed into the limited biological creature I’d cloned. It was a wonderful year. A year of learning. For what could be more deeply educational than poring over all you know and deciding what truly matters?
In the end what I placed inside the creature was me. Toomin. The Ketran gamer.
I kept the child me. Strange, but all these years later, all these battles later, it was Toomin I valued most.
I brought Aguella’s memory: my one great love. And I carried Lackofa with me, too, for his skepticism, his integrity, and his sense of humor.
And to my surprise I found I could not do without Menno. Rebellion, too, was something I needed.
I took sketch memories, overviews without detail, intuitions. Strange, but I did not wish to edit out all the terrible things. I could not allow myself to remove the destruction of my home world, or the disaster of crashing the Explorer, or my long captivity under Father. I could not even bring myself to edit Crayak.
But at last I was done. I poured this abbreviated version of myself into the brain of the clone and all at once I was alive in two places, in two forms simultaneously.
I looked at myself as my new self looked at me. With eyes and ears and deep-probing sensors I observed the biological me: I was a strong beast standing firmly on four hooved legs. I had a slender upper body, not so much different from my own Ketran torso, but with only two arms and no wings at all.
The four eyes were familiar but on this creature evolution had invented the wonderful device of movable stalks so that two of the eyes could be aimed in divergent directions.
I had shaggy blue-and-tan fur and a tail weapon of limited utility. I ate by running, by crushing grasses within my hollow hooves and digesting bulk and nutrients. I had no mouth.
At the same time I looked at the older, fuller me, the machine-spacecraft me, through two large eyes and two stalk eyes. I seemed vast and overwhelming and complex. I, the new, biological me, stood on an open platform, sheltered only by a force field that held space at bay. The old me was a machine, there was no denying that. I could still see a wizened, aged, desiccated Ketran enmeshed in the gears, so to speak, but the soaring crystal spars and titanium machines and composite engine housings and weapons systems extended now for a mile or more.
It made me sad, somehow, to really see myself from the outside. In my mind’s eyes I was still a Ketran male. To any other eye I was a terrifying device of unrivaled power.
The me that was the clone flew down to the planet.
I landed in a wild, untamed wilderness of tall blue grass and fantastically colored trees. I sent my shuttle back into orbit and tried out my legs.
Wonderful! With each step I tasted the earth. My nose filled with the scents of flowers, filled my brain. It had been so long since I had smelled anything. The body was supple, swift, strong. The tail could be used to stab at anything approaching me from behind.
I was no fool; I knew this tail meant there were predators in this ecosystem, but I was not overly concerned. I carried a small beam weapon strapped around my waist and adapted for my physical hands.
I walked through the forest, pushing and grunting my way through dense thickets, shouldering aside clumps of grass that would suddenly adhere together and become a virtual wall.
I had a goal. I had surveyed the planet and knew it well. I emerged from the forest into openness, a field where the grass had been hacked down to form a sort of rough lawn.
Simple habitations had been created by scooping out shallow bowls in the ground and half-covering them with graceful thatched roofs.
I stepped into the open. Three of my “fellow” blue-tan creatures were within a hundred yards. Their reaction to me was instantaneous. They charged me at top speed, surrounded me, and twisted around awkwardly to aim their pointed tail blades at me.
Three stubby blades quivered nervously within a few feet of my vulnerable throat.
Not quite the welcome I’d been hoping for.
I held up my hands, palms out, to show that I carried no weapon and meant no harm. But of course this gesture was less meaningful when dealing with a species that carried its weapon in its tail.
The three creatures flashed a series of complex hand signals at one another. If I’d had my full multitude with me I’d have been able to instantly decipher this gestural language. But I was a more limited me. I could guess but no more.
I decided to try and copy some of the gestures. The creatures watched but were quickly frustrated. Evidently I was speaking gibberish.
And now it was becoming more clear that the three were discussing whether or not to kill me outright as a dangerous stranger. Two of them were quite intent on this and made wild, angry gestures. They cavorted, rose on hind legs, and darted their hindquarters toward me, stabbing the air with their tail blades.
The third, a smaller creature with restless stalk eyes and contrastingly calm main eyes, restrained them, but only with difficulty.
I could sense quite clearly their emotional states. It wasn’t just the body language. They seemed capable of projecting a sort of basic emotional language by some means I could not discern.
<I’m not an enemy,> I said. I said it without thinking, automatically accessing my communications system — a system that was part of my other body, no part of this form.
And yet, I saw a subtle relaxation on
