As I helped bury Tree’s body according to the ritual that would allow her spirit to strengthen the grass, I knew my time with the Andalites was over.
I had gone there making sanctimonious noises about learning, never really expecting to learn anything new. And yet from these primitive, precivilized creatures I had learned how to defeat, or at least resist, Crayak.
More children, some live.
For every race Crayak exterminated, I would plant two new ones.
A hundred thousand generations passed and I had seeded life on as many worlds. I was growing “children” faster than Crayak could exterminate them. My travels, and the database of my multitude, had left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of habitable worlds and systems. And in some cases I simply created habitable worlds where only barren land had been: Melting ice caps to release water was one method, introducing oxygen-producing plant species was another.
I had the advantage now. Crayak had to try to find my new species, simple peoples who did not announce their presence with radio emissions. Primitive species hiding amidst the billions of planets.
And, for the first time, I grew a wholly new species. They were invented in my body/ship, created of bits and pieces of DNA. I accented their intelligence. I quashed their aggressiveness.
I called them Pemalites.
To the Pemalites I gave technology. They became an advanced species within a few decades of my creating them. As their creator, I gave them laws: They would never practice violence, and they would conceal their existence as long as possible.
And I gave them a mission: to carry life everywhere.
With all my powers I still could not equal the volume of work done by the Pemalites. They took to the stars in a cloud of ships, carrying plant and animal species with them as they went. They spread life like a benign contagion.
Not even Crayak could find them all. Nor even a fraction of them all. Life was winning the race against death. Good was outrunning evil.
In all that time, millennia, I had not encountered Crayak. But eventually we must meet.
It happened without warning. I emerged from Z-space in a previously unvisited solar system. A massive jolt hit me before I could so much as switch on my sensors. An energy beam of shocking power.
For a split second I was simply overwhelmed. Every system flickered. Every synapse and connection stuttered. It was a blow that would have killed me ten thousand years earlier.
But I was no longer quite the creature I’d been when Crayak had last seen me. I had followed the same theory for my own survival as I had for the survival of life itself: I had grown, replicated, expanded.
I had broken “myself” into several dozen separate semibiological ships. I was three dozen crystal/ships, all connected, all united by real-time communications on several different levels at once: everything from simple microwave and laser to more subtle connections based on mind-crystal harmonics.
Crayak’s assault annihilated three of my portions. But that was less than a tenth of what now constituted the Ellimist.
Crayak still inhabited his dark, gloomy world. Still surrounded himself with sycophants and toadies. Still possessed the weapons and abilities he’d had. And now his power was not so much greater than mine. If at all.
“It seems I have survived,” I said to him. “Let’s see if you do as well.”
I aimed and I fired with everything I had.
Crayak’s dark planetoid staggered. Huge chunks, chunks the size of mighty mountains, exploded into space.
“You’ve grown,” Crayak sneered.
“And you have not. Life has advantages over death.”
“Only the most temporary advantages, Ellimist. Life is short. Death is eternal.”
“You race from place to place, a fool trying to stamp out a contagion. You’re too slow. Life has outrun you.”
“Life, no. But you, Ellimist, yes, you have complicated my plans. So now, with deep regret, I must end our little game.”
“I see. You lack the courage to play a game you might lose. A coward after all.”
“A survivor, Ellimist.”
He fired.
The battle was on. He fired, I fired. I threw nuclear missiles at him and replaced them swiftly — one of my “portions” contained an arms factory. The missiles exploded against his force field, sapping his power, dumping the radiation of a quasar down on him and his creatures.
He blazed at me with gravity distorters that twisted and turned space itself and bent and broke me.
I struck back with countermeasures to blind and confuse him. And then Crayak turned and ran.
No. He would not escape me. I was going to follow him, hunt him down, and annihilate him.
I chased him into Zero-space. We carried our battle into another system. The two of us orbited a massive star and sucked the energy from it to keep hacking away at each other. We hurled asteroids, we warped the form of space itself, we stabbed at each other with energy beams.
Crayak ran again. And I followed him. The taste of victory was in my mouth, the hunger for revenge and vindication.
I struck at him with beams of energy powered by a star. Unimaginable force. I missed and struck a planet and vaporized an ocean. The species that inhabited that world would not last more than a year on their damaged world.
But there was no time to stop. I told myself I would make it all right when Crayak was dead. I told myself I would come back when Crayak was gone once and for all.
But it was I who ran from the next battle. And the next. Crayak had learned from me. He added to his own powers and so did I.
He ran. I chased. I ran. He chased. And as the battle raged through normal space and Zero-space we each grew. That was the strange paradox of it: We each grew stronger. Each more deadly. Each more accomplished at inflicting pain and damage on the other.
We had become symbiotic at
