But I knew this: As simple and primitive as I might be, I could literally touch and move the vibrating lines of space-time.
Was I grown extremely big? Or had I shrunk to submolecular size? Size meant nothing. There was no size in this place.
I lived, and that was all I knew. I was alive without form, alive without synapses to fire, without food to devour, without limbs to control. I saw without eyes and tasted without tongue and moved with no wings or pods or engines to move me.
This I knew.
And I knew one other thing as well, a lesson hard-learned from millennia of war: My foe would find me.
An absurdly rare event, a cosmic coincidence had fashioned me. The odds? The odds were billions to one, trillions to one, incalculable.
But those were odds of this thing happening once. The odds of it happening again were great. Crayak learned. Crayak watched. Once I revealed myself to him, once I acted in such a way as to show myself, Crayak would find the way to follow me here. And as I was unchanged in mind and morality, so he would be unchanged.
Carefully, frightened at last into true humility, I began to study this new environment. I found I could see into the real world, see the events and peoples who made up these space-time strands.
They seemed to rise and mature and age and fall in the blink of an eye, and as I watched and studied and learned I knew that hundreds of thousands and finally millions of years were passing in real space.
I saw Crayak out there, still at his evil work. I saw lines go dark, unravel, coil up into nothingness as he massacred planets. Billions of lives become nothingness.
I had planted a great deal of life, and my Pemalites still lived to spread more, but the tide was turning once more in Crayak’s favor.
At last, knowing I had so much more still to learn, knowing my own deep inadequacy, I struck back.
Crayak entered a system of nine planets orbiting a medium yellow star. Two of the worlds, a red planet and a blue, were populated. The red planet was already doomed, its atmosphere was oozing away, and Crayak could do no real harm there.
But the blue planet teemed with life. The dominant species type were huge, brutish beasts in a fantastic array of forms. Giant, slow-moving plant eaters and violent, rapacious killers with tearing teeth and deadly talons. There was intelligence there, but no sentience, I could see it so clearly.
Not in the great, domineering brutes, but in a handful of small, swift, fur-bearing prey animals did the future of this world lie.
They had only to be left alone and in forty or sixty million years there would emerge a great people.
Crayak saw none of his, he saw only that there was life there. He aimed his weapons at the blue planet and fired, and I drew gently on the fabric of space-time and his weapons struck nothing. The planet was gone, halfway around its orbit.
He tried again, and each time I applied my crude but powerful countermeasures.
And then, in confusion, Crayak withdrew to consider.
I knew he would be with me soon.
“So here you are, Ellimist.”
“I’ve been expecting you, Crayak.”
He appeared to me as he always had. As a dark monster. I knew how I appeared to him: I had mastered the simple trick of projecting myself in whatever guise suited me best. I appeared to him as a simple Ketran.
“Your advantage is gone, Ellimist.”
“We are equals now,” I agreed. “You can no longer harm me personally. You understand that?”
“I cannot harm you, Ellimist, but I can hurt you. I can kill the things you love.”
“You can try, Crayak. But in the end you are a fool. Do you not see that everything you do I can undo? You can slaughter and I can reverse time itself to restore life. But I tell you this: If we carry on our war inside the bowels of space-time itself we will end by collapsing this universe and killing ourselves as well as every thing in it.”
“It’s a pointless game that has no winner,” Crayak admitted. “But what else is there for the two of us?”
“We could watch. We could admire the advance of evolution.”
“Unacceptable. I would choose my own destruction over that. To live for all of eternity as a passive observer? There must be a game. If there is no game there is nothing for me.”
“Then let us play a game, Crayak.”
“There will have to be rules.”
“Yes, there will have to be rules.”
“And a winner?”
“That, too, though it will take millions of years.”
Crayak smiled his hideous smile. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then come,” I said, “let us play the final game.”
I told the dying human, “Now you know who I am. What I am.”
“Yeah. You were a kid. Like me in some ways, a kid who got in way too deep and couldn’t get back out.”
“A kid.”
“You were trapped. You still are. I’ve been trapped.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Was I one of your game pieces? Were all six of us just game pieces?”
I considered that for a moment. Who is to say who is piece and who is player? How often had I wondered whether I myself was just a game piece in a still larger game whose players laughed at my pretensions?
“I did not cause you to be one of the six. You are … you were … a happy accident. An unwitting contribution from the human race to its own survival.”
The human was silent. No begging, no pleading for life. At the end, acceptance came even to this strong, turbulent spirit.
“You said I could ask one more question.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t ask if we win, I can’t ask if it will all turn out okay.”
“I
