The Ellimist Chronicles

by K. A. Applegate

  Naturally we had secondhand reports from the other crystals who’d encountered them and gone on to do a Dance By with us. Just last year we’d done the Dance with the Equatorial High Crystal Two, our sister crystal, and they’d had an encounter with Polar just three years before that.

  Still, getting secondhand reports from three years before is not the way to understand a civilization. And in any case, some of what the Two’s had told us about the Polars was a bit strange.

  For one thing the Polars supposedly were very involved in quill coloring. Not of itself a bad thing, I guess, but weird. I mean, you have the quills you’re born with, why would you want them to be green or whatever?

  But more profound, the Polars were said to be making great strides in atmospheric communications. This, of course, would be a breakthrough of world-shattering proportions. If anyone could figure out how to punch a wave signal through the background radiation they’d be able to communicate crystal to crystal. We would no longer be a planet of thirty-two independent crystals; we’d have all thirty-two hooked up to a planetary uninet. I’d be able to play against gamers from entirely different crystals!

  I’d be able to lose to people I might never actually see.

  But maybe it was all just rumors. It’s one thing firing electrons through a crystal, it’s a very much harder thing to do it through the air.

  The Dance By of the Polar Orbit High Crystal would not last long, only a few hours. Neither of us was willing to undergo the terrific exertions necessary to slow our momentum and then restart. So we’d have at best three hours where we could free fly across the divide. And individually we’d have far less.

  I was scheduled early when the distance was greatest. I was young. You wouldn’t expect the oldsters to want to free fly for half an hour only to have a ten-minute encounter.

  The whole of society was excited. Me? Not so much. I had other things on my mind.

  I was docked, gliding through a uninet sim of the MCQ3 for the twentieth time, when I heard a voice calling me from very close by. I opened my eyes and there was Aguella. She had come right to my spar.

  “Ellimist. What are you doing?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “It’s time. What, are you ignoring time cues? It’s time! The Dance By.”

  “Oh. Right.” I released my docking talons and peered southward. Polar had been in sight for most of a day now, but it had grown quite a bit larger in the last few hours. In fact my first thought was that we were going to intersect.

  Aguella was grinning expectantly, waiting for something. Waiting for me to notice something. I frowned and returned my attention to Polar. Then I yelled.

  “Hey!”

  Aguella nodded. “Yeah.”

  “They’ve gone asymmetrical. Look at that new growth.” The sphere, or what should have been a sphere, had a definite lump. The lump was only a tenth of the diameter, but way too large to be simply new growth awaiting a trim.

  “Not asymmetrical,” Aguella said. “Or at least that’s not the end goal, I think. I may be wrong, but I suspect a pattern. You can’t see it from here, but I think they’re trying to flatten the sphere in all directions. I think this lump has a matching lump opposite.”

  “Why would they …”

  “Airfoil,” she said triumphantly. “The Polars are making an airfoil.”

  For the first time in seven days I completely forgot about MCQ3. An airfoil! It was something out of fiction. It was no surprise that a sphere was harder to keep lifted than an airfoil. The airfoil could fly into the prevailing breeze and actually derive lift.

  It was the utopian’s answer to engines. Attaching engines to a crystal might destroy social cohesion, but an airfoil design would still require the people to lift. They would just have to lift a lot less. I once read that an efficient airfoil design would allow for half the people to be in free flight at any given time.

  “That would be so breezy if they did it,” Aguella said jealously. “I wonder if we’ll ever try.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. I recalled to mind images of the Wise Ones in council. Half of them were so old they were more drag than lift. I was willing to bet some of them had dropped dead on the spot when they saw the Polar’s airfoil.

  “Come on, let’s get going,” she urged.

  We Four-Effed: flew free, fast, and furious. Not a moment to be lost. Aguella, being female, was faster than me, of course, but she restrained her impatience to allow me to keep up. I rode her wind, staying just behind her. This had the advantage of offering me a view that included both the amazing soon-to-be airfoil and Aguella herself. She had lovely pods.

  Not the point, Toomin, I thought. Not really what you need to be thinking about right now.

  Mones! She was spreading the mones for me!

  For me? No, surely not. Aguella could have any male she wanted. She was beautiful, well formed, sturdy, intelligent, funny, beautiful, very beautiful.

  That was several too many “beautifuls,” I said to myself. It was true then: Aguella was spreading mones. And I was helpless in her slipstream.

  I cut left, clear of her backwash. It slowed me down a bit but that was good. Anything to bring me clear air.

  I sucked fresh air but it was almost too late. My quills were ticklish for sure. How could she do this? She was a fellow gamer! It was an outrage, and with the trip coming up, and the Dance By and … it was a low trick, that was for sure.

  She had to have noticed my sudden, graceless exit. She had to know why I’d done it. Great, now she’d be angry at me, and I was so completely not in the frame of mind to be diplomatic and polite and play it breezy. My brain had crashed.

  “Almost there,” she said. “Look!”

  “What? Look at what?” I yelped.

  “There are the first Polars, just ahead. They look to be about our age.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re not exactly the same age, you know, Aguella.”

  She laughed. It was a disturbing laugh. “We’re almost the same age, Toomin — physically. Now, psychologically …” She laughed again, a mocking, condescending, yet frighteningly intimate laugh.

  I gulped and tried not to read anything into the fact that she had used my chosen name, not my game name. She always called me Ellimist. Never Toomin.

  Oh, this was great. Oh, this was just great.

  I ignored her joke, her laughter, and, as well as I could, the lingering mones. I focused on the Polars.

  There were two or three hundred of them in the air, spread around in an irregular two-mile space. Much as we Equatorials were. Like two sparkling clouds of veiner pests.

  I looked back and saw my own home crystal. It looked very old-fashioned now, dull, compared with the radical Polar design that was now undeniably visible as an eventual airfoil. It made me a little defensive, I guess. Our home was larger, older, and I thought, more beautifully colored. But the Polar was the future, and that crunched.

  I searched the Polars themselves, looking for the artificially colored quills I’d heard about, but they seemed no different than us. They each had “2 plus 4 equals 4 plus 2 and no one the better,” as my presire used to say: two pods, four wings, four eyes, and two arms.

  Aguella and I picked out a pair of Polars who seemed willing to encounter us. They were about our age, both male. One had nice but natural yellow quills and ochre eyes. The other was more notable for his awkwardly large wings. We and they flew to intersection and floated at a polite distance.

  “This is my friend Doffnall,” I said, introducing Aguella by her chosen name. “I am Toomin.”

  “This is my friend Oxagast, and I am Menno,” said the large-winged one.

  “Well encountered,” we all said simultaneously.

  “You have a deep-space probe ready to launch!” Menno blurted.

  He spoke at the very instant that I said, “You’re configuring an airfoil!”

  We all four laughed and I at least felt more comfortable. Their curiosity matched ours, and we had so
mething to boast of after all.

  “Yes, it’s the Mapping Crystal Quadrant Three,” I said, then, without even a pretense of modesty added, “Doffnal and I are crew.”

  “Essential crew?” Oxagast demanded.

  Aguella laughed. “No, sorry, neither of us is a scientist. We’re just a couple of gamers who got lucky.”

  We chatted about gaming and about the possibility of developing a crystal-to-crystal uninet.

  Menno seemed about to say something, had his mouth open, then closed it and forced a smile. Oxagast’s open gaze went opaque.

  “That would be great,” Oxagast said blandly.

  Then Aguella brought up the airfoil design. “Didn’t your Wise Ones resist the idea?” Aguella asked.

  The two Polars exchanged a glance. “They did. So we took a vote.”

  “A what?”

  “We voted. Each of us was allowed to decide our position, yes or no, then we added up the totals. The airfoil design was approved by sixty-one percent of the votes cast.”

  Aguella and I must have looked fairly shocked.

  Menno smirked, nodding knowingly at our disturbed expressions. “We’ve made some changes in our society.”

  “Some changes? Why?”

  Menno waved his hand toward his home. “Because it was necessary. We can’t let the Wise Ones stop progress. Change is coming. Big changes. The people decide now. We’re just two years away from completing the airfoil. Our lives will never be the same.”

  “No, I guess they won’t be,” I said. Was I upset or jealous or both? I was definitely disturbed. That much I knew.

  Oxagast seemed less enthusiastic than his friend Menno. “The idea is that people will have so much more free time once the airfoil is operational, we’ll make huge leaps forward. That’s the idea, anyway.”

  “Of course we will,” Menno said. “That MCQ3 of yours? No offense, but it will be a toy compared to what we will build. Polar Orbit High will lead the way, and others will follow. By the time you return from Three Quadrant, things will be very different.”

  “Different isn’t always better,” I muttered. I was thinking of the Pangabans.

  But Menno shot back. “You’re a gamer and you’re afraid of change? What games do you Equatorials play? Any game worth playing is about control. With voting and with the other changes that are coming we stop being the playing pieces, moved here and there by the Wise Ones. We all become the Wise Ones. We become the players instead of the played.”

  “In any game scenario there’s a balance between change and stability,” I argued. “The game — at least the way we play it — is to make the slightest, most unobtrusive change — and achieve the desired result.”

  “Much the same with us,” Oxagast agreed. “Only lately some gamers,” he inclined his head toward Menno, “some gamers are looking to change the rules.”

  “We call ourselves Intruders,” Menno said with a self-conscious laugh. “We’re getting a little more radical. Why minimalism? Why marginal changes? Why not get inside the game, stick ourselves right into the action, and take over? See what I mean? Why should the gamer be invisible in the game? Intrude!”

  I got a time cue. Time to head back. Too little time, and yet I was relieved.

  “Well encountered,” I said a little too hastily.

  Aguella and Oxagast echoed the farewell. But Menno rudely met my gaze and said, “Don’t be afraid of change, Equatorial. It’s coming, whether you like it or not.” Then, to my utter amazement, he clasped his hands together tightly and yelled the single word, “Intrude!” It wasn’t a greeting or a farewell, it was a statement of belief. It was a challenge.

  Aguella had said very little during the encounter, but on the way back she would scarcely shut up.

  “He’s right,” she said. “Look what they’ve done! Airfoil. Why? They changed the rules, didn’t they? Same thing in the game, they changed the rules.”

  “Yeah, well, he didn’t exactly mention whether he won a lot of games,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe someday we’ll be able to play against them,” Aguella said.

  “Maybe sooner than you think,” I said, remembering the Polars’ strange, constrained looks when I mentioned crystal-to-crystal communication.

  Had the Polars solved that problem? That would be a true revolution, far more profound even than replacing the government of the Wise Ones.

  Of course their transmission would be pretty pointless until other crystals had receivers. Otherwise they’d be a voice crying in the wind, unheard.

  So I thought, and comforted myself with that illusion.

  The next day, with the Polar Orbit High long gone from sight, I went aboard the MCQ3 for the first time.

  There are sims and then there is reality. And let me say that no sim, no matter how good, matches reality. The problem with a sim is that you know it’s a sim. Reality on the other hand, well, it’s real.

  Lackofa, as my sponsor, was my tour guide. Aguella had been chosen by the usual process, so she was sponsorless, and thus had both a disadvantage and an advantage.

  The disadvantage was that she had no one to go to for answers. So she stayed hung with me, which was nice. The advantage she had was that she didn’t have to worry about embarrassing her sponsor.

  Lackofa’s welcoming words to me were, “Just try not to be a complete idiot, okay? That’s all I ask.”

  The MCQ3 was built along fairly standard lines. She was a single-hue cultivated crystal, ovoid rather than spherical. There was dockage for one hundred and four crew — essential and supernumerary. But of course no one provided lift. We could lift if that familiar motion made us feel more comfortable, but lift was irrelevant, unnecessary. A small taste, I suppose, of what an airfoil world would be like.

  The MCQ3 existed within a force field that contained an atmosphere and would, we hoped, deflect most space debris. Should the force field ever fail we would lose our atmosphere. The backup system was a maze of pipes buried within the spars and masts that delivered breathable air to each dock.

  “You simply pull the tube extension from the collar, thus,” Lackofa demonstrated. “And you place it into your airhole, thus. Then breathe normally until the force field comes back up, or until you freeze to death, whichever comes first.”

  “What if we’re not docked?” Aguella asked. “What if we’re in one of the perches?”

  “There are emergency accesses there,” Lackofa said. “Good question. You’re thinking ahead.”

  That made me open my eyes a bit. Was Lackofa looking for some face-face with Aguella? She wasn’t moning again, was she? No, I would notice that.

  I shook the sense memory out of my intakes and ruffled my wings to put it behind me. Didn’t work. Other guys will warn you about being moned; what they don’t talk about is how long the effect lasts.

  “What if we’re flying through Zero-space when the force field fails?” I asked.

  Lackofa favored me with a withering glare. “We would drop instantly out of Z-space and appear back in normal space, where you would once again breathe through the tube or freeze to death. Oh, and by the way? It’s hard to fly in a vacuum. So if we lose atmosphere you’ll want to be docked.”

  I had a flash of myself beating my wings helplessly, futilely in space while the MCQ3 zoomed away toward some distant star.

  Well, no one ever said space travel was safe. Generation 9561 claimed to have lost nearly ten percent of Generation 9547, the first Generationals to attempt space travel, and six percent of Generation 9548. Even as recently as 9558 they were losing substantial numbers in space-related accidents.

  Then again, individual Generationals die pretty easily. It’s kind of what they do. Corporate life-forms just don’t put up much of a fight over every interchangeable member.

  “Follow me, stay close, don’t touch anything,” Lackofa instructed. He flew upward and we fell in place behind him. Up and up through byzantine, unfamiliar spars, past dockages, some that were still being installed and p
olished.

  He led us to a perch like nothing I’d ever seen before — not even in the sim. It was a tipped bowl perhaps fifty feet across, all filled with blinking lights, readouts, and video displays. All of it constructed of metals and carbon filament and flat-crys. It was faintly claustrophobic, all that opaqueness wrapped around you.

  “What is this?” I wondered. “It’s not in the sim!”

  “No,” Lackofa said. “This is the backup command center. In case of catastrophic damage to the core crystal, these machines can be used to continue flying the vessel.”

  “How?”

  “This unit is self-contained. You can’t see it but it has its own engines, generates its own force field. In the case of catastrophic damage to the crystal itself, this pod can detach, break free, and keep flying.”

  “Without … without most of the crew,” I said, unwilling to believe anything so monstrous. “And it’s not in the sims.”

  Lackofa’s eyes were hard. “No, it’s not in the sims. And it won’t be on the uninet at all. You need to understand something: This isn’t your old life. This trip is a little more than an innocent scientific excursion. And it’s definitely not a game.”

  His tone sent a shiver through me. Aguella and I exchanged significant looks.

  We were keeping station outside the hard-edged, darkened perch. Floating far above our home crystal, well within home air. But all of a sudden I knew we had crossed over a boundary.

  “What’s out there?” I asked Lackofa.

  He shook his head slowly. “We don’t know for sure. But two years ago a vessel of unknown origin popped out of Z-space just a million miles from us and lit up our orbital sensors. The drop-pods are released only once every six months as you know, to prolong the life of the sensors. But by good luck we discovered the ship just two months after it emerged. We sent a drone out to intercept and survey. The drone never returned. Two months later we got the answer from another sensor’s drop-pod. The alien vessel had fired on our drone and destroyed it using some sort of high-energy beam weapon. There were no life signs aboard the ship. It had been programmed to defend itself, I suppose. We modified a drone with a defensive force field and faster engine and sent it back to intercept the alien vessel again.