"We bring peace!" Saerr of Vok bellowed, his scales reflecting a million angry lights. "Idiots! Stop fleeing! We propose a universal oneness of peace and love! The Claw of Kz-Gk hunts you and slays your opposition to our enduring friendship! Come back!" Ships continued to zag and twirl in a dozen evasive directions. Saerr's motile frill began to inflate.
"Sir," his First Moltling respectfully hissed.
"Why do aliens hate me? Do they like loneliness? Do they want to hurt my feeling?"
"Sir, we're broadcasting on maximum power—"
"I WILL BROOK NO FAILURE! LOVE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE!"
"—a frequency which the aliens refer to as 'death ray.'"
Saerr stopped. "What?"
"Sir, our messages of peace and love are blasting them into space dust."
"By the fires of Groz-Ka! It's my birthday party all over again!" His sybiatic membrane inflated pensively. "Why must beautiful things be so fragile? I never knew five eyes could hold so many tears."
"Sir . . .?"
"Oh, yes. CEASE BROADCAST!"
Saerr of Vok folded clawed hands together, eyes nictating, and watched the surviving aliens flee. He WOULD befriend them. There WOULD be an exchange of cultures and dance. It would come. Soon.
* * *
Knight-Captain Mupp gratefully sank its rhizomes into the rotting husk of the Star Spore "Indisposable." The cheese-like block of neurons in what could charitably be called its head churned and mixed, connecting and firing as neurons are wont to do. Little puffballs grew from its mantle and burst, releasing sterile messenger-spores into the air.
"Zounds!" Mupp communicated. "Nearly bought it that time. Damned space lizards!"
"Mmmmksss," muttered Priest-Lawyer Shlorsh, who'd gotten into the fermented bark again.
"It's arrogant, really, for animate pre-nutrients to presume to go around blasting things instead of quietly living so they can die and become food. What's next? Vast civilizations of intelligent dung?"
"Ggggrgllll."
"Zounds!" Mupp cried. "They're coming back! Quick, take a message. We must recruit allies to the struggle." Several robot arms descended around Mupp, each holding an empty balloon to capture his messenger-spores. "Dear Animate Pre-Nutrients," he mused. "Though a civilization of creatures that hasn't died yet is an abomination against all that is pure, yet do I extend the hyphae of equality and friendship. Aid us against these abominable space lizards and we will . . ." Mupp paused. ". . . eat away the death that surrounds you always, that you might pretend your cheerful little lives have any purpose but to feed us. Message ends. Package and send." Mupp wiggled its sporatophores at Shlorsh. "I think that went well, don't you?"
* * *
Ragnaran may have been the only world on which orchids had been bred to have gigantic nectar udders, or where honeybees flew yoked to little beeping sleighs. Great hordes of butterflies flitted along bright, quiet streets, sunning themselves or patronizing hovering robotic flowers. Gripped by some urge, they occasionally swirled together into a great mass, multiple probosci easily piercing each other's brains, uniting a thousand simple little minds into one so much greater.
Thoughts and memories swirled, coalescing once more into consciousness. The multiple creature decided, based upon a weighted random calculation, that he was male (15,113 to 14,774) and named Kevin (3 to 29,884). Kevin's thirty thousand wings opened and closed crisply, completely under his control. His "skin" was a masterpiece that repainted itself by the moment, displaying his every thought to any who cared to watch.
"Whew!" he flashed. "Tell me mnagos nectar isn't the sweetest. Anyones who says it isn't it is at least 30% lying. Renford!"
A robot flower twirled deferentially over to him. "Sirs?"
"Why is the sky exploding?"
"Evil ravenous space lizards, sirs. Their entertainment programming appears to have the effect of igniting our atmosphere."
"Huh. Pretty. What about the purple stuff?"
"Missiles from evil ravenous space fungi, sirs. They've made no effort to communicate, just bombarded us with lethal spores. Tens of millions of Ragnaronians are now enraged super-zombies thirsty for nectar."
"Space lizards, you say? Don't they know that interstellar diplomacy is futile?"
"Apparently not, sirs."
Kevin fluttered back and forth. "Like that time with the blazing gas beings. They didn't even realize their friendly greetings were forcing millions of us, mesmerized, to fly into them and self-immolate. Or that race of really quite ungrateful little crustaceans we thoughtfully pollinated. Who knew they were already using that orifice? I mean, what else could it be for?"
"Precisely, sirs." Renford gave a reserved beep. "About the space lizards . . ."
A flash of color rippled across Kevin. "Yeah?"
"What shall we do about them?"
"Why ask me?"
"Everyone else are zombies, sirs. You are the last."
"Oh." Kevin mulled that over. "Do we have guns?"
"No, sirs. We are pretty. That is our mode of defense. We delight people with our whimsical fluttering until they elect not to hurt us. Well, that and the ruins of the ancient civilization we are perched on, which has the power to destroy all life in the universe."
"Hmm. Yeah. Let's unleash an ancient subterranean horror from before time. Fourteen percent of me is thinking that's a really good idea."
"And the other eighty-six percent?"
"Having sex."
"Your will, sirs," the flower said, and twirled off to do Kevin's bidding.
* * *
For the second time in its history, Ragnaran had rings—not of ice or stone, but of spaceships. Tens of millions of them. Battle-scarred saucers, hypnotically strobing cylinders, twirling cubes were all but particles in those vast double rings of metal and light. Down on the surface, a Judgement Orb large enough to house tens of millions of sentient beings had hastily been inflated (or, in the case of the aquatic lobes, flooded).
Grand Maxillary Prefect Vikon Vikon-Smith manipulated the controls of the omnipuppet. It was a fat little wailing thing with dozens of appendages, countless bleating orifices, and an unfortunate number of artfully arrayed scent sphincters. "If you speak enough languages simultaneously," the salesman had assured him, "they're bound to understand one of them." Come to think of it, he wasn't sure his spaceship had needed that micrometeorite undercoating, either.
"Gobs and gobloons!" he swore, kicking the omnipuppet—which immediately translated the obscenity into about fifty million other languages. Silence fell like an thulgroonian space axe. A truly outlandish number of eyes—and other parts—focused on him.
"Fellow, uh, beings," Vikon Vikon-Smith said. "Let the accused stand forward! Saerr of Vok. Knight-Captain Mupp. Kevin."
"We're Gina now," the Ragnaronian gracefully flashed. "One of the Kevins got smeared over ol' scale-faces' windshield."
"IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!" Saerr roared.
"Hey, no prob. He would've wanted to go that way. Frankly, we all do. It's something about the sparkliness."
"Quite gleemly," Vikon Vikon-Smith dubiously agreed. "Nonetheless, you three stand accused of unleashing an evil beyond comprehension. Countless years ago . . ." He hesitated as several scuffles broke out in the upper tiers. He couldn't make out all the shouting, flashing, beeping, and interpretive dance—just something about radioactive skin and ". . . mutated me on purpose!" He decided to press on.
"Countless years ago, the peoples of the galaxy had many problems, even as we do today. They fought each other by accident, hurt each other out of misunderstanding. They sought a way to bring peace. They came together long enough to build an enormous crystalline being called the Vyygor. It was part machine and part madness, powered by the pulsing heart of a black hole. It was meant to finally bring peace to the universe. This it did, by erasing all life in the universe."
Vikon Vikon-Smith paused again. As incompatibilities and misguided attempts to help spread, the scuffles were quickly igniting into battle. At least no one had fired any—
A laser blast flashed across the Judgment Orb. The rattle of projectile fire barked back. The Prefect hastily consulted his notes.
"And. When life re-evolved, and again there was strife, again the great minds of the universe came together to repair the Vyygor and make it work. This time it brought peace by freezing all life into suspended animation and locking it into a monomolecular diamond sphere the size of a solar system. The third time around, the Vyygor went crazy, decided it was God, and enslaved the universe for three rather sticky epochs. Thanks be to the Wavy Ones, someone finally got in and asked it if it could make a dessert so delicious it couldn't stop at just one. That kept it tied up nicely. But now the Vyygor is awakening, and—"
Vikon Vikon-Smith looked up from his notes. Madness. Chaos. All-out war in every quarter. What was more, several extremely large chlorine beings were looming over him.
"We really don't want to do this," the blue one said. "I wrote my thesis on how all life, at the core, is all of one beinghood."
"I've been in diplomat training for thirty molts," the amorphous one said glumly. "This is my very first mission."
"But the chlorine atoms in your breath are an isotope that has an unfortunate tendency to, well, kill us. We must regretfully request that you stop breathing."
"But could you write me a positive recommendation as you die?" the amorphous one said hopefully. "It won't make any difference to you either way, but it could make things so much easier when I have to tell the corps I killed my boss on my first day."
"Very well," Vikon Vikon-Smith agreed. "But my last words are so eloquent, I must entrust them to the omnipuppet." He picked up the fat little thing, contemplated for a moment, and then hurled it directly at the startled chlorine-beings' groinal equivalents. "STOP THE VYYGOR!" he screamed, his outer skin popping off in an escape-molt. Pale and naked, he made a dash into madness.
* * *
Battle swirled around Saerr of Vok, the sheepish sort of war fought by intelligent, sensitive philosophs who only occasionally enjoyed letting loose and murdering everything in sight.
"Pathetic space scum!" he bellowed. "BELLIGERENCE IS A SIGN OF WEAKNESS!" Growling, he picked up the discarded omnipuppet and began pumping the controls. "You . . ." he grunted, "must . . . listen . . ." The thing whirled faster and faster, arms screaming through the air as he applied some muscle. In expanding ripples around him, creatures turned to listen. Saerr pumped harder. "Fighting . . . never . . . solved . . . anything . . ." Wisps of smoke rose from the battered puppet's joins. Irritated, Saerr pumped harder, faster. "Let's . . . exchange . . . dances . . ."
The omnipuppet exploded. Jagged shards of ceramic and circuitry shot like spears through all of the life forms that had been perceptive enough to cease fighting and listen to him.
"NOT AGAIN!" Saerr bellowed. A crackle of gunfire answered him. Something pinged off his scales. He retracted his head and ran for the exit, plowing through anything in his way—until he spotted a cute fuzzy ducky just sitting on the ground, helpless amidst all the battle and carnage. Saerr plucked it up into his hands, cradling it protectively . . . and stared at the severed, bleeding root that had bound it to the ground. The ducky gazed soulfully at him, quacked "I forgive you," and died.
"Oh, THAT'S IT! I don't care if it IS my turn to nurse the tadpoles, I am NOT telling them how my day went!"
With a sudden rumbling, shards of crystal shot up through the ground. The Vyygor come to take them all, perhaps. Fine. Sniffling fitfully, Saerr hopped into a crumbling, ancient passage. Maybe revenge was pointless, but dammit, someone was going to pay for making him cry.
* * *
Looking like a half-crescent wisp of shelf fungus, what little remained of Lieutenant-Knight-Captain Mupp Junior clung tenaciously to the vile space lizard's spiked heel. They were descending a long series of hallways, all crystal and metal and flashing lights. It looked kinda pretty, and every time they passed a shiny metal panel, he saw another fungoid just like himself. Mupp Junior always waved, and the other fungoid always waved back. He wasn't sure what to make of that. Being parted from 98% of his neural mass had taken a lot out of him, though he couldn't remember precisely what. The dastardly pre-nutrients had been rumbling and farting about something or other at their grand convocation, he remembered. Then there had been shooting. And crystals. And Mupp had taken the opportunity to covertly infiltrate a water-being's brain sac—only it hadn't been water. It had been something that burned in a flash when hit by lasers. If the loathsome space lizard hadn't stepped in him, there wouldn't be anything left of Mupp at all.
Well, this time it would be different. Whatever lurked down here—and he could sense its vast power—Mupp Junior would cut a deal with it. Every planet, everywhere, would be nothing but fungoids and the remains of the once-living, experiencing the infinite decompositional joy of serving them!
They passed another shiny surface. Mupp saw another Mupp. He waved enthusiastically, extending his hyphae toward it—and fell from his tenuous perch on the lizard's heel. He had half a moment to wonder what had happened before the creature's spiked tail smeared his neurons across a good fifty meters of hallway.
"Mmmmmmm-yaaaaaa," was his eventual, contented thought.
* * *
A spray of bullets whizzed past, killing Pat, Gene, Edward, Lisa, Gina, Gina, Hugh and Montmorency. Kevin/Gina pondered, decided its name was now Eleanor, and fluttered into the passage the evil space lizard had so recently sprinted down. It was a little hard to think when bits of your thoughts kept getting snuffed out, and as always there wasn't a robot butler to be found when you really needed one, but Eleanor was determined to . . . not to . . . to assure the triumph of . . . well, actually, that part of her seemed to have gotten wiped out when a well-meaning yeti had tried to shield her with its body and impaled a couple thousand of her on its bristly hairs.
"Sex?" fifteen percent of Eleanor wondered.
"Nectar!" twenty percent countered.
"Revenge?"
"Diplomacy!"
"Run away?"
"Pretty-flashy!"
Having decided that diplomatically pursuing pretty-flashy beings and asking them for nectar was the best course of business, Eleanor flew into a light fixture and electrocuted itself.
"Wheee!" thought the lone survivor as it flew wild loops toward the crystalline ceiling.
* * *
Sulphur beings and needle bats. Vegetablekin and jellyspore umbrellas. As they fought, escaped, negotiated, died—all were seen. All were, in a way, loved. The Vyygor saw its children, and though it could not understand them, it grieved at the sparks that were extinguished.
It couldn't think. The great machine was far too complex for that, loaded by its million builders with far too many conflicting instructions to even calculate two plus one. Its vast neural nets were paralyzed in a permanent state of spastic indecision. But a world's worth of metal and crystal wrapped around the heart of a black hole had to do something. The Vyygor had hunches. It had feelings. Paranormal impulses traveled its untold klicks of wiring. Psychic forces condensed around its manyfold circuit banks. It was, basically, a tarot card the size of the galaxy, and it loved everyone.
The Vyygor patiently sent waves of energy through the farthest-flung regions of space, causing microscopic pyramids to spontaneously coalesce out of space dust. Surely the soothing geometric regularity of pyramids would bring peace. Well, that or murdering all life in the universe. The Vyygor had a hunch that this time pyramids would work. At least, it hoped so.
* * *
In the heart of the Vyygor, in front of the Great Control Panel that would have been the solution to everyone's problems if only it were connected to anything, a lizard and a pseudo-crustacean faced off against one another.
"PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON!" Saerr of Vok bellowed.
"I'm putting down my weapon!" Vikon Vikon-Smith squealed, unsure what the giant lizard was roaring about.
"Weapons preclude possibilities!" Saerr growled, ignoring the panicked creature's inane squeaking. "Force reduces the number of voices that are heard! TALKING IS FOR WINNERS!"
"We should talk about this!" Vikon Vikon-Smith cried, popping out of another emergency molt.
"Bah! You throw skin at me? Watch me forgive you! Watch! Look how mighty and forgiving I am! Watch me teach you the sacred dance of my ancestral peoples!"
"Stop trying to trample me!" Vikon Vikon-Smith pleaded. "I only have nine more detachable tails to lose!"
"SILENCE, FOOL! I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO HEAR YOUR PEOPLES' SACRED STORIES!"
"Eep!" Vikon Vikon-Smith yelped. He darted for the exit. The giant lizard stumbled in mid-dance. And . . .
* * *
Impulse and perception rippled up and down the Vyygor's vastness. Pyramids hadn't worked. Preposterous! Nor perfect spheres. Nor icosahedrons, rhombi, or parallelograms of various types. For a while it had even tried little quartz spheres with a pewter wizard on top. Well, surely a perfectly regular 11,117,777-gon would bring peace to the universe? Wouldn't it?
* * *
"Not again!" Saerr wailed. His burnished shoulders slumped. He sighed. Pushing past some of the molted skins that now cluttered the control room, he averted his eyes and scraped off what was stuck to the bottom of his foot. If he ever got home to Vera and the tadpoles, he was never going out again! Never! He hated to think how much poetry he'd have to write to work though his feelings from this mission. Sighing, Saerr of Vok chose a random lever on the great control panel and pulled it.
The flashing lights steadied. The hum of the machine quieted. Up above, the sounds of gunfire slackened. Saerr decided, for court martial purposes, that he had very cleverly determined which was the "off" switch and thrown it on purpose. Right. Tail swishing, he fled the control room as fast as he could.
* * *
The Vyygor, an enigma wrapped in a misunderstanding born of mutual incomprehension, sensed that a spark had manipulated a meaningless control that connected to nothing. But! The control was not a perfectly regular n-gon. It was cylindrical. Cylindrical! What if curved geometries held the secrets of universal peace? The Vyygor decided to spend the next few epochs pondering that.
Then it would kill everyone.