Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

The Rings of Ragnaran

Written by J. Simon

Illustrated by Chantelle Thorne

"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