| The Ellimist Chronicles |
Detailed Plot: The book opens with a prologue featuring the Ellimist coming to an unknown Animorph who calls to him while dying. The Animorph wants to know who he is and why he plays games with them, and the Ellimist decides to answer. He begins to tell his life story, beginning with his "first life." The Ellimist is actually a creature called a Ketran whose full name is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger Forty-one, and he goes by the chosen name of Toomin and the game name of Ellimist. He had his friend Redfar--known in the game as Inidar--engage in what is essentially a video game/RPG, choosing to bet on/back certain races in order to see whose "horse" comes out ahead. Toomin tends to choose in favor of idealism, which makes Redfar mock him a bit since he prefers aggressiveness and plain old brute force himself. Each player chooses a small change to make for a species, and then they fast-forward time to see whose species wins. Ellimist loses to Inidar, because according to him, it's not good people who win--just motivated people. Toomin explains in his narration a bit about how Ket works--his planet is uninhabitable, but the Ketrans live on the crystals that float hundreds of miles above the planet's surface. The crystals and the Ketrans have a "symbiosis" by which Ketrans help keep the crystals afloat by actually latching onto their own home and beating their wings. Without Ketran interference, the crystals don't have enough buoyancy to stay afloat, so their very existence depends on their doing their job. They have a technologically advanced society which communicates by uninet, and many of them like to play games while docked in their flying positions. Toomin talks to another Ketran named Lackofa about his losing another game. Lackofa doesn't really care, and then they discuss going to the announcement about who's going to be the crew for a Z-space ship. Toomin is really hoping he gets to be nonessential crew, but then it turns out Lackofa is going as essential crew as a biologist, which makes Toomin jealous and motivates him to focus more on studies instead of gaming. He wonders what will happen to his people if they ever install anti-gravity generators on the home crystals like they have on the new ship. Toomin flies off to meet his gamer friends and listen to announcements. The Speaker says there's going to be a close passing with another crystal soon--an event that only happens maybe once every nineteen years--so the population of the two crystals will very briefly get to interact with each other if they want to. They listen to the rest of the announcements and then suddenly he's announcing nonessential crew and both Ellimist and his gamer friend Aguella are named. The other two in their group, Wormer and Inidar, don't get called, and this permanently divides their group. When he gets back to his perch, he finds out that Lackofa sponsored him because he's interested in his gaming losses--not exactly that he loses, but why he loses. Toomin studies about the ship he's going to be crew on, and then the time comes when he's allowed to interact with other Ketrans from the Polar High Orbit crystal. Aguella comes to fly with him, and as they're on their way she begins doing something Toomin recognizes as "moning," which disturbs his senses and makes him think about mating. He's confused because that's the last thing he wants to think about at this point, and it isn't appropriate. As the crystal comes closer they can see its inhabitants are building an airfoil, and through discussion they find that their society has changed so they can vote instead of listening to one governing body. The Polars are impressed with the ship being built. One of the Polars is a gamer who likes to try to rewrite the rules instead of playing by them, calling himself an Intruder. Toomin isn't so fond of that, and wonders as they have to leave whether communication between crystals will ever be possible. Toomin gets a tour of the ship he'll be going on, gets told what to do if force fields fail, and hangs out with Aguella a lot (though she doesn't mone him again, and he wonders why). He gets an explanation of what they're going out there to find, learning about a "ghost ship" belonging to the Capasins, and it apparently belongs to a very warlike race that they want to make peace with. He's on the ship and getting some training when suddenly without warning an alien ship appears and blows up his home. The crew is injured in the attack, and they barely manage to power up and try to lift off while the aliens are attacking. A small craft comes after the ship and Toomin is forced to use his gaming strategies to kill the alien so they can escape into Z-space. He's just in time, and the dead alien and its ship come with them into the nothingness. Toomin notifies the highest authority available that this ship is there, and they want to use it to get back to Ket, but they're very claustrophobic creatures and they can't handle the closed space easily. With a dead alien inside, Toomin and Lackofa manage to fly back to Ket and they find that at least twelve crystals have been shot out of the sky by the Capasins . . . and the Polar High Orbit crystal remains. The Capasin ship is sitting above it just waiting, and they don't know why it doesn't fire. Toomin tries to use the ship's weapons to attack the Capasin ship. He and Lackofa disable the ship and then destroy it, then report back. Lackofa doesn't want to leave the little ship they named the Crate, because he doesn't think he'll be able to handle getting back in, so he distracts himself examining the alien inside while Toomin meets with the authority figure named Farsight. The Polar High Orbit crystal seems oblivious to the fact that the ship from another crystal just saved their lives, and they want to argue about authority, but Toomin tells them to shut up. Toomin warns them that the Capasins will be back with more ships to kill more of them, and one of the Polars figures out why they're being attacked: their crystal had learned to broadcast data through a Z-space net and the Capasins must have received broadcasts of their games. Thinking they're real instances of a race that toys with other races, they've come to exterminate them. And when the Capasin ships he expected really do come, Toomin races back to the Crate, takes off with Lackofa, and ends up back at their own ship with the last seventy-two members of their race. Now they have to find a new home, because they're all that's left. Toomin's "Second Life" begins as an officer aboard the ship drifting through space looking for a new Ketran home. They find while exploring world after world that their environment was exceedingly rare, and surface-dwellers are all they can find. They mine planets and moons for materials and continue to improve their ship, and they learn to use weapons because sometimes the natives of the planets they visit are hostile. They've been doing this for over sixty years when the narration picks up. While investigating a watery moon, he and Aguella take a mini-ship down to check out what's going on under that water, based on some weird readings. They submerge and end up caught by some kind of tentacle, and their weapons don't work on it. Soon it dominates them and kills them all except for Toomin, and he later finds out that everyone on the ship died when they attempted to rescue the small ship. The life form that attacked them is a huge creature the size of the moon called Father. And it keeps Toomin alive under the water through a tentacle-based life support system, playing games with him. Father can impersonate people from Toomin's life and give him visions of whole lives acted out, and he can play games with him like he used to play as a young Ketran. When he doesn't want to play anymore Father lets him see that he's just a body impaled by a tentacle floating under the water with nothing to do. He's pretty much forced to play. Father gets his ideas from other dead, imprisoned species and one day he gets a creature called a Unemite which was aboard a Skrit Na ship that ended up on the moon. Unemites have something called music, played with an instrument called the adge, and Father invents a game in which they must both perform and see whose song the audience likes better. He practices mentally in secret and manages to beat Father during the hundredth game, thinking the music will be more beautiful because he's known love and Father can't be original or know anything but cruelty. Father can't understand how Ellimist could beat him, but he can because of creativity and improvisation. After that, when Father started leaving him alone as punishment for winning, Ellmist can entertain himself by composing music in his mind. And that innovation paved the way for his being able to win the next game Father steals and presents. Now that playing games with Ellimist is no longer fun for him, Father leaves him alone, and he manages to figure out how to extend his awareness through Father's net and contact Aguella. She's dead, but he can animate her body and make her "live" long enough to talk to her and ask her permission to "absorb" her. She becomes part of him and then he goes on to "download" the other Ketrans. Then the other aliens. Soon enough Father notices what he's doing and they play one last game, but Ellimist has half of Father's resources now and they're on much more equal ground. Ellimist is able to absorb Father, only to find that he doesn't really exist because he is the total of what he absorbed. Ellimist, in his Ketran body once more, finds his way to an island where the captured spacecraft are stored, carrying with him the knowledge and experiences of all the races that were held under the water. He realizes he has to become something else or these beings will die with him. And he makes a ship from the materials left by all the other ships--a ship that is also a repository for all the minds he's absorbed and a body to live in as well. He becomes one with the ship and empties his knowledge into it, then leaves the moon and blows it apart as a way to finalize all those deaths. Flying through space and through Z-space, Ellimist finally comes upon two races at war, and he tries to stop them from fighting. One just spews slurs at him, and the other seems more polite but refers to the other world as "vermin" and wants Ellimist to side with them to exterminate the other. They won't stop fighting so Ellimist alters their asteroid belt so they can't attack each other. He decides that his role in the galaxy is to become a peacemaker--to use his abilities to encourage sentient life toward an enlightened existence. But one day when he finds that his interference had crippled one of the races he'd stopped from warring and effectively wiped out the other, he realizes it isn't so easy to do what he wants. Then another "gamer" shows up to taunt him. It's another biological/mechanical creature like himself, and it calls itself Crayak. Crayak has already wiped out all the life in one galaxy, and is planning to do the same to this one. He's been following the Ellimist's work and reversing the changes he made so the species will die. He wants to "play" this game with the Ellimist, and after he wins, Crayak believes the final play will be to kill the Ellimist. He sets up games and the Ellimist has to try to outsmart him, but his idealism keeps leading him to make the wrong choice. After failing to protect so many civilizations and always losing to Crayak, he runs away to deep space and finds an inhabited world of primitive grazers. He fashions for himself a body of their race and carefully chooses what memories to put in its mind--an abbreviated version of himself to live in the body so he can go and live with the people below and learn from them. These are the ancestors of the Andalites, and the Ellimist names them, becomes one of them, and occasionally protects them from monsters. He marries a proto-Andalite named Tree and they have a daughter named Star, who dies of a common disease. Despite all the death he's seen, this death hurts him the worst. So he learns about how to cure the disease, wondering if it's all hopeless since he hasn't been able to save the races involved in the game. But his wife wants to have more children, and teaches him something he never realized before: if they have more children, some of them will live. And that's his answer to the bigger problem: if he "plants" more civilizations, Crayak will never be able to wipe them all out. The Ellimist goes around space either encouraging civilizations or making environments where life can arise, and he even creates a new species from his own ship: the Pemalites. He then has them going forth and spreading life, without violence, using the technology he gave them. For millennia he does this, succeeding in seeding civilizations that Crayak can't find, but finally Crayak does find him and begins a fight. They fight for ages, accidentally wiping out civilizations in their wake, but then Crayak pretends to set a pattern and really sets a trap, which the Ellimist falls into. He emerges near a black hole and begins to get sucked in, and Crayak destroys the parts of him that didn't get sucked into the black hole, but somehow the Ellimist merges with time and space and lives still, even without his physical body. The Ellimist is able to see and affect time and space. He knows Crayak might learn from him, so he watches and waits. Watches Crayak succeed in exterminating species. And finally he saves what appears to be Earth from Crayak's destruction. They find each other and decide there can be no more personal attacks; Crayak will instead try to destroy the things the Ellimist loves. And the Ellimist will stop him--within the rules of the game, which they create and play. We cut back to the Ellimist explaining his life to the dying Animorph, and he admits that whoever he's talking to was not manipulated to be one of the six, but was instead "a happy accident" from the human race trying to save itself. The Ellimist answers the dying Animorph's final question--"Did my life really matter?"--with "Yes." Narrator: Toomin/The Ellimist Notable: This book actually came out after The Resistance and before The Return, but because of its foreshadowing and the mostly irrelevant details of its main story, it makes more sense when read after completing a reading of the series. Interesting that female gamers are rare on Ket. Seems the stereotypical gender roles are still in effect, even in the ancient past in deep space. The Speaker says that the home crystal and another crystal passing this close to each other is an event that happens only once every nineteen years. Question is, how long is a year for Ketrans? It's unclear whether he's literally saying it's the length of time it takes for their planet to orbit their sun--which could be anything--or whether this is supposed to be basically a translation to humans' understanding of time. It's not supposed to be revealed exactly who the Ellimist is talking to in the beginning and end of the book, but the Ellimist refers to the dying Animorph as "a strong, turbulent spirit," who also wasn't fated to be "one of the six." It'd be clear to most people reading the series that he is talking to Rachel, which is confirmed in the last book. Best lines: Ellimist: There's a natural affinity between gamers and planetary explorers. Or so we told ourselves. Ellimist: 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. Ellimist: I was Ellimist: the brilliant loser. But now I knew so much more. My wisdom was deep. My powers were vast. Surely . . . and then there was the core fact that I was not playing against anyone. No opponent, just the game itself. Ellimist: I would intrude with exquisite sensitivity and the purest motivations. I would create harmonies. Boldness allied with restraint and a minimalist aesthetic, all in the service of moral certainties: that peace was better than war, that freedom was better than slavery, that knowledge was better than ignorance. Ellimist: How could I care so much about this one small, unsteady creature? How could her death cut me so deeply? The pain was awful. Unbearable. And yet I was glad to learn that I could still feel. Ellimist: 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.
|