I saw nothing, then I blinded myself.

For a very long while, I happily produced my totipotent buds and sent them to find comets that grew into new worlds that were Me.

Within my realm fat with matter and latent energies, I prospered.

Inside a frigid cloud, I became vast, no one noticing my hands at work, thoroughly remaking a great volume of space.

A few suns were scattered inside my body—wanderers with a firm pull and a dangerous heat. Since they did not suit my needs, I let them pass; but their little worlds offeredrare metals and good experience. I devised ways to gut those worlds, lifting out their useful hearts and dismantling what remained.

One of the worlds had life and sentient minds that rode inside a tiny portion of the living matter. My solitude was finished, if only for a moment and only in a small fashion. I studied the little creatures. I learned more about them than they knew about themselves. And of course, nothing about them was special or beautiful, and they did not offer any knowledge about others who were close to my equal. The few bits of knowledge that were new to me, I took. And I took their world and their flesh and consumed each of their minds, and with their own genetics, I built bodies far more lovely than they had ever envisioned.

Afterward, I devised machines that carried slivers of myself out of the nebula, stealing flesh and technologies from my neighbors, and always dressing myself as what I was: powerful and remote and forever undefined.

All is shadow.

The past and future are equally vague, and the Creation was aborted before it could begin, and whenever I listen to the chatter of the little species, none speak about such obvious truths.

Plainly, others are fools.

Inferior, and tiny, and contemptible.

For aeons, through every possible past, I have maintained my perfection. My only regret was that I would live to see the end of this empty unlovely universe—the galaxies cooling and retreating into nothingness; the wasteful suns eating their own flesh until they were cold embers or light-sucking holes; and all of those little species eventually collapsing back to dust.

If only the Creation had been without flaw, I thought.

If its enormous potential could have been realized and the shadows were thrown aside for all time …

And then, I found a speck talking in the dark.

I found O’Layle.

The creature sang praises for some great old ship, and I listened casually. And then he spoke about something tiny and awful that was carried inside the ship—something as old as the universe, perhaps—and I listened fervently.

Suddenly, all made sense.

The Creation.

The Great Ship.

And me.

In the vastness of All, you found me. Conditions and happenstance and the actions of a multitude of foolish souls had brought you to me, and you cannot imagine how it felt.

At the speed of light, news traveled through my grand self.

“My purpose is clear,” I proclaimed with my millions of bodies. And without a shred of doubt or a millisecond of hesitation, I set to work.

We are very much alike, you and me.

But do not fight with me, sister.

If you hear any whisper of what I am saying to you now, hear this:

You are tiny and weak. I am grand and irresistible. Do not struggle, and together, let us finish the glorious Creation … !

Tiwenty-eight

“Think of my body, this little shell, as if it was as large as our dear home,” she began. “Imagine such a thing.”

An array of visuals and sonic diagrams was broadcast along with a multitude of translated texts. Billions saw the Master Captain as she was: sitting inside her relatively modest quarters, her swollen body wearing a warrior’s uniform and a mirrored cap, her posture relaxed but alert while the great golden face showed every good and honorable emotion. She looked confident She looked defiant. Her tight mouth hinted at strengths waiting to be revealed, while the vivid dark eyes held a keen rage that had to frighten any opponent. And behind the eyes, a savage intelligence, vengeful and coiled tight, was ready to teach the bizarre and evil and utterly foolish alien that it had picked the worst kind of fight.

“Imagine I am the Great Ship,” she sang, one hand rising toward her audience. Then the hand began to grow, smoothly and effortlessly, a range of sensory effects convincing her audience that the simple human appendage suddenly was thousands of kilometers long. Slowly, she pulled the stubby fingers into the vast golden palm, and she closed the thumb over the newborn fist. A big-knuckled moon stood perched on the end of her arm, and hers was the sturdy sure voice of a god rumbling, “What has happened is this: very little. Almost nothing has changed. I have stepped into a steady rain, and for this moment, I happen to find myself wearing a thin layer of moisture. On my vastness, a dampness clings. Draped across my bones and flesh is a new cloth—an ugly costume placed here against my will—and when the time is right, I will do what I wish with this unwelcome gift.”

Suddenly the giant woman was wearing only a thin mud-colored fabric, ugly according to a multitude of aesthetics and barely obscuring the mammoth breasts and broad thighs and a prominent golden rump. Every moment or two, a pattern tried to emerge inside the roiling water, but then the Master would flick a shoulder or shake one of her legs, disturbing and distorting whatever design had been struggling to emerge. Without question, she was in charge. The polypond was an inconsequential film desperately clinging to her spectacular self. To prove her dominion, the Master suddenly dropped a fist, landing it on her solid, bare belly—just above the navel, she struck—knuckles glowing white as the polypond beneath turned to steam and death.

AFTER RELIGION, PROPAGANDA was the greatest art form.

Who first said those wonderful, cynical words?

The Master barely imagined the question, and instantly, in the midst of her speech, some tiny nexus began to list a thousand likely candidates, human and otherwise.

She told it to be quiet, and thank you.

Through a range of nexuses, she weighed the cumulative reactions of her far-flung audience. Countless measurements were decanted down into mountains of data that were channeled toward parts of her profoundly augmented mind, and she felt an assortment of stubborn doubts. The harum-scarum nation was impressed with her bluster, but unconvinced. So with an artful ease that no one else could have managed, she adapted her planned text. To the worst of the doubters, she admitted, “Of course this won’t be so easy or quick. Before it’s finished, I promise … some of us will have died, and for all time …”

After that sober note, she paused. Washen sat to one side, Pamir to the other. If they were displeased with her embellishment, at least they knew better than to show it to the multitude. In fact, Washen had the poise to nod agreeably—a tiny gesture invisible to most alien species and the most inattentive humans. Pamir preferred to squint, his heavy blocky face turning to brown stone. Was there ever a soul less comfortable in a captain’s uniform? The question posed itself in her very busy mind, and before any of her army of nexuses could react, she canceled the question, pushing back into the prepared text again.

“Now the Great Ship wears an ocean,” she admitted, triggering a series of honest images and scrupulously detailed graphics. “On both of our faces, we are covered by a body of water and other materials that measure a little deeper than one hundred kilometers.” The rain of buds had ended. In the course of a few odd days, what could well be the largest ocean in the galaxy had formed above their heads. “The ocean is blood-hot from the impacts, and above it is an atmosphere composed of water vapor and free oxygen and noble gases and a shifting array of synthetic molecules.”