Mechs had stimulated suns to supernova throughout the zone surrounding Galactic Center—apparently, to generate pulsars. By laying traps for mech squadrons in near pulsars, the podia had enjoyed their first military successes.
Without warning, terrible fear welled up. Quath met it for the first time in the images swimming before her.
A nebula shimmered with the delicate pink of birthing stars. Nearer, a pulsar flickered, gravestone for a vanquished sun.
Across the thin sheet of light oozed a dustcloud, blotting the nebular face—a precise image of the death that awaited all the podia, all beings, everything.
Nimfur’thon—first singed brown and then blackening, her flesh crisp and brittle, cracking away.
Nimfur’thon was nothing now, gone. Quath felt sadness for her strandsharer, for the spirit that had quadded simply with her in the Hive warrens. But that sadness was the mere skin of the beast that slouched below, the thing that Quath could not voice to herself until this moment, as the dustlanes blotted the nebula’s fair glimmering.
Dust. Darkness. All-swallowing death.
Quath felt a chill of dread, not for Nimfur’thon but for herself.
Quath pressed for the Factotum.
Yes? Your instruction is not complete—
The usual history was there, in abundance. How the ages-long war with the mechs began. How the race had seen the challenge. How the highest of all the podia, the Illuminates, understood what the landscape of science had implied: the holy cosmic view.
But not all agreed. Dissenters called the Interlopers opposed the Synthesis. Debate raged. Finally, all disagreement was banished, liberating the energies of the race. Then, knowing the truth, the race went on to—
Quath clicked off this standard stuff.
Yes?
That is not customarily requested.
Was there a hesitation? Well. I suppose…
A gloss of more history. Dates, places, facts—planets and aeons, now all faded. Then, plunging on, Quath was suddenly in the midst of the Interloper vision, as quoted in their texts.
The death of the individual was a fact, they said, brute and unavoidable. There was no rebirth for each of the podia. There was no hidden message in science.
A resonant, silky voice sang from some ancient bower:
IT IS OUR STATION TO LIVE WITHIN LAWS THAT GIVE US BEING, BUT OFFER OF THEMSELVES NO PURPOSE OR PROMISE, NO TRIUMPH AS A SPECIES. THE UNIVERSE ALLOWS US A PLACE IN ITS SYSTEMATIC WORKINGS BUT ONLY CARES FOR THE SYSTEM ITSELF, NOT US.
Quath gasped, to see such things so baldly stated.
Yet she felt an answering dread inside herself, a swelling feeling of greeting. These ideas she too held. The crisping moment of Nim’furthon’s death had brought these thoughts forth. They would not submerge again, ever. She listened further to the soft, confident voice that chanted its final truth:
EVEN THIS MANNER OF STATING THE TRUTH
MISLEADS.
THE WORLD OUTSIDE OURSELVES
IS IN FACT INCAPABLE OF CARING. WE EXIST
AS RANDOM HAPPENINGS IN A WORLD WHICH
IS ORDERLY
IN ITS LAWS, BUT WITHOUT ANY PLAN BEYOND
THE GRAVID WORKINGS OF DYNAMICS.
Quath recoiled, as though an eating strand had suddenly writhed and turned into a serpent.
Here it was, what she had feared. Now it was substantial and unmoving, a solid chunk of history. Other podia had seen the same vast chewing abyss. The world was a rotten, hollow thing. One touch and it split.
Quath’s hearts pumped erratically; she could sense each thumping liquid surge through a different tube. Hormones showered her, rendering with tangs and savory threads the dry drumroll of history.
The heretics easily refuted the Synthesis by which Quath had lived. History, carved by a different knife, became unrecognizable. There was talk of religious mania induced by the merciless, unending mech war.
But the Synthesis was not religion, Quath argued to herself, it was a philosophical discovery. Religions had come and gone before. None had caused the podia to rise as one.
Unrelenting, the hormone-savored logic rolled on, over Quath’s objections. The Illuminates had come into full being in that vastly ancient time. Their iron rule prevailed.
Images flared, one by one: spindly podia smashing nests, cutting strands. Disbelievers gutted, wailing, and left hanging to shrivel under strange suns.
The Synthesis spoke of rational podia seeking the light, Quath heard. But she could not quell her own thoughts. Did this look like the labors of logic? How could the Synthesis be so sure of its assumptions?
She abruptly yanked away. The Factotum must have been watching closely. You leave?
Angrily, Quath spat,
It is not done. No benefit accrues from— and the Factotum launched into a hoary, cobwebbed oration.
Quath realized that the Factotum would take the words literally and erase the conversation. Perhaps that was just as well. The poor creature could not deal with these questions.
Perhaps, Quath told herself grimly, no podia could.
Then why was she so burdened?
FOUR
Beq’qdahl clacked by, moving rapidly and well.
Beq’qdahl canted her forelegs back with easy grace, her thorax colors and fuzzed eyes rippling with wry humor. Eyelet hairs dilated outward in waves to signify strandsharer fellowship. She added,
Quath burned with embarrassment. Whenever she thought of Nimfur’thon the persistent nightmare flooded all other memories.
Quath decided to cover her confusion with a sly dig:
Beq’qdahl caught the hint in the words.
Quath smoothed her eyelet hairs and oozed red pap through them to show lacings of anger barely held in check.
Quath flared. Her fear of heights and of flying was a barb in her flesh.
Beq’qdahl was surprised.
Quath spat back,
A pause.
Disquiet darted through Quath. Could Beq’qdahl read what she truly felt? Did Beq’qdahl know her doubts? Exposure could ruin Quath’s future.
Quath started to compose a crushing remark and then thought better of it.
Quath brushed away a ratlike service robot which was polishing its handiwork, Quath’s new pod. Beq’qdabl was a competitor, of that one could be sure. For a passing moment Quath had wanted to unburden herself to Beq’qdahl. That would have been an error. No one could help. But still…if she could find even a gesture, a word…
Stamping heavily out of the tunnel to try the fixed pod, ringing and clacking, she noticed a reference output in the ceramic wall. Something nagged at her, something from the simmering anxiety within. She punched for General Information, gave indices, and scanned the flowing text:
THE SYNTHESIS: (1) REALIZATION THAT A CONTINUITY EXISTS BETWEEN INERT MATTER, THROUGH THE GRAND DESIGN OF THE EARLY UNIVERSE, AND INTELLIGENT LIFE TODAY. NOW ACCEPTED BY ALL, THIS COSMIC PERSPECTIVE MAY BE SEEN AS A CULMINATION OF ALL THE ANCIENT RELIGIONS, THOUGH OF COURSE IT IS ERECTED ON A FIRM FOUNDATION OF SCIENTIFIC…
Continuity. That meant things went on. Stated so baldly, in austere and objective lines, the phrases had a certain power.
A tiny crevice, but Quath took shelter there.
FIVE
The podia assembled for the confluence in a cavern deep in the Hive burrows. They had carved it when first arriving here, even while they ripped and scoured whole mech legions. This cavern recalled their ancient origins. Watery images of the mingling, chattering podia reflected from the steepled, glossy walls. Scrabbling pupa had polished the rude stone while they mewled and played.
Danni’vver appeared at the entrance of the confluence portal. She issued the ritual call, syllables booming down from the arched ceiling.
For this occasion none wore the gray, rough work sheaths of laborers. Instead, there were ample ballooned legments. Some sported rosy crescents of flapping headdress. Fuzzed cilia rippled. Rainbow washes of sweet-scented pus set off artfully inflamed eyelets. Teased tracheae plumes and carapaces of steel-blue sheen exalted their wearers. Some played with pearly castanets of animal bone jangling from each legjoint. Old myriapodia showed fresh encrustations of mica or baked pumice.
Those recently promoted found opportunities to display the gleaming leg they had earned, polished and bright amid the tangle of their tarnished pods. Others flaunted ringing, coppery antennae. Or huge ebony tusks. New quartz lenseyes oozed spectra like jewels in oil. Those recently augmented with artificial digestive tracts sported swollen bladders which throbbed with recently pulped food.
The tardy podia swarmed up the laddered strands and into the confluence hole. As they creaked into knee-cock, Nimfur’thon’s image formed above them. The traditional invocation began. A resounding voice thanked the laborers for quitting their tasks, to come and honor a fallen strandsharer. Quath paid close attention though some nearby buzzed with gossip. Then—incredibly!—the Tukar’ramin appeared on high far above Nimfur’thon.
Everyone gaped. Never had the Tukar’ramin deigned to come before them all.
Seeming not to notice the shock she had caused, the Tukar’ramin filled the huge chamber with her resonant voice. She intoned the Verities. Quath listened intently as the ancient story unfolded, trying to pry fresh meaning from it.
The litany was, of course, quite true and grand. It told how perturbations clumped balls of spinning gas, which in time flattened into galaxies. The collapsing cores of young galaxies then flared hot: quasars. Those death throes were burning beacons across an abyss so vast that distance dimmed them to pinpricks of radiance. Yet the podia had deduced that at their center lurked immense black holes of a billion stellar masses or more, holding in a vast grip the surrounding roiling dust.
So it was in all galaxies, down to our very own. *The black holes spin and suck, spin and suck,* the Tukar’ramin said.
So the grip of matter’s evolution went on. Accretion disks swirled about the black holes. Tidal forces ground stars to dust. Inductive electrodynamic fields drove great swarms of particles out from these disks, like geysers. Only in the benign outer districts of a galaxy are there mild conditions for the origin of organic life.
*Thus do we glimpse across the refracting curvature of the universe itself only the pyres of huge ancient catastrophes. The burning of matter itself. The graves of suns.* The Tukar’ramin made the spectacle unfold before them. Galaxies churned and flared and died across the walls of the chasm.
Yet this was only the opening act in a grand drama. In the quiet, unseen, wheeling disks of ordinary galaxies, the Verity went onward. Stars baked heavy elements. Carbon wedded to oxygen, phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen. They thrived. Planets spun. Life struggled up.
Opposing this flowering of natural workings were the mechs. They pitted themselves in vicious, eternal war with sovereign life.
Quath became drowsy. Many legs rustled impatiently. Multipodia nearby sent covert chatter on their private bandwidths. The Tukar’ramin surely overheard them, but still droned on. The familiar litany:
Noughts. Life that was Nought mastered the energy resources of a world. These were simple, unsophisticated races. The first stage. Divine evolution decreed that Noughts must leave the stage. Their lands became grist for the next stage.
Primes. Life coming to Prime converted whole stars to useful purpose: the second level. Their works could be seen across the galactic arms, those chasms of dark and confusion. Such races wrote their names large on the open slate of dumb, blank matter.
The podia were surely Primes now—this much they had risen. They knew their purpose.
Starswarmers. This was the podia’s goal. Starswarmers mastered the colossal energy sources of the galaxy itself.
Such a torrent, used to signal across the gulf between galaxies, could send word of the podia to the entire universe. This was their destiny: Starswarmers.
If the podia could master the energy of the center of their own comparatively mild and inconsequential galaxy, they could yet play a role on the largest of all stages, the singing communications between the great lakes of stars. Thus could they harvest the lore of ancient times and share the gathering destiny of other Starswanners.
The Summation, the merging of all that was best in the universe, would follow.
The Tukar’ramin followed the ageold text, as handed down by the Illuminates:
*—all strandsharers, near and far, flat and thin, sorbed and laced. All shall lick of it in company. That supreme moment shall surely come, when mind dominates matter at last and turns it to the purposes of the Swarmers. The race to entropy death shall be halted. Mind will rule. As the atoms of our bones and metals were cooked in the first stars, so shall we return to oneness with the universe and…*
Something coiled inside Quath. In the spiral arms flaring with crisp orange supernovas she saw not stars coming out of nothing, but instead black dust eating all, a relentless tide of filth that swamped the ember ruby suns—
Her voice shattered the Verities. The confluence ceremony fell into shocked silence. Quath discovered she had risen from knee-cock to full stature.
*You have a question? That is proper, my strandsharer.*
But no one ever asked questions in confluence, ever, and everyone knew it.
*All life will find rebirth.*
*In waiting.*
*In a sense.*
*It will be like sleeping time.*
Above, the Tukar’ramin loomed vast and glistening, anchored to gossamer strands. Quath heard a muttering of discontent around her. But she pressed on:
*Information does not ever truly vanish in the universe, if we can elude entropy’s gnawing jaws. That is our aim.*
*Quath’jutt’kkal’thon…* Using Quath’s full name, the Tukar’ramin lowered a proboscis encrusted with fertile sensors, peering. Her cilia rippled with concern. *It is better to think of the Summation as something far larger than yourself. For such it is.*
*We live on in the sense that our works live. What we are lives. Our vector sum abides in the universe forever.*
*That, I think, is unknown.*
*I do not believe so.*
This reduction of the center of the matter to, to an opinion, stunned Quath. Without this peg the edifice collapsed.
*That is not given to us to know.*
Several of the elderly myriapodia sent discreet low-frequency signals to Quath, urging an end. Other podia murmured and rustled.
*Remember, it is the essence of us which propagates.*
More homilies. Quath felt a sudden rush of embarrassment at being so exposed. They all mutely accepted, all of them. They kept silent. Which meant that none truly believed. Only stupid, blind Quath still questioned.
*This has proved to be a blossoming exchange. Are your quandaries resolved?*
*I suspect you are more disturbed by Nimfur’thon’s passing than the rest of us. Know that we understand.*
Tides of Light Page 11
