Authors: Gregory Benford
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.
in jeering symphony, excreting bile juice from their seams, flooding the tunnel with an acrid smoke.
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.
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.*
to be Starswarmers.>
*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.*
of it?>
*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.*
raak, raak
.
Podia nearby pinched their cilia in disapproval. Beq’qdahl openly jibed.
The
unfalum
, their shared holy food, passed from pincer to pincer. Quath took a strand numbly, engorged it, and began to pull the sticky
wad into strings. The manipulae inside her mouth tugged the sweet filaments and spread them into sheets, expanding the surface
area. Fine-boned manipulae
pressed these against tasting buds, to heighten the sense. Quath sat and worked her mouth, as did the others.
Why was she alone burdened with these doubts? Quath wondered. Yet she could not give them up.
The confluence ended with singing and smacking noises as they devoured the last of the
unfalum
. Quath made a show of clenching her thorax, but no matter how thinly she pressed the
unfalum
, somehow Quath could not swallow, could not truly eat of the essence of their shared vision.
That evening she podded away from the Hive, which floated shadowlike above a wrecked dry plain. She wandered among the hills
north of the Syphon. Tomorrow she would return to the ferment of work, but now something drew her out of the secure warrens.
The land trembled as though this planet were breathing. If so, Quath thought in her distraction, the world would begin to
gasp its last quite soon enough. Inexplicably, the image disturbed her.
A roof of clouds drifted overhead, bellies bulging blue with rain. A wan glow from the setting sun drenched the landscape
in lazy oranges and reds. Quath shifted to transopticals and saw the Cosmic Circle in orbit, inert and dull without the prodding
of the podia’s magnetic fields.
She longed to labor up there, to help fling the incredible sharpness of the Circle into the breast of this dying mudball.
That
was glory, honor, destiny.
The Circle was the most precious of her race’s natural resources.
The names of the podia who had found and captured the Circle would ring down through history forever. Possession of the Circle
gave the podia the key to slitting the throats of whole worlds. They had used it against the mechs who opposed their move
into Galactic Center.
It could be hurled against mech craft at immense speed. After it had chopped ships, there was a way to make it suddenly radiate
enormous bursts of electromagnetic radiation, frying all unprotected mechs within an entire solar system. The Circle Masters
were benefactors and warriors beyond all comparison in the history of the podia. Quath was proud to tread the ruptured ground
beneath their handiwork.
On this rumpled plain mech ruins clogged the ravines. Smashed mech factories gaped like rotted teeth. Mech carcasses still
smoked from past battles. Podia had stripped others of useful parts so that only the shell remained. Quath swelled with pride
at the devastation her kind had wrought.
Even this lightly defended world had demanded the best of the podia. They had fallen upon it while the local mechs were beset
by internal struggles. The Illuminates had detected signs of exceptionally vicious mech intercity competition. Those wise
beings had then ordered the Hives to descend. Once enough of the surface was secured for construction of the magnetic clamping
stations, the Cosmic Circle had been brought into play. Their victory here opened the possibility of penetrating into the
mech fortress stars even closer to the tantalizing core of the whirlpool galaxy.