The words rang cold though they floated awash and welcoming in Tukar’ramin’s warm sea.
<No. I fear some, some—>
*Cease. The weight you carry must be lifted by degrees. Immersion in our Path will help.*
<I know the Path.>
*No myriapod can trace more than a branch or two of the Path, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon. Do not add arrogance to your burden.*
<I—> The pressing fear welled up again and Quath sucked in breath to cry out.
*I see it. Know it. But you must journey through that mossing.*
<But I—>
*The Factotum will show you the Chronicle to a depth you have not seen. Explore it. See the sweep of us. This will restore you.*
Quath left, stumbling on numbed pods, spiracles sucking and bristling in agitation.
THREE
Within the Chronicle, time engulfed Quath.
The Factotum—a dry, fussy sort—had left her moored in a cloying mesh that reeked of use by many bipodia. This place was usually used for the elementary education of the very young, the slow-witted.
Quath could barely remember that phase. She had been totally natural, then, with no machine-augmented capacity. Weak, soft, dumb. She had memorized the Verities of the Chronicle, of course. Now it all felt useless to her. She had lost her faith.
So now she was back here. Among the smells of youth. Helmeted, pinpricked in all her senses.
And before her gaze the vast story opened.
She knew the outlines, had learned this lore without ever truly thinking about it. Images of antiquity flitted by. For the ancient multipodia life was uncaring, a sweet gambol. Even myriapodia lounged amid luxuriant sticky strands. They basked, pap-gorged.
Yet in time the race spread over the homeworld. The sciences and philosophies of those distant times were numbed by the pervading slackness.
The podia had not always been this way. In early drawings fierce, long-extinct animals took the pincer in their throats, struggled mightily, went still. Lazy though they had been, the ancients had cleared their world of such vermin.
Unchallenged, the race lounged. But their parent star had arced into the inner precincts of the Galactic Center. Mechs began to foray into the realm of the podia. The enormity of mech purpose became clear. Only by reproducing at a fevered pace could the podia match the mechs’ expansive verve.
Their slit-eyed spirit revived. After that came scientific discoveries that made sense of all things.
What is your concern? The Factotum was ever alert, feeding Quath a torrent of data, all encoded in hormonal tangs and filigrees.
<I…I am here because the Tukar’ramin…>
You would like some educational facet of the Chronicle?
<Very well.>
Quath was in a vagrant mood. Her mind skittered on the surface of a teardrop that shimmered like a planet, surface tension tugging her to skate on its icy sheen. She braced herself as finely orchestrated scents began singing “Harnessing the Collapsed Stars.”
The introduction quickly shuffled through conventional lore. Suns’ deep fires inevitably ebbed. The nearly burntout stars imploded, their pyre a flash seen across the galaxy. The smaller ones left cores of pure neutrons. Spinning, their polar caps spitting out particles, they beamed frantic search- lights, pulsing steadily: galactic lighthouses. A useful source of energy.
Once the spinning slowed, podia could approach. Teams of strandsharers blocked the circling streams of particles, dammed the energy, silencing the pulsar, converting it to useful purposes.
They had found that mechs were drawn to pulsars, not only for their wealth of energy but for gargantuan scientific experiments. The purpose of these elaborate works, carried out above the poles of pulsars as they gushed electron-positron plasmas, remained unknown.
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—
<Forget that. I want the Chronicle again. Tell me about the Interlopers.>
