Everyone gaped. Never had the Tukar’ramin deigned to come before them all. <What! Why?> someone blurted.
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—
<But what of us?>
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.
<Why do you say we will be rejoined in the Summation?>
*All life will find rebirth.*
<Where will we be hiding in the meantime?>
*In waiting.*
<Will we know it?>
*In a sense.*
<Even though we’re dead? Like Nimfur’thon?>
*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:
<All of us there, together?>
*Information does not ever truly vanish in the universe, if we can elude entropy’s gnawing jaws. That is our aim.*
<But we haven’t! We are only beginning 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.*
<Of course, I know, but—>
*We live on in the sense that our works live. What we are lives. Our vector sum abides in the universe forever.*
<But are we conscious of it?>
*That, I think, is unknown.*
