STARSWARMER [ss], Gregory Benford

One purpose of civilization is to shape our lives and give meaning to them. But is there a purpose to life itself?

Clinking clacking jittering, Qath strode the slashed land. A final hill loomed between her and the Syphon. Qath articulated widely, legs grating, yawning, and surged over the apex. A stone outcrop shattered on her underbelly and ground away with a brittle shriek. Qath tuned out the wail of tearing metal, even as she felt the alloy rip and a storage vat pop, the sulphuric mix gurgling out. She paid no heed, she peered ahead. There, blooming skyward in orange plumes, would grow the Syphon.

" Where are you, slit-eye?" came a burst in Nimfur'thon's sweet-sour tongue.

" Coming askew you on 97deg-42-In8, monopod" Qath spat in reply, though hissing to take the sting from her jibe.

" You will stumble, prang yourself, and be late."

" You faxed you would be heclens from the Syphon. Yet I read you within the zone of second-order radiance"

" So I am" Nimfur'thon said this with an elaborate, shimmering aura that framed her chuckle.

" That is too close. The Tukar'ramin specifically warned. Interchange modes of the jet can snarl outward"

" They are mere statistical fluctuations, low-limper friend. Thermodynamically bounded. Feedback stabilization will catch the bulge and tuck it

back in to its mother sac."

She stopped to measure her position, using fixes on two nearby peaks. There were no moons circling this world; for easy navigation, they should have put a small artificial one in place. But the podia did not plan on being here long enough to justify the trouble.

Qath surged downhill, clanking jingling ringing, as her pods found footing on the skittering stones. She arrowed on Nimfur'thon's peeping redness. Calmly, letting no color into her warble, she said

" Still, we were mandated to stay three heclens away"

" Monopody, you. We said we would come together and watch the plasma dance on the hills. How to see it otherwise?"

" I, we have - "

Qath's mind clogged for an instant as she sensed a servo whine - eeeeeeii - in a forepod. She thought of the Tukar'ramin safely working in the Hive, beyond the brimming ridgeline. She and Nimfur'thon should be there, celebrating with the rest of the hive's brood. Instead Nimfur'thon had persuaded her to come here, against the Tukar'ramin's directives. Qath had tramped these hills many days with Nimfur'thon as they labored together. They had struggled with the fluxtube canisters. Nimfur'thon had splintered a pod bone when a bulkhead tipped over. She had been unable towalk without agony until Qath, boosting on rockets back to the hive, fetched an artificial replacement. The new pod shaft worked better than the natural organic one, as usual. Qath envied Nimfur'thon the fresh pod, for the other was now faster; she had no natural pods left.

" Your ossicles overload at this small flight?" Nimfur'thon sent in sharp chatter. In parallel she lifted a sing-song, /, we have: I, we have on a sour sideband of- her carrier, taunting.

" No, I - I - "

" Ground-burrower, you become. Ciffli'fl-Qath. Your thorax trumpets, but at the cusp moment - "

" Enough cyst-sucker! I am soon to be upon you."

With a lurch Qath birthed a rosy egg of flame beneath her and jetted up a granite-flecked cliff face. All through Nimfur'thon's chiding Qath had been planning, vectoring. Now, expending all her maneuvering reserve in one spurt, Qath arced up the stony wall and - fuel guttering out in a black fog, rockets choking down - she scrabbled at the boulders of the peak. Clutched. Teetered on the brink. Fanned the blue air, and caught. - jitjitjit - eeeee - screamed a linkage, but Qath scrambled to safety, feeling the warmth as her center of gravity slid into snug position above solid ground.

" Take homage here!" Qath

barked as she sighted Nimfur'thon's squat disk on the plain below.

" How did you - ? Ah, squeezed out your last dollop of fuel. Not wise."

" You bray of wisdom? You, who jibed me into ambling here?" Qath felt suddenly exposed on this high point. She spied sheets of phosphorescence hanging_ in the air - near, chillingly near.

" You have the best view." Nimfur'thon temporized, her rippling signal now betraying a thin thread of doubt.

" The Syphon forms," Qath said. Yellow steam gouted from a jumble of hills. Mudworked buildings crescented the ridgeline, temporary housings for the fluxtube formers. "It's coming. I think we should - "

" Yes, go down the reverse slope, Qath, away from the Syphon."

Qath scrambled downslope, sending boulders clattering with her bumpers. "And you? We must hurry."

" I will cross this plain. We meet in that low rut, there - " Nimfur'thon squirted a vectored grid-image " - and watch the Syphon."

Qath could hear her heaving grunt as she geared up in haste.

" We deserve a good gaze at it. This is our first, not like a vinegar-souled multipodder who's bored with it. And we have labored hard for these moments."

Qath ignored these repeated justifications and focused on the skittering gang of rocks that herded before her, racing and leaping downhill. No moment to be buried in the embrace of pebbles, no. She skirted a ledge, made a controlled slide -

" Qath - there are animals here!"

" Impossible. The area was burnt fine. Run, you - "

" No, I have stirred them out with my pounding. They swarm from their pits."

Qath turned and crosshaired Nimfur'thon on the plain. Dots jiggled about the gray-white disk. "Flyers. Birds."

" No, hoppers. They are the worst. Pests, into everything." The disk that was Nimfur'thon lapped flame at the dots and they blackened, tumbled.

" Move on! We have mere moments!"

" No. I sense there are more here. What if they have gotten to the flux-tube formers? They could spoil the Syphon."

" Run." She ceased looking and lurched at full gear down a narrow ravine.

" I can pick up their thrummings now," Nimfur'thon cried. " There are many here. They stretch in long lines."

" Seeking food. Grazers. But you must leave that exposed plain. Now." Chuffing, clenching, she jounced down the steep cleft.

" We must call upon the Tukar'ramin. These pests could be in the fluxworks - "

" Then they shall soon be scoured out. Witless, we cannot call the Tukar'ramin. Forgotten, have you, that we are here without mandate?"

" Yes, there, I have flamed the last. There be more - "

" Forget them"

" You are right. I come."

The sky crinkled.

" Fly? Time does not allow - "

" I am. I am firing - "

The sky shattered.

Qath slid to a stop, tucked in pods, snicked ports and shields fast. The air sang an ionized blue. From the low hills lanced up the fluxtube, ripening pink to red to orange. Wind howled and clutched at Qath's rim, thin fingers to tip her over. Qath tuned frantically to the brood's channel, to call out, and instead was flooded by the brood's view, from the far ridgeline.

The fluxtube grew straight and true from the skirt of hills, biting the ceiling of clouds, boiling them away in a purple flash. It climbed up, up, in an instant had cleared the ivory clouds with its heat. Now the black of vacuum appeared, a spot forming high up, a target coming into being as the arrow shot through it. Stars winked new.

Now the upper link was forged. The tube opened on the clean vacuum of space. They had watched it climb, eyes smarting, awed at it. The brood sent forth a chorus of applause, a popping and frizzing song.

"Complete" came the Tukar'ramin's warm signal. Now the fluxtube hummed with new life.

It was a transparent string of electromagnetic fields, hollow at the center. The intense fields exerted pressure as the tube thrust down, deep into the rock of this world. The tube walls kept back the pressing rock on all sides while the tip probed deeper. Vast stresses fought along the tube walls. The tip gnawed, burning a cylinder of stone free of its mother world. The top of the tube was in the vacuum above, while immense pressures pushed the freed rock upward from below.

"Complete" the mellow, unhurried voice of the Tukar'ramin came - and the fluxtube suddenly filled.

Its pearly, transparent walls of force turned mottled gray. A plug of rock was streaming out.

Qath called "Nimfur'thon" in the roaring, pelting gale. The wind's pebbled teeth clattered on her skin. "Nimfur'thon!"

" Here. I landed, but am exposed."

" Hold."

" Blinded, we are, my monopoddy. This grimy breeze - "

A rolling blast burst over the hills. The fluxtube brightened. The cylinder filled, pink to red to white.

" The core - " and out it spurted. The lance had struck to the center of this world, to its treasure. The flux-tube had flared out as it bared downward, to surround the ball of molten nickel-iron at the core. The tube throat was artfully shaped like a rocket chamber, fat at the planet's center, then narrowing as the white-hot metal funneled up from the core, increasing the thrust. The nozzle connected the vast core pressure to the void of space. The riches squirted up and out, fleeing the groaning weight of this world.

Qath squinted. The fluxtube walls glowed. Liquid metal shot through it, blindly rushing toward the stars. She was totally caught up in the transmissions flooding her. The Tukar'ramin's view of the tube shimmered.

Delicate streamers of green and amber danced amid the white fires. Precious metal fluids - the only horde this wretched, moonless planet boasted. The tube sucked this life out, up, through the air and above the blanket of gas. The view tilted, following a black fleck of impurity up the thin glowing line. Starwards. Through the black disc, into sucking void. The fluxtube curved away, high and beyond air's clutching. There, at the rim of the dark hole, a wire cast in space. The tube peeled over until it found an orbit for its pap, and then released the boiling metal. The yellowing, shuddering fluid, free of gravity's strangle, shot out into the chill. Returned to the spaces it once knew, the metal cold-formed, mottled, crusted its skin with impurities. The birthing thread creaked and groaned in places as it unspooled. It fractured in spots, yet kept smoothly gliding along its gentle orbit. Cooling, it grayed. Graying, the threads would make the frame for their work here.

" Qath! Something - " Qath, dazed, fixed on Nimfur'thon. But the signal faded. She sent a burst to the hive through a haze of noise. An answering tone came, and the brood view at once tilted back down the glowing string of metal, to the hills. A hurricane wind had flushed clear the air. The eerie light of the core metal dappled the plain with shadows. But something wavered -

The tube. It twisted, hummed, curled into a helix, straightened again. Light surged in the walls. A bulge formed. It grew. Qath watched the image, awash in it. The fattening flux-tube rippled. Flexed. And looped suddenly, faster than eye could follow. Out, across the plain. The metal soup escaped. A blinding white ball spilled over, splintering rocks, spreading. The gray pancake of Nimfur'thon, crouched in a shallow draw, was singed where the bubbling liquid first touched. The tide hesitated and then lapped over, blackening, blackening, blackening everything.

" Nimfur'thon!"

The burnished shape did not answer.

The legs jerking. A ripping scream. Footpads melting where they touched bubbling white. Nimfur'thon turning, pods splintering. Skin popping open. Guts pouring out to flame into brown smoke.

Nimfur'thon's walking pods melted slowly into the ooze, her manipulating pods clutching frantically at the sky, as if to pull herself up. Orange plumes cracked the upper bulkhead. Armpods beat at the flames in spasms. Yellow tongues ate. The bulkhead blew open. Gobbets spattered. This was the way Qath would remember Nimfur'thon. This vision seared away all other memories. For what seemed a long time Qath could see nothing but this licking moment of death. Her opticals registered other inputs, but her mind rejected them. She stood frozen. Silent. She began to tremble.

The Syphon guttered out. The helical instability was diagnosed and work parties crossed the plain toward the fluxworks. They carried Nimfur'thon's remains, sectioned, back to the hive. Few spoke to Qath, not because they considered her shamed - inspection of Nimfur'thon's tracer log showed her to be the instigator; the risk was her own - but rather because they were busy restoring the fluxtube projectors, which had fused to slag. As the teams worked, Qath sloughed back to the hive. Her joints and seams ached from pinpricks of damage. Dani'wer, assistant in training to the Tukar'ramin, sent beeping questions during Qath's march, asking details of how the two had maneuvered so close, and - from supple darlings of phrases - sensed the cloud that now descended over Qath.

There followed a rest period, which Qath embraced, even though she felt in the warren walls the strumming of motion from the multipodia, who did not rest. The looping instability was a setback, throwing off their schedule. Overhead, hundreds of their fellow strandsharers orbited, awaiting the gouts of metal to begin their weave. The pace in the hive must quicken, then; Qath knew this. Yet she fell into slumber gratefully, legs folded close and tight in the slick webbing; for something pursued her.

Qath woke panting, pods tangled, the speckling of her tracheae bulging red, yellow, red again in fevered rhythm. There was a buzzing call for her that echoed through the groined alcove. Qath answered and found a summons from Dani'wer. She dismounted anxiously. For some reason her mind was a snarled maze. Her hydraulics knotted and filled with a pressing,ache. She hastily smeared a vomit-drop on an acrid spore. This eaten, Qath quadded inward, resting one leg which had splintered a knee. She limped through vaults astir with repair work. A pentapod hailed, but otherwise she was ignored. This was nothing new, and in fact was what Qath desired this day. The weight that had descended upon her did not welcome company.

" You realize you are blameful?; : droned Dani'wer at the entrance to the central chasm.

" Of necessity."

" Your Ascension will be slowed."

" Yes."

" Addition of a manipulating arm, to render you" - Dani'wer consulted her slate, rather than look directly at Qath " - pentapod, will be delayed."

" Yes."

" It is good that you reconcile so easily. Some do not have that ability, though they be multipodia."

" Yes."

Dani'wer flicked open a port, studied Qath, and said " Despite your ratafelu, " the Tukar'ramin will enter you."

Qath felt the spaces within her suddenly open and the fear flood out, squeezing her spiracles shut until the air wheezed through tight slits. She was sure Dani'wer would notice. The wall parted with a soft rumble that hid Qath's rasping breath, and Qath teetered forward on stiffening limbs. She knew she would be seen for what she was.

"Terror pins you." The thought came as she gazed up, tilting to register the height. A vast bulk moved in the webs. Moist beads drifted in a tingling cloud. Massive arched stoneworks gave the hushed air a pressing weight.

Qath began, " Abbess, abysmal sorrow - "

"Do not attempt it. I see."

The looming structure worked with flashes of light, spanning the chasm with silvery swarm. Qath struggled to take it in. She felt a probing. Fine wires laced through the muddy inside of her. She dully sensed a phantasma dancing, spinning - and then gone, evaporated.

"It is not Nimfur'thon that infests you." The words rang cold but they floated awash and welcoming in the Tukar'ramin's warm sea.

" No. I fear some, some - "

"Cease. The weight you carry must be lifted by degrees. Not shrugged aside. Immersion in our Path will help."

" I know the Path - "

"No myriapod can trace more than a branch or two of the Path, Qath'jutt'kkaJ'thon. Do not add arrogance to your burden."

" I - " The pressing fear welled up again and Qath sucked in breath to cry out.

In a pause which renewed her, Qath heard, "The Factotum will show you the Chronicle. Explore it. See the sweep of us. This will restore you."

"I see it. Know it. But you must journey through that mossing."

Qath left, stumbling on numbed pods, spiracles sucking and bristling in agitation.

Within the Chronicle, time engulfed Qath. Left moored in the mesh by the Factotum, helmeted, pin-pricked in all her senses, before her gaze the vast story opened.

She knew the outlines, necessarily. The familiar images flitted by, in ancient incomplete sensoria.

Flat, shrunken multipodia labored every tenth day and rested the other nine. Their life was uncaring, a sweet gambol. Even aged myriapodia lounged amid the sticky strands, pap-gorged, basking slowly. The race spread over the homeworld and then, much later, to a fortunately hospitable neighbor. The sciences 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, stilled. The ancients had cleared their world of such vermin. And then the long slackness came to the podia. But the challenge of the third planet they discovered - bitter, cold, swarming with toothed life - changed the podia. The slit-eyed spirit returned, and after came the Redeemers, and finally the discoveries that made sense of all things.

What is your concern? whispered the sensorium, knowing attention lagged. The Factotum was ever alert.

" I ... I am here because the Tukar'ramin ..."

That is seen. Perhaps you need a distractantl

" I don't..."

Some educational facet of the Chronicle?

" Very well."

Qath was in too strange a mood, her mind skittering on the surface of something invisible, to digest any literature. She braced herself as the sensorium began, Harnessing the Collapsed Stars, and tried to relax. The introduction quickly shuffled through conventional lore about the nearly burnt-out stars. They 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 searchlights, pulsing steadily; galactic lighthouses. A useful source of energy. Once the spinning slowed to three hextons, the podia could approach. Teams of strandsharers blocked the circling streams of particles, dammed the energy, silencing the pulsar, converting it to useful purposes -

Without warning the thing came welling up from inside. Qath met the fear for the first time and saw its face in the images swimming before her. A nebula drifted, shimmering with the delicate pink of birthing stars. It was a backdrop to a spot where a pulsar flickered. Across the thin sheet of light oozed a dust cloud, blotting the nebular face, a precise image of the death that awaited all of 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. Qath felt sadness for her strandsharer, for the spirit that had quadded simply with her in the warrens of their birth-world. But that sadness was the mere skin of the beast that slouched below, the thing Qath could not voice to herself until this moment, as the dust-lanes blotted the nebula's glimmering. Dust. Darkness. All-swallowing death.

Qath felt a chill of dread, not for Nimfur'thon, but for herself.

Qath pressed for the Factotum.

Yes? Your instruction is not complete -

" Forget that. I want the Chronicle again. The Interlopers."

The usual history was there, in abundance. How the Exodus began, once the race had seen the challenge and understood what the landscape of science implied: the holy cosmic view. How the Interlopers opposed the Synthesis. The debate. Efforts to bring the Interlopers into the starswarming community failed. They deflected arguments, refused to understand bald facts, evaded reason. Eventually they died out (why? the sensoria skipped over this point). Or, they fled, fled to become the Remnant. At last united, then, knowing the truth, the race went on to - Yesl

" The Interlopers - their teachings? Those are not mentioned." That is not customarily requested. " I am requesting it." Certainly.

A gloss of more history. Dates, places, facts - planets and eons, now all faded. Then, plunging on, Qath was suddenly in the midst of the Interloper's own era. Pale sensoria outlined the Interloper vision, quoted their texts. The death of the individual was a fact, they said, brute and unavoidable. There was no sense in the Exodus, the starswarming. There would be no rebirth for each of the podia. There was no hidden message in science. 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. Even this manner of stating the truth is misleading. The world outside ourselves is in fact incapable of caring. We exist as a random happening in a world which is orderly in its laws, but without any plan beyond the gravid workings of the rules of dynamics.

Qath 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.

Qath's heart pumped erratically; she could sense each surge through a different tube. The sensoria went on. The Synthesis was refuted. The history of the Exodus, carved under a different knife, became unrecognizable. There was talk of religious mania.

But the Synthesis was not religion, Qath argued to herself, it was a discovery. Religions had come and gone before. None had caused the podia to rise as one.

But the logic rolled on, over Qath's objections. The images flared, one by one: spindly podia smashing nests, cutting strands. Interlopers gutted, wailing, and hanging to shrivel under strange suns, their hivethons taken to fuel the Exodus. The Synthesis spoke of rational podia seeking the light - did this look like the labors of reason? How could the Synthesis be so sure of its assumptions?

Qath snapped the sensoria off and yanked at the helmet.

You leave all these incomplete -

" Yes, yes. So?"

It is not done. No benefit accrues from -

Qath listened in silence. She remembered that the Factotum was, after all, a stunted podia from the far past, a mere few lobes salvaged for this use. Best to humor it. Then an idea came.

" Surely, Factotum, surely," she interrupted. " I am disturbed by the Interloper lies, that is the reason. But I have a query for you. Only one as old and wise as you can answer it."

A warming burr: / will, of course, try to -

" Your other lobes - those which did not survive. Where are they?"

My other - ? / am not aware -

" You don't sense something missing?"

My earlier self, you mean? I... I do not know. Sometimes I remember doing young things, yes. But those parts are gone.

" Gone where?"

A ... away. They are not functional.

" Not alive? Not anywhere?"

No, I think not. I would sense them if they were ...I, I, this brings pain to me. Please ...

" Of course. Forget what I said."

Qath realized that the Factotum would take the words literally and erase the conversation. Perhaps that was just as well. The poor fractured creature could not deal with these questions.

Perhaps, Qath told herself grimly, no podia could.

Beq'qdahl clacked by, moving rapidly and well.

" Confluence will begin soon." she called.

" What?" Qath, distracted by a robot resetting the sleeve of her injured leg, glanced up.

" The confluence for Nimfur'thon, Slit-eye." 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. "You have not forgotten already, I hope?"

Qath burned with embarrassment. Whenever she thought of Nimfur'thon the persistent nightmare flooded over all other memories - bad enough that a close strandsharer was gone, but what the fact implied was far worse ... Still, she should try to fix thoughts on Nimfur'thon alone. " Of course not. Some mourn in private."

" A point. I will see you, then "

Qath decided to cover her confusion with a sly dig.

" I have not noticed much public mourning, however."

Beq'qdahl caught the hint in the words. " Meaning we all should do what you do not?" She pursed her anal cavity to show the remark carried no sting.

". At least I haven't been striving to transfer into orbital weaving."

" So you haven't. A good idea not to. You are inexperienced."

" Your eyes grow drool-dimmed.

You mistake this crippled leg shell. I carry four pods, as you."

" And have done so longer, I'm sure you will soon add."

" The thought does leap to the lobes."

" Very well." She settled into knee-cock, racket, racket. " You think I overclimb."

" You came here a quad. I spanned less area than you, it is true, but I did have four legs. I still do. For you to attempt orbital weaving before / do - "

" You know I had much experience at seeding the gaseous envelopes of the red giant stars. True, our technique was different - but we did work in free space."

" Cow labor," Qath rattled out with sudden viciousness that surprised even herself.

" Not quite. We plant the spores, yes. The plasma filaments which grow on the star surface froth up, spitting out starlife - waste matter, for them."

" Dung collector*" Qath smoothed her eyelet hairs and oozed red pap through them, to show lacings of jest.

" An element of wisdom, there. The filaments live - technically speaking, though to me they are only arrays of field quantities, vector summed - and they shit upward at us."

" Shit which you comb, cooing to them as you do it."

" They spin off thermweb to us. Are we to argue about how it is delivered? The ancients fried many of themselves to develop such farming. It is the easiest method by far to make a Prime." Beq'qdahl fizzed an outgassing port in frustration." A slippery twine for hoisting oneself upward, however. No advancement."

" That is how you came to have a mere four pods when you came here?" Qath had suspected something far more inglorious and interesting.

" Yes. Promotion comes slug-slow for thermweb farmers."

" The Factors have their reasons, I'm sure."

A pause. "Qath, are you troubled?"

She replied, sharply chittering, " Why? You expect applause for your career as shitmonger?"

" No, just that your words say one thing and your cilia, your thorax spectrum - they say otherwise."

Fear darted through Qath. Could Beq'qdahl read what she truly felt? Did Beq'qdahl know? Qath started to compose a crushing remark and then thought better of it." I have only as many pods as you, Beq'qdahl, but I am still your senior. My thoughts are my own."

" Very well. I hope your precious selfhood remains composed, even after I am promoted to orbital weaving before you." Beq'qdahl clattered her ossicles in jeering symphony, excreting bile juice from their seams, flooding the tunnel with an acrid tang." If we be rivals, let there be no pretending otherwise." She exited, clanking a rear waste port.

Qath brushed away a ratlike service robot which was polishing its handiwork. Beq'qdahl was a competitor, of that one could be sure. For a passing moment Qath 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 Informati'n, gave indices and scanned

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 foundation of the 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 Qath took shelter there.

The podia assembled for the confluence in an ancient cavern deep in the hive burrows, one carved early in the history of the brood. The walls were smoothed by time and the scrabbling of pupa, and they reflected in watery images the mingling, chattering podia. Dani'wer appeared at the entrance of the confluence portal and issued the ritual call, syllables booming down from the arched ceiling. As custom required, the crowd ignored her and kept on making motions at the machinery spotted across the floor. They did no labor, of course - the devices were ancient, stiff from neglect. It was only necessary to appear to be working.

The desired impression was somewhat undercut by the swirl of colors as the podia clustered around the frozen machinery, talking (a few were eating; the day waxed late). None wore the gray, rough work sheaths of a laborer. Instead, there were ballooned legments; rosy crescents of flapping headdress; fuzzed cilia; rainbow washes of sweet-scented pus that set off artfully inflamed eyelets; teased tracheae plumes; carapaces of steel-blue sheen; pearly castanets of animal bone, jangling from each legjoint of the myriapodia; fresh encrustations of mica or baked pumice; on those recently promoted, the gleaming leg they had earned, polished and bright amid the tangle of their tarnished pods; ringing, coppery antennae; huge tasks; pulpy and swollen bladders of those recently augmented with artificial digestive tracts; flashing quartz lens-eyes; sensors, glowing like jewels in oil.

Dani'wer's call again rolled over them and this time the podia answered, swarming up the laddered strands and into the confluence hole. As they creaked into knee-cock, Nim-fur'thon's image formed above them and the traditional invocation began, a ringing voice thanking the laborers for quitting their tasks to come and honor a fallen strandsharer. Qath paid close attention, though some nearby buzzed with conversation. This died away when the Tukar'ramin appeared on high, melting into being above Nim-fur'thon's fading image.

Transmitting on several harmonics, Tukar'ramin's deep voice intoned the Verities. How perturbations of the Ylem clumped the balls of spinning gas, which flattened. The cores of some young galaxies flared hot: quasars. We see these far pinpricks of light even now, because the light of their birth throes reaches us across the universe. These galaxies are ripped apart by the double-armed excretions of black holes, and their satellites, the accretion disks. These cancerous growths blow away the gas and dust. In such disrupted, elliptical galaxies new stars form poorly. Only the benign spiral galaxies provide the mild conditions necessary for life. From the primordial epochs, gleaming across the universe to us, we glimpse only the catastrophies, not the quiet spirals. On those unseen wheeling disks stars bake heavy elements, organic compounds thrive, planets spin, life struggles upward.

Qath became drowsy. Multipodia nearby sent covert chatter on their private bandwidths. The Tukar'ramin surely overheard them, but still droned on. The familiar litany:

Life that was Nought mastered the energy resources of a world. *