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.*

<But it’s the whole point!>

*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.

<Will the Illuminates survive forever?>

*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…yes.>

*I suspect you are more disturbed by Nimfur’thon’s passing than the rest of us. Know that we understand.*

<I…I know.> To cover her fear and confusion she retreated into the ritual of <I give thanks.> Quath returned to knee-cock, 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.

SIX

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.