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.>

The usual history was there, in abundance. How the ages-long war with the mechs began. How the race had seen the challenge. How the highest of all the podia, the Illuminates, understood what the landscape of science had implied: the holy cosmic view.

But not all agreed. Dissenters called the Interlopers opposed the Synthesis. Debate raged. Finally, all disagreement was banished, liberating the energies of the race. Then, knowing the truth, the race went on to—

Quath clicked off this standard stuff.

Yes?

<The Interlopers—their teachings? Those are not mentioned.>

That is not customarily requested.

<I do now request it.>

Was there a hesitation? Well. I suppose…

A gloss of more history. Dates, places, facts—planets and aeons, now all faded. Then, plunging on, Quath was suddenly in the midst of the Interloper vision, as quoted in their texts.

The death of the individual was a fact, they said, brute and unavoidable. There was no rebirth for each of the podia. There was no hidden message in science.

A resonant, silky voice sang from some ancient bower:

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.

Quath gasped, to see such things so baldly stated.

Yet she felt an answering dread inside herself, a swelling feeling of greeting. These ideas she too held. The crisping moment of Nim’furthon’s death had brought these thoughts forth. They would not submerge again, ever. She listened further to the soft, confident voice that chanted its final truth:

EVEN THIS MANNER OF STATING THE TRUTH

MISLEADS.

THE WORLD OUTSIDE OURSELVES

IS IN FACT INCAPABLE OF CARING. WE EXIST

AS RANDOM HAPPENINGS IN A WORLD WHICH

IS ORDERLY

IN ITS LAWS, BUT WITHOUT ANY PLAN BEYOND

THE GRAVID WORKINGS OF DYNAMICS.

Quath 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.

Quath’s hearts pumped erratically; she could sense each thumping liquid surge through a different tube. Hormones showered her, rendering with tangs and savory threads the dry drumroll of history.

The heretics easily refuted the Synthesis by which Quath had lived. History, carved by a different knife, became unrecognizable. There was talk of religious mania induced by the merciless, unending mech war.

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

Unrelenting, the hormone-savored logic rolled on, over Quath’s objections. The Illuminates had come into full being in that vastly ancient time. Their iron rule prevailed.

Images flared, one by one: spindly podia smashing nests, cutting strands. Disbelievers gutted, wailing, and left hanging to shrivel under strange suns.