Perhaps we are being narrow of vision.
“What’s that mean?”
Look there. The threads of green.
The Argo was plunging ever closer to the disk, and now they could see the far rim in profile. Gouts of angry red boiled up from the churning plane where the freshly eaten star was working its way inward. Lumps were being chewed as they rotated in the streams.
“So? Looks like a rat getting digested by a snake.”
True. Not pretty, probably not even if you’re a snake.
“Oh, I see. Those green strands above the plane there?”
Toby could now make out weaving filaments of deep jade that stood above where the star was being devoured. They were like reeds above swamp water, blowing in a breeze.
“It flashes, see?” Blue-green fibers winked with darting yellow. “Like frozen lightning, sort of.”
We might be wrong, that nothing else lives here.
“Ummm. Lightning life?”
The Bridge officers had noticed the threads, too. Some fumbled with ship’s instruments, focusing sensors on them. Knots and furious snarls climbed up the glowing green lines.
“The stuff ripped off the star—looks like it’s fouling up those threads,” Toby said.
Jocelyn had managed to get the Argo’s antennas to narrow in on the threads, despite the turbulent plasma buffeting the ship. The speakers on the Bridge sputtered and buzzed with the fizzing emissions of the disk—and then eerie high wails cut through the mushy wall of sound.
“What’s that?” Jocelyn called. “It sounds terrible.”
Killeen’s mouth twisted at the shrill chorus. Each voice would rise momentarily over the others, peal forth a mournful note, and then subside into the lacing pattern of lament. “Maybe the Magnetic Mind’s not the only thing that knows how to live on electricity.”
Toby said, “Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?”
Jocelyn nodded. “It’s the ones that are connected to those bright lumps.”
Toby’s Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:
These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy. Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence. They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field.
“Doesn’t look like they’re enjoying dinner much,” Toby said sardonically.
The sudden intrusion of the star’s mass has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die.
“How come the Magnetic Mind doesn’t die, then?”
It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers—or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of it, and were singed for their trouble.
Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting starmass—and dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star’s shredded mass was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among the slender, lacy beings.
Toby watched their distant deaths, and despite the gulf separating him from those reedy cries, he felt a strange connection. Such truly alien forms could never be brethren. They were separate nations, but still caught with humans in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of splendor and travail. Beyond matter itself, gifted with extensions of the senses no human could ever comprehend, they none the less shared the veiled dignity of being forever incomplete, of always emerging, a common heritage of being finite and forever wondering.
But the rest of the Bridge was staring beyond the splashes of color from the disk. Now visible, coming toward them, was the hexagonal of ships flown by the Myriapodia. Once more they held between them the shimmering pearly hoop, a weapon bigger than worlds.
“What’s going on?” Killeen wondered out loud. “Where’s Quath?”
Jocelyn added, “Even that cosmic string seems small here.”
The Myriapodia ships bore down upon the Argo relentlessly. They accelerated along the magnetic field lines, invisible slopes that steepened by the minute, pitching down toward the inner edge of the blazing accretion disk.
Into the pit of hell. The air brimmed with hard, dry heat. Toby gulped and wondered if he would live out the next day.
SEVEN
A Taste of the Void
As Toby heard them recounted later, the next hours on the Bridge were electrifying. He wasn’t there to see them, though. On a ship, chores have to be done on time—no excuses. Not even battle releases all of a crew to gape and thrill.
His assignment was seeding one of the seared agro domes. A team of five sweated beneath the blue-white violence in the dome’s sky, glowing from near the Eater of All Things. They had to keep the complex biodiversity here limping along, so plants that had perished under the sting of radiation had to be replaced, and new ones watered, nurtured, sheltered. Hard, ground-grubbing work.
It was a relief, in a way, after the tension of the Bridge. Using your muscles was sometimes easier than using your overstretched mind. He felt the ship moving under him as he toted and dug and fetched, knew that something was happening.
More mechs, he later learned. On the Bridge screens they appeared as flickering images, barely detectable by Argo’s systems. The earlier mech craft had been simple compared with these. It stood to reason. Some higher-order mech-tech had driven humanity from space. These were probably the type—surprisingly small, quick, elusive. They plunged down the jet after Argo and dispersed. Argo’s detectors lost them entirely.
They attacked from several angles, using strategies Killeen and the others could not even understand. Toby heard only a brief rattle of strange static in his sensorium, and then a whoosh as the dome above him vanished.
The hit took the dome’s air in a howling, hollow rush. Toby gasped for air and got nothing. He went spinning up, away from the soil, which rose after him in a dirty storm.
The wailing gale ebbed as he windmilled his arms, rotating to face upward. A huge hole in the dome swelled before him. He snatched at a broken strut, got it, hung on.
I’m dead, he thought quite clearly. Already his lungs heaved, wanting to breathe.
A painful jab in his leg. A sharp sliver stuck from it, flung by the whistling air. He swung by one arm from the strut, smacked into another.
Angry shouts in his ear—on comm, but no time to listen.