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"Must be they started off growing from some kernel," Julia ventured. "Their
growth was selected for."
"Um." Viktor was not convinced; his mouth twisted at both sides, in opposite
directions. "So they get smarter when get bigger? Or started smart?"
"Traits evolve," Shanna said, "they don't just pop out full-blown. Each step
has to give the organism some incremental advantage."
"Oh?" Viktor shrugged. "Maybe Darwin not so universal."
The biologists agreed to leave the theory for later. Viktor judged this to be
a victory, though it was unclear for whom, and brought out some champagne he
had hidden deep in the bowels of
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High Flyer.
"Hard times lately," he observed. The sound of popping corks pleased everyone.
2
MASS IS BRUTE
Forceful coiled itself about a metallic slab of matter-gingerly, gingerly. The
mass tumbled in blackness, glinting with ice. Yet the Beings could sense its
hardness, its slow-yielding mass.
Sunless sent, I wonder if this act is a goodness.
Do not question now! We left because we are at the critical cusp time. Someone
must act! Now help me.
Angrily Forceful intensified its magnetic fluxes near the tumbling mote. Arcs
of spitting ions sprayed the lump.
To Sunless this place was already uncomfortably warm. They had abandoned the
others, then followed an arc around, to harvest energies near the Cascade.
Then they converged, conversing softly, planning, gathering their strengths.
Plasma gnawed at their boundaries, irksome and itching. The Six spiraled near
each other restlessly, some light-minutes away from the solid ships. Sunless
and Forceful had broken off from the Eight as soon as the solids sent a
confirming signal, the small shape of a toroid-the basic form of Being life.
Now there would follow some tedious and disagreeable exchange of signals-
talk, talk, talk, endlessly.
The Eight would debate the meaning of such motes knowing the toroid, and
whether this in some elemental way meant that motes could attain the status of
Beings. Such ideas were too much for the Six.
They seethed with impatience.
Forceful had gone to the rest of the Six and made his case. If their goal of
Outbounding was ever to
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pass, they would need the Eight. But Instigator had captured the attention of
the Eight with its dangerous experiments on the cold world. Now the vermin
from the Hotness threatened them all. The case was clear: We must find a way
to destroy these tiny things and the machines they fly, Forceful finished.
Dusk, now Forceful's new pair-partner, had necessarily gone along, but
remained quiet. Ring and Serene were distant, pondering matters. Mirk, now
paired with Sunless, was similarly reluctant. Out of politeness Forceful
dragged along the forlorn, shrunken Chill. Though Forceful had mentored Chill,
Forceful bristled with spires of pinched, angry energy as it towed the pale
and withered, Diminished
Chill. None could bear to see the ragged shreds of murmuring plasma that
festered from Chill's boundaries, pathetic and diseased.
Forceful asked them all with due formality and quite politely: would they join
in another attack?
No. Somehow the novelty of the moment had shattered the Six.
But not Sunless and Forceful. Each seethed with rage, sending snarled
traceries down their field lines.
Forceful spat as he worked. I have paid strict attention to that strange
voice, the one that says it speaks for the cold ones, the Chemicals. Forceful
had shaped itself, cupping its speech to broadcast outward.
Those Beings farther out would hear his fury song. Perhaps they could be
allies in future. It seeks to blunt the Cascade! Asks the help of Beings to
push the Cascade outward. Arrogance! From tiny things.
From the outer reaches came a calming song. Do the Chemicals not realize that
even they were governed by the spirit, too? That we must live in balance with
the natural spring? That the Cascade is the source of us, unquestionable?
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Surely even the slow, sloppy surges of their bodies also somehow capture some
whisper of this wisdom.
Forceful fumed and did not deign to answer. It radiated a fury pure and
righteous.
Sunless replied in a voice studied and calm. They come to injure us. It seems
their way. Alien beyond knowing.
Forceful continued to work but let no sign of this mix with its radiations.
His tone was lofty, in case the
Eight heard. When I asked that voice of the tiny machines-so loud it is, but
with no Being body attached-
to give its legends, it answered. Such fantasies! The drooling fears of the
young, before they discern the scheme of life.
This provoked relieved mirth from the Six. Forceful always knew how to shift
discussions in its favor, winning with charm. He fumed, ripe with thoughts
now, burning his stored reserves in his fury. There were slight signs that
they did fathom bits of higher truths. They had a legend about a Chemical
pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way-Diminished to
extinction! Apparently a
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commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity
emerged from its full subtraction-to claim life again. Such a desperate story!
Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course. But
the existence of such an ancient story suggests how much they yearned to not
be governed by their own blunt, chemical ways.
Sunless knew to let Forceful talk. Now she slid in with, Understandably.
Extinction! Total subtraction!
Why do they persist in remaining Chemical at all?
They could bring doom to us, Forceful said. They can cut us and yet do not
possess wisdom. Even their legends are primitive.
These tiny things-why, then, do you play with them? Sunless said.
We must! I have a grip on it. Forceful was not skilled at tiny operations,
having long ago left that to the likes of Crafter. Get another such. They have
mass but no other useful property.
The two Beings were in essence flexing fields. Only in long-term memory did
they have need for a realm, tucked in deep inside themselves, for permanent
fields that could hold memory for the ages.
There, static arrays held fixed their core personalities, built up over
billions of years. External forces could destroy these. Indeed, a Being named
Thoughtful, legendary in wisdom, had been rendered stupid by a passing shard
of cold matter that sliced through its central web of magnetically hoarded
memory.
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