But something that the unity possessed was also lost, which the two components could not regain in their loneliness, and that thing was hope.
7. Dark Suns
635,000,000 B.C.
But the dream was too glorious to be allowed to die. Younger races arose.
During the Ediacaran Period, when the most complex life-forms on Earth were multicellular segmented worms, fronds, disks, or bladders, in the dying giant stars of the galactic core an alliance of Dominions who conjoined their living suns, nebulae, and star clusters into one system, larger by far in number than the Colloquium even at its widest extent. They arose from several million races of the flat, nearly two-dimensional creatures dwelling on the surfaces of neutron stars circling the supersingularity of the galactic core.
The exotic supergravity environment of the surface of a cold star, surrounded by dozens or hundreds of bright and giant suns in the closely packed galactic core, is a much more active and fertile ground for the creation of life than planetary bodies, and evolution proceeded at a far more rapid pace, accelerated by the development of dozens of sexes rather than two, and correspondingly more daring mixture of characteristics, a more rapid process of trial and error, and far more painful.
In these bright regions, even the most unlikely or outrageous of molecular and chemical processes could be sustained in this high-energy environment, and nothing nearly as complex and efficient as photosynthesis was necessary.
These flat races also arose in isolation, their astronomers not even being aware at first that their galaxy had arms containing swarms of small bodies called stars, emitting radiations none of their sense impressions and few of their instruments were fit to behold. They certainly did not expect life to arise in such places, any more than earthmen look for animals formed of raindrops or notes of music.
The Archon occupying the galactic core can be called the Instrumentality, for the constituent civilizations did not gather for their own purposes, but to serve an end. What that end might be, they revealed to none.
But surely part of that purpose was to seek the reunification of the galactic mind, for the Core Archon, having tamed the turbulence disk of the supermassive black hole at the galactic core, controlled as much energy as the rest of the galaxy combined. This was wealth sufficient, just by itself, to power the necessary infrastructure. But power alone was insufficient.
8. Threads of Hope
541,000,000 B.C.
In the Terreneuvian Epoch of the Precambrian Period, when Earth boasted the first appearance of trilobites, something stirred to life in the Sagittarius Arm.
It is not a favorable location for any form of life previously known. The Sagittarius Arm was poor in young stars, in which the complex elements favorable to known forms of life arise. Instead, there were many concentrations of giant molecular clouds, large, low-density masses of partially ionized gas in which star formation has recently taken place. Here a few sparse pockets of newly formed stars could be found. This different combination of elemental gasses and older, cooler stars produced many star systems with no planets, but many outer rings or spirals of planetoids or asteroids, or spheres or clouds. These asteroid fields were akin to the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud surrounding Sol, but tremendously denser and larger, as would befit the shroud of old red giants, who lack the solar winds to disperse the debris into space.
Here among the flying mountains of space evolved a plethora of creatures of gossamer thread. In the outer swarms of gravel and ice, the threadlike beings anchored on the dust motes and snowballs and cometary masses, and spun out million-mile-long antennae to absorb and manipulate ultralow-frequency waves far below the wavelengths known to man. Their reproductive processes were unique: longer, more advanced thread forms grew out of simpler roots. Due to this, a single organism sharing one memory chain outlived its own genus—that is, these creatures were as if an ape would grow by Lamarckian evolution into an ape-man and then a man in one lifetime.
Moreover, this form of life knew no differentiation into species, so it was rather as if an amoeba were to pass rapidly into more complex forms, keeping within its one body all the innovations of microbe and plant and animal and using the discoveries as needed.
Drifting on solar wind, surfing the radiation pressure from star to star, but always staying in the cool, outer reaches where their unique molecular and mechanical processes were unharmed by the unhealthy heat of even the dimmest stars, the many outer asteroid belts of the many star systems of the Sagittarius Arm were colonized. The constellations were meshed in cobwebs.
These creatures formed a new psychological template and a new form of biological and biomechanical life unlike anything before. All their support systems were external: each persona lived only insofar as he sustained the others around him, and was sustained in turn. The individual units were helpless as babies. The union was glorious, unconquerable, almost invulnerable.
Therefore, upon achieving the unity and elevation of an Archonate, it called itself the Circumincession, for each was alive in the life of another.
Young, passionate, forceful, and able to draw on resources and energy systems unknown, or even unimaginable to its war-weakened neighbors, the fililose Circumincession spread like a glistering spiderweb to the other arms of the galaxy, dangerous as the sword of Damocles.
It formed not a military danger but a moral one. No Archon could withstand the disintegrating disgust of its component civilizations if ever those civilizations lost faith in the ideals and abstractions impelling them to unity.
The other Archons were shamed by this shining child into throwing more and more resources behind the dream of galactic unity.
This race to whom the very concept of selfishness or self-interest was incomprehensible, incommunicable, could not be told that each Archon must stand on its own in posture of suspicious hostility to all others. Had the older Archons done so, their own component Dominations and Dominions might well take the lesson to heart and split themselves off into segments. Should that happen, brains as large as arms of the galaxy would break into smaller and smaller lobes and wander each its own way.
A plan to restore the Throne of Milky Way to life and selfawareness was set in motion, a Second Collaboration to build a Second Awareness, this time along slower and surer lines, with each new client race having a patron to lead it up the path of evolution.
The Circumincession inspired, and the Magisterium rejoiced, but Panspermians led, and the Instrumentality provided the means. The Instrumentality, commanding the incalculable resources of the core stars, had sufficient power at its disposal to send emissaries to the remotest arms of the galaxy and beyond.
In Perseus, the ancient, indifferent, merciless and decentralized Colloquium was summoned to join in the renaissance; as was the highly formalized, paternalistic, yet forgiving hierarchy of the Magisterium of Scutum-Crux; and, for the first time, the Symbiosis was invited, who was even more merciless than the first, but even more centralized than the second.
There were many surviving artifacts of the infrastructure from the long-lost First Collaboration, including flocks and flotillas of superjovian logic diamonds discovered streaming through the thicker reaches of the interstellar arms. These were likewise recovered and restored to their ancient use, and were brought into the burgeoning coherence of the Second Collaboration.
The three new races joined the three forerunners for the second attempt at pangalactic unity, at first as clients, and then as patrons themselves, carefully urging races and civilizations younger still to emerge from their planets gigantic or small or fire or ice, photospheres of stars, surfaces of neutron stars, or scattered icebergs on the edges of deep space.
9. Twilight of the Archons
525,000,000 B.C. TO 488,000,000 B.C.
It was about in the middle of the Cambrian explosion of new species on Earth, when fishes with jaws were developing and older forms of sea corals going extinct, that the Second Collaboration painstakingly compiled a unified mode
l of history, perfecting the science of cliometry. The results were not merely unexpected, they were an epiphany of dread.
The Archons became aware of unhappy and unnatural influences hanging over their historical records like a curse, a sequence of disasters and failures too purposeful to be coincidence or misfortune. All evidence pointed to the intervention of some malign but ingenuous entity opposed to their efforts interfering with galactic history, and weaving successful devices against them with meticulous care, craft, and mindfulness.
The discovery was horrific, a knell of doom, for the revelation was made just at the particular turning point in galactic history when tensions between the disconnected Archons, exasperated by their need to be bound more tightly into their newfound crusade for unity, were at a maximum.
The sudden wealth introduced by the Instrumentality and the too explicit lack of secrecy ushered in by the Circumincession combined to give an adolescent awkwardness even to beings as old and wise as these gathered minds and mental system; for great as their wisdom was, the dangers of new technologies, tools, and praxes had outstripped it.
Anyone who used the new cliometry could deduce with certainty, yes, deduce using the cliometry itself, that if he betrayed the unity, the mastermind would reward and bless him, and bend all history to his favor.
The turncoat need not ever discover who or what this mastermind was; the treason itself would be rewarded, and rewarded vastly, without any need for an explicit agreement or face-to-face meeting. The mastermind had no need to step out from behind the dark puppeteer’s curtain to speak. History spoke clearly enough.
And worse, the cliometric math did not show which one of them this mastermind might be and also did not predict who would break faith first.
The galaxy found itself in a simple prisoner’s dilemma: the tensions produced by the possibility of betrayal and the fear of betrayal proved too great for a collaboration founded on such uncertain grounds.
None of these civilizations shared a common moral calculus, so none knew where the threshold fell of the Concubine Vector, the fluxion point at which long-term interests were rationally sacrificed for short-term gain. Even as they attempted negotiation to secure the peace, the Archons of the Milky Way prepared for war, and the preparations had the reverse of the desired effect: instead of deterrence, the preparations provoked attack.
And the knowledge that each arm of the galaxy must betray before it was betrayed in order to avoid horrific loss made any hesitating or scrupulous Archons unwilling to wait.
The result was the logical absurdity called preemptive retaliation, the hellish absurdity called war, rendered more absurd by the distances and time spans involved: a war with no possible victors. The most survivors could hope to gain was to suffer a defeat less crippling and a misery less deep and permanent than the defeats inflicted on others.
Each knew that the particular personality and psychology, laws and mental habits of their own component civilizations had been maneuvered into a position where war was inevitable. Each knew their vast minds had been led into a carefully engineered disaster by a mind clearly superior to their own and clearly malign.
But the knowledge that they had been deliberately set on the course of their own destruction was insufficient to derail that course.
10. Dust from the Ashes
444,000,000 B.C.
The Orion Arm was a bridge of gas and denser star cloud linking the ancient Magisterium in Scutum-Crux and the wide and ancient realm of the Colloquium in Perseus. Wandering Furies were released, a type of military energy-being larger than a star system, and bathed the Orion Arm in disasters. World-shattering and star-igniting Armageddons were unleashed, one twilight of the gods upon another.
The Panspermians were scattered and lost, driven from their capital at the Orion Nebula. Some remnants of their memories, housed in gas giant core diamonds, passed slowly and furtively across the interstitial abyss between arms and fled in exile to Sagittarius, where creatures most alike to them in outlook and mentality resided. The Sagittarius Dominations discovered the dead or dying logic diamonds adrift between the stars, learned the lore, and were infected by the strange and violent wisdom of the dead Panspermians.
The threadlike beings passed along to their machine successors the limpid unity of their way of life: but now these machines also understood the Darwinian struggle for survival and its glorious but meaningless importance, its bright tragedy. The psychological effect of learning that their selfless unity of purpose was helpless before the grim indifference of the universe overwhelmed their worldview, changed their racial spirit forever. Silent as drifting cobwebs, the threadlike beings entered the corpses and ghosts of the Panspermian Jupiter Brains, entered the dead memories, and knew as if from within what it meant to live and die.
But eons passed, and hope, that most fragile yet most unquenchable of sparks, arose again. This time, it was a dark hope, and its advent was not as any mind within the galaxy had foreseen.
During the Ordovician Period, when the most advanced life on earth was the long-shelled cephalopod, when green plants first appeared on land, there arose in the gaseous streamers of the Outer Arm of Cygnus a coherent and widespread civilization, issuing from an unsuspected form of organized matter.
Whether they can be called organisms is a matter of debate. These viral motes operated on the submolecular level, eating electrons. In swarms of sufficient mass, their electronic interactions were complex enough to imitate thought, and such swarms met only while the need for thought was present, dispersing thereafter: a strange existence without continuity. The motes were not bound to any planetary body or stellar system. Instead, they swarmed in the rich dust clouds that formed central veins and arteries of material thickly gathered along the main gravitational axis of each arm. The Outer Arm, farther than the others from the core and from the fierce light-pressure of its high stellar winds, had a thicker river of debris running up its curving midline.
One theory held that these dustlike life-forms arose naturally. Another was that they were some stray mutation of the protobiological microbes so long ago scattered so profligately by the slain Panspermians of Orion. Neither theory was entirely convincing. Perhaps it was simply the case that the universe was always more complex and surprising than even the most intelligent of beings could foretell.
Union was both absurdly easy and utterly unnecessary for these several races of microscopic virus-swarm creatures to form. No real distinction between races existed between viruses born in one dust cloud as opposed to another: all could find some way to interconnect, and exchange electronic and chemical information.
Various methods of permanence and idea-formation were discovered by trial and error in the numberless species and strains of the dust. Part of the swarm could be tamed, or programmed, for certain repeated tasks related to the gathering of energies and the reproduction of additional motes. These in turn were refined, created other and more specialized forms of mote, and passed rapidly through a tool-using stage.
But their history was strangely backward—as if a man in a snowstorm found he could bring to life all fashion of snowmen or snow angels to serve him, serfs and mates and then giants that grew ever faster as they snowballed down long white slopes, fathering avalanches. Unlike the other Archons, this form of life was born alone and had only the companions shaped by its hands to serve as tools and libraries.
The resulting civilizations likewise blended into their postbiological forms almost without joint or pause. These beings were truly inhabitants of space, not of solar systems but of the abyss.
They were so reticent and indifferent to the fate of their colonies or neighbors, that, much like Japan under the guns of Admiral Perry, it was a threat of force rather than the honey of sweet reason whereby the Magisterium impelled this vast, cool, and unsympathetic form of abyssal life into the galactic Collaboration.
Their Archon mind was self-organizing rather than centralized, and it rehabilitated and reformed recalcit
rant members rather than expelling or destroying them, but it was so indifferent and detached from all desire for pleasure, progress or power, so ascetic in outlook, that it is best called “the Austerity.”
And yet, ascetic, dispassionate, and reticent as it was, this isolated and unfriendly Archon saw clearly that the damage from prior ages of war must at all costs be healed.
Merely by acting as a record keeper and archivist for all the Archons, trade of information across hostile boundaries became once more possible. As it learned more of the details of its coequals, the Austerity became more demanding; the races of the galaxy had to put aside sentiment and self-interest and do the work simple logic demanded, the logic of self-preservation. The other members of the Collaboration trusted this coldhearted civilization, because it was simply too young to be the mastermind behind their woes. The Austerity alone was innocent beyond suspicion. The Austerity alone could be trusted with the role of final arbiter of any disputes, because it held the disputants in an utter indifference indistinguishable from contempt.
Not without pain, old suspicions were quelled, hostages exchanged, marriages of mental systems stretching throughout tens of thousands of cubic lightyears arranged, stars and planets swapped like chessmen on a vast board of stars.
The addition of the newer, colder Archon of the Outer Arm changed the balance of the psychology of the unborn and sleeping Milky Way mind. Thoughts previously unthinkable became commonplace.
The slow and careful patronage system was renounced. This time the council of the gentle Panspermians was absent, and so the cold logic of the Austerity, the smothering intimacy of the Symbiosis, and the frugal thrift of the unimaginably archaic Colloquium prevailed.
The Cold Equations achieved their final form as the agreed-upon strategy needed for the maintenance of a collaboration across galactic distances. A new tactic of minimal expenditure of home world resources combined with the indenture and servitude of lesser component races was attempted on a grand scale. Despite the muted misgivings of the Magisterium and the Instrumentality, and the outspoken hostility of the Circumincession, the indenture system proved itself useful and spread.