* * *
I was wrong. Now, a few millennia after, I look back with amazement on what they attempted. They tried to pervert the inexorable course of history. Evolution. Time itself. The buggers attacked me. They tried to obliterate me and break me up into segments they could themselves absorb. They caused me pain. I wince now at the memory of that sensation, a tugging at the integrity of my being, the seams of my totality.
I screamed in agony.
It was Dino who warned me. I was suddenly aware of his presence shoving into me, his cosmos approaching mine and causing ripples. Convulsions.
“Stir yourself, you sleepy bastard,” he shouted. “They’re coming for your balls!”
Dino was always very careful in his language, whether the moment was one of calm or of universe-shattering importance, to perpetuate those strands which recalled or echoed what he called in one of his papers “the sexuality of our ancestors”. Other universes, as mentioned, would throw up their hands in horror at such idiocies and outrages; they thought him quite mad. I must admit, I do sometimes wonder about him myself, and whether he hasn’t got something unpleasantly primeval and primitive about him. I do suspect him, when he thinks no-one’s looking, of rubbing some of his astral planes together and getting some sort of cosmic thrill out of it. I think the term Dino himself would apply is, if I remember correctly, “wanker”.
I digress. Well, so what? Who’s to stop me?
Orth was approaching from the right. Cosmic bolts of lightning emanated from him. Or her. Well, let’s not start that again. I couldn’t understand what he was up to. Shafts of his feeble light could never harm my brilliant eminence. An off-white colour could never outdo the very essence of light’s purity.
To put it bluntly, a grey mouse is never going to shag a grey elephant.
Shag. Now, there’s a word. Dino wrote a paper on its etymological history and why, through our evolution into non-sexual beings, it represented for him the loss of our roots, the physicality of existence we had abandoned.
I myself have always rejoiced at the unalloyed oneness of our being. Maybe we have in our genetic prism of light a folk-memory of our origin, but I am overjoyed that the foul, miniscule blobs of infected existence that once populated a corner of a tiny universe are no more. For now. Yes, they will have their day again. Their moment in the light which I will bestow upon them. In the period of my non-existence. They will wriggle their loathsome carcases along the surface of mud and slime they live in, and itch and scratch themselves upon each other in their foul couplings. And I will live only through them. I will be the life-force which holds them together. Their memory of me will be their salvation.
I digress. Again.
Ghue came up at me from the left. You see, Orth’s ridiculous attack had been a ruse to hide Ghue’s attempt to swallow me whole. I should have been aware of it. The all-seeing reputation I would later attain hardly allowed for such blindness. I yelled in agony as parts of me seemed to be wrenched away. I concentrated as never before in curling my immensity into a self-protective ball that Ghue couldn’t penetrate. I felt I would explode. When Ghue fell back, exhausted, near to extinction, I sucked him up into my anus without so much as a backward glance.
I turned to deal with Orth. He started to whimper.
“Ghue forced me to do it,” he whined. “Please spare me!”
“Beg for my forgiveness!” I shouted.
I could be a cruel bugger. Some of that unswerving callousness, I think, leaked into the image that was created of me in later aeons by the insect-like creatures which would return to crawl and propagate upon the face of their stinking cess-pit. The image of a harsh, unforgiving tyrant.
As Orth was in the middle of his grovelling sentences of supine, shameless cock-sucking, I vacuumed him up into my belly and, for his pains, gave out a hearty belch. Orth and Ghue were no more. They were part of me. Of course, you mustn’t think I have a belly, let alone an anus. I am the supremest example of pure light ever known in all the galaxies. It’s just that Dino thinks language should retain all the elements that went into the making of us superior beings, even though we have transcended such base elements. It was in an appendix to one of his papers. Dino was always like that. Clever. Cheeky. You know, putting his paragraphs about parts of the body into the appendix. I thought it rather childish, really.
Dino snapped up Stav while I wasn’t looking. Stav had been hovering on the outskirts of the battle between me and his two mates, Orth and Ghue, waiting to see which way the wind would blow. Dino just sidled up to him and absorbed him in a flash.
So now there are two of us left. And we are fast approaching extinction. Because, you see, that is the terrible paradox. As we absorb more and more of our fellow-stars, and get bigger and bigger, the intensity of that fusion of light-forms upon light-forms brings about such a concentration of power that that agglomerated mass of light becomes no more than a pin-prick. The more we absorb, and the bigger we get, the smaller parameters we shrink into.
Basically, our vastness is imploding in on itself.
We’re being sucked into our own black holes.
And then, when the whole of totality is absorbed within me, when I have gobbled up Dino, my boundlessness will know no bounds and will implode upon itself into the most miniscule of pin-pricks of light which will contain all the power of all the universes of all time, and then… that immensity and cosmic force suppressed into a tiny dot will… well, I’ll soon experience my own death within that eruption.
The problem is we evolved too quickly. The miniscule dots we came from, writhing and puking in their anal smells, far too eagerly rejected their corporal essences to engineer purer forms of existences for themselves. They did it in no time at all, maybe just a few trillion billion years. Well, to cut a long story short, they expelled whatever was base and putrid from their life-forces, and, in a flash, became our rather primitive, but still ethereal ancestors—sources of light peopling the heavens.
We evolved from them. Miniscule dots.
Dino wrote a paper about that once. The tendency I have for unnecessary tautology. Well, there’s another example. Unnecessary tautology. He sub-titled the paper, Lost Up One’s Own Black Hole. He’s a character, old Dino.
Pity I’ve got to annihilate him.