The Ly-cilph claimed such a victory. A mere eight hundred million years after life had begun on their world they had reached
their pinnacle of evolution. They became transcendent entities.
Their nine-year cycle starts in a fish form, hatching from the black egg-clusters concealed below the mud. Billions of free-floating
slugs emerge, two centimetres long, and are eaten by faster, meaner predators as they gorge themselves on the abundant sludge
of decayed vegetation putrefying in the water. They grow and change over three years, losing their tails, developing a snail-like
skirt. They cling to the bottom of their lakes, an ovoid body ninety centimetres high, with ten tentacles rising up from the
crown. The tentacles are smooth, sixty centimetres long, devoid of suckers, but with a sharp curved horn on the tip; and they’re
fast, exploding like a nest of enraged pythons to snatch their ignorant prey swimming overhead.
When their full size has been reached they slide up out of the water to range through the planetwide jungle. Gills adapt to
breathe the harsh musky air, tentacle muscles strengthen to support the drooping limbs away from the water’s cosy buoyancy.
And they eat, rummaging through the matted undergrowth with insistent horns to find the black, wizened nutlike nodes that
have been lying there neglected since the storm. The nodes are made up of cells saturated with chemical memory tracers, memories
containing information, the knowledge accumulated by the Ly-cilph race throughout time. They bring understanding, an instant
leap to sentience, and trigger the telepathic centre of their brains. Now they have risen above a simple animal level of existence
they have much to converse about.
The knowledge is mainly of a philosophical nature, although mathematics is highly developed; what they know is what they have
observed and speculated upon, and added to with each generation. Farside night acts as a magnet as they gather to observe
the stars. Eyes and minds linked by telepathy, acting as a gigantic multi-segment telescope. There is no technology, no economy.
Their culture is not orientated towards the mechanical or materialistic; their knowledge is their wealth. The data-processing
capacity of their linked minds far exceeds that of any electronic computer system, and their perception is not limited to
the meagre electromagnetic wavelengths of the optical bands.
Once awoken, they learn. It is their purpose. They have so little time in their corporeal form, and the universe they find
themselves in, the splendour of the gas supergiant and its multifarious satellites, is large. Nature has ordained them as
gatherers of knowledge. If life has a purpose, they speculate, then it must be a journey to complete understanding. In that
respect intellect and nature have come to a smooth concordance.
In the ninth year after their hatching, the four large innermost moons line up once more. The distortion they cause in the
supergiant’s magnetosphere acts like an extension to the flux tube. The agitated particles of the ionosphere which use it
as a conduit up to the first moon’s plasma torus now find themselves rising higher, up to the second moon, then the third,
higher still, fountaining out of the magnetosphere altogether. The Ly-cilph world swings round into their path.
It is not a tight directed beam; up at the mushrooming crown the protons and electrons and neutrons have none of the energy
they possessed when the roiling flux lines flung them past the first moon. But as always it is the sheer scale of events within
the gas supergiant’s domain which proves so overwhelming.
The Ly-cilph world takes ten hours to traverse through the invisible cloud of ions loitering outside the flux lines. In that
time, the energy which floods into the atmosphere is more than sufficient to destroy the equilibrium of the slowly circulating
convection currents.
The deluge arrives at the end of the planet’s one and only mating season. The Ly-cilph and their non-sentient cousins have
produced their eggs and secreted them into the lakebeds. Plants have flowered and scattered their seeds across the landscape.
Now there is only the prospect of death.
When the first titanic bursts of azure lightning break overhead, the Ly-cilph stop their analysing and deliberations, and
begin to impart all they know into the empty cells of the nodes which have grown out of their skin like warts around the base
of their tentacles.
The winds howl, voicing the planet’s torment. Gusts are strong enough to break the metre-thick stems of the fern trees. Once
one goes it starts a domino effect in the jungle. Destruction spreads out in vast ripples, looking like bomb blasts from above.
Clouds are torn apart by the violence, reduced to cotton tufts spinning frantically in the grip of small, ferocious whirlwinds.
Micro-typhoons plunge back and forth, accelerating the obliteration of the jungle.
All the while the Ly-cilph remain steadfast, their adhesive skirts anchoring them to the ground as the air around them fills
with broken fronds and shredded leaves. The nodes, now saturated with their precious heritage, drop off like ripe fruit. They
will lie hidden amongst the grass and roots for another three years.
Nearside is ablaze with potent lightstorms. High above the tattered clouds, the aurora borealis forms a veil across the sky,
a garish mother-of-pearl haze riddled with thousands of long, lurid scintillations, like giant shooting stars. Beyond that,
the conjunction is joined, three moons sliding into alignment, bathed in an eerie trillion-amp phosphorescence. An epicentre
to one of the gas supergiant’s planet-swallowing cyclones.
The particle jet has reached its zenith. The flux tube’s rain of energy penetrates the tormented lower atmosphere. It is embraced
by the Ly-cilph. Their minds consume the power, using it to metamorphose once again. The nodes brought them sentience, the
supergiant’s surplus energy brings them transcendence. They leave the chrysalis of the flesh behind, shooting up the stream
of particles at lightspeed, spacefree and eternal.
The liberated minds swarm above their abandoned world for several days, watching the storms abate, the clouds reform, the
old convection currents return to their familiar courses. The Ly-cilph have achieved incorporeality, but their perspective,
shaped by the formative material existence, remains unchanged. As before, they deem the purpose of their life is experience,
perhaps eventually to be followed by understanding. The difference is that they are no longer restricted to a single world
and brief glimpses of the stars; now the entire universe is laid out before them, they wish to know it all.
They begin to drift away from the odd planet which birthed them, tentatively at first, then with greater boldness, dispersing
like an expanding wave of eager ghosts. One day they will return to this point, all the generations of Ly-cilph that ever
lived. It will not happen while the primary star still burns; they will travel until they meet the boundary of the universe
as it contracts once more, following the galactic su-perclusters as they fall into the reborn dark mass at the centre, the
cosmic egg regathering all it has lost. Then they will be back, congregating around the black star husk, sharing the knowledge
they have brought, searching through it for that elusive ultimate understanding. And after understanding they will know what
lies beyond, and with that a hope of a further switch to yet another level of existence. Possibly the Ly-cilph will be the
only entities to survive the present universe’s final reconfiguration.
But until then they are content to observe and learn. Their very nature precludes them from taking part in the myriad dramas
of life and matter unfolding before their ethereal senses.
Or so they believe.
Iasius
had come back to Saturn to die.
Three hundred and fifty thousand kilometres above the gas giant’s wan beige cloudscape the wormhole terminus expanded, and
the voidhawk slipped out into real space. Sensors mounted on the strategic-defence satellites patrolling the gas giant’s designated
starship emergence zone found the infrared glow straight away, as radar waves tickled the hull.
Iasius
hailed the nearest habitat with its affinity, and identified itself. The satellite sensors slid their focus away, resuming
their vigil.
Captain and crew borrowed the bitek starship’s paramount senses to observe the glorious ringed planet outside, whilst all
the time their minds wept with the knowledge of what was to come. They were flying above the gas giant’s sunlit hemisphere,
a nearly full crescent showing. The rings were spread out ahead and two degrees below them, seemingly solid, yet stirring,
as if a gritty gas had been trapped between two panes of glass. Starlight twinkled through. Such majestic beauty seemed to
deny their terrible reason for returning.
Iasius
’s affinity touched their minds.
Feel no sorrow,
the bitek starship said silently.
I do not. What is, is. You have helped to fill my life. For that I thank you.
Alone in her cabin, Captain Athene felt her mental tears become real. She was as tall as any woman of the hundred families,
whose geneticists had concentrated on enhancing sturdiness so their descendants could comfortably spend a lifetime coping
with the arduous conditions of spaceflight. Her carefully formatted evolution had given her a long, handsome face, now heavily
wrinkled, and rich auburn hair which had lost its youthful sheen to a lustrous silver. In her immaculate ocean-blue ship-tunic
she projected a regal quality of assurance, which always elicited total confidence from her crews. But now her composure had
vanished, expressive violet eyes reflecting the utter anguish welling up inside.
No, Athene, please don’t.
I can’t help it,
her mind cried back.
It’s so unfair. We should go together, we should be allowed.
There was an eldritch caress down her spine, more tender than any human lover could ever bestow. She had felt that same touch
on every day of all her hundred and eight years. Her only true love. None of her three husbands received as much emotional
devotion as
Iasius
, nor, she admitted with something approaching sacrilege, had her eight children, and three of them she had carried in her
own womb. But other Edenists understood and sympathized; with their communal affinity there was no hiding emotions or truth.
The birthbond between the voidhawks and their captains was strong enough to survive anything the universe could possibly throw
at them. Except death, the most private section of her mind whispered.
It is my time,
Iasius
said simply. There was an overtone of contentment within the silent voice. If the voidhawk had had lungs, Athene thought
it would have sighed at that moment.
I know,
she said wistfully. It had been increasingly obvious during the last few weeks. The once omnipotent energy patterning cells
were now struggling to open a wormhole interstice. Where over half a century ago there had been a feeling that a single swallow
manoeuvre could span the galaxy, the pair of them now experienced a muted sense of relief if a planned fifteen light-year
swallow was accomplished only a light-month short of the required coordinate.
Damn the geneticists. Is parity so much to ask for?
she demanded.
One day perhaps they will make ship and captain live as long as each other. But this which we have now, I feel a rightness
to it. Someone has to mother our children. You will be as good a mother as you have been a captain. I know this.
The sudden burst of self-satisfied conviction in the mental voice made her grin. Sticky lashes batted some of the moisture
away.
Raising ten children at my age. Goodness!
You will do well. They will prosper. I am happy.
I love you,
Iasius
. If I was allowed to have my life again, I would never change a second of it.
I would.
You would?
she asked, startled.
Yes. I would spend one day as a human. To see what it was like.
Believe me, both the pleasures and the pain are greatly exaggerated.
Iasius
chuckled. Optically sensitive cells protruding like blisters from its hull located the Romulus habitat, and the starship
felt for its mass with a tiny ripple in the spacial distortion field its energy patterning cells were generating. The habitat’s
solidity registered in its consciousness, a substantial mote orbiting the outside edge of the F-ring. Substantial but hollow,
a bitek polyp cylinder forty-five kilometres long, ten wide; it was one of the two original voidhawk bases germinated by the
hundred families back in 2225. There were two hundred and sixty-eight similar habitats orbiting Saturn now, along with their
subsidiary industrial stations, their numbers tangible evidence of just how important the bitek starships had become to the
whole Edenist economy.
The starship sent power flashing through its patterning cells, focusing energy towards infinity, the loci distorting space
outside the hull, but never enough to open a wormhole interstice. They rode the distortion wave towards the habitat like a
surfer racing for the beach, quickly accelerating to three gees. A secondary manipulation of the distortion field generated
a counter-acceleration force for the benefit of the crew, providing them an apparent acceleration of one gee. A smooth and
comfortable ride, unmatched by Adamist star-ships with their fusion drives.
Athene knew she would never be quite so comfortable if she ever took a trip in a voidhawk again. With
Iasius
she could always feel the nothingness of the vacuum flowing by; a sensation she equated with being in a rowing-boat on some
country river, and letting her hand trail through the calm water. Passengers never received that feeling. Passengers were
meat.