Stars came crashing into my gloom by the hundreds and everything around me began to gleam a searing white. Something was directly ahead, unseen behind a huge bank of illuminated gas. Gas circling in a disk. Circling, round and round, like lava pushing to dive down the crack from which it had spewed. Akin to my body, it was much larger--perhaps ten times as grand, maybe more.
It seemed to be beckoning to me.
"Mouth without eyes, come closer. Do you feel my presence? We are alike. Together, as one body, one mouth, united, we may finally spread broad our eyes and truly see and survive and discover what it is like to be those whom we ingest. The little ones. The ones with tiny limbs. With smiles and frowns. With ears and doddles to truly hear, not simply listen. With antennae to smell, tongues to taste, crechs to measure. With minds. With eyes."
From afar arrived muffled screams.
At a blinding velocity, I splashed into the dense bank of gas and misshapen stars. The matter began to stream into my mouth at a rate I had never thought possible; it too clogged my mouth, churning and colliding at the boundary, and I wondered if my body could contain all of this income. Deep down I knew it could. The body leads to the heart. The heart extends endlessly into realms I know little of, only that they are darker than the blackest blend of pitch. Blueblack, I remember one race saying.
And suddenly, the other mouth was right there. Black against a boiling white.
I can remember as our mouths touched the terrible shocks that rippled through my body, as boundaries overlapped, and as we finally merged, all notion of distinction falling to pieces. Together we were larger than the sum of our individual bodies. Together!
But there was no we anymore. As quickly as things had happened there was once again I--a different I, a more powerful I, but nevertheless I. One, the singular, unity. One giant gaping black portal at the center of the galaxy, drinking of the spiral arms, reeling them in like tentacles.
The other had seen so much more. There hung an overwhelming smell of death. So much information. Millions of civilizations. Screams and echoing moans sounded as worlds fell apart, as shadows fell over broken cities, as oceans rocked coastlines, as tectonic plates buckled and snorted and as volcanoes unleashed tremendous pressures below. As moons barreled into planets. Horrid, horrid cries. Joints popping and scales stretching and tearing and nerves twisting and splintering and snapping and tendrils glowing hot white and bursting in sprays of liquid biological fire. Little ones, it does not matter that I had not intended to commit these countless acts. There is no discrimination. I did it.
Many civilizations thought I was the mythological Kingdom of Evil and Destruction descending upon them. Maybe they were right. Hades, they called me. Raz. Vespar and the Dark Dungeon. Razor Cloud. Hell.
At this size, the urge to consume, the hunger, was poised at an all-time high. Something told me that I must eat. Matter brings life, it said. But emptiness ushers sickness and weariness and the sensation of drowning in the abyss of space.
I do not make excuses, little ones, I merely relate my motives. I wish neither for sympathy nor lenience.
And so, feeling the approach of sickness I began to eat, furiously, without pause, faster and faster as the screams continued, growing louder, stars and planets and nebula and asteroids and comets, swallowing clouds of dark and clouds of white and merging with other smaller mouths of blackness like myself, without looking forward and without looking back, simply stretching my mouth and widening and growing yet still feeling the agony of hunger, my shuddering body yearning for the food that it desired, the food that could not enter my mouth quickly enough...
Then the whole galaxy was gone, inside me, millions of cultures both advanced and primitive falling toward my heart. It did not bother me in the least. Too caught up to care about loneliness, I did not miss the sense of being enclosed, of belonging. I was my own galaxy now. Crazed and grabbed by gluttony, I cast flickering glances to find the source of my next meal.
Panic. Surrounded by emptiness. Merely a smattering of glowing bands in the far distance. And so I waited.
As the handful of neighbouring galaxies gravitated in my direction, as they slipped through space, already I could feel myself weakening. All of the matter I had consumed over the aeons wanted to escape. The planets and the vegetation and the biological specimens wanted to burst through the boundary. They desired to explode back into the realm of the outside. I could feel them moving within, their howls still orbiting my heart. They spited me and they burned to see the day of my demise.
Something was trickling out.
It had been leaking all along, but in the absence of food, the sensation was most noticeable. Many civilizations believed that nothing could escape from monsters like me. They said it wasn't possible. Once inside there was no return to the outside: by the Eiaen's Laws of Stellar Collapse and by the Chricknon's Five Gravitational Assumptions and by the Law of Relativity, to achieve a speed in which to "beat" the pull from my heart was an impossibility! Yet it was happening. A few intelligent races had predicted correctly. Energy had found a hole. It had made a hole, poked, jabbed, tunneled.
I shudder at the thought. What if my next meal had come too late? Or had never come at all, if my pull had not been strong enough? What would have happened? I remember long ago watching an explosion in a distant galaxy. That could have been me, I know. So easily, that could have been me.
Death and life, little ones. The reason, the purpose, remains elusive. Life. Death. All for what?
When it came, matter never tasted so good.
There is nothing like feeling a dwarf galaxy glide silently through one's lips, without overlapping the boundary, without churning or deforming. Just one of these meals was enough to restore me to my peak strength. Once again the threat had ended.
Now tell me, little ones. The flaming jets above and beneath flare into space, in an instant carving their paths, tearing their way through walls of sparkling filaments of gas. Nothing hinders them. The blue spiral arm of another galaxy passes into my mouth; I grow, and as millions of stars disappear from the rest of the universe, my eyes open.
This is beauty, and I am alive. Alive, I believe. Is it possible? Can it really be--my body, living flesh like those I have consumed, more than a spatial phenomenon, truly? The first deep breaths of cold space? The first tremors of my dark heart? The first yawn? A beginning.
What causes me to ask these questions? What, what, what is it? What has changed? All else is obvious, answered many times over before the awakening.
I can remember and I can see all that has happened to my body. From when I was as the hot shimmering spheres I now consume, crackling and sizzling, until I vanished from the outside universe, I remember. From a pea to a black pea to a monster.
I recall the disappearance. The inner layers of my body had plummeted to my solid heart, bounced like a rock on a tiny planet, and had slammed into the outer layers still rushing in. A tremendous detonation ensued and in the intense barrage of energy, all that was left was blackness, and no distant eyes would ever look upon my sparkle again.
In a sense I was and am like the little ones, confined within their fleshy shells. But no. My separation was absolute. The outside world looked sharply blue and stars close and far away jostled position with unusual agility, dancing, weaving their paths, wobbling, being born and then fading away.
I am remembering these happenings, yet, somehow, in some subtle way, they are different now. They mean something--not simply as cold actions and ideas, but as entities filled with mystery, brimming with colour and flame.
All along as my body grew, I was drifting. Pulled by an invisible grip to some fateful destination abroad, there wasn't anything in my power to do about it.
First contact with the living came by sheer chance. The Aiernio 5 was a small vessel out on a daring first interstellar voyage, powered by the slow decay of a radioactive element, utterly creeping through empty space. The ship's crew of 256 silicon-skinned scientists hailed from the planet Eaien, a dense world in a binary star system not far away. I gave no second thought to the tragic deaths of these beings, or at least no conscious thought. Only now am I comprehending remorse as the Eaien race saw it. Yes, I see, a glimpse. Yes. Like a stab, like a wound.
Their ship ventured close, perhaps filled with an excess of curiosity, perhaps wanting too badly to be dubbed as intrepid explorers.
And I ate them.
The propulsion drives could not rescue the ship. They sailed quietly from the outside to the inside and from their point of view continued to fall forever in a dark winding spiral. Yet to my eyes, closed though they were, I could see their demise and observe their nervous systems flare like exploding stars, their glaves cringing wide and their duttles hooked and frozen and their dozen annastas spouting sickly white slime. The ship buckled. Their moist bodies were stretched into thin strings. All of their knowledge, all of the information contained in their minds, in their cells, in their atoms and subatomic particles, all of this volume became nameless, simply mass, simply electric charge, merely momentum.
The drift continued. I could see past the glow of the spiral arm that the galaxy's core was approaching quickly, or rather that I was approaching it, being towed.
I swallowed many vessels. There was the striking silver glisten of the Bradbury Thunderclap--I recall this ship the most clearly, every detail, every bit of data. The small crew had voyaged from a crumbling planet they called Earth: odd-looking hominids, like the first visitors they were scientists, but in this case renegades, fugitives on the run. From what I remember the crew was trying in desperation to escape the military regime that persecuted them. I am perplexed by their actions. Why go to all this bother? Was their independence such a treasure? They had planned to swoop near to my body, using the strong distortion of local space to dilate what they called time, and to arrive safely at some approximate interval in the future.
They miscalculated. I ate them. I ate the military regime too. All twenty ships. These metal cans and animals were mere crumbs to me. Larger supplements would soon arrive, much meatier meals to feed my appetite.
Deep within something is undulating. It hurts. What is hurt? This. Yes little ones. You know it well.
It makes me wish to return to death, to numbness and nonliving. I would my eyes were shut, even after wishing so long for them to open. I would like to forget and to remain invisible.
But the truth must come out, little ones. I feel guilt--I believe that is its name--heavy guilt, like a glutinous paste, heavy and bitter and strong. If I could sigh I would exhale to the ends of the universe. I admit, here and now, that my actions, my crimes, are nearly unbearable. Yet I must somehow release this terrible burden. Sharing my woes seems the only way. I am like the human child--have you heard of this race?--caught with his hand in the cookie jar. No, worse still: I am a child fornicating in his parent's bed, and my father has arrived home early to discover me in the horrid act. Only now do I realize the price the little ones have paid to sustain me, to grant me awareness, to allow me to ponder my existence.
Thus I hereby confess. After the ships I began to swallow planets. Stars too. Even entire star systems and nebula and clusters and everything in them. Races of living beings and complex ecosystems I did wipe from history, erasing all traces that they had ever existed. They will never come again. Maybe something similar, but the prototypes are forever gone.
As I ate my mouth would grow in diameter, my body inflating like the bloated surface of a dying star.
I watched the tiny creatures in their last moments of light. On a collection of planets and dead stars and asteroids some primitive races possessed not the slightest clue as to what was happening as they entered warped space. Others rioted in their cities. They tried senselessly to claw their way to an escape. A few believed their existence was beyond the physical and mental, and so resigned in serenity to their fate.
How can I say that I am repentant? How can I relate that there was no other way?
Nevertheless, little ones, it wasn't all one-sided.
A civilization I soon encountered in advance of reaching my destination was called the Pprin-O'pprina. Its constituents were non-biological, mechanical, electronic. Contrived by a race of hominids they had rebelled against their creators and enslaved them. The machines, a collection of ingenious engineers and scientists, were relentless in their search for a dependable energy source. If I had possessed emotion like their creators I'm sure I might have felt a tinge of fear, even jeopardy in their approach. They were dangerous.
Buzzing about in their dart-like vessels, the Pprin-O'pprina began construction of a rotating torus around my waist. The interaction between the metal shape and my already gyrating body sent the torus spinning, slowly stripping the energy endowed upon my depths. Like dipping a kasreez into the Plasma Bay of Honlas they took the energy from me. They channeled it to their dead star, and for a short time the civilization returned to its booming state.
How staggering a change of roles! For the first time I was the one being consumed. Me. Not the others. This expansive body, this yawing mouth, drained by a tiny form of life.
Should I encounter these sort of beings again my feelings will not be any more heartfelt: I hate the idea of their kind of life and I hate their logic and their thirst for information. I hate that they are cold, and I hate more so that they are strong.
And so one could imagine the proud yet disgusting and hollow joy I feel at having watched the Pprin-O'pprina and all their intricate work fall into the jaws of gravity.
Something new began to happen, not long ago. Deep within came a stirring, soft like a whisper, like a tingle or a rustling of gwanzi leafs by the sulfur wind on Gaunya. It soon strengthened into a terrible rumbling. The feeling was growing more powerful than my pains of hunger, and at a galactic size, hunger is not a delicate urge, little ones.
I began to consume the outskirts of the large galactic arm swinging about in my direction. Soft blue and pink twists of gas cloud dotted the limb like clumps of flowers. The galaxy was famous in the folklore of many civilizations, called the Queen of Night by the Ruknex and Abackak the Lord by the silicon-based Man'O'Lar'A and Andromeda by those peculiar Earth people of distant lore.
Once inside I heard each individual life form tremble and gasp the moment before their soft little bodies split wide, spilling juices and innards. Millions of stars entered my mouth.
My body expanded further, stretching, spreading blackness. On the inside the volume of matter and energy and information grew; it approached, stepped up to, and reached toward something strange, a new level, a critical mass.
I gasped. My eyes, there, in the blackness! There were my eyes! But how was I to open them? My heart seemed to swell and for a moment appeared closer than expected. And to these eyes I pushed all of my concern from mere survival and consumption, telling them, pleading with them to swing wide and behold the universe.
Finally, they opened. Where was I? What has been happening? The suffering I've caused, I said. Look! No. Look, look at the gore. Instead, the universe spinning on end, I turned in defense. I marveled at the gorgeous blue hues of my surroundings, so hauntingly beautiful.
So, little ones, that is that. I sit as the galactic juices bleed into my mouth. I watch. I feel. And I wonder.
I believe I know everything about the physical universe: I have read all books ever written by every civilization at any time in all of the star systems within me; I have lived every sort of life, worked every job, given birth to billions of different creeds of children, watched them grow, made their decisions and mistakes and discoveries; I have been witness to star birth and star death, to the formation of countless planets, to the transformation of amino acids into simple life and from simple life to complex organisms; I have sifted the dirt of the ground and tasted the magma of the volcano and drank the salty blood of the veins and the amniotic fluid of the womb and the rashradda's oil and licked the flesh and the bones and the mane and everything alive in the universe.
And still, still. I am at a loss. What is this thing called life? I have scoured an near-infinite quantity of definitions and not a single explanation satisfies me. Am I alive? Like the little ones who crawl about, am I alive?
I think again of the Pprin-O'pprina. They were alive, presumably. They assumed it. They knew it. But their creators would say differently if they were still around.
Then what is the distinction between the creator and the creation? I picture their bodies. A condensed circuit sphere instead of a brain. Conduction oil in place of blood. Polymer for skin, lasers for antennae, photon-counters for eyes, litmus fabric for a lishda and for fingers, electronic receivers for ears. The result of painstaking invention, the Pprin-O'pprina could easily store a vast amount of information in their brains, in circuits billions of bytes upon bytes, row after row of twos and ones and zeroes, sheer walls of information...
Just like me.
No. I hear myself crying. Please no. My heart sinks back into sickness and I curse the race of robots. I must not deceive myself; I must force the truth from the pull of gravity, tearing away the layers of blackness. Is that why I hate the Pprin-O'pprina with such intensity, because they remind me of what I am--cold and lifeless, simply an extensive accumulation of matter and data and facts and numbers, a bank that has grown so large that it has been granted the ability to think?
But not alive. Not really. Intelligence can exist separate from life. Life, in all its forms, is not a precursor. It is not an origin. Here there is not life. Nothing real or natural.
Yet I was born and I have grown and will continue to grow, and it is an inevitable fact that someday I will die. I require food to sustain me. I produce a slow and steady waste. I think about who I am and where I came from and although I have no control over what I do or where I go, I can look about, I can close or open my eyes. I can feel agonizing guilt at my past actions, joy at fortunate happenings, loneliness in the absence of others like me.
Once more I look around. The galaxy continues to plummet over the precipice and into the abyss. Soon it will all be gone, just another meal. You, little ones.
I have told my story. If I am to survive further with this burden, I must quickly come to my point. I have a request. Yes, little people. What? You do not believe a being as microscopic as you has any such gift to offer my massive bulk? You are wrong. You possess more riches than I may ever know.
Please, little ones, with your tiny zurms and tails. Before your planet plunges through my mouth and into my deep dark body to join the countless others, I want you to do something. Please. Do not spite me, little ones, for I could not have prevented your destruction. It will be dark inside, but do not fear, for in your own eyes you will live forever. I will preserve you in blackness. Quickly now, grant me this: When you enter my body, when you move from the outside to the inside, lick your finger and hoist it high in the air.
And tell me, is the wind within a warm wind? I must know. Tell me, little people, as a sign of your forgiveness. As a sign that all of this is not a waste. Tell me that there is a purpose to the suffering, to the endless cycle of life and death.
Tell me, little ones. Bring me peace.
Stephen Goobie lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Besides currently finishing an Astrophysics degree, he is involved in local independent filmmaking and writes in his spare time. This is Stephen's first publication and he would appreciate any comments and criticism readers may have.
E-mail: goobie@ap.stmarys.ca
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