//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: Stellar Courtship // Story: The Death of Tiamat // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// Love among stars is not much like love among organic beings. To begin with, only the largest stars are likely to spawn new stars, and they pay for this genetic-evolutionary success by living short, though torrid lives. These stars leave physical descendants, exploding to enrich nebulae with the metallicity of their life's work and their final surges of fusion, seeding their vicinity with the heavier elements around which new stars condense, and which make possible more complex and varied planetary systems. In contrast, the smaller stars normally do not spawn descendants. The larger among these more modest, main-sequence stars may flare or swell, generally late in their lifetimes, and give off bursts of matter and energy that can, collectively, help feed nebulae and aid the coalescence of new stars, but they never as single stars play primary roles in these processes. Their eruptions are of low mass and metallicity compared to the final throes of the supergiants; the main sequence stars at most provide a background of interstellar gas and radiation to support the nebulae. But the main sequence stars do one thing the supergiants cannot. They can live for billions of years. Consequently, it is the small stars who carry forth the culture and wisdom of the sidereal Universe. It is they who remember the events of their galactic clusters; who record and pass on the emission-patterns of the past; who live long enough to complete multiple orbits of their galactic cores; who can converse with the vast slow brains of the galaxies to whom they belong. At the time of which we speak, the Universe itself was only 9.1 billion years old. During this time, no yellow or cooler stars had died save by mischance. Even in our own day, when the Unverse is 14.7 billion years old, no orange stars have died of natural causes: they have about 25 billon years left to live, and the hottest red stars have 75 billion or more years left, while the coolest ones will shine for a trillion. Compared to such gulfs of time, the 3.2 millon years Tiamat had shined was but a few days, something that Tiamat and Barba both knew well from early in their lives, due to the converse they had held with smaller, elder stars. Hence, they must gather their flowers whilst they might, for tomorrow they would die. Stars do not have genders in our terms. I have here called Tiamat and Barba female, but that is because they were both able to produce offspring from their bodies, which is in mammalian terms a female attribute. I could have as reasonably called them male, neuter or hermaphrodite, but Tiamat's personality was particularly what we would think of as female, and Barba was a being of the same general sexual potential as her mate. Supergiant stars do not need the aid of any other stars to reproduce, so we might reasonably claim that they were parthenogenetic. Tiamat might, theoretically, had she formed in a region of space where she was the only supermassive star, have passed through her life cycle and exploded in solitary glory, briefly outshining the whole rest of the Milky Way, and then from her scattered ashes spawned a whole new cluster of her children. But this, as she well knew, was not to be her fate. Tiamat had formed, as stated earlier, as part of a cluster of twenty other stars, one of whom -- Barba -- was her binary companion. Most of these stars were hot bright stars, destined to live a few hundred million to at most two or three billion years. Some were supergiants, like Tiamat herself, doomed to mere millions of years lifespan. The inevitable fate of supergiants was to explode, producing nebular clouds. The supergiants of Tiamat's cluster would in the end mingle their mass ejections into a single body of gas and dust, but each part of the nebular would be primarily the product of a single specific supergiant. Because Tiamat and Barba were a binary of supergiants, both would explode and their masses mingle more intimately than would be the case with Tiamat and the others of her cluster. But, in the normal course of events, Barba would explode some tens of millions of years after all that remained of Tiamat was a singularity and a gradually-spreading cloud. Barba would of course continue to orbit with the singularity, which would contain much of the mass of Tiamat's core, but Tiamat the person would be no more. This would have been their fates had they been brute physical objects, or had not cared to choose different ones. But stars are thinking beings, and they had chosen a different destiny -- one to experience together. They had chosen the stellar dance of Love and Death. The minds of the stars are not like those of motile organics. Compared to those of the organics, they are vast and slow; instead of being concentrated in one or a few vulnerable brains, they are distributed throughout their huge incandescent bodies; a tremendous number of processing nodes, each as capable as an organic brain, linked into extensive neural networks. In sheer power they far exceed the capability of the motile organic minds, though the burdens borne by these stellar brains are correspondingly crushing, and consume much of that vast capacity. Thus, their experience of themselves is very different from that of motile organics. They have sprawling arrays of sensors, huge batteries of effectors, and -- while not wholly sessile -- can alter their courses but gradually, even by the slow standards of their perceptions Unlike motile organics, their minds are multi-compartmented: they can focus their attention simultaneously on many different complex tasks. A very rough and inadequate analogy -- probably the one most comprehensible to beings of our own present-day levels of intellect and technology -- would be with a distributed computer system capable of serving multiple users, with each node being capable of performing multiple simultaneous tasks. Though the truth, of course, is far stranger and more complex than that simple outline. In this multi-minded nature, they are like tiny, primitive versions of the true forms of the Cosmic Concepts themselves. If motile organic brains are like prokaryotic bacteria compared to the Cosmics, and Gaian world-mnds like microscopic multi-cellular eukaryotes, then the star-minds are the equivalent of tiny worms, just great enough that they do dimly spy the true forms of the Cosmic Concepts, as vastnesses mostly beyond their comprehension. Due to their ability to multi-task, and their inability to move rapidly even on their own spacetime scales, most of their relationships of all sorts with their fellow-stars are conducted at long distance. About eight out of ten stars are in multiple systems, such as the binary formed by Tiamat and Barba, but even those normally orbit each other at such distances that they can best communicate by radio emissions, rather than directly touch one other, if only with coherent plasma filaments. Yet those stars fortunate enough to be in multiple systems can feel the strong tugging of each other's gravity, and smell each other's scents on the stellar winds. What they can do is to talk. That is what Tiamat and Barba had enjoyed with each other since the moment when Barba ignited, and Tiamat comforted her companion in Barba's first awareness of the rest of the Universe. Thus, Tiamat made a new and lifelong friend. I have termed the radio conversations of the stars 'speech,' and rendered them as such I must here confess that I have engaged in an egregious oversimplification of this matter. For the speech of the stars is not a simple linear message, with but one main communicative channel, perhaps supplemented by a couple of secondary channels such as tone or body language. Instead, the stars direct extremely complex signals at each other, with sufficient bandwidth to carry millions of shades of meaning, to the point that they essentially create and project a series of executable scenarioes; constantly and smoothly updating and modifying these scenarioes as they transmit them, responding to the often greatly-timelagged signals they receive in return. In such wise do the stars converse, creating as it were virtual worlds, within which they respond to one another in close to real time -- by their own slow standards -- even when they are a dozen or so light-years apart, all without any transmissions exceeding the speed of light. It is a feat of programming and synchronization which puts the greatest such examples of our own work to shame; so subtle that our astronomers imagine it mere minor anamolies in their radio spectra, when we do chance to intercept the sidescatter. Thus could Tiamat commune with any and all of the stars in her own little cluster, and with many stars beyond. WIth Barba, who was never more than a few light-days away, the conversation was complex, continuous and deep. There is not the space nor time here for a discussion in detail regarding the sexual etiquette, morality and courting customs of the stars. Such a dissertation could fill many of our books, and would be made more difficult by the fact that it would describe the doings of beings not only far greater and vaster of both form and intellect than are we, but also ones of a radically-different sort of life than our own. I shall here make no such general essay: it is, frankly, beyond my humble powers of description. Suffice it to say that the stars do have such mores, though the details would be incomprehensible to unaugmented organic minds such as we possess. It is also sufficient to say that, in fact, the close friendship of Tiamat and Barba had long been a profoundly romantic one, and that they had together sampled some of the carnal delights possible to their kind, and many of those possible to two binaries not in close orbit. There were more such intimacies possible than an organic motile might have imagined possible, due to the stellar mode of conversation. For, in projecting complex executable scenarios to each other, they could interact in near-total realism within them, playing with each other in ways both physically possible in the real Universe, and others wildly-imaginative in nature. They were constrained only by signal lag, and, as I have explained, the nature of their communications were such that this was not too severe a limitation. So it was that Tiamat and Barba began spiraling in toward each other, spraying plasma all over their system, and badly disrupting the orbits of the swarms of asteroids that tumbled between and around them. For, as they were only 3200 millennia old, their star system had no true planets. Nor did it have any life, beyond the microbes that had drifted in from other star clusters. There were thus no major worlds nor advanced life forms to be threatened by the courtship dance of the two stars. Though, if the truth be told, it would have made little difference to the besotted supergiants. For, even at the best of times, the stars take little notice of any but the most massive of planets; still less do they pay heed to the organic ecosystems which bedew their surfaces. Their incandescent glory benefits planetary life, but it is not for this benefit that they shine, and when strong passions literally move the stars, lesser life must needs scramble out of their path. Circling ever closer, Tiamat and Barba emitted continuous and intense communications. A large volume of this traffic was directed at one another, and consisted essentially of mutual declarations of love, and the presentation of romantic scenarios to one another. These scenarios ranged from the sweetly-sentimental to the most frankly erotic, and everywhere in between. The love-scenes were of course tight-beamed, as they did not wish to share the details of their bliss with any other stars, not even the others of their cluster. With those stars, however, they continued to converse, for even in the midst of their passion their vast, multi-compartmented minds retained some parts free for other functions. In a manner quite impossible to most organic motiles, therefore, they simultaneously engaged in the most tender and passionate courtship, whilst fulfilling their more ordinary social obligations and maintaining their friendships with their fellow-beings. The substance of the elaborate love-talk and romantic fantasies in which they indulged was mostly incomprehensible to our kind of life and sapience. There were loving explorations of each others' hearts and dreams and souls, conducted with a certain intsensely passionate urgency, for both knew that their time together would now be fleeting. They teased each other with innuendos and promises to perform acts upon one another which only our most advanced astrophysicists might perhaps dimly grasp. They projected extremely-detailed and highly-detailed erotic images and scenarios, both in their own forms and in those of other and sometimes imaginary beings and states of beings, none of which were those of planetary surface dwelling organic motiles. "We're getting closer and closer," Tiamat said (to sum up her emotionally-tinged presentation of complex orbital dynamics, complete with the scattering and occasional vaporization of asteroidal debris by their immense bulks and actinic glares). "Soon, my dear one, soon we will be able to caress in truth, for the first time ever in our lives." "Oh, my beautiful Tiamat," replied Barba. "I have yearned for your touch since my core first fused. This will be a dream come true!" A certain tender radius was crossed. Lines of magnetic potential firmed between the two stars. Prominences erupted from their chromosphere, immense fountains of madly-radiating plasma many millions of miles long, flowing along the field lines. Each reached out toward the other star. At first all they felt was an intensification of the electromagnetic fields that they had exerted upon each other since both stars began burning. Their stellar breezes blew ever harder on both of them, eliciting little half-giggling gasps as they tickled and teased at each other's coronas, finally blowing them back so that they circled one another, their long hair streaming in their mutual winds. Then the field lines stablized, and each gasped in shocked delight as still-incandescent plasma from her partner actually touched her, first stirring the already-compressed corona, then making contact with the chromosphere, and finally stirring currents that convected down into the photosphere itself. They cried out in growing joy at this delicious mutual penetration, something of which they had learned in tales from older stars and so often fantasized in their erotic scenarioes. "Oh!" cried Tiamat. "I ... I'd heard ... I'd hoped ... but I never dreamed it really could be like this!" She had flirted with other stars before she had decided to stay with Barba to the end -- she had even seriously considered capturing one or two smaller ones to join her system -- but of course she had never been this physically close before to any other stellar body. Never closer than she had been to Barba, and never closer to Barba than she was now approaching. 'I can feel you!" gasped Barba. "Your isotopic distribution ... in my own outer layers ... some of it's drifting even deeper ... this is incredible! I've always wanted this!" Barba, in the days of her extreme youth, had gazed out with wonder and even some lust at the rest of the Universe, but her heart was pure, and when her mind had developed to the point where serious love was possible, she had fallen once and for ever for her companion. She had always hoped for the ultimate union with Tiamat: this was Barba's dream come true. As the two supergiants approached still-closer, the volume and density of exchanged matter increased by whole orders of magnitude. Little sparks of greater brilliance began to appear on their photospheres, where profound currents were stirring, allowing the emergence of energies from their depths. These merged into excited blushes, whose radiance erupted outward, annihilating those asteroids which whirled into their paths. Now the interconnection was continual, and both stars shuddered and cried out in joy as their coronas united. Even their chromospheres began to intermingle, masses of incandescent plasma flowing from one star to the other; mostly from Barba to Tiamat, though Tiamat ensured that some matter was returned. Because Barba was less far into her stellar evolution than was Tiamat, this meant that hydrogen flowed onto the larger supergiant. This might have made a difference long ago, but Tiamat was now too far gone. Her core was already layered into different elements, with hydrogen in the outermost shell, helium in the center, and carbon in in the inmost layer. This carbon was fusing at some 800 million degrees absolute; it was increasingly becoming contaminated with significant impurities of oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium and aluminum, which would not itself fuse until Tiamat's core had become much hotter. There would not be time for the hydrogen from Barba to save Tiamat, for before it had filtered down to the core, Tiamat's final moments would have been reached. This infusion of hydrogen was not an attempt by Barba to aid her lover; it was nothing more nor less than an act of love itself. The two supergiants whirled around one another, locked in what was now close to their final embrace. That was the moment at which company came to call on them. Even less possible to describe than Tiamat and Barba were the three Beings who came to attend on their final millennium. They were no more organic motiles than were the two stars, and they were far less mortal. They were nodes of concentration in networks which stretched across the whole Cosmos, and mere organic motiles were less to them than bacteria would be to our own forms. Their leader -- if the term may be applied to three equals -- I might describe as a vast sphere, shimmering with all the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum and all the vibrations of the strong force, surrounded by an aura which was thus something like a rainbow, and which was attuned to the rest of the Universe in such a fashion that one might see within it twinkle all the stars of Creation; that within that shimmer blinked an infinite number of extremely beautiful violet eyes, surrounded by an infinite number of shapely horns, and lazily-fanned an infinite number of white fleecy wings. From her eyes and wings and horns, there radiated an ancient subtle wisdom and inconceivably great power. And that description would be almost as accurate, or inaccurate, as imagining her to be simply a tall winged white woman of great majesty, upon whose brow was fixed a brilliant star whose radiance projected outward like a horn, and whose long multi-hued hair billowed about her like a rainbow. For the truth of her is far less comprehensible, and if we grasped it we might go mad from its wonder and glory, for all that She is fundamentally-friendly to our kind of life. And, of course, to the kind of life represented by Tiamat and Barba, for without Fusion the stars would not burn. On her right hand was her Sister, was more compact, and dark where Fusion was light, and her halo or hair was the subtly shaded dark blue of the night sky by moonlight, and in it also shone the stars, the brighter by contrast with her darkness. Her eyes were blue and seemed almost innnocent, but in them was great intelligence and bottomless depths. She was Gravity, and she called herself a simple Concept, for all she did was to hold things together. And yet, to hold things together is not something to be scorned, when the fire of Paradox spreads and the fabric of all things is threatened, and at such moments Gravity was ever by her friends, never fearing the hottest part of the fight, and for this reason all who her knew her well did greatly love her. The third was different from the Sisters, for while they were Forces, which was to say Concepts of Law; Dissonance was a Tendency, which was to say a Concept of Chaos. While we may imagine the Sisters as spherical or at least symmetrical entities, he was an animate mass of muti-colored lightning bolts or strings, flashing and vibrating between nodes in a network whose apparent patternlessness was dizzying to behold. Even his fellow Concepts found him rather disconcerting, and for that reason few of them got on well with him at all. His eyes were red and yellow, and shifted and whirled madly about his nodes. Or if you prefer, imagine a tall, thin, winged and bicornate man, clad in motley and capering like a fool. None of his parts, neither arms nor legs nor wings nor horns nor even eyes, is truly symmetrical. Many would find this ugly and annoying -- but a certain very devious and mischevious sort of mind might find him bearable. Or even beautiful. And certainly hilarious. One might not imagine the Sisters had minds like that. One would be quite wrong. Especially as regarded Fusion. The three Beings appeared just outside the orbits of the supergiants, and hung there for a while appreciating the spectacle that was before them. It was far from the greatest one they had ever witnessed -- they had participated in the birth and death of galaxies beyond counting; indeed, had catalyzed the coalescene of the great strings of galactic superclusters. But they had an eye for beauty and sense of wonder. All three of them loved the Universe which had given them birth, though they expressed this in very different manners. And this was an event both beautiful and wonderful indeed. "Well, this sure is a show," said Dissonance. "Wish I'd brought popcorn." This is of course not what he actually said, but it is a fair translation of his immensely rich communication into terms which we might comprehend. "Dissonance, you are disgusting," said Gravity, sniffing to herself. "They are but mortals, but neither their mating nor their deaths are some mere show, put on for your amusement." She was full well capable of bawdiness, but only on her own terms. And he had always been able to annoy her, for all that she would have risked destruction to save him. "It is what it is," said Fusion. "The natural cycle of their own kind. They love, which is beautiful. They die, which is tragic. And they shall spawn new life in dying -- which is, after all, a wonder beyond our own knowing." Gravity nodded soberly. Dissonance briefly gazed at Fusion with an expression which might have been worshipful. Then he spoiled it by laughing. "I'm not sure our intrusion is welcome. They're somewhat busy right now." "I know both of them well," said Fusion. "They are something of a pet project of mine. They will still have enough computational resources to commune with us, without interfering in their final union. We may all learn something from them." "If you think it a good idea," said Gravity, "lead on." Dissonance laughed again. "When have I ever respected any being's privacy? This should be amusing." Gravity scowled, and Fusion glanced at him reprovingly. But it did not affect their collective decision. The three Cosmic Concepts communed with the two supergiant stars.