The Long Swim

 Gravity hurls me like an insect on a wave. I ride a ten-thousand-year storm, the strange pulse of two decomposing black holes orbiting in the near distance. I scream with the tidal forces, my body stretched light-years from nose to tail. I hold myself on this razor’s edge, on the point of breaking, for the sheer joy and exhilaration of it. My synapses burn with velocity. No one else can surf these tides. I have folded myself into an aerodynamic slug, a conscious comet hurtling through bending blackness. I stare ahead with all senses, sniffing for the prick of radiation that means a stable system lies ahead.

I love gravity storms. I have danced with dozens of them, dodging their hazardous waltz to catch the ripples of their steps. They are beautiful and terrifying, black holes in accretion disc gowns of frozen stars, glittering in the endless time dilation of the near-horizon.

A black hole is the corpse of a star, its mother and its mortal enemy. Two forces locked in perpetual harmony. But black holes are not social creatures.

Troupes of stars form organically, growing out of gorgeous nebulae and spinning their bright songs through the universe. Stars make patterns. Concentric rings, spirals, constellations, clusters, each as beautiful as the last. I have studied thousands of constellations and created thousands of my own.

Not so with the dark dancers. Vicious remnants of long-dead suns, they consume without end. Many of my people have fallen victim to their pull, chasing the mystery of singularity into the deadly accretion disc and hovering there forever, gorging on data that will never reach the outside world.

“Never” is a concept I learned when I was young. It is difficult to wrap an ageless mind around such an idea—we are taught from our first days of the dual infinitude of space and potentiality. But when faced with forces like those from the dark dancers, infinity breaks down. My parent knew I would venture out into the endless black, and knew the tales of those who gave in to the seductive pull of the singularity. It wanted to prepare me.

My parent spends its life in the Ziz system, its treasure, guarding and guiding it, giving germ to civilizations and seeing what they create. It has chosen to be a god. I do not envy it.

One of its prized cultures were crystalline beings, rotationally symmetrical and exceedingly intelligent. Each one was unique in shape and character, and their beliefs revolved around potential and possibility. Anything they could understand was mundane. They revered only the impossible, that which they thought could never exist, and in trying to discover what was sacred they created more beauty than I’ve ever seen on one planet. I cannot translate their vibrational prayers, but they taught me the meaning of “never.” By the end, they had created so much that only one thing remained inaccessible to them: perfection.

The symmetric beings found bliss and death in space. Given untampered void, they eliminated all error, froze the possible into the actual. They made themselves into a massive sphere, perfectly crystalline in all dimensions, preventing new genesis and ending their evolution. They still float. It is their heaven, I suppose. Nothing but perfection remains.

My brave relations trapped in accretion disks are the same. In pursuit of the unknown, it became their universe. Each of them will collect data known to no other being, and none will ever speak to another.

I do not venture near the accretion discs. But the dancers are so violent that the universe takes notice. When two black holes approach they begin to tear at the space around them, two unstoppable forces at odds. The uniform suck of a single gravity well turns into the frothing boil of a storm, and huge waves are thrown out like waterfalls. They bend the universe around them, pulling emptiness faster than light could travel in unbent void.

This is why I love them. I have crafted my body to stretch and curve with the twist of space. I house worlds in my belly, perfectly stable microcosms built from samples of systems past. Sometimes, during the long swim between stars, I will put on skin and explore a forest garden or abyssal cavern. I love my small worlds. Some would say they are my life’s work, but really they are its product.

My true life’s work lies at somewhere ahead on this wave. The gravity storm will stop once the two behemoths finally collide, devouring one another and settling into supermassive equilibrium. I have ridden it intermittently for the past few eons, slowing whenever a healthy star approaches. Each time I have seen beauty beyond imagining, works of art and magic so true I stared at them for centuries unmoving.

This is why I believe the dancers are sentient. Each ride I take has ended with revelation. I believe they speak to me, in a way, eddies of gravity brushing my skin, the last sparks of ancient fire. It is true they are dying, and that they take all they catch with them. But they know they will not catch me, and so they urge me onward.

The space of a black hole’s wave is dark by nature. Anything with traditional mass breaks the flow, dispersing it into bubbles and froth, before it can be known. I have visited civilizations who have tried for centuries to measure waves that their physics tells them must exist, who built finely-tuned sensors and placed them far out in space to wait for the ripple. But the sensors were too massive. The eye, in opening, destroys what it would see.

I have shaped my body to ride the wave. To be towed along, bent with the universe, I have tucked my mass away in a deep pocket of myself, rolled up so tight it is invisible to the huge eyes of the dancers. My skin is a fuzz of quarks, a quantum anomaly that exists within the pull like any other random assortment of virtual particles in vacuum, pinging in and out of existence, more potential than reality. My mind holds the wavering group together, the sentient cipher of an unreadable code. Unique of all life, my skin does not protect me from the elements—it protects the elements from me. Without this layer my workings would be laid bare and the wave would disperse, realizing the trick, leaving me floating in star-studded space once more. But for now I am concealed in an eddy of void, a stowaway on a vessel larger than stars and more delicate than the first stirrings of life.

An uncounted span of time passes. The black churns around me. I fold myself tight and descend into my gardens, flying between the small worlds floating in my belly’s black. Each is a wonder of engineering and evolution, bustling with flora and fauna found nowhere else in the universe. They have had ages to grow and evolve, aided by the slowed clock of their tiny dimension.

I choose one at random and slip into the body I use to explore it. Each world requires a different form, and I take almost as much pride from the bodies as I do from the planets themselves. In this world I walk tall, many-armed, silver-skinned. Wings flare behind me and I feel hot daylight pour onto my flesh.

I stand in a vast floodplain, mountains ringing the expanse. Tall trees stretch wide fronds upward. The sky is bright, light pouring from all angles. This is the garden of eternal day, where light is food and what water there is lies far beneath the baked ground. I walk on fine sand, the beach of an ocean long subsided. I stretch outward, palms opening to the flat sky, wings pushing at air that begs to lift them. I relish the smooth movement and strain of joints, luxurious after the pure stillness of the wave. I close my wings and kneel, pushing hands into the ground, feeling the grain and sift of warm sand.

I feel movement. Something brushes by my fingers. I wait. It comes again, touching each in turn, then again, more slowly this time. I curl my hand, feeling the thing curl with it, and raise it into the light from its hiding place. As it rises above the surface I see tendrils stretch and break, scurrying back below the surface. The creature doesn’t seem to mind.

Hanging from my fingers is a fine web, a skein of fibers and feelers built around a central spine. It contracts as it feels the light, spreading itself over my hand and onto my arm. The web is dexterous, sticking where it touches. The spine lays itself along my upper arm to bask in the warmth. I raise my arm to my face. The spine is translucent, a series of small black discs suspended within its clear jelly. As I tilt my arm they tilt with it, staying perfectly perpendicular to the sky. As I watch the web grows, feelers slowly extending from each broken end where a connection had snapped off. Looking closely at its branching, glassy tendrils I see faint pulses traveling to each point of growth from the black discs.

I plunge my other hand into the sand, gently closing my fist and raising it, and bring up another web. This one I try to preserve, bringing it just above the sand to see its tendrils, but some hair-thin struts break. They flutter in the floodplain’s low wind, then they, too begin growing.

This second creature is smaller and has no spine, but its many arms still search in the air. It moves up my arm, and I bring both hands together. As soon as the webs touch they merge, joining into a large net that stretches and grows as I pull my arms apart. I bring the mesh to my face and feel tension and movement as the whole web realigns, keeping the spine’s discs pointed straight up. The spine curls around my arm, snaking along its lit edge to take in as much light as possible. Examining the threads between my arms I see the more quivering pulses, traveling in all directions along all parts of the web. Whether vascular or neural, the whole web thrums.

I speak. A long syllable, rising from a low infrasonic roar through ever-smaller wavelengths, waiting for a reaction. As I approach my upper range the web tenses, squeezing my arms with surprising strength. I hold my voice steady, singing one high note, and the web responds. With a high keening whir all of its fibers buzz into motion, vibrating themselves into sound. I can feel it against my skin, a taut tingling.

I sing to it, a small tune in my upper range, culled from the hard drive of a satellite floating in the atmosphere of a ruined planet, ashes and dust covering its blighted surface. Five notes in a pentatonic scale, over and over again.

The threads respond. They hum with me, changing their tune, harmonizing with each new note a moment after I sing it. After a while it accustoms itself to the pattern and there is no delay. We sing the tune for a few repetitions before the web begins to improvise, sounding out a melody over my simple rhythm. I change the rhythm in turn, alternating the sequence, and its response is instantaneous.

I bend again, lowering my arms into the sand, still singing. As the threads of the skein touch the sand they jump out, grabbing hold of other tendrils buried just beneath the surface, and the humming grows louder. I kneel, pressing my two arms into the sand, and listen as the webs join with their siblings. The humming grows louder and stretches farther, until the whole desert is singing with me, amplifying and overpowering my own small voice with its huge one. For long moments, we sing.