C.S. MacCath

Before the ancient stars coalesced into brightness, in the vault of the foregoing universe, there were sorrows too great for any being to bear, and the greatest of these was the sorrow of ending. Not the end of a day, with its sundown promise of another sunrise, and not the end of a life, while memories of the dead remain and there is hope in some hearts for the soul's journey onward. No, this sorrow was vast, cold and complete, and it spanned the void of space among the last rough fragments of matter strewn in terminus.

Who was there to grieve in that heat death? Scripture tells of three; supermassive singularities at the end of their gathering in, brooding upon the cacophony before and the quiet ahead, sacrificing radiation to become chimeras of the wonders they once devoured. There was Face-of-Time, in whose mouth a trillion tongues cried out in languages long extinct. There was Skin-of-Suns, fat with the orbits of planets given to memory. And there was Feet-of-Entropy, fevered with a dance of creation fallen to stillness.

One day (as they understood days, these black-eyed watchers of epochs), Face-of-Time strode into the void on a legion of legs; each one a transit system between the stars, a glittering city, a hut in the mountains, a burrow where mothers of beasts gave birth to their young and spoke the deeds of sentience. “I mourn the loss of minds,” it said in all those tongues. “There was a poet once, a being of fire and ammonia, who gave the brief flame of xyr life to the search for a perfect word and spoke it as xe died. Who will remember the poet, the word or the many who held it on their lips for a thousand years? There was a pilgrim too, a piercer of the spacetime veil, who matched the speed of light and yet prays in a shrine where time and motion cease. Who will call him away from that devotion? And what of the cow who hid her calf to save him from the slaughtering knife? Who will tell the small tale of that good mother when I am gone? I mourn the loss of minds,” it said in the languages of the dead and retreated to its fading accretion disk.

Skin-of-Suns shone into the vacuum then; a hundred billion solar nebulae casting planets like dice into the hundred billion galaxies of its flesh. A gravity well opened its throat in a threnody for the celestial, captivating the last two listeners in the universe. “Exquisite, they were,” it sang, “elliptical, spiral and irregular, extravagant civilizations of matter and the kindred supermassives they contained. Their jewelly stars are extinguished forever now, and even the knowledge of them will perish when I am dead. Incandescent, they were, those daughters of hydrogen and helium, audacious mothers of worlds and moons. What became of their children, the fertile descendants of stellar ignition, whose bodies were the nurturers of life? Disintegrated in the blasts of supernovae. Burned to cinders in the long, slow fires of solar giants. Left to freeze while their primordial foremothers huddled, small and white, in the unremitting dark. I sing of them all,” it whispered in a broken strain of grief. “They were exquisite.”

“How they moved.” Feet-of-Entropy embodied the inception of the cosmos; nihility, infinite density, an outward rush of power. “From no-place, no-time there came a pulse, unconstrained, a wild expansion that brought the first builders into being.” A fire burned upon its belly, radiating out, and in it the forges of the elements worked. “Light and heavy, they were made and sent forth into the black, fallow night to blanket infant worlds and combine. There was breath in that union, and water, and in time, there was life.” Bacteria spread across the vastness of its body, now brimming with a myriad sunlit cradles of evolution. Hosts of beings swam in the oceans there, crawled forth to stand on claws, hooves, paws and feet, launched into the air on tremulous wings. “Some survived, adapted, and of these a blessed few traveled out again to greet the universe that gifted them so richly. I was there, a necessary sorrow, from the origin of things; a putrefactor of flesh, a quencher of forges, a cold, killing equilibrium. The dance has ended now; for them and soon for me. But oh, how they blazed, how they soared, how they moved.”

A trillion years they spun thereafter; silent, pensive, dying. Scripture tells us nothing of that time, nor do we know who chance favoured in that bleak, forbidding night with an insight that would bring an end to endings forever. Perhaps there had been a universe before, and perhaps some weaker God therein had offered what it could to the one that followed. Such a thing was probable. But Face-of-Time, Skin-of-Suns and Feet-of-Entropy were three, and they were not yet consigned to dissolution. A measure of strength remained in their colossal accretion disks and in the depths of their inky singularities. So it was when together they chose a minute point in spacetime and poured all they had gathered into it; every perfect word, every civilization of matter, every swimming, crawling, standing, flying being. They lost the chimeras of their bodies, and in time, they lost their lives to that pouring out and into infinite density. But in the moment of their deaths, a new universe was born, one that remembered.

This is why we know them; three Gods who paved the Way of Perpetual Arising and embedded awareness of it in each particle of the cosmos. The leaf, the river, the cloud, the planet, the comet, the star all carry fragments of the same primordial tale. Have you heard it in the howling of the wind? In the crashing of the wave upon the shore? In your dreams of other times, distant places, foreign people? By the triune constellation marked upon my face from birth and its mirrors in the skies of every world where we evolved, by the marks my brethren bear from every species we have met, I speak a truth already singing in your bones: You are an heir of spacetime, and the memory of you will never die the heat death.

Now this telling comes to an end, but there is much left to be told; in the wise cells of your body, in the skillful combination of elements, in the practiced fusion of their creation and in the Gods who will send them forward into universes unending. Go now, and live a life worthy of their sacrifice.

 

T is for Three (at the End of All Things)

 

Author's Note: Many thanks to the Tribe of Physicists for its help with the science of this story.