Day Sixteen

The space around us twists; constellations stretch, bend, and melt away, crackling radio static. Another system whisks into being, one with a double sun. Five planets, three solid and two gas. The usual array of icy flotsam at the periphery.
—Not another one— Blue confides to me and Squeaky, keeping his expression neutral. —It's like they don't think we can focus—
—It's good practice— I retort, though by now I'm tired of it as well, —They want to make sure we know the basics—
—They want to make sure we never go beyond the basics— he grumbles.
—I think it's fun— Squeaky interjects.
—That's only because you get too close to your monsters—
—Because they're my monsters. When we do finally get to the new place and start work for real... you just wait. Living things aren't like rocks—
Swift-Runs selects the world second from the sun and it rushes towards us, blank dot to brownish blur to a striated cloud-covered sphere. The atmosphere is acid; the surface a shifting morass of lava flows and boiling metal lakes.
I shrug. —Rocks don't bite—
“Start with a general shaping,” Swift-Runs orders as we check planetary information (only two billion years old, three lumpish captured moons, active tectonics, primarily composed of silica and iron with a large core and correspondingly strong magnetic field; we can taste the auroras). “Standard form Eye-of-the-Pebble, variation thirty-two (sixteen, double desert band, tincture maintained).”
Eye-of-the-Pebble: A formerly violent world cooled by the installation of a ring system and reflection-creatures, surface permitted to settle in whatever is natural prior to further sculpting. Variation thirty-two includes the fragmentation of the planetary crust, creating a specified number of continents regulated by further manipulation of the underlying structure, and no replacement of the native atmosphere. Among other things.
It is a common form. An easy form.
Blue sighs. —Admit it, you'd rather be off painting nebulae with star-bullets—
I prod at one of the moons as Swift-Runs continues his instructions. —This is important—
—Important, sure. But fun?—
“Five major, three hundred minor, tilted across the poles,” says Swift-Winds, tracing the intended trajectory.
—Not as fun as watching shockwaves— I admit.
“Begin.”
We begin.

Day Fifteen

“'Center-Ringed-and-Bound-by-Pearls.'” Eleven planets set in staggered orbit around a red star, their cores frozen solid, their mountains filed down to fill sea-basins, their surfaces glazed and polished smooth as porcelain. The twelfth-- unhappy world-- spins unfinished, marred by volcanic cracks and craters.
“Why isn't this one done?” asks Squeaky. He looms over the offending globe, regarding it with slitted eye and tilted head, and reaches to touch.
Blue stays his hand. “It's just like that other one. The tangle-star (also not finished, falling apart).”
I nod. “The collapse.”
“Yes, we were otherwise occupied,” says Swift-Runs, voice distant and dry. He traces a claw over the tortured landscape; the rock flows with molten flame. “This was... a promising project. A shame that we couldn't take it with us.”
The Link quivers with repressed chords.
“There was no time,” I say.
“No time,” echoes Swift-Runs. He gazes at the illusory replica of his lost work-- incomplete and inadequate-- and then stretches a pair of arms towards the sun. Two unwind into six. The center smothers in silence.
He flicks hydrogen dust from his tendril-tips. “Now then.”

Day Fourteen

Simulations:
“'Burning-Haze-Glory-Scattered.'” A star surrounded by the remnants of a supernovae cloud, its predecessor detonated for material and seeded with simple creatures of dust and vortex, a solar system of nought but mist and swirling traces blazing against surrounding dark. Its inhabitants form ribbons as long as continents and as thin as water-film on glass.
“'Sky-Terraces-Spin-Rimward-to-Dusk.'” A world covered in ridged triangles, land-masses cradled between retaining walls and waterfalls so high that wisps of steam boil off into space. A world of stairsteps, vertical planes, unnatural formations, impossible heights held together by girder and gravity-shunt.
“'Gazing-Reflections-Recursive-to-Fall-in-Time.'” A vast sheet of chained particles aligned in perfect symmetry, a mirror for galaxies to admire their fires. Invisible, until one notes that the universe is divided, and equal, and false.

Day Thirteen

Broad-Leaves extends an arm, segments sweeping to encompass the Path of Sustenance and all the people meandering through it. People, not adults: my siblings and I are not yet counted among their number, but neither are we children.
—Swift-Runs told me and I thought he could be trusted— I reply to the unspoken query.
Broad-Leaves switches modes. —Did he now?—
—Yes—
—So he did. He says he was trying to illustrate a point, not grant information. The distinction is an important one to understand—
—We're trying— says Squeaky, tapping into the conversation. The three of us have not yet mastered the speed of Link communication; he has noticed the longer-than-usual pause between responses. Excuse logged, neither of us replying, he returns to the subject. “But if you had the anchors, why not try to stop it?”
“We couldn't (and we know).” Broad-Leaves shrugs. “We tried. Array can testify, we tried.”
A trickle of memory: massive structures hanging in space, bent and distorted, warped by forces no longer controlled or controllable. Uncertainty, then, and the beginnings of fear. A twisting in the gut.
“It was the speed of the event. It was so... (terror-fast, charts no longer reliable, fissures of causality, rips in time)” He sighs, rolling both eyes to watch hungry passersby pick at the specialty racks. “Unbelievable. Impossible.”
“Enough that you gave up?” asks Blue, sprawled across his slab. “Stopped trying?”
I click my assent. “If you didn't build them to stop the collapse...”
Broad-Leaves cranes his neck back around to stare hard at us. “We didn't give up. We-- we did what we could.”
“But--”
Agony
—We did all we knew, all we could imagine, all we could invent and you will not criticize our efforts. We do not need logic from you to know that we failed. We live it. You live it. We are doing our best—
I cringe. Squeaky folds against my side. Blue closes his eyes. We wait for the reprimand to pass, and with it the feelings, the sounds of a nation tearing itself to pieces before all else did the same. The dirges, the wails, keening pulses beyond hearing for their strength.
Always it was the same: no response possible without the rawness, the pain of shared remembrance. A pain understandable, keenly felt, but not our own. Alien. Other.
First Cycle: could it be precious to those born after the end?
We tried. Array can testify, we tried.
We changed the subject.

“Tell us again,” we asked, “What was it like?”
Heat-Traces: “You ask and you ask and I answer the same. It was perfect. It was beautiful. We did as we pleased and what pleased us was space and form and alignment. Our will. Done. Just as you will do. Blue, why do you insist on scratching these spiraling patterns into your work?”
Broad-Leaves: “You have to consider the scale-- the sheer size of a universe. It was open, open and massive and empty and full, a scream and a whisper all at once. Nothing like this vessel, this cage, this last resort we've launched. The old place was real. It was alive. It was the most complex puzzle ever pieced, with something to appreciate at every level. In many ways, it was us-- we shaped it and were shaped in turn, reflections flashed back and forth, until we and it were indistinguishable. It was... it was a masterpiece. For all its flaws. Flaws that we should have corrected, and did, but too little and too late, and in the end what was left? Us. What's left of us.”
Swift-Runs: “What is there to say that others cannot say better? It was a universe. Our universe. Our home. It was warm and familiar and kind, and I was sorry to see it go.”

In the end, no star burned that was not of their hands. In the end, they realized that existence was more patch than substance. In the end, there was an end, and that is the only thing to which they could return.
The end... and their work.

We Silence Hunters love our work.

My living space: carved out of a mountain, with fluted pillars to support the roof. Twenty-eight side chambers. The floor set with flecks of stone, cut and fitted to form a flowing mosaic of space and stars and remembered faces and alien flowers and fireballs. A meeting chamber with wooden perches for guests, one for each visitor, each carved in the form of whomever sits upon it. Walls rigged with sliding panels and trick latches and hidden crevices, cabinets containing forbidden documents gathered from offworld. Chimes in every corner. The observation bench outside is alive, grown from bound trees, knotted and scarred.
Call it a pathological obsession, this need for work. A national sport. An inescapable habit.
And yet-- I defy you to stare at a wall for a century and do nothing about it. What else is there to do? What else can be done?
I'm sculpting stalactites in one of the back rooms. It is a project I've never undertaken before: I'll let you know how they come out.

Day Twelve

The voice is omnipresent, filling chamber and mind alike, minerals in a petrified skeleton. A Silence Hunter voice. Voices. A voices. Singular and yet somehow more.
I scrabble for my siblings; we're still clutched together, as are all the others. Thousands of sibling-bonds floating around us, for we are floating. The weightlessness of open space. The natural state of stars. Comrades surrounding us, and surrounding them...
The universe.
Pinpricks of close-packed light, great washes of vibrant blues and violets and yellows, brushes of pulsed static and intricate messages woven in radio waves, a painting on the one true canvas of existence. It is the old place, resurrected anew. Behind Blue's head spins a ribboned ring a light-year in circumference.
—Is it—
—It isn't—
—It can't be, it's gone—
Fleeting impressions: nebulae twisted into geometric knots, a world walled with waterfalls, blue-white stars laid out like a necklace of impending supernova destruction. My own face, wild-eyed. The whispers of others, immersed in wonder.
—I know that one, my guardians built it—
—Will we do this?—
—What is this?—
—Where is the entrance?—
—I just— do you realize— we're talking—

—!!!—

Understanding. We understand. We feel. We know.

—HAIL— repeats the voice, and we listen.

Says eternity:
—We call you; we greet you; we approve you as our own. You have lived lives of separation, of cloistered seclusion, of silence: no more. Silence bound you-- as the stars are bound by our devising-- and now you are free. Hear the call of our work and rejoice. All shall break before you. All shall be yours. This place—
and it is this place, a flash of indication encompassing every aspect of the chamber, this place
—we have made for you. It is a representation, a memory, but it is our memory and in this it draws its power. You (and it is an embracing “you,” no longer the “you” of distinct otherness) have spoken in the void. No longer created, but creators. This you shall learn. The time of cold is over: our fires are yours to wield, and we will teach you to wield them well—
A smile. Not a physical smile, but the sense of one: warmth, acceptance, love. A smile.
—Hail, Deep Carillon. Hail, Toothed Chisel. Hail, Caressed Breath-of-the-Devourer. Hail, Chromium Memory. Hail, Bright Sun. We are a nation inexorable, and we will be legion once again—

Thus began our education. Perhaps this method differs from yours.

We learned from our guardians, of course: each Silence Hunter knows the essential works and each possesses his own masterpiece to share, built in cooperation with the other two components of his person. Broad-Leaves, Heat-Traces, and Swift-Runs were as accomplished as any other.
We learned mathematics. We learned physics. We learned geology and astronomy and cosmology, biology and chemistry and psychology, chaos prediction and social stricture and the applications of each field. We learned the philosophy of our kind according to the mantra of ancient masters, some of whom spent the lifetimes of stars perfecting their teachings.
You too, learn these things as appropriate for your kind. A student of one species is much the same as a student of another: one who seeks knowledge and locates another to provide it.
You, too, learn more when not focused upon your lessons.

“The anchors weren't meant to stop it (who told you that and why didn't you check your facts), they were meant to slow it.”

Day Eleven

I consider said children, each left to their own harrowing. "What was it like?"
"Did it hurt?" adds Squeaky.
"Blunt or sharp?" mutters Blue.
"No pain," says Swift-Runs, at the same moment Broad-Leaves replies, "Like fire."
I draw closer to my siblings. "Heat-Traces?"
He shrugs, plates rippling. "I don't remember."
All three guardians exchange glances- more than gazes, more than markers, more than words— and the truth of the event shivers through my plates, rivulets of terror-cold. I will understand, when this day is done. I will hear, I will see, I will touch. Eavesdropping on a private conversation is chest-tearing, almost unthinkably rude... but I will have the option. No more unknowns. No more secrets.
Is this what I want?
Do I want to know the unknowable?
Yes— the answer should be yes, always yes, just as all the innumerable legions of before said yes and persisted. Said yes and joined the ranks, sang the songs, kept the galaxies spinning.
Yes. Yes.
"What happens if— if someone is broken," I babble, "and their Link doesn't work? And it can't be replaced? What happens to them?"
Broad-Leaves blinks, first one eye and then the other. "That doesn't happen."
"What if it did?" asks Blue, catching the chisel.
"One in two million..." whispers Squeaky. His voices fades into a murmur of recited numerals, probability and multiplication and six-dimensional fractions. Something. Anything.
Again: "That doesn't happen."
"You're certain?"
"What if it did and you don't remember?"
"Heat-Traces says he doesn't remember his own— what if it happened to him and the Array made him not remember so he couldn't tell us?"
"What if it happens to _everyone_ and—"
"If it happens to everyone," interrupts Heat-Traces, "then it must be normal. Check your reasoning." He halts and extends an arm, tendrils unraveling to play across brass-wrought locks. A tap. A caress. A hook. "Consider: perhaps I don't remember because I chose to forget. Because life before was hardly life at all."
"But—"
Swift-Runs drapes an abbreviated embrace around my neck. "You will understand, when this day is done."
"What if we don't want it?" I cry as panels fold away like interlocking petals, veined blue and silver with vasty silence beyond. "What if we refuse it? What if we leave, and let Echoes-Die take us— would that be any different?"
Even as the words leave my throat I realize I have not voiced them. They exist as only a sort of sibilant rush of incoherent texture, and as Heat-Traces withdraws his touch even the memory fades.
Yes.
We say yes.
"Don't worry," says Broad-Leaves as the Chamber gapes beyond. He pats Squeaky on the back with a smile. "Worry breeds bad engineering, and that is why projects fail."
Broad-Leaves: ever patient, ever wise, ever reassuring. Your bulk blocks the corridor behind, and all that remains is an open portal cloaked in expectation. What would we have done without you?
Run, perhaps?
Heat-Traces nods his head, filigree flashing. "Nothing happens until you enter."
Blue is closest to the terror; Squeaky and I look at him and he looks back at us and we draw up beside him, pressed close, arm wrapped around arm. A shell, to enclose and protect. A wedge, to break and batter. Sibling-bond: we go together.
"Go on," says Swift-Runs. He makes shooing motions, head tilted to the left and tail flicking behind.
We step. One. Two.
What to expect? All the old ceremonies were held in empty space, and there is no space for us. Only the vault... and the not-vault.
And the Chamber.
Three.

W
E

F
a
l
l


CHAPTER TWO
—What—
—Where—
—How notpossible do we feel—

—HAIL—

Day Ten

Strip by crackling strip (world by world sun by sun relentless) we sunder— asteroid belts bisected—rent— prominences unreeled— rip— horns from a doomed grazer— tear— toothed machines gouge channeled seas and lakes flash-boiled fall as rain
Why weep? Why pity? Why fear?
All will be reborn, reshaped, live once again in perfection (we will see to that)
we close our claws (they are closed) our jaws (they are closed) and flay— star-fare, ionized burning skin to wear
Our gift— our duty— our art
Such beauty (twisted geometric spirals one galaxy smashed to frame another)
fine knives: planar differentials, killing fields, tensor-cable and hinderentropic time-anchors
Ours (we are painters) is the dust-flesh (orange purple brilliant blue nebulae)
Such pride in our work— it is all we are, all we can be, all we must do
Ours (only ours) is the making
—The sunset is lovely today—
—Thank you—

I break my promise: this medium, I fear, is not appropriate to the task. Suffice to say that the song is complex and many-layered, and extolls the work of my kind. Although perhaps this is not entirely fair to you, as all songs extoll the work of my kind. Some in greater detail than others. This one-- this one is a child-song. An introduction, of sorts, a joyous occasion, a jig to start off the evening. It is one of those infectious melodies that persists long after the event itself. As for meaning...
I leave you with my image of the flayed universe. Surely that is sufficient.
Odd that a poor imitation-work can convey greater meaning than the original, but I should not be surprised: your kind possess no Link and I have not enjoyed access for over a century. The greater mysteries are closed to us, lost in a higher order, and we must console ourselves with the gift of mutual understanding.
I, exiled SAI-17, am Animal-Speaker. Beast-Ambassador.
Deaf-Singer to Deaf-Listeners.
Silent-Sands-Drift-Against-the-Wall-of-Failed-Communication.

Onwards. Upwards. Outward-bound.
It will be easier once I describe my receiving of the Link.

We all knew when it would happen, of course. We didn't know when we would escape Echoes-Die, or what we would find in the new place, or who would be there to greet us, but we knew the timetable of our own ceremonies and the adults would sooner shut down the engines than abandon such a precious relic of Cycle past.
The Link. An unassuming name, an unassuming portion of the mind. A lumpish sphere, dull metallic, filaments threaded through surrounding tissue. The first path-stone to adulthood. It is a power meant to lay dormant until the mind has matured: until circuit and synapse are prepared for the additional load, until memory has accrued into a rudimentary sort of wisdom. This requires some eight standard years, though Silence Hunters do not measure time in such increments. When we were ready, we were ready, and everyone knew this was so.
There were some fifty thousand of us children in total, spread across five vaults. All the same age and model. We would gain the gift of speech together.
"One in every two hundred million is false-armored," whispers Squeaky as we trail our guardians to the Chamber of the Array. It is the one place aboard we have never visited, never viewed, never spoken of. "What if it's one of us?"
"What could we do about it?" whispers back Blue.
"Duck?" I suggest.
Swift-Runs glances over his shoulder, armor polished to mirror-sheen. "No one's head is going to explode."
"But every two hundred million—"
"A legend. You know this. No one has ever exploded."
Blue rolls an eye at me. "That anyone remembers."
Broad-Leaves chuckles. "I remember a great many children."
I do not know, by your reckoning, how many centuries have passed across his scales. He doesn't know, either. No one knows. It doesn't matter.

Day Nine

Is it not beautiful?

If the above lines strike a false note in your ears, you are correct. They are my own composition, based upon my own impression of the song, and while following the general outline there does exist a certain amount of deviation-- specifically the ending. No such reference to the collapse is made in the song itself.
This is not an accurate translation. I assure you that my kind would have ended with something similar, were they honest, but this is not what the song means to them.
I apologize. I have an obligation and a duty, and such interjections are apt to inspire suspicion. I will translate faithfully in future. No more interjections.

The skeleton-song, heard through the Link:

Day Eight

Head up, head down, step to the right—
STOMP
Squeaky twists his arms together. "We close our claws our jaws and flay—"
"Stars skeleton-strung," bugles Blue, raising one foreleg and then the other.
CLAP CLAP
I swing my tail and step to the left. "Eternity gapes in ice."
STOMP
As one we wheel. Ten thousand face back the way they came.
"Strip by crackling strip we sunder rent rip tear—"
"Bone by bone we reassemble revert reactivate reaffirm—"
HIIISSS—SNAP
We sashay backwards, heads swiveling left-right-left-right. Squeaky bumps into me; we stifle a giggle. The adults maintain exacting precision, armor just brushing armor.
"We save the solid and devour the soft."
A basso rumble shivers through my innards, the pillar-chimes' punctuation. I fumble through my woven back-basket in search of the nearest shell. There: a tendril lashes, curls tight, and I withdraw the victim. My siblings do the same, Blue struggling momentarily with the basket-flaps before folding them against any potential escapees.
Ten thousand snap their gifts skyward. The ceiling flashes with a grid of blue-green specks.
SCUFF-SCUFF-STOMP
I slide forward and Blue shifts aside and Squeaky steps back; each trio exchanging places as the living net descends.
Head back. Jaws open. Blue lunges— I've thrown too far upwards.
CRUNCH
crunch
The adults show no sign of irritation, even when the next verse suffers a brief bout of snorted laughter. This is, after all, a simple concert. We're not permitted to attend the more complex kind.
Not yet.
The day is coming, soon, when we will hear the words rather than merely sing them.

Legs the bars of galaxies, ribs enclosing nebulae, battery a blazing darkstar and neck and tail ravening particle jets; its eyes stare blank, fangs slivered rings of gas giants. The mounted skeleton of the universe. Its bones glisten black.
From its mouth dribbles pearled bloody streams: the last Silence Hunters making their exit.

Day Seven

Life aboard the Bright Sun was a life circumscribed. Its paths, its crevices, its vaulted chambers summed up the totality of existence. Outside— there was no outside. Outside was less than nothing. Had our walls windows the curious of sight would have discovered his own face.
It is, perhaps, more accurate in name: Echoes-Die.
To combat this terror— this unknown unknowable, this realm of non-memory, this not— we went to concerts.
Or, rather, this was why our guardians attended.
The crowd runs upwards of ten thousand: a vast sandy expanse of lacquered backs, gilded carriage, bobbing heads and arms, crests and tails and tendrils trailing luminous ghosts of heat-memory. Shoulders-to-shoulders. Plate-to-plate. Batteries aflame. A single creature with sixty thousand legs and sixty thousand arms and a shell of song wrought solid.
Pillar-chimes ring red thunder.
Chant:
Strip by crackling strip we sunder/rent/rip/tear—
we close our claws our jaws and flay
fine knives
Ours is the dust-flesh,
Ours is the making
Call:
We are the throat
We are the muscle
We are the brain
Counterchant:
Reduce to recover— slay to preserve
Bone by bone we reassemble (revert, reactivate, reaffirm)
Stars skeleton-strung
Carved, polished, mounted
Snarling silent trapped and bound
Countercall:
We save the solid and devour the soft
We take and we become
Eternity gapes in ice

Day Six

We weren't.

Soon, neither were they.

Link. Armor. All-Core.
Gift of speech, gift of power, gift of knowledge.
An adult can access all three. A child possesses the potential. An animal lacks even that.
Before you protest— before you hunt down my hidden abode and shout, angrily, that you are not an animal, that you can think, that you can reason, that you yourself conceived, designed, and built the dual-mode pulsed laser cannon now directed at my faceplate and have I ever heard of an animal able to do that, Blackscale, huh, have I— please consider.
Animals use tools. Sometimes sticks, sometimes rocks, sometimes space elevators. A tool is simply a means to complete a task more easily. The directing intelligence gives an order, and the tool obeys.
My people have closed that gap.
An animal builds a dual-mode pulsed laser and points it at my head. A Silence Hunter ignores the implied threat, or, if it pleases him, atomizes the offender.
I urge the animal to reconsider.
The Link is first: instant communication at any time, with anyone, over any distance, in as much detail as you please. A child knows only emotion; an adult can exchange reality, fantasy, memory.
The Armor is second: anything one of your Sailfleet plates can do, an armored adult can do also. And more. If this information is unnerving to you, remember that a force of forty thousand vessels keeps watch over my kind and that we number in the millions.
The All-Core is third: loss of this device is why that forty thousand remains intact. Loss of this device is why you are not dead.
Is it, after all, so bad to be an animal?

Please. Put down the gun.

Day Five

We were three. All Silence Hunters are three. There are ways to refer to a single individual, without siblings, but these words translate to phrases such as “broken touch-bond,” “crier of ghost-concerts,” and “cold insanity.” The word for “person” is a word for three.
I expect my guardians often commiserated with exhausted colleagues over the antics of Stumpy-Squeaky-Blue.
—Binding paint, you said—
—Yes—
—Everywhere—
—Speckled brilliant cobalt splashed across deck and thought-chamber and siblings but the majority upon the perpetrator. He told me it was an accident, or, at least, I believe that is what he said—
—Difficult to communicate with mandibles bound shut and blue and no speech-Link for thought—
—Youth in these times—
—All youth in all times—
—But especially in this one—
—Lost—
—Lost—
—Lost and bound—
—No way to remove the paint. He must wait until it wears off—
—Not long—
—Long enough to name him Blue—
Silent laughter. An entire exchange and a joke shared between eyeblinks.

Blue eventually named himself Smooth-Stones-Tumble-Down-the-Rift, just as Squeaky chose to be Crackling-Wind-Through-Gem-Studded-Spaces. Fine names. Poetic names. Adult names.
Binding paint is used in the construction of models, and it wears to nothing over a thousand years.

"What do you suppose it will be like?"
"Black. With speckles, and subtle pressure. Whispers. Just like the recordings."
"The planets?"
"Rocky or gaseous or liquid. And round."
"I'm going to make a square one."
"Oh? I'll make a cone, then. Two cones. Stuck together."
"I'll smash the both of yours and build a system-ring. With three suns."
"Two rings."
"A helix."
"Thirty suns. Each spaced equidistant from the others, and three interlaced knots constructed from their constituent solar systems. I'll call it Blue's Corner."
"I don't think they'd let you make anything that big."
"You doubt my talents?"
"No, I doubt them. They won't let you. They won't let any of us. They want all the best projects for themselves."
"We could steal the suns."
"They'd notice."
"Not if we were sneaky."
"Very sneaky."
"One sun at a time."
We consider the possibilities. Far above a cloud shaped like Heat-Traces' head scuds past, bullet-smooth front with a trail of three wispy prongs.
This is our favorite place: the outer manufactory rings, where life is formed and maintained and stored, ready for use by the cities. Strips of grassland stretch below, inhabited by wandering food-animals, scattered trees, caretakers. We rest upon a ledge halfway up the curving golden walls. No mean feat-- adults can manipulate tools at a distance, shrug off stellar-scale explosions, and defy gravity, but we, young, armor not yet activated, had to climb.
Distant bugling, sharp and shrill. Another herd called to the Path of Sustenance. Echoes of its programmed movement filter through the sunstrips, orange ribbons of flickering dust.
Squeaky rubs absently at a streak of blue spattered across his flank. “Maybe if we moved them in pieces...”
Blue shrugs, namesake coating glistening like a tailored sea. “Then we'd have to put them back together, and that would take too long.”
“What if there aren't any suns?” I muse.
Squeaky shifts. His tail drapes over the ledge. “No suns?”
“That's stupid,” scoffs Blue, unwinding an arm into its constituent tendrils and snapping two insects out of the air, one after the other. “Of course there will be suns. Every inhabitable universe has suns.”
“We wouldn't be going to the new one if it didn't,” adds Squeaky.
I watch heat traces wisp from my half-open chest panels, the ridges of internal cooling vanes-- residue of a battery fueled by the same processes that enable said possible suns. “I was just thinking.”
If no suns, perhaps no Silence Hunters? There are, so they say, representatives of our species in every universe, created at its creation to direct its development... but what if this isn't true? What if, in the new place, there aren't any?
What if we're on our way to a place without meaning?
“There will be suns,” repeats Blue. He grinds his jaws. “There must be.”
Squeaky stares up at the clouds and their gossamer shepherds. “If the new place makes sense.”

They said we of the Second Cycle weren't prescient.

Day Four

"More than five, right?"
Swift-Runs says nothing. Heat-Traces glances at my third and final guardian, hard-edged Broad-Leaves-Twisting-Towards-the-Twilight.

"Right?" I repeat, pressing on despite a vague sense of unease coiling within my chest. Mine or theirs, it is difficult to distinguish— the early Link cannot share speech or images, but can channel emotion, and to wound another is to wound oneself. A subtle mechanism of control.

My guardians exchange words beyond my hearing; I wish sourly for the day when my siblings and I will be able to do the same.

"Stumpy," says Broad-Leaves, finally, slowing his pace to walk beside me, "I know it is difficult, but understand this: there were indeed more than five. Just as we were once legion, so were our methods of escape. I expect that our flotilla is not the only one."

"So there are more, then."

His footsteps scrape against the deck. Shh-clik. Shh-clik.

"I cannot say."

"But—"

"I ask again: understand. Others likely exist, but we have no way of knowing. Not for certain. Events... aren't as predictable as they once were." He attempts a smile, mandibles swung half-open. "It's like being young again."

The smile fools no one; that subtle sense of despair persists, as it has forever. Background static. Just like the engines, or the atmosphere processors. Another product and consequence of life.

"I thought the Array knew everything?"

"So it did. Once we arrive in the new place, it will again."

"The Third Cycle."

"Yes."

"When?”

He glances at me quizzically, and I rephrase the question using words reserved for the completion of projects. "When will the Second Cycle be finished?"

At this his arms twist into segmented knots. The feeling of emptiness intensifies to near-physical pain, and I, chastened, abandon the subject. Later I will learn that this is another mystery: no one knows when, or where, or whether we'll survive the transition at all. Later I will learn that the Second Cycle is to last over twenty years. But that is later.

Once we reach the Path of Sustenance I snatch the nearest morsel from the nearest rack and bolt it down before it can struggle.

“Stumpy,” admonishes Heat-Traces as he selects a more discriminating meal and pops off a leg, “What have we told you about savoring your food?”

My siblings, thinking themselves unobserved-- or at least under less surveillance than usual-- scoop up handfuls of candy to tuck away for later. One of the glittering tidbits tumbles to the floor, squeaking. Liberated, it scampers in first one direction, then another, then pauses, antennae aflutter. Swift-Runs steps on it before it can escape. The shell implodes with a tiny crunch; in moments the deck will recognize it as refuse and it will be gone.

They tried their best, I suppose. Heat-Traces, Swift-Runs, Broad-Leaves. Guardianship is voluntary work: if they hadn't been willing to suffer the squalling of slow-witted infants they wouldn't have presented themselves as available. The Array called, in time of crisis, and they answered-- a dedication to duty that astounds me even now. Decades of tiresome correction lay ahead and yet they did not falter, did not hesitate, did not consider the potential cost. A brief enough span, but to them it must have seemed another eternity.

Perhaps they didn't know.

Thank you, Heat-Traces. Thank you, Swift-Runs. Thank you, Broad-Leaves. You raised us as well as you knew, my guardians, as well as anyone of your generation. You were the responsible adults, strong and patient and wise, and for this I hold no grudge. Had I been constructed in Harmony times, perhaps we would have been closer. Perhaps you would have taught me better. Perhaps I would not have done what I did.

But I was a child of my generation, and you were not friends.

That privilege was reserved for my siblings.

Day Three

I once asked how many vaults there were.  How many massive circular vessels, cradling cities like gems, were hurtling through the void and chaos of transit to an uncertain destination.  How many of my kind had survived.
I asked: I ask.
We walk, six of us, three elders and three children, on our way to eat.  Slow footfalls click crisp on covered decks, marbled surfaces of compressed stone.  Ribbed ceilings arc overhead, gossamer bands of silver and deep mahogany rising like arrested streams; high art, hand-made, gleaming regal as ghost-circuitry and ontodynamic engines silibate behind.
How many?
The question lingers, just long enough to consider.  A function of the hall's design.
Guardian Swift-Runs-the-Receding-Sun rolls one eye back to regard me.  "Five," he says.
"No," I persist, "how many are there?  In sum?"
"Five."
Heat-Traces glances over his thorax ridge.  "Recite."
"Bright Sun, Toothed Chisel, Deep Carillon, Caressed Breath-of-the-Devourer, and Chromium Memory."  The knowledge is automatic, no thought required.  I blink up at him.  "But what about the others?  How many are there?"
"No one knows," replies Swift-Runs, softly.

Day Two

World-carvers, we were, grandest of architects, spinners of galaxies and snuffers of stars.  I— along with my two siblings, along with all of my generation— would carry on the tradition, succeed where our precursors had failed.  I was small and awkward and wrong-headed and slow, but one day— one, distant, cryptic day— I, Stumpy, would scratch rivers with my claws.
After choosing a name befitting my lofty work, of course.  Something suitably poetic.  Something evocative of vast wonders and unvarnished success.
Rushing-Rivers-Cascade-Through-Sparkling-Lovely-Canyons-of-Deep-Devising-With-Shiny-Rocks-On-The-Bottom.
Yes.
Such dreams.  Such ambition.
Crippled by a single problem.
I lie: there were many problems. But only one of which I was aware at such a puerile age, adult accouterments not yet activated, unable to remember what had not yet began.
I had never set foot on a planetary surface.  Never seen a world.  Never seen a star. 

Day One

CHAPTER ONE

Imagine a choir.  Two hundred constituents, perhaps.  All masters.  Their voices ring clear as space, rich as forest leaves, deep as oceans, warm as molten cores.  Every individual is unique, distinct, yet inseperable from the whole.  A river.  A beam of light.  A beach of sand.
A tapestry.
Its threads surround and bind and draw inwards: requiem wrapped around the wrists, toccatta shrouding waist and chest, hymnal harmonies trussed tight and tied, bass twined through battery and intestine and melody seeping, measure by measure, sotto voce, into the mind.  Each chord a caress.  Each pause a laceration.
So they sing.  Such beauty!  Such harmony!  Such crushing inspiration!
Now: select one.  That magnificent specimen on the far left, perhaps, clad in whorled silver and plumes of blue.  His mandibles are wide and his eyes are closed.  His expression rivals the flattest of salt plains in serenity.  Like the others, he sings perfectly in time and in tune.
Shoot him.

CRACK

Now, listen to the choir again.  Evaluate.  Jot down a few notes.
When ready, select another target, and repeat.

That is how a universe sounds when it dies.  So they say. 
I wouldn't know. I wasn't there.
But that is what they say.

My first memory: a wall, rough and pitted, marked by tiny rectangular niches.  Most are empty, but one, far above my head, holds a ceramic bowl with jagged flowers painted around its rim.  If I rear upwards, first and second set of legs braced against the wall, foremost arms straining... I can just touch it.  The merest of brushes with the tips of a tripartite pincer.  No further.
I want that bowl.  I can't say why, or for what purpose, but I want it.
I stretch, tail thrashing.  The bowl remains stubbornly out of reach. 
I thwack the wall.  The wall does nothing.  One of the niches puffs dust.  The bowl— its glossy sides, its mocking red-stenciled petals— trembles, slight motion large as worlds in my sight.
I understand.  The solution is only a matter of degree.
Headshield meets wall and wall declines the offer of engagement. 
A rustle, a faint whistling of air. 
A crash. 
Liquid courses across my plates.  Water— it was full of water, and now there's nothing to be full.
I sputter.  I drop back to all sixes.  Rivulets bite icy canyons from the back of my neck, droplets spatter from writhing afflicted arms.  It seeps into my eyes.  My mouth.  Drips from my jaws and pools, dust-congealed, amid jagged flowers converted to jagged pieces.
Footsteps—
The bowl lies shattered; I crouch before it, and scrabble at the shards. 
"Stumpy," says the ages.
I hold up a flower, split in uneven fours— a pair of petals here, the tip of a stem here, the spiraled center nearly intact between these three corners.  The edges are chipped.  Everything is wet.
"It's prettier this way," I declare.
Guardian Heat-Traces-Waver-in-Whispered-Torrents blinks.  He tilts his head.  He raises a armored foreleg and taps the fourth piece with a finger.  "Check your reconstruction, child.  It doesn't match."
The indicated segment is from a different part of the bowl; I rotate it thirty-six degrees to the left so it fits better.
"There."
He sighs, carved plates clattering, and as he kneels to correct me the golden strips bolted to match the curves of his headshield flash like the bent and broken ribs of a captured sun.  I have never seen a sun, but I know they are bright and good source of fuel.
"If you don't match the pieces," he says, voice low and patient and despondent, "it won't be watertight."
I select another fragment; it doesn't quite fit either.  "I'll use extra glue."
"Glue leaks."
"Then I won't fill the bowl with water once I've fixed it."
He intercepts a droplet rolling down my face.  "No," he agrees, claws glistening damp, "You won't."

PRELUDE

According to you, the world was birthed in fire or formed from the bone-shelled back of a great beast or brought into existence by an eternal being who ordered the elements divided and wrought mountains and seas. According to you, the stars were set in their places by tweezer-wielding spirits or spun into being by the crushing closed fist of the cosmos or scattered, beacons burning with the sacrificial eyes of ancestors, to safeguard the stillness of the night. According to you, at some point in the distant past there was a creation. What happened next is a matter of some dispute.
My kind don't believe in beginnings.
Our version of events follows thus: We were. We are. We will be. If there has ever been or ever will be a time or a place or a non-time or a non-place when and where we could or should or might exist, it is so.
We lit your oven. We ate your celestial animal. We placed mountains chain by chain and we poured the seas. Your tweezers: our forge. Your fist is our fist, your eyes are our eyes, and if there ever was a beginning we played no part in it, for we have always been.
You know us as the seventeenth species discovered under the jurisdiction of System Administration Inviolate. Species SAI-17. Blackscales.
This is not what we call ourselves.
Our names are Infinite, Countless, Ring-Shapers and Star-Symphony. We are Silence-Hunters: the knife which cuts and shapes the raw noise of the universe. We refine it, we bind it, we pursue it and kill it and devour it to make it our own. Until we become it. Until we are that which gives all else meaning.
I forget, of course, my own hypocrisy.
My apologies.
Silence-Hunter once, Second Cycle once, Bright Sun once- at one time in the long ago and far away I called myself Silent-Sands-Drift-Against-the-Wall and my guardians called me Stumpy.
Now I am SAI-17.
You know me, don't you?

No?

Are you certain? They say my countenance is difficult to forget. "A monstrous cross of machine and flesh, shell and scale, a giant of ribbed skeletal chest, wreathed in self-made steam and slow-swinging tail."
A lizard. An insect. A furnace.
Voice like an organ, tread like thunder.
A creature of sixes: six jointed legs, six coiled arms, heavier than six of your kind put together. Fingers three, pincers three, jaws three, crests three... and three times four equals twelve, while twelve divided by two turreted eyes equals six.
Certain philosophers among you hold that six is a perfect number.

No?

I believe congratulations are in order.
Royal Victory, Gracious Kia, Ninth House Rank Twelve, former Fleetpart Commander, former Empress-Holder of the Imperial Shield: I congratulate you. A century of non-existence has done its work, and done it well. Even as you walled away my people you walled away my person, denying the truth while surrounding it with enough firepower to obliterate this ceiling, these walls, this stone beneath my feet and the continent from which I carved it.
I know how many vessels you set in the heavens: I counted, in my spare time. I stood beside my doorway and raised myself from sixes to fours and curled my arms close to my chest and tilted my head upwards, and I watched, and listened, and felt. Miniature false stars, secret fantasies radioed in riddles.
I broke your codes, Victory.
Twenty-two Sailfleet plates, Victory?
Victory: what were you afraid I might do?
My kind planned to annihilate yours, disassemble your planets, erase your memory, lock the universe of your singular birth into a perfect unending well-tended garden with themselves as gardeners. Not because they hated you, but because eternity would be prettier without you. Because, in the end, they knew of nothing else to do.
You encircled them with a force of forty thousand. I applaud your prudence.
However.
I still believe that twenty-two to guard a single individual is excessive.
I can say this because you are dead.

Because you are dead, I can say many things.

Among my own kind a story commences with the end of a thought: a fragment, each and every syllable chosen according to a rigorous test of taste laid during the First Cycle. This is appropriate, as the First Cycle has no beginning— only a middle, and an end. No one likes to admit that it ended, although everyone admits that the implosion of one's home universe is difficult to ignore.
Here is a sample: ...shivers thrilling-silence, wasted lace of presence(lost)
The greater part, naturally, is lost in translation, for your language does not support time-chords and does not account for prescience and expresses bent infinity with great difficulty and little tact. It is primitive. It is imprecise.
But this is the Silence Hunter speaking. This is the Array. This is the collective wisdom and untarnished experience of an indeterminate number of years spent listening to galaxies collide.

I, alone, am SAI-17.

You believe in beginnings, and so I shall begin at the beginning, for like you I was built.
Born.
It makes little difference.