In cooler stars themselves, the solar corona seethed with creatures like manta rays, coasting—plasma life on a star. But their client planets were even stranger.

A dawn like a gray colloid. She felt it in her pod… chilly. The dwarf’s ruddy glow stirred the world’s air like a thick fluid, sending blue streamers through the clotted air, bringing soon enough sharp shafts to bear on black forests below. They already knew, from SETI messages and innumerable probes, both human and alien, some sad truths. Millions of worlds had brimmed with life, true—but like a puzzle with a sole dreary solution, the show ended soon. Ice or fire snuffed out life’s promise.

But on living worlds, there was a plenitude of wonders. There was even oxygen—the slow fuse to the explosion of animal life. On Earth around 635 megayears ago, enough oxygen had supported tiny sponges. After 580 million years more, strange creatures as thin as blue crêpes had lived on a lightly oxygenated seafloor. Fifty million years later, vertebrate ancestors glided through warm, oxygen-rich seawater, much as she had done as a girl. So dwarf stars with oxygen-rich children had billions of years of advantage over latecomer Earth.

They used their eons, she saw. Probes sent on photon beams from Earth had dropped into the atmospheres of these planets, in the records of that grand exploring age. These smart packages heard distant calls like screechy toots on a rusty trombone, gut-bucket growls, sighing cries—from creatures that looked as dull and gray as sluggish rutabagas. Then—goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Odd beings who burst into flame at mating season, apparently after passing on their genes—and leaving the stage in hasty crimson blisters.

Her heart jumped like a mullet, quick and hard—just as she recalled seeing the fish in the salty, warm Gulf air where she grew up. Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plain, she thought, as she played back the sounds of distant animals she would never see, beyond mere pixels.

Then the entire vibrant world was gone in a sharp instant.

7.

She staggered a bit, going away from the yawning mouth of the pod. Looking back, it seemed indeed like a giant grin that had swallowed her, and now spat her out, altered. The experience had turned her inside out, like a pocket no good for holding much anymore.

Somehow the sensorium had been fuller, more invasive this time.

Smell carried memory, conveyed history. She bore now an after-memory of the shimmering redlands she had seen, somehow transmorphed into smells, sounds, and textures in her recollected sum of all she had experienced. The pod made that transition across senses, embedding the dry past into the sensual present. The pod was an Artilect and so learned her, too, and each new world had held greater impact, from that. The pod made worlds for her, in fuller and fuller form.

She had seen shattered biospheres, those at one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. Those who could pour no more into the golden vessel of great song, sent across the eons and light-years. Their Messages might once have sung of alien Euclids who had looked on beauty bare, and so stitched it into Messages of filmy photons, sent oblivious into the great galaxy’s night….