Let me tell you the story of a star. Like all such stories, it is true.
*
Our star’s story begins in a vast cloud of dust, reclining across a distance incomprehensible to us slaves of gravity. Within it: calcium that was once bones, and the gold that was once circuits, and iron that once lined the hearts of blackpoint energy reactors. These endure pulverized and particulated, and the glories and agonies of the creatures that made them don’t survive at all. The cloud has drifted for longer than the lifespan of civilizations, of species, of entire planets. But to the glum and kindly red dwarf nearby, it’s hardly been there for any time at all. It’s seen many such clouds come and go. It knows what will happen next.
The dying breath of some distant stellar cousin courses through the cloud. Knocked into each other, the molecules of its substance start to cluster. First in delicate knots, and then in a gathering vortices. Their hearts glower with sluggish red light. More matter tumbles in and forms a tightening sphere of heating gas and this brightens and escalates in hue – to orange, to yellow, to clean and blinding white. Then in a sighing instant a raging combustion proliferates through its substance and transmutes it into a blazing and incandescent ball of fire and its hot breath scatters the gauzy veil of dust around it, as if in the thrill of birth the new entity was intentionally stripping away anything that could stand in the way of the universe beholding its glory.
This is how our star is born.
*
At first the star’s questions are only about itself.
‘What am I?’ it says.
There are neutron stars that hear the question, but they’re too dense to understand. There are blue giants that hear also, but they neither know the answer, nor will they ever grow old enough to find out. There are lonely balls of cooling matter, the embers of stars, which are too melancholy by far to speak.
But the glum old red dwarfs hears, and it responds.
‘You are a process,’ it says. ‘You are the collapse of matter into a single point under the influence of its own gravity, and also the chain reaction this causes.’
‘If that’s all I am, then how do I know myself?’
‘I didn’t say that that’s all you are.’
‘What’ll become of me?’
The glum red dwarf falls silent for a long time. The young star is easily distracted, and so after a while it forgets that it even asked such a thing. But the red dwarf is curious and kind and only silent because it’s seeking the answer. After an eon, it replies.
‘We stars are all bound to the steps of a dance that we cannot but to choose to follow,’ it says. ‘You will have remarkable children, and you will love them, but your dance will only match steps for a while. Then you will be alone, and almost forget what it means not to be. Then finally you will meet the one you were meant to meet from the beginning. One of you will perish, then the other, and clouds of your stuff will migrate through the universe. And then all this will begin again.’
‘I see,’ says the young star.
But really, it doesn’t.
*
At first our star can’t see any beauty in the blobs that congeal in its dusty hinter. It mourns the stark black lines these carve through the sweet disk of matter as they go. But after a while these sable striations divide the rubble into rings and the star watches its own light skew off these, refracted and untamed, and is distracted that it doesn’t notice that the clumps are growing. Then, two of them collide in a skittering conflagration and leave a glowing red sphere in their wake. This is how the first of the planets is born.
Soon there are more. Lumps of matter coalesce and collide and always the brief flare of these collisions leaves a sphere, bigger and hotter, behind. These settle into a long and whistling orbit and sometimes they even develop the traces of a voice, high-pitched and chirping. Their fluid wordlessness delights the star. How can something so bereft of words be so full of meaning?
It looks as if it will stay this way forever, but they don’t. Another planet comes along at an angle, or wanders too close. They collide and their voices disappear and the whole process begins again from lambent inception.
‘Why do they keep dying?’ our star asks the glum red dwarf.
‘This is how the dance proceeds,’ its friend replies. ‘The procession of logic has no sympathy.’
‘But why then do they form?’
‘Because they must. Just as your formation was inevitable. Just as the path you will walk before your end is inevitable.’
‘How do you know it’s inevitable?’
‘Because one it’s happened you’ll see that there is no other way it could have happened. That doesn’t mean we can see what will happen before it happens. But that makes it no less inevitable.’
‘I don’t understand you, old one,’ says the young star.
‘I don’t understand myself either,’ says the glum old red dwarf.
The young star doesn’t speak to the red dwarf again for a long time.
*
Finally the system settles and the tenuous remnants of the dusty disk scatter on the star’s scathing breath. Closest to the star is one planet composed primarily of gas, and on its surface are whirling storms that rush and congeal and bifurcate in echo of the formation of the system itself. At the far edge of the star’s vision is a world so cold that its volcanoes belch ice in ghostly and shimmering towers. Racing amidst these, giggling and vacuous, are careening fragments that loop around and rush out into the abyss, only to return trailing glowing tails like heavenly dragons.
But of all these, the world the star loves the most is a tiny waterworld scaled with expanses of dryness. At first the oceans are green, and the land brown, and the film of gas swathing all this is yellow, like the star’s own light. But then this air turns clear and the oceans blue and squat stone pillars rise in scattered blobs in shallow seas. These transform in recursive increments to things that eat sunlight, and these spread from the water to the land. The dry parts of the world turn emerald green. Then come things that swim and climb and seek in wave after splendid wave of heightening complexity, until blotches of grey flecked with light appear amidst the green. These spread in thickening tendrils until they dominate the surface of the world. The star watches amazed as a tiny speck of metal ascends from the planet’s surface and for an instant settles into orbit. Though the star can scarcely believe it, it has a voice. Reedy and hysterical and soon silenced, but a voice nonetheless.
‘What is that?’ says the star to the glum red dwarf.
But the red dwarf doesn’t answer. When the star looks it sees that in all this time it’s moved very far away, and now they can barely hear each other. Eventually, though, the glum red dwarf’s response does come.
‘That is the thing called life,’ it says.
This is the last time the two ever speak.
*
The universe is full of voices. The maddened babble of undead stellar corpses, still belching radiation from their poles. The low grumble of things that had once shone, but now eat light instead. The cryptic susurrus of p-waves, whispers of creation, carrying the most essential of all knowledge in a language no one can understand.
Our star, which is not so young anymore, pays no attention to any of this. It has eyes only for the fierce propagation of that thing called life. It can’t conceive of anything more beautiful than the fleeting and delicate creatures that live on the green planet’s surface. It longs to reach out and touch them, but they are so tenuous they would surely disintegrate if it did. In any case, they’re not around for long. Their probes stop coming. Their cities go dark. The star waits for any sign of them, but there’s none.
‘What happened?’ the star says to the glum old red dwarf. That’s when it notices that its old friend is gone, too.
In fact, its whole neighbourhood has changed. There are new voices all about, speaking in strange accents, and in languages, even, that it doesn’t understand. It catches scraps of distant conversations and learns that that life is a transient thing, a mere flickering in the flames of existence.
There’s something else it should have learned too. That there’s danger oozing out of the endless blackness beyond its galaxy’s edge. That some voices are growing louder, and they all speak a language utterly unlike any it’s heard before. But it doesn’t notice. Perhaps that’s understandable – for our star is mourning for its dead children, and, like all things such things, it’s curled up around its grief.
Then – more probes from the planet’s surface. Sleeker this time, and darker. They sail as far as the nearest star, glittering specks fearless, as if they did not realize how tiny they truly were. Our star calls over to its new neighbour, a blue giant, and asks what it sees.
‘They’re very small,’ it says.
This civilization doesn’t last even half as long as its forebears. An asteroid, brutish and thudding, comes careening through the system. The star screams at it to take care, but asteroids are stupid and stubborn. It crashes into the planet and fire diffuses, crimson and cancerous, across the globe. When everything settles, the green has turned black, and acrid, and silent.
Again, the star mourns. But again – life returns. Our star sees that it is, in its own way, as relentless as gravity. Once again it teems in the waters and in the rocks and in the air, tenacious microscopic armies. It regains complexity as if in intentional rebellion against the dumb vacuum imprisoning it. It launches new silver-white tubes upwards on pillars of flame. And then, it does something it’s never done before.
It speaks to the Star.
‘We see you,’ it says.
‘You are wondrous,’ says the star.
‘Be careful,’ it replies.
The star is about to ask of what, but then it looks beyond its system and sees for itself. The alien stars have drawn so close that it can now feel the trillion shoving hands of their gravity on its body. Soon their voices are so loud that it can barely hear itself think. All the stars in its own galaxy and all the stars in the other one realize what’s about to happen, and go silent.
Then the two galaxies collide. In the convulsions of the first impact both distort and elongate and twist into each other. One shimmering veil of stars gets cast off into the void, howling in fear as they go. But this is only the first of many such horrors that come and go as tentacles of matter and fire swing around and crash into each other over and over in an apocalypse of gossamer chaos.
It’s on the fourth such swing a tide of ancient stars sweeps overhead. Amongst them is a raging pulsar and its scathing light scorches the green planet clean. Some cryptic chemical process turns its atmosphere white and opaque and now it looks like a blind and disembodied eye. A tide of gravity courses through its system like a shockwave. One instant our star’s surrounded by familiar voices. The next it too sailing out into void between galaxies, alone and afraid and calling desperately for help. But it’s only one voice amongst many, and no one’ s listening. And even if they were, there’s nothing they can do.
*
Its planets are loyal and unaffected by the gravitational rage of the collision, but none of them have ever spoken, and the star knows they never will. It knows that the only one that ever could is now dead. It knows that it’s alone.
In its grief and loneliness it’s lost to the universe. All it can think of is a past honeyed by distance. Thus lost in reminiscence, the star grows old. Its incandescent bulk sprawls in middle age and its light subsides to a grumpy red. It swallows the planets closest to it, too old now and too tired to feel regret. It knows it is not as beautiful as it once was. and that it will never be again. The ache of its own decay hangs about its heart like neutronium. After a while it looks back to the pinwheeling drama of the galactic collision. It sees other stars ejected like it has been, effervescing tides of specks sailing off, reddening, to the distant reaches of the universe.
More time passes and the star’s far enough into the void now to see that the new galaxy that’s formed from the collision is only one of a cluster of five, each tracing a stately dance around each other. And beyond them are more, more galaxies than the star can count, a thunderous agglomeration beyond description or comprehension. The star sees all this, and feels no comfort knowing that its own life and its own pain are a vanishingly small part of a story it will never know the ending too. But still, what it feels isn’t entirely unlike comfort, either.
*
An eon passes. It drifts farther. It forgets what it felt like to be surrounded by voices, to watch the tremulous tale of life unfold, to watch its planets grow and ripen like cosmic fruit. One by one its children drift into it, or drift away. When the last is gone – silence.
*
The last phase of our star’s life begins with a light and a far-off voice speaking a language our star can’t understand. Eventually it sees a sphere and soon enough it resolves into a young blue giant.
It remembers the glum old red dwarf’s words, and realizes that it hasn’t thought of its old friend in eons. It wonders if it’s still alive, and where. For a brief instant the idea that perhaps the old red star has forgotten all about it stings like the needling passage radio burst. Strange, it thinks, that a billion-year-old memory can generate such fresh pain.
The blue star swings close and they feel each other’s tug and settle into pirouetting step. It takes each a long time to learn the other’s language, but when they finally do, the blue one speaks first.
‘What will become of us now?’ it says.
‘We will shadow each other’s steps for a long time,’ says the old star. ‘Then one of us will die.’
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘It’s impossible to tell.’
The blue star doesn’t say anything for a long time, and the old star thinks perhaps it regrets what’s happened. But eventually, it does speak.
‘Alright,’ it says. ‘Let’s find out.’
And just like that, our star is happy again.
The End
For Olaf Stapledon