The Lone One then departed that star system and went about other business, content to wait on events for a matter of some five or ten Tauwff lifetimes. As the palate-sharpener before a great feast, well the Lone One likes the fear that may arise when It threatens a species’ viability and then withdraws, leaving them to live their days in doubt and unrest, always unwilling to enjoy any good thing for fear of the blow that promises to fall and bring it all to nothing.
And when It reckoned that enough time had gone by so that the edge was beginning to come off the fear, and the tales of that long-ago Choice were beginning to be ended with “but all went well regardless—”, then It knew Its moment had come. The Lone Power came back to Wimst’s system, and saw how some time in the last millennium or so one of the small dislodged bodies from out in the distant rubble-cloud had made its way inward through the system, and had slipped into unstable orbit around Wimst. Again and again the little oblong rock had dipped close to that world and swung out again, its orbit growing more perturbed each time. And at last, while the Lone One watched in much-anticipated enjoyment, that small rogue body arced in one last time, falling, and struck Wimst a deadly blow.
Swiftly Wimst’s air went dark with upthrown dust, and the crust of the planet writhed and cracked in torment and emitted lava and deadly fumes. Wimst rides near its sun, and swiftly implacable heat grew and grew under the newly darkened skies. Wimst’s poisoned seas began to steam themselves away into the new dark canopy, and the fouled air choked nearly everything that breathed, and most life on that world was extinguished. Soon all that was left was the Tauwff, and not many of them. And so shattered was their ecosystem that little or nothing was left for the few survivors to eat except each other.
“How like you your prophecy now?” said the Lone One. And It went away laughing, relishing the opportunity to step back into local time once more in a few millennia to see how many of the Tauwff were left, and in what state.
Yet broken and befouled and hurt nigh to death their world might be, the nature of the surviving Tauwff—perhaps five percent of the original population—remained as it was, unchanged. As years went by in their thousands and the atmosphere slowly cleared, as their now-barren planet was once more exposed to their homestar’s blazing light, the remaining Tauwff were quite clear as to who had struck this blow at them, and why.
Then as now, the Tauwff were a hardy people and a stubborn one, intent on staying alive even in the bleak almost-lifeless waste their world had become. Great was their anguish at their awful fate; yet they would not simply accept it, knowing that surrendering to the Lone One’s malice would simply make it stronger elsewhere, and fill other worlds with more fear.
So many of the Tauwff who survived bound themselves and their hatchlings by a mighty oath. They swore that those who were best able should surrender their lives and their bodies as food for those who were younger and might be able to keep their species alive; and those who so surrendered would do it willingly. "It seeks to turn us against one another," said the Eldest of the Tauwff, "that we may all die or struggle for life in hate and fear, preying on each other like beasts. But we will not suffer the Lone One to garner such enjoyment from our fate. If we must die, we will die doing each other all the good we may. We do this in Its despite; for by our action, something better will come of this. Though this fate seemed bleak to us, we are the Powers’ people, not the Lone One’s. Our choice stands.”
And so it went on Wimst. That place which had been glad and full of life was now arid and bare and full of pain. The species that had been billions strong dwindled to a mere few hundreds of thousands over time, scattered far and wide across their planet in far-flung clusters, finally achieving a population that stayed stable at the barest subsistence level only by virtue of many of its people agreeing willingly to become one another's food—so that every life was potentially a sacrament.
And so matters went for many thousands of their lifetimes. The Lone One, true to Its intent, came back and saw what pleased it greatly; a beautiful world reduced to near lifelessness and a mighty species reduced to the most marginal of existences, barely clinging to life and at all times seeming just a claw’s breadth from extinction. And seeing Wimst’s great cultures wiped out—that garden of a world ruined and blasted and premature death now made a commonplace in nearly every life, only mitigated (if lucky) by another's sacrifice—the Lone Power was deeply satisfied that the ancient prophecy had been brought so neatly to naught. And was it not the Tauwff’s own fault? For they had brought this fate upon themselves by refusing the gifts of Death and Empire It had offered them. If they were so unwilling to live lives of comfort and plenty, then that was on them, not It.
Seeing that all had gone as It willed, if not better, the Lone One went away well pleased and turned Its attention elsewhere.
And for many, many centuries, so life went on Wimst.
…Until something changed. For all inadvertently the Lone Power had revealed to the Tauwff the mechanism by which their species would be restored someday, and all Its ill works be undone; so that the Wimst would become greater than any mere Empire would ever make them.
But that is a different story.
***
There was darkness, and for a long time that was all right.
Then she knew it was darkness, and for a good while that was all right too.
Then there was something else: faint, hard to make out for a long time, but slowly it became plainer. That was light; faint, diffuse, but definitely there. At first, by contrast with what had gone before, the light seemed peculiar; she was initially a little afraid of it. But as time went by, it seemed less strange, and finally the light became all right as well.
There was nothing to do, as yet, and nowhere to go—not that the concepts of “doing” and “going” would have meant anything to her at that point—so she just hung there in the faintly glowy nothing, waiting.
After a while she could feel something else happening where she hung. It was a sort of thumping sensation all along her skin, and not just there, but inside her too. Curious about what it might be, she tried moving around a little—having recently discovered that she could do that—and realized that the feeling and the vibration of it around her sped up slightly when she did. All right, she thought after a few more experiments of this kind, that’s something of mine, then! It made her feel strangely excited and cheerful to find that she could change something. She started doing that again whenever she remembered to.
Things went on this way for a while, and then something happened that surprised her more than anything that had occurred so far, even the discovery that the light was brighter sometimes than others. Without warning in one of the slightly-more-shadowy times, she started to feel another bumping on her skin… and it wasn’t hers.
A feeling rushed all over her: excitement! If I do that, she thought, and that’s not me, then there’s… another somebody!
She trembled all over with amazement, and her own bumping started to speed up because of it. And then the other one sped up too! She hardly knew what to do or think in the face of something so astonishing except to be there with it, enjoy it, be glad. You’re not all by yourself, she thought, as if to whoever else was bumping: I’m here too. We’re together!
That was the beginning of a happy time. Sometimes the bumping sound or feeling was fainter, sometimes it was stronger, but when she would drowse a little in the warm faint light, it was always there again when she would wake up. Another feeling began to become familiar to her: affection. She liked that sound, liked whoever was making it, hoped it could always be this way between them; that sense of reliable presence, so welcome, so different from before when it was just her. The warmth had been pleasant and her own sounds reassuring to listen to, but nothing like as enjoyable as the other’s.
The warmth grew stronger and the light swelled and faded, swelled and faded, and she hung there waiting in company with the other who waited too. Slowly it became plain to her that s
omething was going to happen to her, and to them. She hoped it was going to be something good. But what most excited her was the hope that that she was going to find out who or what that other presence was… and maybe even who or what she was. And if there could be something that was different from her, more than her, then, possibly, there could also be something that was different from here… more than here! All she could do was wait. But I’m already good at that, she thought, relaxing into the warmth, watching the light slowly grow out of the darkness again. And so are you. Later on maybe we’ll be good at it together!
There was another realization she had arrived at lately which had been less pleasant than the earlier recognition of warmth and light and company. It had to do with an odd feeling of compression, of tightness. True, as that sensation had increased, so had the sound of the other’s presence, that steady reliable thumping. But all the same the slowly increasing pressure was growing ever more irksome. She wanted to do something about it but didn’t know what.
There came a point where she caught herself starting to move in response to the pressure, twisting and pushing, though she wasn’t even sure what she was pushing against. There just seemed to be less room in the world, and what had been perfect comfort was less so with every brightening and darkening of the light.
Something else went wrong then, too. That steady reliable thumping so like her own… without warning, it went missing. One moment she was engrossed (to her great annoyance) in that pushing behavior she couldn’t seem to stop, always feeling lately that she needed to find more room, more ease. Then the next moment she stopped, realizing how peculiarly quiet everything had become. All was bright around her, and indeed unusually warm, but the only thumping she could hear now was her own.
When did that happen? she thought, feeling suddenly lost. How did I not notice before? How did I not notice right away? I don’t like this!
She concentrated on holding still and listening harder. What if I just wasn’t paying attention? It might come back. Let me listen! But she was finding it hard to hold still. That urge to push and twist against the growing pressure kept getting in the way. And she could hear nothing of that friendly bumping, pulsing rhythm, even at her most still.
Her frustration grew, as did something else: a strange feeling, one she’d never felt before. She was sad.
How long that sadness lasted, she couldn’t tell; it seemed like forever. Her sense of time was still very new, and resolving the finer shades between “always” and “not always” was still a challenge. But certainly that other bumping had been there for a long time, compared to the time she’d been aware of herself. That it should be gone now, without warning, without any way to tell if it would ever come back, was a blow.
There she hung in her sorrow through many darkenings and lightenings of the light, whatever those meant. She found it hard to care. But at the time when the sadness seemed strongest to her, another unusual thing happened.
She began to experience another feeling. It was nothing like the earlier ones. It seemed, like the thumping that had gone missing, to come from outside her. But it was far more direct, more specific; as if something else, something that had thoughts like hers, was speaking to her using those thoughts. It said: Now. Now is the time. This is the where and the when that has always been meant for you: this is your place. Arise and do what you came to do.
And she had no idea what that meant.
She considered for a while, there in the growing light and warmth in which she hung, but for the time being at least the words made little sense. After all, she thought, arise how, exactly?
There in the depths of her pondering she was distracted once again by that recurring feeling of pressure, of tightness. All of a sudden it felt much worse than it had before. Furious at having her thoughts interrupted by the growing discomfort, she squirmed against it, kicking—
And something gave. The shock of it went straight through her, disorienting, jarring her out of the feelings that had soaked so deep into the fabric of her mind. She lashed out again, pushing, arching herself, and felt whatever it was push outwards where she struck it.
That was when the light broke past her, indeed almost through her, such was its strength. Against the blinding force of it she found herself screwing closed eyes that a moment before she hadn’t known she had. Something was falling away from around her in half-soft fragments that hardened and went fragile under her touch, shattering as her weight came down on them.
For a few moments all she could do was try to hold her own against the onslaught of input from senses that had never yet been matched to their proper stimuli. Her just-freed limbs staggered and bowed under gravity for the first time; her ears roared with the sound and even the feel of wind. She stared up into the harsh cloudless blue-green sky, briefly blinded by the color of it, while the knowledge came rushing into her brain.
Now she knew and understood that she was in the world. Now she knew and understood that she was just hatched, and that she was a Tauwff, and that there were many, many more like her.
But right now she cared not a whit for all of them. Two things were possessing her. One was something she had never felt before now: hunger. She was desperately hungry.
The other was a question that desperately needed an answer. There was no one here to give her any answers, though, for she was all alone: the last one left.
She glanced at the shards of shell scattered all around her in the rocky depression where the rest of the now-shattered eggs had lain, and then gazed, turning slowly, at the clawed footprints leading away from them in eleven different directions through the wind-drifted sand. It wasn’t hard to understand what had happened to her brethren and sistern when they hatched. All had fled in every direction except toward the others, to save themselves from possibly being eaten before they’d drawn so much as a day’s worth of breath.
She looked back to the deserted clutching-place, half buried in gravel and more sand. Next to the shell from which she had come lay another one, also empty: but its pieces were much paler, broken a good while ago… and not from the inside. The shell was partially crushed, and from the marks and gouges left on what was left of the delicate inner membrane, its insides had been picked out and eaten. Without any way yet of knowing how the knowledge came to her, she knew that the other one who had been with her in the dark, the one whose hearts she had heard beating in time with hers, had been in that shell.
Gone now, she thought, feeling that huge sorrow rise in her again. Gone.
But I will not forget them!
The sun—that was what it was called, she realized, the source of the light she had perceived even in the shell—beat down on her, hot and merciless, even slantwise as its light was coming so late in the day. The wind slid hot around her, and her eyes veiled themselves in an extra lid against the sting of the sand the wind carried.
She lashed her tail. Other feelings she had experienced before now—gladness, sorrow, loneliness. But now one arrived that was new. Anger. Because seriously, what kind of world treated you this way when you’d barely just been born?
She stared around her at the planet, and the universe at large, which had proven itself so immediately at fault. She was furious. But she had a plan.
“I am going to put right what is wrong with you,” she cried, and whether the world or the wind were actually listening, she wasn’t sure she cared. “Because plainly there’s a lot that’s wrong. So you’d better look out!”
***
Names take longer to arrive than the basic knowledge that manifests itself in a newly unclutched Tauwff on its hatching day. The exact mechanism by which that knowledge appears was for a great many centuries uncertain, but understanding it was one of the motivations that drove the Tauwff to an understanding of the biochemistry of heredity nearly unmatched among species who turned their minds to such studies without first evolving highly technical cultures.
Over the many millennia after the disaster that turned their garden of a
world into a desert, the Tauwff’s desperate attempts to survive resulted in their already exceptionally adaptive physiologies gradually evolving their bodies into biochemical and analytical laboratories of astonishing flexibility and inventiveness. Even before the disaster, Tauwff bodies were already unique in their ability to store experience at the cellular level, in carbon-based compounds of exquisite and unprecedented complexity that interleaved in real time with the unique transmitter neurochemistry of the Tauwff brain. But the long desperation of the Doom drove the Tauwff, in their endless struggle to survive, into efforts and accidents of development that no one—plainly not even the Lone Power—could ever have predicted.
Much later research established that the pentahelically-compacted compounds holographically stored across the cellular structure of a Tauwff’s body tissue were no longer merely archiving a given being’s physical heredity. As the millennia of the Doom crept by, they had slowly begun to act, after the donor’s death, like fossilized memory storage—backups of the original “hard data” on which the living being had acted, and from the evaluation of which it made its choices.
The practical implications of this situation, in an ecosystem where all life was under threat, swiftly became obvious. Tauwff who were better at survival stored that tendency in the fabric of their bodies—and those who ingested that tissue in turn became better at surviving. This being the case, it was only a matter of time before some Tauwff, better than others at exploiting their inner abilities for biochemical analysis, became able to sort for more effective food donors in the terrible ages during which (in line with the Doom laid upon them by the Lone One) there was little for them to eat besides one another.
Phenotype, genotype, somatype, overhide and underhide color, length and number of legs—all these markers in turn became signals that the bearer possessed greater or lesser aptitude for various traits that were of survival value, worth incorporating into oneself and passing to one’s offspring. Some sets of traits were accordingly hunted nearly to extinction in the early millennia of the Doom, and it was many centuries before (reconcentrated or reintegrated by the chance eating habits of later generations) some of them cropped out again.