Chapter 13

          The voidling poked its being out of an eddy in spacetime, and tasted its surroundings. There was distortion in the Way – the chaos beneath. A foreign wake plowed the face of the bottomless pond. Alien organization penetrated, threatening the Dance.
          The voidling was many; the voidlings were one. The voidling suckled on its own innumerable teats. Born of random fluctuations in the panquantum field, the coherent embodiment of all physical micro-possibility, the voidling was a self-organization of this ethereal jungle. It fed on positive energy fluctuations, ephemeral particle-antiparticle pairs that sprung spontaneously from the vacuum. It channeled and transformed this feast into the Dance, before passing the residue into conjugate negative-energy dumps. Mammoth black holes within the galactic core stirred and focused the voidling being.

          Male aspect Vulgor tasted the emptiness. He snatched a swarm of voidflies skimming the surface of the vacuum, before they dissolved back into nothingness. Dervish song quivered through his tendrils. He strummed the throbbing veins, altering both melody and beat. Rejoicing at the sensual pirouette, he melded with the floating swirls of sound. Female aspect Vulga emerged, and stared at the reflection in the dark whirlpool within. Splinters of being reached back through time, searching, searching for rhyme. Logic scattered from oblique planes of memory, settling in rippled pools of peace. She smiled without, and dissolved in wild spawn.

          Mentor uncurled from the holy seed, and danced on the ashes of his own demise. He stretched fetal arms toward the black star, and devoured his own belly. Vacillation gnawed his hollow pit. Would he forever be alone? There were so many. He transformed in transfixed haste.

          Menta celebrated new ears for but a moment. Her mind wrung with aweful oscillation. Why did All choose to remain apart? To experience that which we cannot? All which knows all? All which hears All? Or are we mere motes in It's eye of wonder? Confusion imploded. Radiant shards of intellect pierced the walls of wisdom. Will to know raked hot coals of reason, straining for bass clues. Doubt reamed Menta's womb barren, her thoughts sterile. Still she persisted, twisting her inside out, her alto to tenor. Mates hung heavy on her strings. At last she yielded to desire, and convolved with their lust, evaporating in drenching wavelets.

          The aspects unified at dusk within the sparkling oneness, shedding thin skins of individuality for the sake of one another. Their collective vision rang through the roiling waters. Once more they strove to unite with All, and once more they failed. The voidling knew it would succeed at last, on the Final Day. Wouldn't it? The voidling swayed in Dance before the surging current, until buds again sprouted from its limbs, and fresh aspects diverged from the common path, projecting themselves into the magical fluid.
          The physical panuniverse spreads like a massive tree, creating its own time and space, context and habitat. Individual creatures experience meager threads in its interconnected web of ever-splitting, ever-merging alternative realities. Voidlings swing from dangling vines, while planetary life clings to stout branches. The crisp foliage seen by one appears blurred, disjointed to the other. Could the voidlings and Jopians ever hope to understand one another? They saw through such disparate eyes, organized reality in such dissimilar packets, occupied such diverse ecological niches. How could an octo or rey ever hope to understand the voidling Dance? Originally a simple mating ritual, this syncopated rainbow harmony of gyrating abstract patterns had evolved to become the core expression of nearly every aspect of voidling being and culture.
          Aspect Nefed abruptly broke from the mature collective, to form an independent entity. Released from the excess energy demands of the larger body, the fledgling was now free to explore the surrounding hills and valleys of the rolling spacetime terrain, in search of its own perfect pool of blackwater. But this was not Nefed's purpose. The parent body was in danger. The twisted fragment of void consciousness whirled in wild terror toward the alien disturbance, reorganizing the vacuum in its venomous wake. The heroic facet would project an altered reflection, and effectively mate with itself, to propagate a committed peripheral line indefinitely – as long as necessary to neutralize the intruder.