With a satisfied hum, she poured the gravel—crystals of uniform color and size—into the funnel-shaped port atop the device she had just bartered for. As instructed by the trader, she put the flask into a receptacle at the bottom of the device, moved one of the bars to the right, another to the left, and pushed a button …
And was in a darkness of space, confronting a new, young planetary system. Her viewpoint shifted erratically, as though the recording device was being moved or anchored. Abruptly, the viewpoint settled, only to be interrupted by the edge of an enormous … well, it looked rather like a membrane of some kind. A wing, perhaps. Whatever it was, it receded off one side of the view, never allowing Questioner to see what kind of creature it was part of.
She returned her attention to the sun, around which three young planets whirled in fiery rings. The recording system obviously compressed the action. Mechanical time lapse equipment, perhaps. Or, considering that the Quaggi exchanged information through these crystals, an organic system which secreted memories: information pearls, secreted over time by Quaggian oysters. In any case, the recording device was also orbiting the sun, allowing a good view of a nearby planet with eight moons, three in one orbital plane, three smaller ones, no doubt captured asteroids, with orbits at considerable angles to the other three, and two tiny orbiting rocks, close to the planet, moving very fast.
Her view could be extended in every direction. When she turned slowly to look away from the sun, she saw two gas giants and then, after careful search, the shadow arcs of several smaller, colder worlds farther out. Beyond them was a circling field of galactic flotsam and jetsam, a cometary collection, perhaps remnants of some larger and older thing, and beyond that the darkness of space sequined by a far-off scatter of fully formed stars and galaxies.
She returned her attention to the nearest planet where thin plates of surface rock were thrust across great furnaces of the deep to be suddenly pimpled with a rash of baby volcanoes, each vent a basaltic core that hardened inside its ashen cone into a cyclopean crystalline pillar. Echoes from within the planet allowed her to perceive a spongy crust built up by recurrent layers of lava tubes superimposed on sedimentary structures. She could detect great caverns held aloft by basaltic pillars, one atop another, some created by fire, some by water, some by both together, some mere bubbles with a pillar or two, others measureless caverns with forests of columns.
Here and there chasms split through the layers, bringing light to the inner world. Those deepest down had been invaded by the abyssal oceans where scalding vents spewed black smoke while complicated molecules rocked in the steaming waters at the edge of the white hot magma, spinning in the heat, accumulating and replicating themselves, adhering, separating, drifting away on the currents of the sea.
She turned her gaze outward, and this time saw in the far dark of the cometary field a thing that raised itself upon wide, pale wings and moved inward to roost upon a tiny moon of a cold planet. The Questioner watched the planet as it passed behind the sun, emerged, then arced toward her once more. As it swung by she received the fleeting impression of a wing of pale fire unfolding across the stars.
Something living sat on that cold rock, something from outside. Something akin to time; certainly something accustomed to waiting; a bat the size of a mountain range, perhaps? Or something like an octopus, with membranes stretched between its tentacles to make a winglike structure? Something very large, certainly, and something very old.
Her concentration was interrupted by a vast mooing or bellowing of radio waves coming from somewhere in the system, spreading outward in all directions, a message repeating over and over. Come. Come. Here is a new planet, still warm. Here are fires, still burning. I await. I await.
The message was in no words she knew, no language she had ever heard, and yet it was unmistakable in intent. It was a summons, and something within her responded to it, something she had not known was there. For the time, that was the only response. She could detect no other.