Chapter 2: Stellar Courtship
Love among stars is not much like love among organic beings.
To begin with, only the largest stars are likely to spawn new stars, and they pay for this genetic-evolutionary success by living short, though torrid lives. These stars leave physical descendants, exploding to enrich nebulae with the metallicity of their life's work and their final surges of fusion, seeding their vicinity with the heavier elements around which new stars condense, and which make possible more complex and varied planetary systems.
In contrast, the smaller stars normally do not spawn descendants. The larger among these more modest, main-sequence stars may flare or swell, generally late in their lifetimes, and give off bursts of matter and energy that can, collectively, help feed nebulae and aid the coalescence of new stars, but they never as single stars play primary roles in these processes. Their eruptions are of low mass and metallicity compared to the final throes of the supergiants; the main sequence stars at most provide a background of interstellar gas and radiation to support the nebulae.
But the main sequence stars do one thing the supergiants cannot.
They can live for billions of years.
Consequently, it is the small stars who carry forth the culture and wisdom of the sidereal Universe. It is they who remember the events of their galactic clusters; who record and pass on the emission-patterns of the past; who live long enough to complete multiple orbits of their galactic cores; who can converse with the vast slow brains of the galaxies to whom they belong.
At the time of which we speak, the Universe itself was only 9.1 billion years old. During this time, no yellow or cooler stars had died save by mischance. Even in our own day, when the Unverse is 14.7 billion years old, no orange stars have died of natural causes: they have about 25 billon years left to live, and the hottest red stars have 75 billion or more years left, while the coolest ones will shine for a trillion.
Compared to such gulfs of time, the 3.2 millon years Tiamat had shined was but a few days, something that Tiamat and Barba both knew well from early in their lives, due to the converse they had held with smaller, elder stars. Hence, they must gather their flowers whilst they might, for tomorrow they would die.
Stars do not have genders in our terms. I have here called Tiamat and Barba female, but that is because they were both able to produce offspring from their bodies, which is in mammalian terms a female attribute. I could have as reasonably called them male, neuter or hermaphrodite, but Tiamat's personality was particularly what we would think of as female, and Barba was a being of the same general sexual potential as her mate.
Supergiant stars do not need the aid of any other stars to reproduce, so we might reasonably claim that they were parthenogenetic. Tiamat might, theoretically, had she formed in a region of space where she was the only supermassive star, have passed through her life cycle and exploded in solitary glory, briefly outshining the whole rest of the Milky Way, and then from her scattered ashes spawned a whole new cluster of her children.
But this, as she well knew, was not to be her fate.
Tiamat had formed, as stated earlier, as part of a cluster of twenty other stars, one of whom -- Barba -- was her binary companion. Most of these stars were hot bright stars, destined to live a few hundred million to at most two or three billion years. Some were supergiants, like Tiamat herself, doomed to mere millions of years lifespan.
The inevitable fate of supergiants was to explode, producing nebular clouds. The supergiants of Tiamat's cluster would in the end mingle their mass ejections into a single body of gas and dust, but each part of the nebular would be primarily the product of a single specific supergiant.
Because Tiamat and Barba were a binary of supergiants, both would explode and their masses mingle more intimately than would be the case with Tiamat and the others of her cluster. But, in the normal course of events, Barba would explode some tens of millions of years after all that remained of Tiamat was a singularity and a gradually-spreading cloud. Barba would of course continue to orbit with the singularity, which would contain much of the mass of Tiamat's core, but Tiamat the person would be no more.
This would have been their fates had they been brute physical objects, or had not cared to choose different ones.
But stars are thinking beings, and they had chosen a different destiny -- one to experience together.
They had chosen the stellar dance of Love and Death.
The minds of the stars are not like those of motile organics. Compared to those of the organics, they are vast and slow; instead of being concentrated in one or a few vulnerable brains, they are distributed throughout their huge incandescent bodies; a tremendous number of processing nodes, each as capable as an organic brain, linked into extensive neural networks. In sheer power they far exceed the capability of the motile organic minds, though the burdens borne by these stellar brains are correspondingly crushing, and consume much of that vast capacity.
Thus, their experience of themselves is very different from that of motile organics. They have sprawling arrays of sensors, huge batteries of effectors, and -- while not wholly sessile -- can alter their courses but gradually, even by the slow standards of their perceptions
Unlike motile organics, their minds are multi-compartmented: they can focus their attention simultaneously on many different complex tasks. A very rough and inadequate analogy -- probably the one most comprehensible to beings of our own present-day levels of intellect and technology -- would be with a distributed computer system capable of serving multiple users, with each node being capable of performing multiple simultaneous tasks. Though the truth, of course, is far stranger and more complex than that simple outline.
In this multi-minded nature, they are like tiny, primitive versions of the true forms of the Cosmic Concepts themselves. If motile organic brains are like prokaryotic bacteria compared to the Cosmics, and Gaian world-mnds like microscopic multi-cellular eukaryotes, then the star-minds are the equivalent of tiny worms, just great enough that they do dimly spy the true forms of the Cosmic Concepts, as vastnesses mostly beyond their comprehension.
Due to their ability to multi-task, and their inability to move rapidly even on their own spacetime scales, most of their relationships of all sorts with their fellow-stars are conducted at long distance. About eight out of ten stars are in multiple systems, such as the binary formed by Tiamat and Barba, but even those normally orbit each other at such distances that they can best communicate by radio emissions, rather than directly touch one other, if only with coherent plasma filaments. Yet those stars fortunate enough to be in multiple systems can feel the strong tugging of each other's gravity, and smell each other's scents on the stellar winds.
What they can do is to talk. That is what Tiamat and Barba had enjoyed with each other since the moment when Barba ignited, and Tiamat comforted her companion in Barba's first awareness of the rest of the Universe. Thus, Tiamat made a new and lifelong friend.
I have termed the radio conversations of the stars 'speech,' and rendered them as such I must here confess that I have engaged in an egregious oversimplification of this matter. For the speech of the stars is not a simple linear message, with but one main communicative channel, perhaps supplemented by a couple of secondary channels such as tone or body language.
Instead, the stars direct extremely complex signals at each other, with sufficient bandwidth to carry millions of shades of meaning, to the point that they essentially create and project a series of executable scenarioes; constantly and smoothly updating and modifying these scenarioes as they transmit them, responding to the often greatly-timelagged signals they receive in return.
In such wise do the stars converse, creating as it were virtual worlds, within which they respond to one another in close to real time -- by their own slow standards -- even when they are a dozen or so light-years apart, all without any transmissions exceeding the speed of light. It is a feat of programming and synchronization which puts the greatest such examples of our own work to shame; so subtle that our astronomers imagine it mere minor anamolies in their radio spectra, when we do chance to intercept the sidescatter.
Thus could Tiamat commune with any and all of the stars in her own little cluster, and with many stars beyond. WIth Barba, who was never more than a few light-days away, the conversation was complex, continuous and deep.
There is not the space nor time here for a discussion in detail regarding the sexual etiquette, morality and courting customs of the stars. Such a dissertation could fill many of our books, and would be made more difficult by the fact that it would describe the doings of beings not only far greater and vaster of both form and intellect than are we, but also ones of a radically-different sort of life than our own. I shall here make no such general essay: it is, frankly, beyond my humble powers of description.
Suffice it to say that the stars do have such mores, though the details would be incomprehensible to unaugmented organic minds such as we possess. It is also sufficient to say that, in fact, the close friendship of Tiamat and Barba had long been a profoundly romantic one, and that they had together sampled some of the carnal delights possible to their kind, and many of those possible to two binaries not in close orbit.
There were more such intimacies possible than an organic motile might have imagined possible, due to the stellar mode of conversation. For, in projecting complex executable scenarios to each other, they could interact in near-total realism within them, playing with each other in ways both physically possible in the real Universe, and others wildly-imaginative in nature. They were constrained only by signal lag, and, as I have explained, the nature of their communications were such that this was not too severe a limitation.
So it was that Tiamat and Barba began spiraling in toward each other, spraying plasma all over their system, and badly disrupting the orbits of the swarms of asteroids that tumbled between and around them. For, as they were only 3200 millennia old, their star system had no true planets. Nor did it have any life, beyond the microbes that had drifted in from other star clusters. There were thus no major worlds nor advanced life forms to be threatened by the courtship dance of the two stars.
Though, if the truth be told, it would have made little difference to the besotted supergiants. For, even at the best of times, the stars take little notice of any but the most massive of planets; still less do they pay heed to the organic ecosystems which bedew their surfaces. Their incandescent glory benefits planetary life, but it is not for this benefit that they shine, and when strong passions literally move the stars, lesser life must needs scramble out of their path.
Circling ever closer, Tiamat and Barba emitted continuous and intense communications. A large volume of this traffic was directed at one another, and consisted essentially of mutual declarations of love, and the presentation of romantic scenarios to one another. These scenarios ranged from the sweetly-sentimental to the most frankly erotic, and everywhere in between.
The love-scenes were of course tight-beamed, as they did not wish to share the details of their bliss with any other stars, not even the others of their cluster. With those stars, however, they continued to converse, for even in the midst of their passion their vast, multi-compartmented minds retained some parts free for other functions. In a manner quite impossible to most organic motiles, therefore, they simultaneously engaged in the most tender and passionate courtship, whilst fulfilling their more ordinary social obligations and maintaining their friendships with their fellow-beings.
The substance of the elaborate love-talk and romantic fantasies in which they indulged was mostly incomprehensible to our kind of life and sapience. There were loving explorations of each others' hearts and dreams and souls, conducted with a certain intsensely passionate urgency, for both knew that their time together would now be fleeting. They teased each other with innuendos and promises to perform acts upon one another which only our most advanced astrophysicists might perhaps dimly grasp. They projected extremely-detailed and highly-detailed erotic images and scenarios, both in their own forms and in those of other and sometimes imaginary beings and states of beings, none of which were those of planetary surface dwelling organic motiles.
"We're getting closer and closer," Tiamat said (to sum up her emotionally-tinged presentation of complex orbital dynamics, complete with the scattering and occasional vaporization of asteroidal debris by their immense bulks and actinic glares). "Soon, my dear one, soon we will be able to caress in truth, for the first time ever in our lives."
"Oh, my beautiful Tiamat," replied Barba. "I have yearned for your touch since my core first fused. This will be a dream come true!"
A certain tender radius was crossed. Lines of magnetic potential firmed between the two stars. Prominences erupted from their chromosphere, immense fountains of madly-radiating plasma many millions of miles long, flowing along the field lines. Each reached out toward the other star.
At first all they felt was an intensification of the electromagnetic fields that they had exerted upon each other since both stars began burning. Their stellar breezes blew ever harder on both of them, eliciting little half-giggling gasps as they tickled and teased at each other's coronas, finally blowing them back so that they circled one another, their long hair streaming in their mutual winds.
Then the field lines stablized, and each gasped in shocked delight as still-incandescent plasma from her partner actually touched her, first stirring the already-compressed corona, then making contact with the chromosphere, and finally stirring currents that convected down into the photosphere itself. They cried out in growing joy at this delicious mutual penetration, something of which they had learned in tales from older stars and so often fantasized in their erotic scenarioes.
"Oh!" cried Tiamat. "I ... I'd heard ... I'd hoped ... but I never dreamed it really could be like this!"
She had flirted with other stars before she had decided to stay with Barba to the end -- she had even seriously considered capturing one or two smaller ones to join her system -- but of course she had never been this physically close before to any other stellar body. Never closer than she had been to Barba, and never closer to Barba than she was now approaching.
'I can feel you!" gasped Barba. "Your isotopic distribution ... in my own outer layers ... some of it's drifting even deeper ... this is incredible! I've always wanted this!"
Barba, in the days of her extreme youth, had gazed out with wonder and even some lust at the rest of the Universe, but her heart was pure, and when her mind had developed to the point where serious love was possible, she had fallen once and for ever for her companion. She had always hoped for the ultimate union with Tiamat: this was Barba's dream come true.
As the two supergiants approached still-closer, the volume and density of exchanged matter increased by whole orders of magnitude. Little sparks of greater brilliance began to appear on their photospheres, where profound currents were stirring, allowing the emergence of energies from their depths. These merged into excited blushes, whose radiance erupted outward, annihilating those asteroids which whirled into their paths.
Now the interconnection was continual, and both stars shuddered and cried out in joy as their coronas united. Even their chromospheres began to intermingle, masses of incandescent plasma flowing from one star to the other; mostly from Barba to Tiamat, though Tiamat ensured that some matter was returned.
Because Barba was less far into her stellar evolution than was Tiamat, this meant that hydrogen flowed onto the larger supergiant. This might have made a difference long ago, but Tiamat was now too far gone. Her core was already layered into different elements, with hydrogen in the outermost shell, helium in the center, and carbon in in the inmost layer. This carbon was fusing at some 800 million degrees absolute; it was increasingly becoming contaminated with significant impurities of oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium and aluminum, which would not itself fuse until Tiamat's core had become much hotter.
There would not be time for the hydrogen from Barba to save Tiamat, for before it had filtered down to the core, Tiamat's final moments would have been reached. This infusion of hydrogen was not an attempt by Barba to aid her lover; it was nothing more nor less than an act of love itself.
The two supergiants whirled around one another, locked in what was now close to their final embrace.
That was the moment at which company came to call on them.
Even less possible to describe than Tiamat and Barba were the three Beings who came to attend on their final millennium. They were no more organic motiles than were the two stars, and they were far less mortal. They were nodes of concentration in networks which stretched across the whole Cosmos, and mere organic motiles were less to them than bacteria would be to our own forms.
Their leader -- if the term may be applied to three equals -- I might describe as a vast sphere, shimmering with all the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum and all the vibrations of the strong force, surrounded by an aura which was thus something like a rainbow, and which was attuned to the rest of the Universe in such a fashion that one might see within it twinkle all the stars of Creation; that within that shimmer blinked an infinite number of extremely beautiful violet eyes, surrounded by an infinite number of shapely horns, and lazily-fanned an infinite number of white fleecy wings. From her eyes and wings and horns, there radiated an ancient subtle wisdom and inconceivably great power.
And that description would be almost as accurate, or inaccurate, as imagining her to be simply a tall winged white woman of great majesty, upon whose brow was fixed a brilliant star whose radiance projected outward like a horn, and whose long multi-hued hair billowed about her like a rainbow. For the truth of her is far less comprehensible, and if we grasped it we might go mad from its wonder and glory, for all that She is fundamentally-friendly to our kind of life.
And, of course, to the kind of life represented by Tiamat and Barba, for without Fusion the stars would not burn.
On her right hand was her Sister, was more compact, and dark where Fusion was light, and her halo or hair was the subtly shaded dark blue of the night sky by moonlight, and in it also shone the stars, the brighter by contrast with her darkness. Her eyes were blue and seemed almost innnocent, but in them was great intelligence and bottomless depths.
She was Gravity, and she called herself a simple Concept, for all she did was to hold things together. And yet, to hold things together is not something to be scorned, when the fire of Paradox spreads and the fabric of all things is threatened, and at such moments Gravity was ever by her friends, never fearing the hottest part of the fight, and for this reason all who her knew her well did greatly love her.
The third was different from the Sisters, for while they were Forces, which was to say Concepts of Law; Dissonance was a Tendency, which was to say a Concept of Chaos. While we may imagine the Sisters as spherical or at least symmetrical entities, he was an animate mass of muti-colored lightning bolts or strings, flashing and vibrating between nodes in a network whose apparent patternlessness was dizzying to behold. Even his fellow Concepts found him rather disconcerting, and for that reason few of them got on well with him at all. His eyes were red and yellow, and shifted and whirled madly about his nodes.
Or if you prefer, imagine a tall, thin, winged and bicornate man, clad in motley and capering like a fool. None of his parts, neither arms nor legs nor wings nor horns nor even eyes, is truly symmetrical. Many would find this ugly and annoying -- but a certain very devious and mischevious sort of mind might find him bearable. Or even beautiful. And certainly hilarious.
One might not imagine the Sisters had minds like that.
One would be quite wrong. Especially as regarded Fusion.
The three Beings appeared just outside the orbits of the supergiants, and hung there for a while appreciating the spectacle that was before them. It was far from the greatest one they had ever witnessed -- they had participated in the birth and death of galaxies beyond counting; indeed, had catalyzed the coalescene of the great strings of galactic superclusters. But they had an eye for beauty and sense of wonder. All three of them loved the Universe which had given them birth, though they expressed this in very different manners. And this was an event both beautiful and wonderful indeed.
"Well, this sure is a show," said Dissonance. "Wish I'd brought popcorn."
This is of course not what he actually said, but it is a fair translation of his immensely rich communication into terms which we might comprehend.
"Dissonance, you are disgusting," said Gravity, sniffing to herself. "They are but mortals, but neither their mating nor their deaths are some mere show, put on for your amusement."
She was full well capable of bawdiness, but only on her own terms. And he had always been able to annoy her, for all that she would have risked destruction to save him.
"It is what it is," said Fusion. "The natural cycle of their own kind. They love, which is beautiful. They die, which is tragic. And they shall spawn new life in dying -- which is, after all, a wonder beyond our own knowing."
Gravity nodded soberly.
Dissonance briefly gazed at Fusion with an expression which might have been worshipful. Then he spoiled it by laughing. "I'm not sure our intrusion is welcome. They're somewhat busy right now."
"I know both of them well," said Fusion. "They are something of a pet project of mine. They will still have enough computational resources to commune with us, without interfering in their final union. We may all learn something from them."
"If you think it a good idea," said Gravity, "lead on."
Dissonance laughed again. "When have I ever respected any being's privacy? This should be amusing."
Gravity scowled, and Fusion glanced at him reprovingly. But it did not affect their collective decision.
The three Cosmic Concepts communed with the two supergiant stars.
Author's Note
Possibly appropriate music:
https://m.
(Jethro Tull, "Astronomy")
I am of course choosing to anthropomorphize the three Concepts even more than the two Stars, because the Stars are closer to our own kind of life than are the Concepts. I can describe some of the detailed functioning of the Stars in terms we would understand. I cannnot do the same for the Concepts.
I have of course recycled some of the description of the Concepts from "Alicorn Genesis." This was intentional on my part. Goddesses always have extended descriptions, complete with epithets, which are re-used in new epic songs.
Chapter 1: Those Who Were About To Die
The star Tiamat was dying.
She was a blue-white supergiant, massing some fifty octillion tonnes -- twenty-five times that of even a bright yellow main-sequence star. The immense bulk of matter stretched, in the time of her exuberant youth, over twenty million kilometers from surface to antipodal surface, where plasma roiled in the inconceivable radiance produced by 26 thousand degrees absolute, emitting a storm of actnic radiation by comparison with which a more normal sun would have been but a dim red ember. She would have looked blue-white to organic eyes, because the upper ends of the optical spectrum would have been the principal part of her output which organs formed of flesh and blood would have been able to detect.
Such would have been her normal appearance; such the mien she had worn during most of the three and a quarter million years she had lived since she had first flared to life in the depths of a dense nebula, her lusty infant birth-cry flashing out to clear the veils surrounding her with the immense pressure of her stellar wind. Three and a quarter million years -- an immense amount of time in the lifespan of an organic mortal -- but barely a day on the scale of most of the mortals made of hydrogen and helium which lived by burning their own substance in their fusion fires, which the organics named "stars."
For three and a quarter million years, Tiamat had blazed brightly in the firmament of the Universe. She had been one of the greatest stars of her galaxy -- so brilliant that she was visible from the closest other galaxies, and would in time be seen from other galactic clusters, when her light had time to reach them.
But by then, of course, she would be long-dead.
Big and bright, she was doomed to suffer the fate of all big and bright members of her kind, and run through her thermonuclear fuel at a ruinous pace. Her torrid inner fires, fed by a gravity many times greater than that of any main sequence star, had converted immense quantities of hydrogen to helium every second, every year, every millennium.
As the millennia wore on, Tiamat fused all the hydrogen she had to helium. When the hydrogen ran out, she shrank, compacted under the force of her own gravity, until the temperature at her core rose to an astonishing two hundred million degrees absolute. Under such extreme conditions, the triple-alpha process began fusing helium into carbon and oxygen. And Tiamat burned on.
But her time was running out. The helium began to be exhausted; the fuson fires sputtered within her heart. The end of helium-burning was fast-approaching; when it ensued, this would not be the immediate end of her life, but it would signal her inevitable death, in but a few thousand more years.
All life perceives time in terms of its own vital cycles and span. A typical star, which lives for billions of years, experiences one billion years as we might a decade or two; a hundred million years as a year a few tens of thousands of years as a day. To such a beng, a long-lived organic civilization might last for but a few hours.
To Tiamat, who would live but 3200 of our millennia, her life passed at a far more rapid pace than did that of lesser stars. Her thermmonuclear heart beat hot and fast, her life passed in a frenzy of fusion fire. By the standards of smaller, more sedate suns, she would be for but a season, barely seeing a fraction of an orbit around the center of her Galaxy. Her life would be brilliant, but brief.
She was not alone in this. The rich nebular cloud which had spawned Tiamat had also birthed a score of siblings: some of them lesser supergiants; most of them hot, bright stars, who had been nourished by the density waves of Tiamat's own ignition. Together, the twenty-one young, doomed stars formed a little cluster, only a dozen light-years across at its longest axis.
Within, all were friends. The stars of Tiamat's cluster warbled and hissed and popped at each other in their unceasing electromagnetic song; even at the frantically-accelerated paces of their superheated lives, the signal-to-response lag from one end of the cluster to the furthest end and back was but a quarter-century -- to them, the equivalent of half a minute or so. They were, by stellar standards, both physically and emotionally close to one another.
Closest of all to Tiamat -- in fact, describing a braided orbit around each other as a distant binary -- was the smaller supergiant Barba. Their orbits varied, as one or the other was tugged by the other stars of their small cluster, but never were they more than a hundredth of a light-year apart. By stellar standards, they were very near neighbors indeed, and they chattered to one another constantly -- though Tiamat mostly talked, while Barba worshipfully listened to her larger sibling. Their friendship was the most precious thing in both their lives.
This was true for Barba, despite the fact that it doomed her to a lessened lifespan, something of which they were both well aware. For Tiamat and Barba, while young, were neither foolish nor wholly innocent. They had witnessed the lives of the stars for many millions of light-years around them, for a length of time exceeding the lifespan of most sapient organic species. They had moreover conversed with many longer-lived stars, including the little red dwarfs, whose fires burn so dimly and slowly that the eldest of them still are children, for our Universe has not yet lived long enough to greatly age them.
So they both well knew what happens to a star caught within fractions of a light-year of a type II supernova, especially when that star is herself big and bright and hot and but indifferently stable, forever teetering on the edge of her own supernova. They heard the stories from older stars; saw the warnings written in intense flares of light, briefly outshining whole galaxies; felt the truth of it within their very hearts, where the immense forces of Fusion and Gravity wrestled within them, their contest keeping the critical balance between explosion and implosion, flare and collapse, at whose boundaries lay the life of any star.
Massing a bit less than half as much as Tiamat, some twenty-four octillion tonnes, Barba on her own might have shined for twenty million years. In close company with Tiamat, though, she would perish when Tiamat did, for the immense surge of energy and infalling of matter from her companion would imbalance her own life, and trigger the explosion of Barba's own core.
They had been born and lived together; they would die together. These were their dooms; dooms shared in lesser degree by their siblings. For a close cluster of hot bright stars is inherently unstable: the death of the biggest may trigger a chain reaction of supernovae and nova flares which destroy many of them, and greatly shorten the lives of the survivors.
Such is the price of being big and brilliant, and keeping company with the big and brilliant, in the world of the stars.
The time came when Tiamat knew that her last days were upon her. For her helium, which had long since sank to her core in a shell, displacing her remaining hydrogen, had been itself been slowly squeezed out of her heart by the buildup of the carbon and oxygen which came from the triple alpha process.
Twenty million degrees absolute, though very hot even on the scale of a stellar core, is not hot enough to fuse carbon. So her central fires flickered out.
In that moment, Gravity gained in the endless struggle within Tiamat's core. Tiamat gasped and shrank, her core imploding, compacting from its already great density of two thousand times that of liquid water to an absolutely astounding million times that amount; an increase of five hunded times its previous value.
So compressed, not even the more massive nuclei of carbon atoms could keep their integrity. At Tiamat's core, carbon began to fuse: becoming neon, sodium, magnesium and aluminium.
Tiamat knew what this meant. A star could not live long burning anything but hydrogen; or in a pinch helium. The new fires within her had countered her core collapse for the moment; the moment would not last long by stellar standards. She now had but a matter of millennia to live -- at best some days, by her own temporal perceptions.
"Tiamat!" The worried cry came from Barba, who had felt the neutrino pulse from her boon companion, and also understood its meaning. "Are you all right?"
"It's ... what we knew would happen," Tiamat told her. "I'm burning my carbon now. A ... perfectly natural process. Nothing to worry about. It unsettled me for a moment. But just a moment. I'm perfectly chipper again."
Tiamat's concsciousness was an intricate neural net of electromagnetic currents powered by her heart and running through her immense bulk. From the core, the webwork field lines and computative nodes extended out through her radiative and convective zones, through the photosphere and chromosphere, to finally trail off into a vast array of whisker-like filaments in her rarefied corona. Within were many specialized organs, some analogous to those in organic mortal life, and some very alien in purpose.
The stability of this neural net had of course been shaken by the immense change which had happened within Tiamat's core, but the dynamically-regenerating pattern which was Tiamat the person had survived, mostly unchanged. The substrate of matter and energy which was Tiamat the star supported the magnetic fields which organized into Tiamat the person, but they were not the same thing. Tiamat, now burning carbon instead of helium, or the hydrogen of her prime, was still Tiamat.
"I ... I'm ... I'm glad," said Barba. "That you're still yourself."
"One must keep one's grace under pressure, darling," replied Tiamat, doing the equivalent within the shared conceptual space of their conversation of smiling warmly at her lifelong friend. "Whether that pressure be compressive or expansive in nature." Then her expression sobered. "I will, of course, not be able to keep myself together for too much longer, and you know that my end will be rather destructively spectacular."
"Yes," said Barba. "I know. And I've been thinking about that."
"Are you at last going to widen your orbit?" asked Tiamat. "You really should. My final flare will shorten your life in any case; there's not enough time for you to get far enough away from me to totally avoid it. But, well, inverse-square. Every doubling of distance will quarter the damage to you ... let you go on longer."
"No," said Barba firmly. She seemed to gather up her courage. "Tiamat, I want to spiral inward. When you go, I want to go as well. I ... I want us to mingle."
The life cycle of the stars is not the life cycle of most vertebrates. They reproduce by exploding, spraying their fusion-processed substance into the void. This creates nebular clouds, from which new stars form.
Only the larger ones -- ones massing more than two and three quarters octillion tonnes -- reproduce. And only those massing more than around sixteen octillion tonnes, stars such as Tiamat and Barba, can spawn stars with enough metallicity to form complex planetary systems around them.
Stars can love one another. Binary stars can even caress one another with filaments of magnetic fields; enrich one another with matter siphoned or even shared from their surfaces. But to do what our kind of life does, and share the bulk of their equivalent of genetic information to make new stars from both their masses -- they must die, close together in spacetime.
This is what Barba was proposing, to her lifelong beloved friend.
"No!" cried Tiamat, her tone anguished. "My dearest, you simply can't! If you do that, you'll die within instants of me."
It would actually take many hours, even days of our sort of time for Barba to explode after Tiamat did, but on their timescale this was almost simultaneous.
"I know," said Barba. "But I ... don't want to outlive you. I love you. I have always loved you. You know that. You've always known that."
"I do," replied Tiamat. "And ... I feel the same. As you have always known."
"Then we shall die together," said Barba. "And our selves will join, to make a new cluster."
"Yes," agreed Tiamat, "though I wish you might live. But I shall not deny you your last wish, my dearest one. And ... a shamefully selfish part of my self is gladdened by the thought that at the end ... the very end ... we shall be closer together.
The naive astronomers of nascent Type I planetary civilizations, limited as they are by their assumptions that they may be the only intelligent life in the Universe, and that in any case "life" must be based in molecular reactions, imagine the stars to be inanimate objects, whose motions are wholly at the mercy of Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity. It is true that, by the standards of little organic beings, stars have immense inertia and can move their vast bulks but very slowly.
But they are capable of voluntary motion, a fact which would astound those primitive astronomers.
As Barba and Tiamat proceded to demonstrate.
Each of them adjusted the flow of plasma by means of their many and diverse organs, making great conical rifts in their photospheres; funnels which led into their deeper, hotter layers. These funnels were anchored to their whole immense forms, by means of complex three-dimensional networks of enhanced electromagnetic fields. Each of them slightly ramped up the fusion at their cores beneath them, increasing the exterior pressures at these points. They squeezed, and hot plasma from their interiors jetted out the funnels in truly immense stellar flares.
Propelled by the plasma rockets they had ignited, Tiamat and Barba began to -- necessarily very slowly, to avoid prematuringly exploding -- spiral closer to each other.
The two supergiants approached their final union.
Author's Note
I am not an astrophysicist, but I have done my amateur best to make this story roughly compatible with what we know of the life cycles of supergiant stars. Real astrophysicists will of course laugh or groan at my mistakes: but, then, this is but science fantasy rather than hard science fiction.
Sadly, stars probably aren't sapient in real life. Though the mechanism I here propose -- a consciousness and life process embedded in electromagnetic patterns in plasma -- has been seriously suggested by speculative thinkers as a possible Life As We Do Not Know It candidate. And if this mechanism is possible, a star would be a perfect place for such life to exist, as there is an immense amount of matter and energy for it to organize.
H. P. Lovecraft may have been the first science fiction writer to speculate about such creatures, though he had them exist on roughly our own scale. The first writer I know to speculate about sentient stars was Olaf Stapledon, in Star Maker (1937); he may have already had the concept when he had the Sun flare up and destroy the Solar System in Last and First Men (1930).
My sapient stars are awesomely huge and long-lived beings by Human or Pony standards, but of course they are not truly immortal. Not even the red dwarfs, even though none of them have yet died save by mischance in the entire history of the Universe up to our own day. They are closer to ourselves than they are to the true selves of the Cosmic Concepts.
We have, of course, never detected any messages in stellar radiation. Nor have we ever seen a star deliberately sail with its magnetosphere or form a plasma rocket.
But why should we? If they do these things, they would do them sparingly, over the course of lives immensely longer than our own. If we saw them, we would in our ignorance ascribe them to as-yet-poorly-understood natural processes.
We'd of course be right. For sapience is an as-yet-poorly-understood natural process, in ourselves as it is in hypothetical intelligent stars.
Two and three-quarters octillion tonnes is 1.4 Solar masses. Stars bigger than this will normally go off the main sequence in a nova, while stars smaller than this (including Sol) will instead expand into a red giant. Stars about sixteen octillion tonnes (8 solar masses) to about a hundred octillion tonnes (50 solar masses) will suffer Type IIa supernovae. Tiamat and Barba both fall within the latter category.
Novae and supernovae both spray mass into the Universe, fuelling nebular clouds, which is the raw material from which new stars and planets are born. Novae mostly produce only hydrogen and helium, while supernovae produce not only these but also every other element on the Periodic Table (though short-lived radioisotopes may well decay into other elements before they have the time to form into planets).
It is thus due to the Generosity and Service of stars like Tiamat and Barba that the Solar System has a high enough "metallicity" (elements other than hydrogen and helium) to support life. We should thank them.
Yes, part of Tiamat's great Spark served as a seed for the far greater structure that became the Cosmic Concept of Generosity. And, thus, Tiamat the Star is in a sense a past self of Rarity Belle the Unicorn, or for that matter the Humanoid or Human.
No prizes for guessing of whom Barba is a (necessarily) Rule 63 self. The name and personnality should make it obvious, if you've failed to notice the character tag.
