Alastiar Reynolds

So it was that the first stars to host rocky worlds formed closer to the core, where the metals reached the critical level first It was from the core zones, within a thousand kiloparsecs of the galactic centre itself, that the first starfaring cultures emerged. They looked out into the galactic wilderness, flung envoys across thousands of light-years and imagined themselves alone and unique and somehow privileged. It was a time both of sadness and chilling cosmic potential. They imagined themselves to be lords of creation.
But nothing in the galaxy was that straightforward. Not only were there other cultures emerging at more or less the same galactic epoch, in the same band of habitable stars, but there were also pockets of higher metallicity out in the cold zone: statistical fluctuations which allowed machine-building life to emerge where it ought not to have been possible. There were to be no all-encompassing galactic dominions, for none of these nascent cultures managed to spread across the galaxy before encountering the expansion wave of another rival. It had all happened with blinding speed once the initial conditions were correct.
And yet the initial conditions were themselves changing. The great stellar furnaces had not fallen quiet. Several times a century, heavy stars died as supernovae, outshining all others. Usually they did so behind sooty veils of dust, and their deaths went unrecorded save for a chirp of neutrinos or a seismic tremor of gravitational waves. But the metals that they made still found their way into the interstellar medium. New suns and worlds were still coalescing out of the clouds that had been enriched by each previous stellar cycle. This ceaseless cosmic industry rumbled on, oblivious to the intelligence that it had allowed to flourish.
But near the core the metallicity was becoming higher than optimum. The new worlds that were forming around new suns were very heavy indeed, their cores laden with heavy elements. Their gravitational fields were stronger and their chemistries more volatile than those of existing worlds. Plate tectonics no longer functioned, since their mantles could no longer support the burden of rigid floating crusts. Without tectonics, topography — and hence changes in elevation — became less pronounced. Comets were tugged into collisions with these worlds, drenching them with water. Vast world- engulfing oceans slumbered beneath oppressive skies. Complex life rarely evolved on these worlds, since there were few suitable niches and little climatic variation. And those cultures that had already achieved starflight found these new core worlds lacking in usefulness or variety. When a pocket of the right metallicity threatened to condense down into a solar system with the prospect of being desirable, the elder cultures often squabbled over property rights. The ensuing catfights were the most awesome displays of energy that the galaxy had seen beyond its own blind processes of stellar evolution. But they were nothing compared with what was to come.
So, avoiding conflict where they could, the elder cultures turned outwards. But even then they were thwarted. In half a billion years the zone of optimum habitability had crept a little further from the galactic core. The lifewave was a single ripple, spreading out from the centre to the galaxy’s edge. Sites of stellar formation that had previously been too metal-poor to form viable solar systems were now sufficiently enriched. Again, squabbles broke out. Some of them lasted ten million years, leaving scars on the galaxy that took another fifty million to heal over.
And still these were nothing compared with the coming Dawn War.
For the galaxy, as much as it was a machine for making metals, and thereby complex chemistry, and thereby life, could also be seen as a machine for making wars. There were no stable niches in the galactic disc. On the kind of timescale that mattered to galactic supercultures, the environment was constantly changing. The wheel of galactic history forced them into eternal conflict with other cultures, new and old.
And so the war to end wars had come, the war that ended the first phase of galactic history, and the one that would yet come to be known as the Dawn War, because it had happened so far in the past.
The Inhibitors remembered little of the war itself. Their own history had been chaotic, muddled and almost certainly subject to crude retroactive tampering. They could not be sure what was documented fact and what was a fiction some earlier incarnation of themselves had manufactured for the purposes of cross-species propaganda. It was probable that they had once been organic, spined, warm-blooded land-dwellers with bicameral minds. The faint shadow of that possible past could be discerned in their cybernetic architectures.
For a long time they had clung to the organic. But at some point their machine selves had become dominant, sloughing their old forms. As machine intelligences, they roamed the galaxy. The memory of planetary dwelling became dim, and then was erased entirely, no more relevant than the memory of tree dwelling.
All that mattered was the great work.

In her quarters, after she had made certain that Remontoire and Felka were aware that the mission’s objective had been achieved, Skade had the armour return her head to the pedestal. She found that her thoughts took on a different texture when she was sessile. It was something to do with the slight differences between the blood recirculation systems, the subtle flavouring of neurochemicals. On the pedestal she felt calm and inwardly focused, open to the presence that she always carried with her.
note 318 The Night Council’s voice was tiny, almost childlike, but utterly unignorable. She had come to know it well.
Yes.
note 319
Yes.
note 320
Clavain is dead. Our missiles reached him. The kill still has to be confirmed… but I’m certain of it.
note 321
He didn’t surrender. He kept running all the while, even though he must have known he’d never get far enough away with his engines damaged.
note 322
Skade wanted to nod, but the pedestal prevented it. Thank you .
The Night Council allowed her time to gather her thoughts. It was always mindful of her, always patient with her. On more than one occasion the voice had told Skade that it valued her as highly as it valued any of the elite few, perhaps more so. The relationship, in so far as Skade appreciated it, was like that between a teacher and a gifted, keenly inquisitive pupil.
Skade did not often ask herself where the voice came from or what precisely it represented. The Night Council had warned her not to dwell on such matters, for fear that her thoughts might be intercepted by others.
Skade found herself recalling the occasion on which the Night Council had first made itself known to her and revealed something of its nature.
note 323 it had told her, note 324