The fate being meted out to Selene Ada upon the nearest moonlet threw the Being"s mind back to other deaths, other losses it had suffered.
For forty thousand years the Tok had explored the galaxy, streaming details of everything they"d found across the communication arrays to the Being. For forty thousand years the Being absorbed what was given to it, drinking in the deluge of knowledge, with each day bringing fresh wonders and fresh puzzles. But after those four hundred centuries, the flow of data had ebbed. The Tok in their clever machines had reached the limits of the galaxy, visited every star system, found every dust cloud and space rock, every comet wandering alone in its eccentric orbit. They"d found every complex lifeform and every monocellular speck of protoplasm.
The Being re
