Titans of Chaos

"Almost nothing. There were only two, an old woman and a young, of our race we left. Malecoand Dexithea were their names. The Olympians favored them, as they were the first to erectstatues to the gods. We walked away across the dead soil, without any word of farewell, regret, orblame. They stood and watched us depart as we walked into the sea.

"My people are stoic and dispassionate; they act without anger but kill without mercy. They donot regard life as a sacred thing, since it is merely a complex mechanism made of atoms inmotion. But we do have duties, and one of the duties, the one my teacher placed within mylong-term memory, was that the strong protect the weak. Otherwise, we would be destroyed bycreatures stronger than we, our creators. Any living machinery we create, we also must encodethis same thought-mechanism into them, so that the thought is passed though the generations likea virus.

"Another thought-chain Amelia found and stimulated in me is this: I remember a necklace Ihelped forge for someone named Harmonia. It was shaped like an amphisbaena, a two-headedsnake, and the two mouths clasped ornaments of jasper and moonstone. Each gem, eachmolecule, even each atom, contained parts of the code of prior ages of the Earth, earlierevolutionary stages of the cosmos, reflected in miniature.

"Built into the scales and patterns of the necklace were energy-bundles related to earlier strata ofevolution, including the primal atom-shapes adapted to the conditions of the early universe. Thenecklace was a history: but a cyclic history, for one head eats and consumes the other, withoutending and without beginning.

"The cosmos undergoes periodic universal conflagrations, a concentration of matter thatcompresses, builds up heat, and destroys sun, moon, stars, void, earth, ocean- everything. This isthe meaning of the jasper stone, which is ruddy. After the conflagration consumes all, the universeis empty again. This is the meaning of the moonstone, which is clear.