Their original home was a marble of white, blue, and green. Its dance with the red giant had been stable for unknown millions of orbits. But as is often the case with massive gas giants, it captured more mass. Perturbations unpredictably nudged their blue-green marble in, and the death timer began. There is no stability in chaotic systems, one is either spiraling out or in. There is no steady state. A colony either grows or dies; the egg hatches or the ant decays; life either reverses entropy or succumbs to it.

Though their original moon died, its loss enabled their adopted ice moon to move into stable orbit. The ring would thin quickly and rain ice into the gas giant or the ice moon, or out to the black depth of space. Each action cemented the strength of the ice moon’s orbit. Never again would their world be ripped apart by the giant’s gravity well. In the meantime, the organic compounds which littered the ice ring spectrographically broadcast: ‘life here.’ It was a beacon fifty percent larger than the width of the largest gas giant and unmistakable at interstellar distances.

Old Lumina walked down their tunnels, lit with the faint glow of bioluminescence. In between her other duties, she was allowed time to search the black sky. Their colony, Farside, was near the anti-bulge, the point farthest away from their gas giant. During the middle of the eclipse, it was the darkest.

Lumina crawled into a small, transparent dome. It was the bulbous exterior of a dead greenhouse ant. She let in a weaver, then closed up the room with a plug. In the center of the cramped room was a slope she could perch on.

She viewed the heavens and wondered what all the specks of light were. Tiny Suns? Tiny Moons? Were there other ants out there? Typically watchers scoured the sky for threats, and not during a full eclipse. In-falling material was a hazard, but not a worry. Instead, they kept watch for any enemy colonies who might crash near them.

The exact middle of the eclipse approached, and the shadow squelched any light reflected off the ring. She could see an amazing array of stars now, even faint milky smudges.

Lumina peered at a distant dim light. Out beyond the rings, beyond the other white ice light, was a different world, one ugly yellow and brown. They had known and recorded that world, which frequently moved in resonance with them. For every two times they went to eclipse, the pale yellow moon did too.

Since the ice-sheet was unbuckled from the planetary core, the shell drifted. Watchers recorded locations of other lights in the middle of eclipse, since that point did not wander. Small lines of silk ran over the top of the dome. Meanwhile, she used triangular tools to ease her calculations. The weaver complied by knotting the cord per her instructions.

But yellow-moon was not Lumina’s goal. Tonight she was interested in the location of the blue dot, an azure color which crawled along the sky so slow there was no resonance, or if there was, it was far outside of space ant math to calculate.

Blue Dot. Lumina told the weaver. The weaver put away the cordage for yellow-moon.

The weaver ran its antenna over a new thread, checking the name. Blue Dot. Its antenna confirmed. They would record the location on the right piece of silk this time.

Lumina stood motionless in the center of the room, and counted the number of silk lines Leading, told the weaver, and then did the same for North. Lumina saw the yellow world right on time. It went dark as it began its short eclipse. Yellow moon acted as a timer and a fixed point in their celestial geometry.

Lumina watched the blue dot. The leading side of the yellow moon broke eclipse. She counted the silks and communicated the blue dot’s location back to the weaver.

And then Lumina became puzzled. Darkness unfurled. Nothingness grew and enveloped the stars and lights like an ice-quake to a pond. There was a disk of pure black, then suddenly a point of intense light appeared. It was like the sun, but not wide—a small pinprick of infinite light.

Before she became blind, it was as though she saw everything: past, present, and something past the present… The future.

Spacetime folded, and a distant place merged with theirs. Whereas previously the light had been twenty-seven light-years away from Space Ants, somehow something had for one brief instant combined the locales with a wormhole. What was far was now close. What was the future was now the present. In all wavelengths, at all frequencies, super-cosmic energies were released in a causality spike.

All events which could happen in the intervening twenty-seven light years were violently and explosively thrust on both ends of the wormhole. Alternate realities which might have occurred, all the plausible or potential, were instantly aborted. The power requirements for the temporal and spatial synchronization grew by an exponent of three for the radius of the wormhole opening, and even an advanced alien society could only push a small device through. The wormhole collapsed and the causality of different spacetimes diverted away again, though they did not stray far. The small size of the hole determined how synchronized the realities became.

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The end effect of the energy spike was a burst of light, which flashed out and was dissipated by the square power law. But the ice moon, and the few ants which had looked up at the night sky, were bathed by blinding energies.

Lumina saw a blue and green planet—like the home world they lost. Next White Moon. Then the Silver Sphere orbiting their moon, and finally the intense white light.

She was stunned. What did she see? What could she see now? Lumina ran her antenna over her eyes as though some obstruction was on them. Then she assumed she was suddenly underground in the middle of the deep night. She searched around and bumped into an ant. Where? She asked. Caste?

The confused weaver ran its antenna over Lumina, wondering if it was some new ant, as Lumina should know who and where she was. Dome, weaver, she replied.

It dark, Lumina said. No light.

Yes, dark, the weaver agreed. Weavers relied mostly on their sense of touch to tie the cordage and read the knots. Weavers were nearsighted anyway, and the small distant pinpricks of starlight were impossible for them to see. Done? It asked.

Lumina now ran her forearms over her eyes again. Yes. New record. New light.

Name?

Silver Star.

Location? The weaver asked.

Everywhere! Record. For many moments, Lumina instructed the weaver and tried to get the weaver to record six orbits’ worth of ideas. Lumina tried to communicate a new concept which was neither now nor before. Prophecy, forecasts, or even a plan were not things Space Ants understood. Recorded events always happened in the past, as one could see in the saved cordage; but ants, including the hive mind, lived in the ever present ‘now’ which was always a conceptual barrier.

Lumina tried to get the weaver to understand. If the past were knots, and ‘now’ the next open space in front of the last knot, then how does one knot an event for the future? She eventually had the weaver tie a new line tangential to the long silk mainline. The ‘Anti-Past,’ Lumina made up the new concept, but that was not a word the weaver understood.

Lumina exited the room without providing more insight. She climbed into a nearby tunnel, the one with faint bioluminescence light, but Lumina could not detect it. Tunnel? She asked a passing worker, but the busy ant moved on. Most of the colony was asleep, waiting for the night to end. The few ants she bumped into could not help her. Muscle memory and smell returned her to her hutch. She was now certain of her blindness.

She fell into deep torpor like most of the hive without thinking more.

The night brought strange dreams. It was as though she was viewing her colony, with its exterior paths and piles of waste outside in the hard vacuum, but from an impossible vantage point. She floated until she saw the white moon. Speed increased, and the perspective grew farther away until she could see the giant crescent slice of their gas giant with her white moon now a small gleam. The view widened still more until she beheld the full sparkling beauty of the rings shining in the sun, and even the yellow moon.

Worlds now spun backwards in an unnatural direction. As her point of view went farther and faster away, the familiar sights disappeared. Then she saw her star, which she knew by color and intensity. It bathed their red giant in light, and its rings shined with the most beautiful scene Lumina had ever imagined, a scene she could never have witnessed. Then the stars themselves stretched into long lines of silk until they snapped back into points. Now she saw a white-blue sun, then a deep blue world with white clouds.

There were hints of deep forest green on its landmasses. Green, that instinctual color of life! Lumina beheld it for only a moment as everything happened in reverse and her mind’s eye whipped back through the tunnel of light until she saw her gas giant. The perspective slowed until the white moon dominated her field of view.

Then she saw the silver star.

She zoomed forward until it filled her view. Unlike any chunk of ice, unlike anything in the depths or the meteorites above. The sphere was smooth with one green glowing eye. The surrounding sky was black, as though deep underground. Then their local universe, the white moon and gas giant Lumina had always seen, unrolled—uncoiled?—she did not have the right words, but it was like the ripples on a still pool.

The silver sphere approached the white moon, and something grew off it: three white strands, silver like silk in the moonlight, but much thicker. At the end was a silver cylinder. It was not natural. The Sphere was perfectly smooth, and other than the protrusion and the green eye, perfectly spherical. It shot an impossibly straight glowing green line down at her moon, where a green dot bounced over the terrain.

The moon’s surface showed their greenhouses. Her perspective descended rapidly down to her observatory, then she saw an ant, and the point-of-view struck the ant’s eye at fatal velocity.

Lumina’s muscles tensed and she awoke, startled. Alarm! She felt another ant.

The dream ant recoiled. It stayed quiet in the blackness, but its antenna tried to calm Lumina. No Alarm. The dream ant then left.

Lumina moved her eyes around, but still saw nothing. Permanent blindness. She heard the familiar bustle of ants who had already started work.

Lumina navigated back to her observatory by muscle memory. Still, she could not see. So she again tried to get her weaver to ‘tie-forward’ the locations of things as she saw in her dream. She dictated six orbits worth of forecasts. Regardless of how accurate any tie-forwards were, Lumina could not hide the fact she was blind.