Interregnum

"Turn them loose," said the smuggler. "Or you can stay here and be absorbed by the Cheese."

"Just do it, Grampamama," said Vespa. "The old world is dead, who knows how the new one will be."

So Carbuncle did: tears in their eyes, sick with shame, they peeled back the seals and gently shook the blisters onto the table. They stretched their delicate limbs, paws in tiny fists, and opened their pink maws in lazy yawns. They wiggled their whiskers, blinked their black eyes, sat up, and looked around.

The Mr. Prospector was crawling with blisters. It was such a horror show of promiscuity Grampamama Carbuncle refused to leave their stateroom unless they absolutely had to. They spent the trip cuddled up with Miesque working on a family tree. They tried to prevent Vespa from venturing out as well, but while the Mr. Prospector was small and rundown and entirely jury-rigged from salvage, it was still a starship to explore, and besides, Vespa had a prurient obsession with what the gene blisters now appeared to be: a seething organism the smuggler called "The Mice"; a synergetic interstitial network the manifestations of which appeared in the moldy old furniture and under the sink in the galley and in broom closets and in every crack and cranny one might look. They were a swarm of squirming, quivering, tickling whiskers and claws and noses. They crawled over the smuggler, delightful adornments, peering out of pockets, from behind hair, scuttling lumps like busy tumors underneath their shirts.

"Salacious," Carbuncle would hiss to Vespa at night. "Lewd. A hideous debacle. A gutter in which our legacy is terminated. A sewer."

But in the day Vespa was laughing and shivering with ecstasy as The Mice scurried about their person.

"Where are your womb animals?" Vespa asked and the smuggler smiled.

They took Vespa to the squalid mess of the bridge and from a corner piled high with chewed over laundry they produced a boot into which Vespa peered. At the bottom, nestled into the halfmoon of a dozing blister, nuzzling at its teats, were a half dozen hairless pink creatures each about as a big as Vespa's thumb.

"Baby blisters!" Vespa gasped.

"Yes," the smuggler said. "If our embryos are not exposed to the hormonal floods of a womb animal their genetic logics revert to more vestigial patterns."

"They turn into The Mice!"

"Not just mice," said the smuggler. "But mice loaded with many exabytes of genetic information, chains of data increasing in density and complexity with every generation."

They hopped from system to system, planet to planet: forgotten outposts of Empire; isolated mining colonies bypassed by emergent capital flows; Luddite bubbleworlds filled with gendered Christians; orbital refugee camps run by non-profit AIs; atavistic research facilities where the scientists had become philosophers. At every stop the smuggler would trade cargo for cargo, and, if possible, blisters for blisters. At every stop they would release some of their own stock into the biome they were leaving.

On a gas giant moon dedicated entirely to the production of pineapples, Vespa and the smuggler watched as a half dozen mice scampered into the flat, prickly, snake- and rat-infested fields that surrounded the launch pad. Raptors circled in orange skies, robotic harvesters conducted their violence on a horizon dominated by the gargantuan golden orb of the planet they circled.

"They'll never make it," said Vespa.

"If they are lucky they might," said the smuggler. "Just like you and Grampamama Carbuncle. And they'll breed. Desire will impose itself on action. Subjectivities will form in the spasm of unconscious reactions. Information will proliferate. Concentrate. Disperse. They will interact with other species at imponderably slow speeds. Accidents will happen. Like us, the mice are thrown into an existence beyond their comprehension. Like us, the mice will spread through the galaxy, minute episodes of a titanic organism. Like us, the mice will keep evolving and not know it."

The smuggler talked in perpetual riddles, stringing together words in combinations which Vespa could not rearrange into sensible thoughts. It was exhausting.

"Anarchy," said the smuggler. "Compulsion. Pleasure."

And in a flash of recognition Vespa finally understood what the smuggler was saying, understood what they were doing, understood that the question of what it all signified was irrelevant, understood that their flight across the stars was neither the end of one history, nor the beginning of another, but simply the most recent moment of an eternal recurrence in which each repetition was always different from the last. They finally understood there was nothing left to do but love the fate into which you were born.