Atop the immaculate tower of ivory,

Pale souls revolve like constellations.

They eulogize their own eternal and glorious passing.

They shed crystalline tears that leave no path on any face.

Their long and lonely journey will birth their own destruction.

On the immaculate tower of ivory,

There exists no impurity, no sin.

Beneath the holy water of their song,

All living creatures receive salvation.

I look up at the ivory tower; it pierces the clouds and reaches toward the stars. Immaculate, without stain. I stand here at the base, as close as any being can. I still hear the song: does anyone else hear it? No one can see its top. You could stand back a mile or more and still not see its full height. The song seems to come from the very top, so of course no one else can hear it—but I can. Why? The surface of the tower, smooth as polished jade, is engraved with clouds and vast fields of stars. The work was done with nanolasers, and so the light that touches its surface shifts along the contours as if flowing through the dimension beyond space, as if a path in time is also open to it. And there are flowers carved there, so white as to chill the hearts of those who visit the tombs of the dead, yet they are clustered in bouquets as if to please the eye and blend harmoniously with the images of alien constellations.

There should be butterflies engraved there as well, I think. Where are the butterflies?

The shadow cast behind the tower is large enough to shroud three planets in the dark of eternal night.

This side, facing the sun, is brushed over lightly with a golden gauze, a hazy mix of sunlight and shade. This monolith could be the very gate of heaven, sufficient to encompass all of the sin and retribution of the universe within its charitable embrace.

At the tower’s foot and at mine lies a vast, misty expanse of long whiskers like water weeds, inclining in the direction of the planet’s weak wind. The bowing of the grasses appears to be a gesture of goodwill directed toward any approaching pilgrims.

Not even a mote of dust presumes to rest upon the ivory tower. In fact, particles of metallic powder seem to be flying away from this place of beauty and trouble, dispersing in clouds that make the already bright sky even more dazzling to the eyes. This brilliant light is why they chose DE54, a smallish planet orbiting far from the central star of the D5 system, as the site for the ivory tower.

The light from D5 shines upon this sturdy yet delicate planet from a great distance, but this region of the planet spends two-thirds of its time in the radiance of the extended dawn. The spotless white nimbus of the star freezes at the horizon, and the tower and star regard each other from afar. Each seems to enhance the beauty of the other. Who can say if the starlight is making a pilgrimage to the tower that stands in all its dignified grandeur, or if the tower is gazing with envy at the vital force of the sun?

As the “top expert” at the center of the research into the wandering elephant phenomenon, I was invited here as “Professor” Bai Xuan to be part of this ribbon-cutting ceremony upon the completion of the ivory tower, a monument whose magnificence rivals any achievement in human history. I had been asked to deliver a speech at the inauguration of the obelisk that would “stir the hearts of all who heard it.” The text before me fills five pages in small print. Every word to be stressed and every pause to be breathed have been carefully marked for me, ostensibly to ensure that the Naoxi and other peoples in the audience can understand; or that, at the very least, their interpreter devices can accurately translate and transcribe what is being said.

The script has been written and annotated for me with meticulous care. I feel ill.

Do I really deserve to act as this “professor”? I have a degree, but I’m not an academic. They speak of me with this vague title, “top expert in the field” when in fact there are only a handful of researchers anywhere close to this field.

Everyone here is more interested in the creatures’ economic value than in their biology. Almost everyone.

The faint singing circles around me, and seemingly only me. Listening to it is like sinking into a stillness as deep as the sea, or into the benevolence of the sunlight; it is like the dancing of butterflies on a spring breeze. But when I look up, the dazzling sky hurts my eyes and stifles the vitality of the song.

The leaders of the neighboring, populated DE5 planets are the lowest ranking Community figures present at today’s great gathering. But on this day, all the important visitors from other systems envy this humble star system, which happened to be home to a dwarf planet with the precise type of sturdy and recessed terrain that could serve as the foundation for this unique structure, the perfect gravity to support the huge ivory tower, and the perfect illumination to embellish it. The planet was the perfect size to show off the magnitude of the tower; it was as if the planet had been designed for this particular purpose and for nothing else.

The prime ministers of the cultural and political departments of the Galactic Destiny Community arrived here yesterday after crossing a third of the galaxy. The presidents and directors of massive corporations such as Gaimo and Leiwang naturally wanted to take this opportunity to promote themselves as well. After all, they had covered the lion’s share of the cost of raising the tower.

And so it is that at this moment, everyone, perhaps the entire galaxy, is looking at me in real time over their lag-free quantum relays, looking at my ordinary face and my trained and hollow smile. Everyone wants to be standing here, and some among these powerful people will stand here after me, but now, the first person to speak and be recognized by the entire universe is me.

I am called an “authority,” but I am an authority without power to save or redeem anything.

I know some of the people in the audience who are staring at me with unwavering eyes: that pack who helped me write the speech and pushed me onto this stage. What do they want from me? What do they think is going to happen? They crowned me with the title of “authority.” Any misstep now might reflect badly on them, but it would surely bring down ruin upon myself, utter discredit. I would become a pariah.

Look at all these eager eyes, the humans and the others, full of expectation.

And I, a lowly sinner, am about to speak.

Just this once, would it be okay to make the other choice, the mistake? I want to tell the story.

And now, I am going to tell it to you.

The first time I saw the remains of a wandering elephant was on the eastern shores of an azure, copper-sulfate ocean on CY933. That body was really a very small specimen, compared with the many discovered later. To speak in layman’s terms, it was probably only the size of five adult blue whales, three Tubula, or two Great Kans. Granted, compared with most creatures familiar to us, it was fairly large.

It lay placidly on a beach that was covered by sand and velvet sapphire flowers, allowing the waves to lightly slap its snow-white fur. It had apparently died peacefully, as if it were dreaming a beautiful, endless dream, so tranquil did it appear under the blue vault of heaven. The corners of its mouth turned up in a smile as sweet as that of a river dolphin, and two tusks that stretched almost half the length of the body pointed upward toward the sky.

When the creature was first discovered by the local Fisheries Administration, they called in oceanographic experts from the planet and the nearby systems, who put forward all sorts of hypotheses about this new variety of marine life. And, naturally, there were those outside the scientific community who looked to old tales to explain this phenomenon. Some wanted to name the creature after the great “Kun,” a leviathan of ancient earth legend that could transform itself into a giant bird, the roc, also mythological. These tales were hastily overruled by some of us in the scientific community who hurried to choose a more neutral and modern name for the creature, before ancient superstitions could take root. Until we could assign a proper taxonomic classification, we called them “planetary elephants,” “wandering elephants,” or just “wanderers.”

In fact, no one could figure out how the wanderer came to be there on CY933. The space monitoring stations on the planet had not recorded its landing. The species did not belong to the local ecosystem, so it must have come from somewhere else. But where and how? We simply did not know.

And at the same time, the Community was occupied with more pressing issues. Every Community department was all-hands-on-deck dealing with XU2, where the red giant was nearing supernova. Between radiation management, energy reclamation, and evacuation of the surrounding areas, naturally there was plenty of urgent work to attend to. And so it was that even our Biological Research Institute had only two idlers left in the office who could be spared for the analysis of this newly discovered organism:  Harry and me.

Of course, what we found was surprising, even stretching the limits of belief. The creature had reached the surface of the planet intact and apparently without injury; there was no trace of its impact on the beach.

So there we were on that sand, the two most worthless young members of the Community Biological Research Institute, good for no other task in the universe, and I was now the senior member of our tiny investigative “Team.”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Team Leader, can I take one picture first?” Harry was scampering excitedly around the carcass of the planetary elephant like a three-year-old child. I think he wanted to take a selfie against the seascape for his girlfriend. Did he have a girlfriend?

But I was practiced at declining his requests.

“No, you can’t.”

“Aww, it’s such beautiful scenery. Being here is a rare opportunity. We may never come back here.”

“I said no, unless you want to be accused of taking a vacation on the taxpayers’ dime.” I firmly quashed his request, squatted down, and began my investigation of the body. Although the appropriate authorities had already sent us three-dimensional scan modeling of the “unidentified organism,” there is often much to learn from direct physical inspection.

I suddenly heard the melody as if from a music box, ringing in my ears.

“Do you hear something? It sounds like singing.”

“Huh? Team Leader, you must be hearing things. I don’t hear anything but the waves.”

“Hm.” I thought he might be right.

In my memory, I had never seen such a pure creature of snowy white, such a beautiful corpse. Who would dare utter a profanity in its presence? The existence of this thing seemed to represent the essence of life itself. Even through the gloves, I could feel the softness of its fur, smoother than silk. We would soon compare the body with that of elephants, but standing before this first specimen, I thought the body was more akin to a fish or lizard. Where the back halves of the two huge “teeth” connected, the joint was curved into the shape of a rugby ball. There were three pairs of limbs on the creature’s sides ending in amphibious webbed palms; these appendages were also covered with long white fur.

It was the most beautiful species I had ever seen.

Not a grain of sand adhered to the skin or snow-white fur, an unaccountable phenomenon considering the environment, the waves, and the length of the fur. Also unfathomable was the creature’s manner of transportation.

Did it drift to this location alive and eventually die here, or…

“Team Leader—there’s something over here.”

…alive or dead, it could have drifted here, eventually pulled to the surface by gravity. But a creature of this size, enduring the friction of entering the atmosphere without apparent damage, and the surface showing no signs of impact … it didn’t make any sense.

“Team Leader! Team Leader!”

“Can you please stop shouting and give me the probe. Quickly.” I looked impatiently in his direction, but the man’s face displayed an aggrieved expression, as if I had wronged him terribly.

“Team Leader, come here quickly and take a look at this!” His face suddenly reverted to his usual flippant smile. He looked proud of himself, as if he had pulled something over on me. I had actually believed this idiot for a second. Would he ever grow the fuck up?

This purported “wunderkind” of the department had acted exceptionally innocent and upstanding during his early days on the job, but gradually he had revealed his true self. I’m not saying that youthful liveliness was a bad thing, but sometimes Harry was simply too much for me to deal with.

“Cut it out, Harry! We’re not here for sightseeing. We’re not tourists. Get serious.” I was on the verge of using harsher language.

“I am serious. You seriously need to look at this!” He actually grabbed my left arm with all his youthful vigor and pulled me roughly, like a farmer dragging a dead pig, toward the side of the corpse that was facing the ocean.

A milky white liquid dripped from a gash in the skin. The fluid had no perceivable odor, and the inner layer of white flesh was faintly exposed along the edges of the wound.

Internal fluids were active. Was this thing still alive?

“Quick, Harry, get the emergency aid pack!” Those were the words I spoke, but my legs instead ran me back to the spaceship while Harry didn’t move from the creature’s side. God damn it! Why had I only carried the autopsy kit? Why hadn’t I considered this possibility?

Damn it!

“Hey, Professor! It could be that there are no organs left in the body. That doesn’t look like blood. It’s probably decomposing viscera. I think I see maggots.” Harry’s voice seemed to reach me from a great distance. When I turned back, it was as if he were standing next to a beached snow-white battleship, or a small island.

Damn it! This is not the time to lament the insignificance of human life. I staggered back to Harry’s position.

“Look at this, Team Leader! Look at this!” At some point he had actually followed regulations and donned protective gloves. He had gently peeled back the skin at the edges of the wound. The cut was not directed inward; rather, it appeared as if something had pushed out from the inside. Harry opened his eyes wide, looking at me with all of his feigned innocence like a boy in kindergarten hoping for a kind word from the teacher.

The discovery made me pause, but his expression annoyed me. Was he serious? How old was this guy? I started to speak, but stopped myself to lean down and look more closely. The fluid came quickly now from the widening wound, and my body went numb as if a taser blast had shot through me.

Death.

“Go! Move! Get out of here!”

“Team Leader?”

“Run! NOW!” Not caring how crazy I looked, I seized Harry’s wrist through our thick protective clothing, getting as good a grip as I could, and pulled him back up the beach away from the corpse. I didn’t slow down until we had reached a distance of about two hundred meters from the creature, and dragged down by our heavy clothing, we finally sat where we fell.

Behind us, at the site of the creature’s landing, the seething sound of the internal liquid hitting the atmosphere crescendoed into an explosion whose heat wave hit us before the sound did.

“Harry, whatever you do,” my breath emerged in gasps, and I had trouble speaking, “do not touch anything with those gloves. Nothing.” I continued to pant heavily. When was the last time I had sprinted that far? I had probably been a small child; now I was a sedentary adult wearing cumbersome protective gear.

“Emergency order!” I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself as I communicated to the ship’s computer through the transponder in my helmet. “Immediately implement a level-three blockade. Seal off a one-kilometer perimeter around the body of the unidentified creature.”

There in the distance, where the pus-like fluid flowed from the carcass, all the blue, velvet flowers on the beach began to wither, but they quickly transformed into a shape similar to the fur we had seen on the creature. Carried on the wind toward us from the rapidly expanding prairie of wild white grass came the exotic scent of lilies and winter jasmine.

“Fascinating, Team Leader. Seems like the can of worms we opened up doesn’t stink after all.” Harry excitedly raised his toxic gloves high to make a celebratory “Yea!” gesture. The protective molecular-vibration layer on the exterior of the gloves shed the remaining pus from Harry’s hands, leaving a white scar like a spinal column in the earth.

The elegy sounded in my ears like a symphony, as though it would flood the whole planet.

The provisional designation of the CY933 creature as an “unknown organism” did not last long. Similar corpses, many much larger than the first, soon appeared in every corner of the Milky Way galaxy, all of them seemingly springing out of the void without any clue as to their origin.

No satellite monitoring system on any planet had witnessed the descent of a wandering elephant, not one. The creatures seemed to be able to find an invisible path between distant places, yet they all died mysteriously at the end of their journey.

It was natural for us to make a connection to the concept of the “elephant graveyard,” a location in the wild where elephants go when they know they are dying, but the planetary elephants appearing throughout the universe did not conform to this pattern. They were not a herd of elephants choosing to gather their bones in one place. Instead, they had apparently separated from each other, putting vast distances between the members of their group. Planetary elephants did not seem to be herd animals; they did not live in groups. Or at least they did not die in groups.

They seemed to me like children in a nursery rhyme, sailing alone across the starry skies.

And as the numbers of specimens rose, the size of the newly discovered individuals reached dimensions that were difficult to countenance. The fifth reported specimen had been as large as a small city on Earth. Common people who could not imagine an organism so large began to speculate that the elephants might be shards of stars, exploded splinters drifting through the universe following some apocalyptic event.

Perhaps, they said, these were fragments produced by the ongoing collapse of the XU2 system, but how could anything like this have escaped the strong gravitational force of the red supergiant? The star, which was still expanding rapidly, was on track to consume the entire XU2 star system in less than a year. According to the best projections, there was a 90 percent or greater possibility that the red supergiant would explode suddenly in a massive supernova disaster, which  could extend the damage to nearby systems.

In view of the shocking size of the corpse and the two huge tusk-like objects, it was at this point that we named these creatures “planetary elephants,” though other names persisted.

My own opinion was that the long fur covering its body made the creature closer to a wooly mammoth than an elephant.

Or maybe more like a butterfly? This inexplicable thought flashed through my mind for the first time, and not the last.

The corpses of planetary elephants landed constantly, and their frequent discovery in far-flung locations inevitably drew the attention of eccentric, spiritually inclined Community members who didn’t have enough real work to occupy their time. They called these beautiful corpses “tears of the universe,” “dead gods from distant lands,” and “immaculate unstained angels”—every mystical name you can imagine. Scholars of the occult and cynical local politicians forcibly combined the planetary elephant phenomenon with their own religious cosmologies or national mythologies, and they brazenly preached that the visitors were clear indications of a special grace from God, whatever god the locals called their own.

But it was not even those people who profited the most from the elephants.

The composition analysis results were so confounding that they made me want to throw the keypad across the room. The outer layer of fur on the planetary elephants was made of a biological fiber that had never been seen before. The molecules were similar to silicon, but the analysis suggested regular structures, tidy little machines, like chloroplasts. Even with the blueprint right in front of me, I still could not fathom the design principle. If the structure of the body’s fur was this obscure, I felt hopeless when I thought about the pus-like fluid. I couldn’t even obtain analytical data on that substance. As soon as our ordinary lab instruments came into contact with the smallest drops of that liquid, the fluid quickly transformed into a structure similar to the hair. The more specialized, and expensive, equipment that arrived later fared no better.

The relatively large outflow of bodily fluids in the case of that first corpse resulted in the coastal waters within a radius of one kilometer losing all biodiversity and becoming a forest of the white fibrous material, a semicircle of silky water weeds. The process was rapid and violent in that case. The sea water had boiled, and the heat had penetrated even the ionospheres produced by our protective suits. Harry and I had suffered burns of varying degrees.

The thing that made the elephants worthy of the name was the fact that, although the function of the planetary elephant teeth was not clear, their physical properties were nearly the same as those of the Earth ivory with which we were already familiar. Their resistance to weathering and their strength fell within the top tier of all known materials. In terms of these qualities, the tusks could compete with the hull of a standard starship.

Perhaps the creatures were biological starships.

The bodies could be “docked” anywhere: in forests and cities, on seashores, moons, and asteroids. But unlike a satellite or spacecraft, they were never found in orbit around any celestial body; these ships invariably came to shore.

A huge biological corpse that takes up space and is full of dangerous fluids, yet sports magnificent ivory appendages—naturally, these bodies would not be left alone. The bodily fluids could be released into the magnetic field of space and transformed into fibers as fine as silk. These fibers could be made into clothes more precious than mink coats; and of course the “teeth” must be harvested and not wasted.

Ivory, that long-prohibited trade, returned to the marketplaces of the universe via a new path, and the trade swept through the galaxies like a tidal wave.

“Now, here are the questions we’re trying to answer.” I sat dispirited before the big flickering screen, unable to turn my eyes away from the three-dimensional image of the planetary elephant corpse. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, an endless obsessive loop, as if the answers must be hidden somewhere in my fruitless repetition of that act.

“One, still the old question: if the planetary elephant falls to the surface after death, how can it fall without sustaining any damage? Hypothesis: there must be some special function or ability housed in the structure of the creature, maybe in the fur or the tusks, that makes this possible without reference to the creature’s viability.”

Butterflies. The seemingly irrelevant word again echoed in my thoughts.

I looked into my own eyes reflected on the screen. I was searching for my own soul there so I could take hold of it, interrogate it, force it to yield the mysteries it withheld from my conscious mind.

“Question two: how did the elephants travel over vast distances, appearing suddenly in all corners of the Community, and with such apparent randomness that when the computer tries to calculate the possible origin of the phenomenon, the recommended search radius is half the size of the Milky Way? Hypothesis: the planetary elephant has powerful abilities of space navigation written into its DNA and, again, developed in structures like, possibly, the fur or teeth.”

“Whatever this thing is, Team Leader, it’s a huge discovery.” Harry shuffled slowly in front of me, blocking the image. He was always moving around the room, like a hyperactive child. “I mean, this guy’s amazing. Interstellar traveler, super good-looking. He’s frickin’ James T. Kirk.”

Picard, I thought, but did not engage out loud with his childish prattle. “Question three—” I was trying to ignore the youth and continue the interrogation of my subconscious, which seemed to have access to more truth than my waking mind. “Why has the planetary elephant only appeared now? If they’ve traveled from a great distance and journeyed through Community space, why have we never seen them before? And why are they scattered as widely as they are?”

My first sight of the planetary elephant flashed into my brain. Suddenly my mind was a dirty rag dipped in the copper blue of the alien ocean; the blue water rose, the stains gradually faded away, and I was lost in the vision.

The waves pulsed against the velvet flowers on the shore, and the petals escaped into the sea with the gentle, relentless waves. The petals fluttered, spun, and sank in the eternal motion of the spindrift. The snow-white fur was like aging seaweed, like the gentle swaying of frail bodies or the pale skirts of young dancers spinning in unison to the accompaniment of the wind’s song.

Then the world grew dark, and the stars were extinguished like table lamps beside a bed, inviting all living beings to fall into dreams together. I strove with all my strength to keep my eyes wide, but in the endless darkness, I could not be certain whether they were open or closed. What was I looking for in the deep blackness? A voice was calling to me, a gentle singing surrounded me—lofty, noble, inviolable.

The song grew and became a symphony or holy chant, not deafening, but resonant, as though the universe were composing another Hamlet or The Tempest, like the weeping of stars. The music flowed through my being like a river, carrying hundreds of thousands of tiny firefly lights meandering toward the ocean.

The tiny lights stretched along the length of the channel, combined into larger stars, and at last I saw the enormous white wanderers emerge like ships in a breathtaking fleet, soaring into the black, their magnificent bulk sufficient to hide from my sight the brilliance of the stars.

The singing was undying and unconcerned, at once dreadful and joyful.

“Team Leader, are you there? You can’t sleep with your eyes open. You’re not a Kene from B6, are you? I think I would have seen the signs before this, if you know what I mean. Wake up!”

Harry waved his hand a few times quickly in front of my face, trying to wake up his colleague who had clearly lost all awareness of the world around him. I blinked and attempted to affect an expression of calm to protect my image in his eyes as the “Team Leader.”

“What is it, Harry? Did you come up with something?”

“Team Leader, I was thinking; if the wandering elephants always die in the atmosphere of the planets where they are discovered, how is it possible that they survive the vacuum of space on the journey? And if they die before arriving within the planet’s atmosphere, how are their corpses so fresh and well-preserved? This represents a significant contradiction. Furthermore, all evidence points to the fact that the planetary elephants never experience descent and landing, and yet we still indulge this irrational fantasy that they must have some magical ability that allows them to fall into an atmosphere without manifesting any signs of having fallen into an atmosphere.” Harry said all this in a single excited breath. Now he stared at me with piercing eyes, expecting me to comprehend his theory.

And in fact, at that moment I did indeed understand his meaning. So this kid actually was some kind of genius.

“What you’re saying is that . . .” I was following his trail of breadcrumbs, but he couldn’t resist finishing his speech.

“They seem to have appeared out of thin air; therefore, they must have appeared out of thin air. The only remaining possibility, however unlikely, has to be the truth. There is no space travel involved as we understand it. They are capable of direct and instant spatial migration—teleportation—on an individual scale. They must each carry a kind of portable wormhole, an even more impressive and unbelievable ability than the original hypothesis, when you think about it, but it has to be the answer.” Harry’s right hand massaged his chin so vigorously that I worried he would crumple his young face into an unrecognizable mass of wrinkles.

“If that is in fact the case, we can ignore the question of navigational ability and focus on these questions: one, why do they leave? Two, what is the cause of death? And three, which comes first, transition or decease? If death comes first, then someone must be delivering the corpses across the universe. If they travel first, why do they die, and why do they travel across the galaxy to a place where they cannot survive? Clearly, within the bounds of such an enormous universe, it is impossible that they could find no other place suitable for their survival. The most important thing for us to do now is to find out where they came from.” Harry spilled out his ideas rapidly, his lips curled into a grimace of anxiety and excitement, his eyes almost pleading for me to understand.

And what could I say in reply? I did indeed understand and agree.

Somehow this person before me had transformed himself from conceited prodigy to obsequious disciple to astute colleague, and I suddenly felt myself to be slightly unworthy of this “Team Member.”

“Huh. So you really are some kind of genius.” I assumed a rather exaggerated expression of disdain to downplay how impressed I actually was.

“Team Leader, say it again, Sir!”

“I said you are a genius!” For once I allowed myself to play along with his antics and deliberately shouted the words into his ear. In truth, I wanted to pick him up and spin him around, I was so excited about the now-obvious insight he had provided.

Almost immediately, I felt the need to pour some cold water on this self-congratulatory celebration. Maybe I could push this boy-genius to scale even greater heights.

“Harry, let’s slow this down.” I held down his jumping shoulders, and he paused. “We need to figure out where they come from.”

“Right, Team Leader.”

Lift your face to the skies,

And pick a star, my child.

The sky is full of stars, as far as the eyes can see.

We will eventually travel far.

Lonely wanderer, far from home,

Pick a star,

My dear child.

Not long after we started investigating the origins of the planetary elephants, the proposal for the construction of the ivory tower was officially approved, and the Community began the work of design and of site selection. The public and official mania for the project was such that no one was seriously concerned about cost or materials or logistics or harsh working conditions. What concerned the committee was that they might find no location with a suitable environment to complement and bring out the beauty of the monument. And what worried them even more than that was the thought that, after construction was complete, an even larger planetary elephant might be discovered with even larger tusks.

Planetary elephant number 19032 was truly gargantuan, almost the size of Hong Kong, so big that people first wondered whether there existed a planet whose bedrock and gravitational field could bear the appalling weight of its teeth. But in the end, they found one. The interior of planet D54 was filled with a rare low-density gas, which provided that orb with a sufficiently large level surface and a low gravitational field. The bony material of the tusks themselves was relatively low in mass, so a tower that should not be able to stand had found a colossus capable of bearing it upon its shoulders.

They chose D54 probably also in part because of the realities of transport logistics. No quantum jump base in existence could hold such a behemoth.

So, in the end, it had to be towed, like a planet wandering through the starry sky. If the ocean were magnified to the size of the infinite universe, this was a blue whale swimming across that sea, a lonely singer of songs, the mightiest creature in the boundless void. Like everyone else in the Community, I had watched the wanderer being drawn slowly forward by the tow-ships, its dreamlike white brilliance shining against the black background of the universe like an angel.

But I cared little for the spectacle, as Harry and I were preparing for our own journey. At the time of the groundbreaking for the ivory tower project, the two of us were hitching a ride in a Dyson ball spacecraft crewed by a star energy collection team. We were being tossed around in the eerie and beautiful Yao Shun wormhole, named for legendary sage kings of ancient times. We watched dark blue and deep purple mingle in infinite combinations through the quartz glass.

And we arrived at last at the Community transit station nearest to the edge of the XU system.

A planetary elephant nearly half the size of the old Type 003 super-carrier was being processed here at the port, and we had arrived just in time to witness the procedure. Lucky us. The transport ship first dragged the corpse into a large off-planet belt of trash and waste, then thrust hundreds of organic catheters into the back of the creature, releasing an enormous volume of bodily fluid all at once into space. After the massive energy surge released by the transformation, the collection ship approached to harvest the newly formed white fibers and to flay the creature for its valuable pelt.

Finally, the great ivory bones would be shipped directly to the buyer’s location, and if desired, their bulk would be sliced into smaller slabs before the ornamental carving.

The butchery was expert and efficient.

Even in the vacuum, the singing still swayed around my ears, rising and falling like a rowboat on the waves.

The predicted supernova would provide a feast of energy for the Community. This sector and thousands of others in the region housed countless force field distortion meters and Dyson ball conversion plates, embracing the doomed system, holding a bright flame in cupped hands.

Originally the Community had no intention of lending us a spacecraft to take us from this transit and collection station on the outskirts of XU2 to our final destination, still far away, just inside the XU2 system. However, after the Community learned that we had a plan to find the home of the planetary elephants, like a mask changer in a Sichuan Opera, the government’s indecision changed to resolution in the twinkling of an eye. Suddenly they acted as if they were inviting us to XU2 rather than responding to a request, as if the whole project had been their idea in the first place. They generously loaned us a new ship, the best gear, and three experienced crew members who appeared to be even more excited than I was.

To tell the truth, what I was feeling was not so much excitement as a powerful sense of foreboding that had gradually mastered my consciousness. Even the seemingly oblivious and insensitive Harry was quiet, as if he too were vaguely aware that, as the number of planetary elephant appearances declined, the matter was moving toward a point of crisis. We thought we already had the answers, but now it was up to us to go find the evidence to prove it to everyone else.

This voyage and these sensations had probably been predetermined weeks earlier when we had finally fixed upon our best guess as to the location of the original homeland of the wandering creatures. It was this hypothesis that had brought us here to the edge of a system on the verge of annihilation.

“Unfortunately these big dudes don’t carry anything that reveals their birthplace,” Harry had said on that auspicious night. “They forgot to bring their wallets when they walked out the door. Even if we were possessed by the spirits of all the greatest detectives—Sherlock Holmes, Arsène Lupin, Edogawa Ranpo, and Judge Dee—we still might not be able to find their home.” Harry was sprawled on his back in the middle of the sofa, with one leg carelessly propped up on the back of the furniture. I resisted the urge to pick up the biggest dictionary on the bookshelf and hit him in the face.

But he was not wrong in his rough statement of the problem. I was sitting on the edge of the couch, and images from my dreams flashed dimly behind my eyes.

“Hey, Team Leader, why did we even assume that the elephant was ever alive in the first place? What if the creature is not even a living thing? What if it simply resembles certain living things in its structure and shape? What if it’s something else, like a rare kind of rock, or a fossil?”

“Because they’re singing.”

“Okay, Team Leader, you always come back to that. I know it makes sense to you, but it doesn’t help anyone else, and it can make some people have doubts about you.” Harry laughed, but his expression showed some concern.

What a joke. This guy was concerned about me.

The singing was real, mellifluous and sorrowful, like a murmuring stream surrounding me, as if I sat at the center of the world and all the emotions of that world were transformed into wind and waves. They brushed past my shoulder, and when I turned, they were gone.

The creatures looked something like whales, something like elephants, but can the work of classifying the planetary elephant really be that simple? There was something more complicated going on here. We had all extrapolated our concepts of them based primarily on outward appearance. We had created controlling paradigms biased by human experience.

Butterfly. That maddening word swam up yet again from the bottom of the subconscious ocean.

The points of light from my visions of the wandering creatures finally coalesced into a massive brilliant ball of plasma lightning which, when unleashed, struck deep into my mind.

“Okay. If the wanderers originally lived anywhere near a highly developed region, it is highly unlikely that they would have remained unknown until now.” I guessed my eyes must be as wide as a goldfish, but at that moment I didn’t care how ridiculous I appeared.

“However, naturally there are many undeveloped areas in the Community, right? And even the most flourishing cluster of galaxies, cluster A, has many outlier districts. So this line of thought can only take us so far. But the next clue should have been obvious. When do creatures leave an area? When do we see mass emigration? Where do refugees come from? If a region is stable, why should large numbers of living creatures pour out of there all at once? A slow-developing crisis would lead to a moderate outflow of refugees over a long period of time. The planetary elephants have appeared throughout the populated universe over the course of a relatively brief period of time. What environmental changes could have caused this sudden exodus? Put another way, what immediate danger or environmental crisis is forcing these creatures to resort to separation from their community, to turning their backs on their homeland? The wanderers aren’t exploring; they are escaping.”

The planetary elephants were not on a trek through the stars; they were fleeing into exile.

I was breathing heavily, my face twisted into a grimace like a triumphant demon or a heretic convinced that his crooked ways are righteous. All the muscles in my face were tight with hysterical excitement.

Truth, song, butterflies, the starry universe, confused and disordered lyrics roared in my ears.

“They’re from XU2!” Harry jumped up on the sofa cushions like a rabbit, and almost fell off as he bounced. “And since, for the moment, the wanderers are still being discovered, it seems that their planet has not yet been swallowed by the red giant. They must live at the outer edge of the system. Team Leader, you are a genius!” Harry leapt toward me from his position on the sofa, even at a crouch standing a full head higher than me. He would have knocked me over if it weren’t for my military training. As it was, I ended up holding him tightly by the waist and spinning him around.

The singing became ever more sonorous and ever more forlorn, but it continued to encircle me. The song had not ended.

Even with the ubiquity of material transfer technology, the entire trip from the A system—hitching a ride through the Yao Shun, and then on to our final destination thanks to our chartered Community craft to the border regions within the gravitational field of the XU2 system—took us more than two months. And the latter leg constituted the majority of that time. The dark red ball of fire tinged with blue actually could not yet be called large. From this distance it could even be called small. However, standing on the ship’s observation deck, I was still drawn powerfully by its Prometheus fire, headed obdurately toward extinction. I looked directly at the dazzling object for a long while, unable to turn away.

Out of its vast sea, the red leviathan constantly spat tongues of coronal fire. The raging solar storm beat against the ship’s Dyson ball collection casing and made visible the countless invisible particle clouds floating in the distance, revealing fluttering flame-colored butterflies, dancing in a solar breeze.

Although the distant orb did not appear intimidatingly large, the red supergiant’s rate of expansion was terrifying to consider.

The seething churn of the roiling red star had engulfed all of the delicate planets within its sphere along with the rest of the system’s unpalatable matter. Still, as the enormous fireball slowly shed its mass and lost gravitational force, the planets at the periphery of its realm were granted more time and space in which they might escape destruction. They slowly drifted even farther toward the fringes of the system, as if they had real hope of escaping their shackles.

The conclusion of the struggle was never in question; even the outermost planets were butterflies in a tempest.

The singing, an endless lullaby, accompanied me to sleep every night. Sometimes I would wake with a start from a dream, find myself face-to-face with the expanding hellscape outside my cabin window. I would allow my thoughts to whirl about with the patterns in the flame, chaotic, and finally I would fall back into a troubled sleep.

We arrived inevitably at the destination that drew us in even as we dreaded it. As far as anyone could measure, XU29 and XU210 were the only two surviving planets at this late stage, and we naturally chose to descend first to the larger planet: XU210. The massive volume and low relative gravity of this planet were almost exactly the same as those at the ivory tower building site.

Spiderwebs of rivers that had recently been glaciers crisscrossed the planet. The endemic bitter cold had been destroyed by the warm ardor of the red supergiant’s light. All that remained now were endless waves of water and of heat. The rushing river near our landing site raged like a pulsing drum, and white waves splashed rhythmically onto the shore. The planet still held an atmosphere, but nothing we could breathe.

“Team Leader, do you really think this is the place? I don’t see any signs of life.” Harry’s voice came through the helmet com with a slight electric twang.

“They’re here. I’m sure of it.”

The singing that surrounded me had coalesced into a maelstrom, and the spiraling pipes of the accompanying organ were so tall that they blocked out the sky, but the pipes were a clustered amalgam of brilliant creatures, searching for a paradise where they would not die.

Butterfly.

“Harry, you come with me. Captain Yuan, stay with the ship and keep coms open at all times. I don’t anticipate trouble, but if there’s any problem, I’ll call you in immediately.” I beckoned for Harry to follow me.

Black soil and purple crystals mingled under our boots. Fragments of an unknown substance, charred black, littered the wide plain before us. In spite of the thickness of our boot soles, the sharp coal-black shards gave me pause. Tall amethyst monoliths rose like jagged saw teeth here and there and were gathered thickly into a kind of stone forest in the distance. The low gravity allowed us to bounce lightly forward, and soon the spaceship disappeared in the distance behind us.

“We’re almost there.”

The voices had guided me to the landing zone, and they were guiding me still. I had directed our pilot to land in a place I knew was not far from our destination, but also not too close. We only needed to follow the river, and the song, to find the ocean.

“Team Leader, it’s getting hotter. Do you feel it?”

“I feel it.” Even the suits from the energy harvesting team were barely sufficient. If it weren’t for the Dyson ball material, we’d be dead already. But I bounded lightly forward without a pause.

The truth. I had to see the truth for myself.

I was not here now as a researcher, but as a mere human being, crossing this black earth, feeling the scorching wind battering the special material of the suit, which used the energy to sustain my life-support functions. The heat that could kill me was absorbed and transformed into power that kept me alive.

The sunlight refracted through the crystal forest forming a maze of light, a fairy tale world. The sky was as red as flame, and the waves of heat warped and twisted the space around us. All of this would soon be buried in a sea of ​​fire. It would burn until nothing remained, not even the ash and the dust.

“Harry, think about this: why is there never any dust around the planetary elephants?” I stared at the dazzling brilliance of a crystal before me, looking for my own reflection.

“Dust doesn’t stick to them. We already decided it must be some magnetic property, static electricity, like polarities repelling each other.”

“No. It’s just the opposite. They don’t repel the dust. They absorb small inanimate matter and transform it. The elephants are all about transformation. Their cilia, their body fluids, all of it exists to be transformed.”

“But how can they do that after they’re dead? It’s impossible to maintain absorption properties after death.”

I sighed. “Harry . . . they’re not dead.” I leaned over and dug up some dirt from the base of several crisscrossing crystal pillars. The riotous profusion of colors and textures in the crystals was enthralling. I experienced a translucent sense of life: pure, unadulterated, singular. What would it be like to live here before the apocalypse, like children, ignorant and fearless, in a fairy tale forest?

“Team Leader, are you okay? Your words are getting more poetic and less scientific,” Harry forced a laugh and touched my shoulder.

“What if the elephants are not a single life form, but rather are singular forms full of life? What if they are in a state of hibernation, a low-consumption state of ‘death’ and slow transformation? Maybe they can live a long time, maybe forever.”

“Team Leader, let’s keep moving and finish this job. When we’re done with all this, you can go be a poet. I’ll be your manager. But for now, let’s keep moving.”

I lifted my head to the sky. Night was almost here, perhaps the last night this planet would ever see. In a world scorched by raging flames, the sky was still so pure. Even before dusk fell, the stars had already appeared, however misty. There was a crowd of them, shining; the nebula shook like a bursting flower. The slowly shifting colors in the sky were calm and indifferent.

“Okay.” I had waited a long time before answering him. He did not yet see the truth, but he would very soon.

I took a decisive step, passing by the last layer of crystal pillars, out of the stone forest. A vast dark purple ocean appeared before our eyes. We slid halfway down a small hill near the shoreline. We had made it. Even if we no longer wanted to know it, we had come too far to deny the truth now.

“Look, Harry. We are about to see the true face of things.”

Harry looked into the distance with an excited and bemused expression. Just as he was about to say something lively and flippant to lighten my mood, his smile froze, like an amethyst that had lost the sunlight.

Harry didn’t answer me. For the first time he was speechless; I hoped it would be the last time.

Wave after wave of heat brushed the surface of the sea, tracing faint ripples. The sound of the surf on the shore echoed in the dim light like lost souls wailing from the abyss.

We stood on the shores of that sea. I call it a sea, but it was in fact an enormous lowland plain that had collected the ice melt. The water, soil, and crystal dust had mixed to form a dark, luminous purple ocean, the eye of night.

Harry sat on his haunches, silent, looking up at me as if he wanted me to say something, like a boy about to cry. He finally understood.

“I’m sorry.” I thought I would have had the courage to look him in the eye.

The singing flooded me now, like a sea of ​​tears, suffocating me. How could I endure it, the dirge of an entire planet, the whale song of the stars.

Suddenly there were countless white creatures blotting out the sky and covering the great purple lake. A hundred million? Two hundred? Even more than that, and they were all the more brilliant for the dark backdrop of the water and the falling night. If it weren’t for the way they moved, like only living things can move—chaotically—one might have thought this sea was composed entirely of white water.

I left Harry, lost in thought, behind me and moved a few more steps down toward the water. Loose earth and stones slid down the hillside with me.

Seemingly heedless of my existence, the white creatures rushed at me, encircled me, and passed around me before running back out to sea with all their strength on their way to the last great gathering of life.

Were they running or flying or gliding over the water’s surface? I could not be sure. Their pale shapes were ghostly yet solid, ever shifting. Some of the large creatures were as big as the smaller wandering elephants we had seen, and there were small creatures here also, the size of mice. At some silent signal, like a flock of birds, they all turned in unison. They gathered at the center of the great sea. I had tried to stand in the way of one of them when they were near me, but the being was more nimble than I could have imagined and evaded me effortlessly.

Ten thousand times more magnificent than the great earthly migrations of the wildebeest or the wolf, this was the great migration of all remaining life on a planet. There was no predator and no prey; there was no joy even. There was simply the desire to survive.

In the middle of the ocean, they clustered together, pressed close until it seemed they had melted into a single pale mass. The merging released a burst of energy in a violent gust of heat, a shock wave that almost knocked me to the ground.

The cloudy mass of white began to move like kneaded dough, like a child playing under a quilt. The mass now kicked and bulged, and now deflated, changing constantly like plasticine clay. I wondered how many lives were represented there in that writhing cloud. I was standing at the ocean’s edge on Earth, wondering how many whales were out there in the deep.

This must be nearly the last group, I thought, maybe the very last.

The burning clouds in the sky, suffused with purple, drew down the curtain on the day. The solar winds from a sun that was about to destroy this planet twisted and shifted just like the creatures that were trying to escape that destruction.

They used their own biological material to construct escape ships. Amazing. Countless souls, countless singers, joined as a single body, like a colony of ants gathering to survive a forest fire, but more evolved and complex than anything in human experience.

The cloudy mass gradually took on the familiar shape of a wandering elephant, while nearby on the water, newly formed larvae, like milky-white caterpillars, began to wriggle slowly into the transformed cloud. They called to mind for me the legend of Three Immortals Mountain, these small white islands moving through the ocean with full consciousness of the gravity of their situation and of the journey before them.

Butterflies.

I watched, unable to move, as the endless song enveloped me.

What if I drowned in this song? Would I become a part of them, my fluids drawn out, my skeleton ground up, and all of it transformed into something more. I imagined all this in a daze, oblivious to the fast-falling night.

Harry was suddenly there next to me. He reached out to hold my hand like a child. He was shaking.

“We have to bear witness to the end of this tragedy, Harry.”

“Can’t we do something?”

“I don’t think we can. I’m so very sorry.”

What cosmic telephone could I use to tell all the people of the universe to stop butchering the bodies of the wanderers? Even if this moment’s video feed were to be sent instantly to the research institute or to the entire Galactic Destiny Community, I suspected that no one would believe me. Or if they believed, would they care? There was nothing we could do now except watch it all play out.

And when this last planetary elephant arrived at its destination, their lonely journey finally at an end, the people waiting there would already have dug a grave.

A large blast of solar particles shot into the atmosphere, and the ripples stirred up a flickering display across the entire sky as if the goddess Aurora were offering a final prayer for this planet. The stars also seemed to be brighter than before, using the last of their strength to see this planet off into the afterlife.

“Team Leader, they’re starting to move again.”

“Yes. It’s time for them to spin a cocoon.” I found that I barely had strength to speak.

They were neither elephants nor whales. They were butterflies, sailing in the softest and most fragile of cocoons, intending no harm to anyone in the universe.

I imagined the white caterpillars, enveloped in their liquid cocoon, enclosed within the solid exoskeleton hull of their escape ship. I imagined them raising their heads in unison and looking toward the sky, their great eyes blinking, as if they could see the light of the stars through those white walls.

Then, two enormous ivory tusks began to grow from one end of the shell, like a great ship’s oars. Even at this distance, I could hear the pulsing sound of the liquid bubbling within the wanderer, the sound of life, their collective desire to live. The atmosphere around the creature seemed to shrink uncannily as it drew in and absorbed the air and dust within its immediate surroundings. Finally, the six amphibious arms tilted the massive body up at an angle so the tusks pointed skyward.

Then everything stopped.

Choose a star, my child. The singing found a new kind of sympathetic resonance within me, linking my brain, limbs, heart, and blood vessels. Everything in me was united in and through the song.

How could we have written the wrong meaning into so many meaningless things; how could we have come to all the wrong conclusions?

The sky is full of stars; we will eventually travel far.

The snow-white cilia all over the wanderer’s body stiffened as if with static electricity, in order, I guessed, to better absorb the material around it and provide energy for the voyage. A network of lightning strikes crisscrossed the sky in a swift white flash, countless singularity vortices brought the song to an apotheosis, and for a moment the world under the stars contorted and buckled. Then the wanderer was gone.

Harry and I were left with a sky full of stars and our limitless loneliness.

We waited there for a long time, hoping to see another white herd or flock gathering on the horizon. Maybe we would be able to capture a few of them and take them to a safe place, let the institute protect them and cultivate a new generation.

Even if there were only one.

But they never came. There was nothing left here. In the cold night, I looked at the faithless stars. I wanted to pick out one familiar constellation, but I did not know any of their names.

When we set foot on our homeland again, five Community standard months had already passed since our departure.

Upon our return, Harry closed himself away in his house, and for a whole month he did not speak a word to anyone except me. And I wished he hadn’t spoken to me. His cold words—“I’m fine, Team Leader” and “Team Leader, I don’t need to bother you. I know you have troubles of your own”—sounded to me like a reproach.

And I blamed myself as well. This was all my fault.

I handed over the video and my reports to the preeminent scientific academy in the Community.

Planetary elephants were spacecraft enclosing the cocoon of an XU210 biological aggregate that would, if left unmolested, presumably emerge independently from the cocoon at some point. Of course, that would be the ideal outcome. In reality, people had consistently released the embryonic fluid, torn off the skins, and scraped the shells clean. The undeniable conclusion: we had carried out a genocide without knowing it.

Once I heard news about a late specimen discovery. I immediately booked the fastest flight at my own expense, but by the time I arrived, they had already emptied it. Nothing was left but the desiccated shell.

Sadder yet, I still heard the singing. I did not know if this was a good sign or merely a protraction of the tragedy.

The institute did not immediately publish my research, but the investigation attracted a great deal of attention from all the upper-echelon departments of the Community. For a while, I was sought out by the class of bureaucrats who had never looked in my direction before. The conversations were trivial, chicken feathers and garlic skins, meaningless garbage. They blew smoke up my ass for a few minutes and never followed up on any of my conclusions or requests.

Then the XU2 system finally went supernova. The Dyson balls had been pulled back and the Community deliberately did not try to convert as much energy as some claimed the devices were capable of recycling. I suspected they made the right decision; the supernova yield would probably have fried them all if some of the overconfident and grasping politicians and scientists had had their way and left the machines in place.

For three days and three nights, people stood outside their doors, watching the snow-blue brilliance of a sky that never slept. It was as if someone had opened the gates of heaven, and colors flowed through the sky like a child’s finger painting.

There were parties that lasted all day and all night. I stayed inside with Harry, behind the closed doors of the institute, keeping even the windows tightly shut. In the end, we didn’t even know what time it was.

And then they found me and spoke a long series of flattering phrases, but I understood what they meant: Since those things were already extinct, there was no use asking people to bear the psychological burden of guilt. Besides, there was still a great deal of planetary elephant merchandise circulating in the luxury goods market. If this information were to be published at this time, imagine the economic uncertainty it would create. In this present age, maintaining control over economic fluctuation was much more difficult than before, when each individual planet was home to a self-contained economic ecosystem.

And ultimately, they argued, a genocide caused by ignorance was by definition an innocent act. It could not even properly be called genocide.

In other words, what we had to do was to conceal the truth for the sake of everyone in the Community with a new version of the history of this phenomenon. The planetary elephants were not able to withstand the radiation of outer space; they died during the voyage. During their long wormhole journey, they became a unique sort of fossil. The truth was blended expertly with fiction. It was perfect. No one would suspect the truth, especially now that there was no living evidence.

As far as we could tell, none of the wandering elephants survived, so no travelers would emerge from their cocoons. No one would refute this version; no one would look for cracks in the reasoning. I would have money, reputation, power, everything that those people spent their lives chasing. And of course, if I refused, they also “had their ways of dealing with the situation.”

And so, I agreed.

Harry didn’t blame me. He just smiled that forced smile which seemed to be the only expression his lips now remembered how to form.

I look at Harry down in the audience crowded beneath the tall podium. He still has that affected smile plastered on his face. He wasn’t like this before.

The faint singing atop the tower transforms in my mind’s eye into a nightingale, fluttering its dark wings, and piping out its song with the last of its remaining life. Now, finally, I think Harry can hear it too.

For the first time in my life, I stand in front of so many people, so many powerful people, the media’s tiny camera globes covering every angle. I see those people smiling, a kind of general smile, a smile that says they are in control of everything. I feel ill.

Everyone looks up at me, this silent man on the high stage.

I take out a bag I’ve been carrying in my pocket and pour it out before me on the lectern. A handful of XU210’s black soil mixed with shards of amethyst. And now I am about to start talking. I think I am going to tell that story . . .

The truth.

“What I am now going to say . . .” I take a deep breath. My voice is unsteady. My eyes go blurry, so I have no way of seeing the expressions of those people directly in front of me. Only the gentle singing voice supports my frame with a firm, cold hand. I think I would fall if not for the help of that single friend. “What I want to talk about now is how we exterminated a beautiful race of creatures from XU210.”

I wish I could see their faces.

On the immaculate ivory tower,

The nightingale sings with an unyielding soul,

Forgives and forgives and forgives our eternal sins.