Free Take No Prisoners by John Grant

We do not know what happened to churn the featureless serenity of the ocean, and perhaps it is impertinent of us even to speculate. But something touched its waters into motion, something sent waves rippling across it; so that, whereas before there had been nothingness, as all the probabilities were perfectly matched and balanced, now there were regional asymmetries – like temperature discretenesses in the waters of a worldly ocean. And as with those variations, on occasion fluid nothingness was frozen into a more tangible beingness – a minuscule crystal of ice – a locus where the probabilities were restricted, so that the future was no longer a choice from an infinity of potentials, merely from a great many.
    Probability was the living music.
    Countless times a note of living music was instantly mated with a negation-of-living one, such that both vanished in their birthing of fresh nothingness, as if a spider devoured not only her mate but also herself; but this was not always the case. Sometimes the living notes escaped the seductions of their anti-living counterparts, so that both remained solitary, unable to return to the formlessness of the once-tranquil sea. The living notes might sometimes then come together, growing just as tiny crystals of ice can grow out of brine to create something huge – a stately, lumbering ice-mountain. Not all did this; some were too fleet-moving, and for others the conditions in the sea around them were ... not quite favorable. And the same occurred for the pieces of frozen counter-music, of course; hugely large or infinitesimally small, they still pattern the surface of the probability ocean, seeking to mate with the living; in their different ways, both the Ironfolk and the Finefolk know this to be true, but knowledge of the truth has brought to neither of the kinds of folk any proper understanding of the life-negating counter-music.
    The waters of the probability ocean are never still. They wash around the ice-bits remorselessly. Sometimes they melt away a piece; sometimes they bring some of the counter-music up close enough to the shore that much is reduced to water. But over everything there is a balance, so that what is lost back into formlessness in one place emerges from it in another.
    To the Ironfolk the pieces of frozen probability are something less wonderful: they are particles either of matter or of energy – for the Ironfolk do not realize, in their hearts, that energy is merely fleeter matter, singing the same song but more nimbly; and nor do the Ironfolk know that nothing in the probability ocean is truly disassociated from all else, so that nothing can be particulate. Yet even the Ironfolk have recognized, in a smallest way, the waves on the waters. Where the pieces of living music are very tiny, the eddies around them are accordingly so; and they may build to become standing waves, as I have seen in fjords. These minuscule ripples, too, the Ironfolk call particles, even though they know that they are not that but fluctuations on the surface of the probability sea.
    In the gulfs between worlds the waves have a chance to grow much greater, so that they are like those of inland seas. It was the discovery that they could make their craft flit from crest to crest of these that enabled the Ironfolk to travel so very rapidly among the stars; though they will never discover what the Finefolk have always known, that it is possible to create music in resonance with the waves of the particle sea, so that we pass through it instantly along uncluttered pathways.
    As they skip the crests of the rollers between the stars, the Ironfolk's vessels cast up a great spray of droplets. Pieces of living music and counter-music are condensed from the waters, only to mate with each other and instantaneously vanish again. These pieces of stiffened probability may take many forms and magnitudes: most are only notes, mere crystals, smaller than a crystal of physical water could ever be, and