Moth, Flame, Mycorrhiza
Through the cold darkness of the Sagittarian Sector the spore drifted. Like whales drawn to the shallows, or salmon to their home river, they were attracted to the warm, pinprick stars sprayed across the galactic arm. An instinctual need, a craving impossible to resist.
Away from the stars, gases became liquids and flowed as blood, liquids became solid bones or muscles, and electrical pulses found freedom to move unimpeded. In the cold of deep space, thought existed in its many and varied forms, for the spore were not all of a kind, but a multitudinous host.
Around the fringes of the stars, they would feed. Organics and other volatiles stoked their slow burning metabolisms. They swarmed the icy rocks that girded the system, swooping low to absorb the molecules that floated free under the distant sunlight. Landing to soak in the nutrients.
And here, in the dimness, thought became intelligence. An electromagnetic hum, lost in the background wash of the star, was the conversation of billions, or maybe the mind of just one.
Yet even the intelligences among them felt the craving.
'Go where it is warm.'
'Join together.'
The rock came by. Like fish, schooling after bait, they jetted into its influence. The foolish ones rushed in quickly and were swallowed in the planetoid's gravity, but most swung about it in a great cloud. Majestically, it drifted along its course through the edges of the system, reached apogee and began the long fall inward. The cloud continued to grow as more joined for the ride, jostling the orbits, causing some to lose their tentative grip and still others to fall inward to the icy rock below.
And then, they were alone. Just the rock and the cloud on the long slide down the star's gravity well. At first, they felt no change, the young laughing at the warnings of the old. Slowly, heat began to build, complimenting and irritating the burning craving that had driven them to this moment. Thoughts became sluggish as the volatiles warmed closer and closer to the superconductivity border.
Pressure from the sunlight began to impede their progress and the smaller ones began to fall behind. As the planetoid fell further, its surface began to heat causing great jets of gas to blast outward, carrying a lucky few from the surface back into orbit, and blasting still others into the trailing tail.
All thought was now impossible. Bare instincts were all that remained and still the heat grew. As they swept towards their turn, the space among them became filled with the tiny bits that interacted to make more of the spores.
Their spawning complete, most went inert, husbanding the last of their cold gases to survive the return trip to their deep, cold home. Not all would survive. Some would sweep too close to the star, boiling off the last of their precious volatiles to become empty husks. Others would have their orbit perturbed and would lack sufficient energy to reach their home in the Oort Cloud, destined to forever cycle between the heat and cold until they too were baked into empty shells. And there were the other obstacles, before them a blue speck grew larger and closer. The wispy tendrils of its gravity tugged at their course and more fell.
As they fell to the blue planet, the passage through the atmosphere burned away their protective shell. The tightly packed organisms slowed and stretched out into long filaments. Tasting the rich organic soup of the blue world, the spores' only remaining instinct awakened.
They began to feed.
At the edge of the system, another, smaller rock began to fall.