Short story with life forms that are like hexagonal tiles with insect-like or crab-like legs

Question

This short story involves a group of scientists that visit a planet where much of the surface is covered with life forms that are something like hexagonal tiles with insect-like or crab-like legs. The scientists discover they communicate by the way their edges interact with one another.

Eventually, they discover that the planet as a whole is sending out a pulse of energy to a distant part of the galaxy/universe. The story ends with the line something like “This was the first time humans glimpsed the true nature of the universe.” Leading the reader to imagine that the planet as a whole was just possibly one neuron in a huge super brain, etc.

I am fairly sure it was included in an anthology titled something like Far Futures...maybe.

Answer 1

This is "A Dance to Strange Musics" by Gregory Benford. It was published in the anthology Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons, which might be what you're remembering.

There's a brief plot summary on sfsite.com:

While surveying the planet Shiva, the crew of the starship Adventurer discovers a massive lake that appears to be suspended in mid-air. Their investigation leads them to a bizarre race of crab-like polygon-shaped creatures, whose hive-like society defies interpretation. Benford tells this tale with a merciless eye toward his premise and its conclusions. He willfully disregards any attempt at characterization, refusing the reader any comfort derived from likable, sympathetic characters. Here the scientists not only grow embittered by their inability to understand the ecology of Shiva, but become jaded by the existential horror of confronting an alien race that may be as vastly superior to us as we are to amoebas.

The last paragraph of the story matches your description:

This was the first contact humanity had with the true nature of the galaxy. It would not be the last. But the sense of utter and complete diminishment never left the species, in all the strange millennia that rolled on thereafter.

Answer 2

This is at best only a partial match, but I'll mention it in case you've misremembered the story or conflated it with another story. Anyhow, my suggestion is Hallucination by Isaac Asimov. I read it in his anthology Gold.

A young scientist called Sam Chase is sent to a planet (simply called Energy Planet in the story) to investigate hallucinations being experienced by staff on the planet. He finds insect like creatures that are hexagonal as you describe:

One of them landed on his finger and Sam looked at it curiously. It was very small and, therefore, hard to see in detail, but it seemed hexagonal, bulging above and concave below. There were many short, small legs so that when it moved it almost seemed to do so on tiny wheels. There were no signs of wings till it suddenly took off, and then four tiny, feathery objects unfurled.

Sam discovers the insects link together as you describe to form a hive mind:

“Not an individual insect by itself, but they fit together when they want to, like little jigsaw pieces. They can do it in any way they want. And when they do, their nervous systems fit together, too, and build up. A lot of them together are intelligent."

But the planet is not sending out pulses of energy. It's called energy planet because it is in orbit around a neutron star and humans wish to use it to generate energy. This would destroy the insects' hive mind hence the insects are generating the hallucinations in an attempt to communicate with humans.

The stort also does not end with a quote of the type you describe and there is no suggestion that the planet is part of any galactic mind.