that Earth had. A relatively small amount of matter circulated in each mass loop, and so the whole thing was only marginally stable, and not always self-recovering.
It had even happened here, on Ra-Shalom. Greenberg had woken once to find concentrations of the amino acid called lysine had crashed. The Weissmans were too busy on dreaming their cetacean dreams to think too much about the systems that were keeping them alive. Many died, before a new stability was reached. It drove Greenberg crazy.
But the Weissmans didn’t seem too upset. You have to think of it as apoptosis, they said to him. The cells in the hands of an archaic-form human embryo will die back in order to sculpt out tool-making fingers. Death is necessary, sometimes, so that life can progress. It is apoptosis, not necrosis …
Greenberg just couldn’t see that argument at all.
And in the meantime, Ra was still on its course to become the next dinosaur killer. The predictions just got tighter and tighter. And still, nobody seemed to be concerned about doing anything about it.
When what the Weissmans said to him made no sense at all – when they deigned to speak to him – Greenberg felt utterly isolated.
But then, all humans were alone.
Nobody had found non-terrestrial life anywhere, in the solar system or beyond, above prokaryotes: single-celled creatures without internal structures such as nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mars was typical, it had turned out: just a handful of crude prokaryote-type bugs shivering deep in volcanic vents, waiting out an Ice Age that would never end. Only on Earth, it seemed, had life made the big, unlikely jump to eukaryotic structure, and then multi-celled organisms, and the future.
It seemed that back when he was born Earth had been one little world holding all the life there was, to all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if his generation and a couple before, Americans and Russians, hadn’t risked their lives to enter space in converted ICBMs and ridiculous little capsules.
Makes you think, he reflected. The destiny of all life, forever, was in our hands. And we never knew it. Probably would have scared us to death if we had.
For if we’d failed, if we’d turned ourselves to piles of radioactive ash, there would now be no life, no mind, anywhere.
Gravitational tweaks by Earth and Venus gradually wore away the asteroid’s energy, and its orbit diminished. The process took a hundred million years.
At last, the asteroid with its fragile cargo settled into a circle, a close shadow of Earth’s orbit. Its random walk across the solar system was complete.
The inhabitants adapted. They even flourished, here in the warmer heart of the solar system.
For a time, it seemed that a long and golden afternoon lay ahead of the refugees within the rock. Once more, they forgot what lay beyond the walls of their world …
But there seemed to be something in the way.
Scale: Exp 6
We have an assignment for you .
He came swimming up from a sleep as deep as death. He wondered, in fact, if he was truly in any sense alive, between these vivid flashes of consciousness.
… And Earth, ocean-blue, swam before Ra, a fat crescent cupping a darkened ocean hemisphere, huge and beautiful, just as he’d seen it from a Shuttle cargo bay.
In his vision there was water everywhere: the skin of Earth, the droplet body of Ra-Shalom, and in his own eyes.
We have an assignment for you. A mission.
‘What are you talking about? Are you going to push this damn rock out of the way? I can’t believe you’ve let it go this far.’
This has happened before. There has been much apoptosis.
‘Hell, I know that …’
He looked up at a transformed sky.
Everywhere now, the stars were green.
There was old Rigel, for instance, one of the few stars he could name when he was a kid, down there in Orion, at the hunter’s left boot. Of course all the constellations had swum around now. But Rigel was still a blue
It had even happened here, on Ra-Shalom. Greenberg had woken once to find concentrations of the amino acid called lysine had crashed. The Weissmans were too busy on dreaming their cetacean dreams to think too much about the systems that were keeping them alive. Many died, before a new stability was reached. It drove Greenberg crazy.
But the Weissmans didn’t seem too upset. You have to think of it as apoptosis, they said to him. The cells in the hands of an archaic-form human embryo will die back in order to sculpt out tool-making fingers. Death is necessary, sometimes, so that life can progress. It is apoptosis, not necrosis …
Greenberg just couldn’t see that argument at all.
And in the meantime, Ra was still on its course to become the next dinosaur killer. The predictions just got tighter and tighter. And still, nobody seemed to be concerned about doing anything about it.
When what the Weissmans said to him made no sense at all – when they deigned to speak to him – Greenberg felt utterly isolated.
But then, all humans were alone.
Nobody had found non-terrestrial life anywhere, in the solar system or beyond, above prokaryotes: single-celled creatures without internal structures such as nuclei, mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mars was typical, it had turned out: just a handful of crude prokaryote-type bugs shivering deep in volcanic vents, waiting out an Ice Age that would never end. Only on Earth, it seemed, had life made the big, unlikely jump to eukaryotic structure, and then multi-celled organisms, and the future.
It seemed that back when he was born Earth had been one little world holding all the life there was, to all intents and purposes. And it would have stayed that way if his generation and a couple before, Americans and Russians, hadn’t risked their lives to enter space in converted ICBMs and ridiculous little capsules.
Makes you think, he reflected. The destiny of all life, forever, was in our hands. And we never knew it. Probably would have scared us to death if we had.
For if we’d failed, if we’d turned ourselves to piles of radioactive ash, there would now be no life, no mind, anywhere.
Gravitational tweaks by Earth and Venus gradually wore away the asteroid’s energy, and its orbit diminished. The process took a hundred million years.
At last, the asteroid with its fragile cargo settled into a circle, a close shadow of Earth’s orbit. Its random walk across the solar system was complete.
The inhabitants adapted. They even flourished, here in the warmer heart of the solar system.
For a time, it seemed that a long and golden afternoon lay ahead of the refugees within the rock. Once more, they forgot what lay beyond the walls of their world …
But there seemed to be something in the way.
Scale: Exp 6
We have an assignment for you .
He came swimming up from a sleep as deep as death. He wondered, in fact, if he was truly in any sense alive, between these vivid flashes of consciousness.
… And Earth, ocean-blue, swam before Ra, a fat crescent cupping a darkened ocean hemisphere, huge and beautiful, just as he’d seen it from a Shuttle cargo bay.
In his vision there was water everywhere: the skin of Earth, the droplet body of Ra-Shalom, and in his own eyes.
We have an assignment for you. A mission.
‘What are you talking about? Are you going to push this damn rock out of the way? I can’t believe you’ve let it go this far.’
This has happened before. There has been much apoptosis.
‘Hell, I know that …’
He looked up at a transformed sky.
Everywhere now, the stars were green.
There was old Rigel, for instance, one of the few stars he could name when he was a kid, down there in Orion, at the hunter’s left boot. Of course all the constellations had swum around now. But Rigel was still a blue
Similar Books
