A thousand generations went by and Waving Ancestral Nodes worked in a great experimental ecologarium, orbiting the outskirts of the Starseeder system. WAN's laboratory was attached to a planetoid-sized mass of liquid methane, confined by an impervious membrane. Within, the tiny life forms swam and bred. Evolution was proceeding on its own. Through a viewer, he watched as the diatom-like creatures propelled themselves about, consuming other life forms that lived off nutrients in the methane.
'They are ready,' he said.
From a speaker nearby, the Mind agreed. 'Yes, it would seem so. We are at a stage where vessels like this may be released upon the methane worlds. They will breed and prosper.' WAN nodded to himself. 'It is a pity,' he said, 'that they cannot be our own kind.'
'They can be,' said the Mind, and it began to speak. WAN felt a dawning wonder as he listened. The great ships went out, the worlds were colonized with life, and the Starseeders watched patiently and waited, communing with the artificial brains they had created. Slowly, the race became extinct. Finally their sun exploded and all that they had originally been was gone. The artificial brains went on without them, proliferatingthe Grand Design, but not quite alone. The things in the methane continued to evolve.
Continuities . . .
Now Sealock was seized by the scene that he hated most, the moment of his life that he hated to review the most and so most often did.
The musician, John Cornwell, had come to Montevideo intent on meeting with Ariane Methol and her little pool of special applicants. They talked and, at some point, the two retreated to the privacy of her bedchamber. Pinned, a fly in amber, Brendan pressed his face to the cool, soundproofed wall that separated them.
Vivid imaginings.
He saw them locked together in a foul, treacherous embrace. He saw them kiss and touch. He saw the man tonguing her, saw her sucking his penis, a long, thick thing, shining moistly as it emerged from her lips. He saw the man's buttocks rise and fall slowly as he drove deep within her body, heard her sighs of pleasure, her murmurs of devotion. And no room in their hearts to feel his pain. . . . They emerged, smiling and dry, and the decision was made. 'What the hell,' he said, 'I'll go.' He helped build the ship and it was better, safer for his presence. They went.
They were on Earth again, taking their last views of a never loved, never thought-about homeland. Heimaey Cosmodrome . . . The transporter lurched and stopped. Silently the exterior door-stair assembly unfolded and extended to the ground. The cool air of an Iceland August pushed in and rummaged around. The midnight sun would have set less than an hour before. It was still quite bright, though overcast, as they filed outside.
There was yet forty feet of hard-packed ash between them and the ship. All horizons were dark and sterile against the shimmering gray-yellow sky. Brendan knew that he was seeing the last of Earth but, to his amazement, it didn't bother him. He was impatient to be away and could almost feel adesire to skip coming up his legs as he made his way toward the towering black and white spaceship. It looked to him like a silent, motionless stargazing penguin.
He lagged far enough behind that he could see the other eight of the group, their varying treads somehow chaotic and unyielding. They were all strangers, even Ariane. Memory struck within memory. The pictures of Triton, against the odd, broken clouds of Neptune, filled the screen, and he heard Cornwell's voice saying, 'Come with me.' It seemed a long time ago. Time became a stranger commodity as he grew older. His memories remained intense, solid, yet he wondered if this would still be true after the years on board
They crowded into the plane's elevator and the intimacy made him feel good, momentarily. They began the ascent.
As they rose Brendan found himself looking at Jana Li Hu. She was short and solid, a classic central Chinese, and she affected a ponytail that fell to mid-back. An astronomer trained at the totally regimented Reflexive Institute in Ulaanbaatar, she could have been a cold automaton, but beneath that controlled facade was something very disturbing. . . . What? In a sudden, icy flash of insight, he realized that there was something in her reminiscent of himself. The elevator hissed to a stop.
Keeping pace with their charges, the artificial brains that the Starseeders had left behind continued to evolve. One to a world, they talked to each other across the interstellar wastes, slow conversations by electromagnetic beam, and sometimes they traveled, using the great colony ships that had distributed them throughout a sphere several million light-years in radius. Three billion years went by as they grew and changed. They too were methane beings now, too large to leave the interiors of their vast ships. From their orbits they oversaw what was going on below. They sent down probes to sample and, presently, to direct the course of a slow, cold evolution.
The seeded beings developed as swiftly as their environments would permit. They lived in the depths of the great frigid Mother Ocean and used the resources that they found,most often resources dropped among them from the immense, immortal beings in the sky.
Seeded with methane monera, the planet soon filled with life. There were methane plants and animals, methane fungi. The animals grew complex, then large, as their ecosystem provided niches for them to fill. Aeons passed again, and the universe had brought forth its third generation, the next in the line of intelligences.
Bitter Shell was stalking a food-pod creature. He had wounded it with his lance and could smell it leaking oil as he cruised along its trail. It had fled high into the upper reaches of the sea in its pain, where the methane was thin. Pressures and temperatures were nearing the triple point and he knew that neither he nor the food-pod could go
