Creations (43 page)

“It still sounds like you’re changing your mind to me.”

“Not really. Even Darwin considered this question, but he got nowhere near this answer of course. In “The Origin of the Species”, he talked about the creator ‘breathing life into many forms, or into one’, but letters he sent to his colleagues often talked about life starting in ‘some warm little pond’, with just ‘ammonia, salts and heat’ to drive it. Whatever planet
they
grew up on, that’s probably how it happened. It just didn’t happen that way here.”

“And you think those bacteria are like what you were doing? Like what ESOS was building?”

“Yes. What we call Archaean cyanobacteria, were actually replicating machines, chemical replicators, built for planetary terraforming. DNA based life is just too unlikely: Sheldon Karman and I worked that out ten years ago but we were never willing to face the implications. Those things had to be artificial. That needle was packed with them, all sorts of species, but most of them died out as soon as they were released. The cyanobacteria though, they’re the ones that took hold. Every bit of free oxygen in Earth’s early atmosphere was thanks to them. Someone wanted Earth to have a cosy oxygen-rich environment. We were being seeded for a reason.”

“But by who?”

“I don’t know, but whoever they were they never followed it up with a personal visit. The seeds they planted here took over and did their own thing. And that’s what we are. Everything that’s ever lived, in the whole history of Earth’s evolution, came from those beginnings. Replicating machines evolving out of control.”

She shook her head, as if still trying to digest the story he was feeding her. “No way, Max. I can’t explain what you found in that
rock, or why it looks like that needle you saw on the Moon, but you can’t tell me this is the simplest explanation?”

“It makes a lot of sense to me. It’s like we’ve found a whole new cycle of evolution, acting on a timescale of billions of years. Within each cycle, species grow and adapt the way Darwinian evolution takes them, but whenever something intelligent figures out how to build replicators, they end up making way for their own creations. It’s going to happen to us too. It’s already started.”

The Moon wasn’t visible from where they were but Max had seen the news reports of the accelerating growth currently underway, telescope images of that growing dark patch centred on the place he knew Kambria lay. It had made Victor’s defence at the enquiry all the harder, knowing that the effects of what he’d built would be visible to the naked eye within weeks. Corporate negligence on an exponential scale; Max was no lawyer, but it was probably a legal first.

“I take it you know how people will react when you tell them all this,” Gillian said. “Space aliens seeding Earth, like some cosmic-scale science experiment.”

“We’re taking it into consideration. No one else looking at those samples has found anything similar, so it’ll be a UCLA announcement. I’m going to have to brace myself for the backlash though. Do you think you’ll be ready for that?”

“I think so.”

“There’s no walking out on me this time you know.”

She didn’t answer straight away, but smiled instead, walking in silence with her hand to her stomach. She was already starting to show.

“She’ll be the first generation to be born knowing we’re not alone, and where we really came from,” Max said. “Some people will find that hard to get used to. They’re going to blame me before they blame anyone else.”

“I know. But I’ll be here, I promise.”

“It’s going to be a very different world you know, for us as well as her,” Max said.

“I think it is,” Gillian said. “I think it is.”

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