“Imagine a bunch of maniac skaters making circuits around an ice rink, all gyrating and flailing their arms,” Damien had suggested when trying to explain it to one of the ship’s crew. “Every time two of them collide, they send each other off toward other parts of the rink, where there may or may not be someone else to collide with again. If there is, then it repeats until you get to somewhere where there’s more room. Eventually everyone ends up with enough space to be left alone, and until something disturbs it all again, you’ve got a stable system.”
Exactly what would happen depended on some very nonlinear equations that made prediction hazardous at best. But the significant thing was that the number of possible solutions being found for them was far greater than anyone had guessed. It meant that the probability of the Solar System rapidly recovering to find a stable configuration was also much higher than had been previously imagined.
What made this even more interesting to Damien was that it added credibility to the suggestion Emil Farzhin on Dione had first proposed, of Venus going into a resonant pattern with Mars and Earth after its expulsion from Jupiter, causing Mars to approach Earth and hang in the sky over northern India for something like twelve years at a time. Damien had found the thought captivating emotionally, but surely too improbable to take seriously without a lot more supporting evidence. Now it appeared the probability of not necessarily that particular instance happening, but of at least one from many like it, was not so remote after all.
To add to it, examination of many findings reported on Earth over the years before Athena was turning up more things that were consistent with Farzhin’s scenario. No satisfactory explanation had ever been put forward for the sudden rise in sea levels worldwide of around a hundred meters at the time in question, between 3000 and 5000 years previous. Data on ancient lakes and river systems, the depth and distribution of alluvial deposits, and staggering beds of animal and plant remains indicated repeated and massive flooding of the Tibetan-Himalayan region. Yet records from the adjacent areas of China and the eastern Mediterranean told of cyclic patterns in which suddenly receding waters left ships stranded on dry seabeds and ports landlocked far away from relocated coastlines. The number of meteorites found scattered on Earth or in Earth-intersecting near-asteroid orbits with compositions anomalously indicating Martian origins wildly violated all probability statistics based on Mars’s always having been where it was at present. And so it went on.
Farzhin’s team were continuing their investigations of the Indian Vedas and other Terran mythologies. Their latest, even more startling, claim was that under the strange conditions of microgravity that existed between Mars and Earth at the times of their mutual capture, tidal melting of the crustal rocks on Mars had caused immense lava fountains to erupt from the surface, which when cooled on the outside became conduits to convey further flows higher, until enormous, complex, glowing structures were formed, extending as high as a thousand kilometers and clearly visible from Earth. This, they contended, was the awe-inspiring deity that came to be worshiped as Brahma. Shiva, the destroyer, was the power that brought about its eventual collapse when the Earth-Mars bond was broken—in the process producing the layers of peculiarly formed rock shards and fragments covering the Tharsis Bulge region, which had always been something of a mystery. Thus arose accounts of “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Hamlet’s Mill,” Atlas supporting the sky, the columns of smoke and fire of Hebrew and Egyptian lore, and various other stairways, pillars, godly phalluses, and the like, that towered above some celestial realm or appeared to offer a bridge for mortals to cross. Damien’s first reaction had been to smile and shrug. But slowly, he was being won over.
Now, with evidence mounting to suggest that maybe it wouldn’t have needed to be the freak occurrence that had at first been supposed, the question that was coming to be asked was how likely it might be for something similar to happen again. Already, Athena had come close enough to Venus to transfer enough momentum to lift Venus outward several million miles, and future intercepts could creep even closer. One set of possible ways the orbital equations could evolve produced another three-body resonance, this time with Athena in the role previously taken by Venus, and Venus being hurled outward farther to enter into periodic encounters with Earth. Nobody was saying at this stage that it would happen; but at least one family of mathematical solutions said that it could. Damien wasn’t sure if Earth was ready to undergo another series of Mars-type encounters just yet. Maybe it was just as well, he reflected, that some of the first of the new AG-based technology, capable of cutting and building massive structures out of native rock, was on its way with the Aztec. They—or maybe their successors who would one day take over later spells on Earth—might well find they needed it.