* * *
It was late in the morning when Marie awoke. Yassem was already up, but as yet nobody had agreed on any firm plans. Luodine had wanted to stay to cover the South American situation, and Vrel’s thought had been to head across the Pacific, but now they were wondering about trying for the newly formed Federation territory in what had been the U.S.A. Both the flyers were personal short-haul vehicles and didn’t have the range for such a journey. However, Nyarl ascertained from the web that commercial flights into western North America were still operating from Quito in Ecuador, which was reachable. To check on the American situation, Vrel tried calling his colleagues at the Hyadean mission in Los Angeles, which he seemed surprised to find was still functioning. He asked to speak to a Hyadean called Wyvex.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE PHYSICAL SIMILARITIES between Terrans and Hyadeans, not just in general appearance but in terms of chemistry and genetic codes as well, had been devastating to Earth’s prevalent theory of life and its origins, but had come as no particular surprise to the aliens. They had listened skeptically but with interest to the idea of how ooze could turn itself into a jellyfish and a jellyfish into a horse by selectively accumulating random mutations, and when the evidence claimed to support it proved not to, they dismissed it as another of Earth’s secular religions, invented to displace an earlier one.
In a way that fitted well with the Hyadeans’ catastrophic account of the origins and development of planetary systems, Darwin’s original notebooks were filled with observations of evidence written worldwide of epochs of sudden, cataclysmic change. But twenty years later when he published, he had come around to adapting to biology Lyell’s principle of gradualism, by then established as the guiding paradigm of geology. Under the new scheme of things, no catastrophic upheavals needed to be invoked to explain the past. Everything could be accounted for by the processes seen to be taking place in the present, provided they were allowed operate for a sufficiently long time. Hence, from an ideology were constructed the immense spans of time that the Hyadeans found it astonishing anyone from Earth could look at the surface of their own planet and believe in.
Earth’s history fascinated the Hyadeans. Revolution in the American colonies and then France had terrified the ruling houses of Europe. Napoleon’s armies had carried notions of rising up against traditional authority from Catholic Spain to Tsarist Russia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the continent was seething with militant political movements advocating socialism. All it needed now was for science to declare that violent upheaval was the natural way of change. The new scheme, however, depicted change as a slow, gradual accumulation of tiny advantages—so slow that little significant difference should be evident even in the course of a lifetime. And on the other hand, an explanation for life that did away with the supernatural served the new, technocratic wealth, based on commerce and industry, by completing the undermining of the authority on which the old power structure rested. Expedient and intellectually satisfying, it was embraced from all sides and rapidly enthroned as science. When the evidence that had been predicted failed to materialize, and contradictions continued to accumulate, ingenious and imaginative possibilities were devised to explain the facts away. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that the reason so little proof could be found of life’s having evolved from simple molecules on Earth might be simply that it hadn’t; it had arrived there.
Yet it had long been known that bacteria and other microorganisms exhibited an extraordinary tolerance to extremes of such quantities as radiation, temperature, and pressure, that was difficult to account for by any selection process on the surface of the Earth, where such conditions had never existed. But it made them ideally preadapted for space. Carbonized structures uncannily suggestive of familiar forms of microbe had been discovered inside meteorites—and yes, with the possibility of contamination excluded beyond reasonable doubt. Refractive indexes in part of the interstellar clouds matched those of biological objects more closely than any of the alternatives put forward to explain them. Some scientists over the years had pointed to these findings as a case for supposing that the genes that directed life had originated from somewhere else. The mainstream scientific community saw warnings of the theological can of worms opening up again, and their general reaction was to ridicule the suggestion or leave it alone.