Interlude One: CYTHERIA...
Johnny1a
The star was a newborn, the fusion fire at its inner core only just
begun, but already it was impressive, notably more massive than Sol,
and richer in metals (in both the astronomical and the chemical
sense). As the star's fusion flame blazed into furious activity, the
great disk of gas and dust around it was condensing into small solid
bodies, in the way of young stars. Rich in heavy elements, the disk
swirled into whirlpools of denser mass, forming a vast swarm of
planetesimals.
The heat of the new star rapidly volatized those elements that had low
melting and vaporization temperatures, the pressure of its light
driving these gases outward to the colder outer reaches of the star
system, leaving refractories to form rocky objects closer in. In
their turn these planetesimals began to collide, and accumulate into
larger bodies. The gravity of the larger bodies drew in more
planetesimals and created a feedback, and in time the largest objects
absorbed their smaller siblings, clearing out vast sweeps of space in
their orbits around the central star. Those objects whose orbital
paths crossed tended to either collide, or to be hurled out of the
system or into the central star, leaving those objects in 'safe'
orbits to grow, and grow, and grow, until they began to resemble true
planets in size and mass.
In the outer reaches of the system, the light elements and volatiles
that had been driven out of the inner reaches condensed, accumulated,
and began to form into large bodies. In a development that would in a
distant time give Terran model-builders and astronomers fits, the
majority of the mass in the newborn star system ended by condensing
into two enormous gas giants, which orbited each other as a double
planet, and a third smaller gas giant further out. These huge bodies
expelled most of the rest of the mass from the outer reaches, but left
the inner reaches relatively untouched, something not universally true
of newborn star systems.
Though the vast bulk of the original material of the source cloud
ended either in the star, the gas giants, or expelled to interstellar
space, enough refractory material remained to make rocky planets the
inner reaches of the new star system. Three of them were comparable
to Earth in size and mass, two were smaller, and three of the five
were orbited by one or more substantial moons. Though all these
planets were interesting, our attention will be focused primarily on
the fourth world out, and its two moons.
This planet was almost exactly the size and mass of Earth, and its
composition was similar, though it was heavier with radioactives than
Earth had been at a similar point in its development. This star
system was younger than Sol by gigayears, and had been more heavily
enriched by profligate supernovae.
The planet was mostly made of rock and metal, as radioactives melted
the interior, the iron sank to the center and added its own potential
energy to the heat bank, and as crustal rock formed volatiles began to
cook out of the interior. The fourth planet was far enough out that
water could remain liquid, close to avoid freezing solid with the help
of a thick atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide and methane.
As water vapor condensed into liquid, it began to rain, rains of an
intensity and scale that would stagger the imagination of a
Homosentient used to the clement environment of older, mature worlds.
New oceans began to spread across the surface, and volcanic activity
began to build granite masses that would in time become new
continents, as this world followed a path rather like that of Earth in
an earlier time.
As time passed, the geology of this new world began to look quite a
bit like that of Earth. Circulation cells formed in the mantle,
moving surface features around just as they did on Earth. Newborn
continents, surrounded by deep green oceans, slid apart, fused
together, piled up mountains that were eroded away by new rivers.
Volcanoes rumbled, driven by the heat of a rich heritage of uranium,
thorium, and potassium-40, expanding the new lands.
But this world was not _exactly_ like Earth, it had its differences.
It rotated once every 65 hours, close enough. It had two moons,
neither as large as Luna, and its axial tilt was greater than that of
Earth, and of course, most important of all, it was utterly without
life. Not so much as a microbe was to be found anywhere in its
oceans, its crust, its continents, or its thick, carbon-dioxide and
nitrogen atmosphere.
Johnny1a
The absence of life left this planet with a developmental track rather
different than that of Earth. In terms of overall composition, it was
much like Earth, it had oceans (though they were rich with dissolved
minerals), it had continents of granite much life those of Earth,
though those continents lacked anything like soil, the ground-eroded
rocky powder was more like a moist regolith than soil. It had an
atmosphere that was thicker than that of Earth, though it was composed
of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and a witch's brew of minor
constituents.
It should be noted that the planet did not lack the raw materials, the
building blocks, of life. The planet had a rich supply of carbon,
hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, albeit not necessarily in convenient
forms. It had extensive supplies of liquid water, though granted
periodic climatic extremes tended sometimes to freeze the water,
sometimes to turn too much of it into water vapor. All the usual
amino acids were present, both from extraplanetary arrival via
meteoric impacts, and from local production near sources of energy
such as geological heat sources or lightning or ultraviolet
radiation.
But nothing _used_ these resources, like so many other worlds, like
the vast _majority_ of all worlds, this world was without life.
Then everything changed.
The change was sudden, marked by a sudden change in the axial tilt of
the planet, over what was cosmically a very short time. In less than
one thousand orbits of the planet around its star (somewhat more than
1000 Terran years), the planet's axial tilt was reduced to
approximately that of Earth, and over the course of another several
thousand orbits, the rotation rate increased, going from about 65
hours to 24 hours, 3 minutes 10 seconds.
These changes set of tectonic activity all over the globe, enormous
volcanic eruptions and earthquakes on a scale the planet had not seen
in hundreds of megayears repeatedly ripped through the oceans and
continents, but there was no living thing to be harmed.
And then...suddenly...there were living things. Over the course of a
few hundred orbits around the star, the planet suddenly had
photosynthesizing algae in the seas, chemosynthetic bacteria in the
deep seas, fungi in every niche, there were a thousand different kinds
of arthropod in the seas and on the shores, and myriad small
vertebrates in the seas, creatures that would in time on Earth give
rise to the first true fishes.
The new ecosystem was radically unstable, the creatures in it had been
suddenly transplanted from a distant world, and dropped into a new and
alien environment. Most did not survive long enough to breed...but a
few did. More kept appearing, and gradually a new ecosystem emerged,
one that was adapting to the local conditions...and adapting the local
conditions to the needs of life, as well.
A million years passed, not a long time on the scale of ecosystems and
planets. The climate oscillated wildly from hot to cold as the new
axial tilt and the rapidly changing chemistry interacted. Oxygen
began to build up, first in the seas, then in the atmosphere,
oxidizing the iron of the seas, some of which settled to the sea
floor, and some of which simply vanished from the planetary environs.
Ice formed at the poles, then melted again, then formed again, as
embryonic ice ages alternated with the starting stages of runaway
greenouse in rapid succession.
Yet in each case, something stopped the various potential runaway
feedback loops before they could proceed very far. The planet was
allowed neither to freeze over nor to boil into a hothouse hell, and
as time passed, the wild oscillations settled, the new biosphere grew
in complexity and began to gain the ability to moderate its own
environment. In some ways the process was like what had happened on
Earth earlier, over the course of billions of years, but in others it
was different. It happened radically faster here than it had on
Earth, and the life forms appearing in the seas were beginning their
existence on this new world with a level of complexity that had
required gigayears to manifest on Earth.
Ten million years after life first materialized, seemingly from
nowhere, in the oceans of this world, a thriving and self-sustaining
biosphere existed in the seas, a biosphere both life and unlike that
on the distant Earth from which it had derived.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Nearly 200 megayears after life first appeared on this world, a rich
and complex ecosystem had evolved, both descended from the original
life-forms and augmented by later arrivals from elsewhere (meaning for
the most part Earth). Life forms identical to those of Earth, closely
akin to those of contemporary Earth, and distantly akin to those of
contemporary Earth were to be found in the oceans, on the land, and in
the air. Sharks swam in the ocean, competing for the niche of top
oceanic predator with a locally evolved gilled predator whose closest
Terran relative was a tetrapodal land herbivore. On land, reptiles
and advanced amphibians and reptiles, the most intelligent life form
on the planet was a form of therapsid adapted to an omnivorous
existence along the tropical coasts, following a track of evolution
foreshadowing the early cetaceans of a later time and another planet.
A flying relative had taken the therapsids to the skies on this world
as well, albeit in an ungainly form, it was still the most effective
flier on the planet.
In the seas fish dominated, much as they did on Earth, though they
were in many cases not the _same_ fish. The largest free-swimming
organism in the oceans was a form of shark larger than anything Earth
ever saw (though not by much). A distant relative of the eel was the
dominant coastal ocean predator, a distant cousin of the starfish
dominated the pelagic depths.
All in all, this world was recognizably 'Earth-like', a little hotter,
of course, orbiting a spectral class 'F' star as it did, the ecosystem
very different in detail, the fine composition of the air a bit
different, but close enough that most life-forms of either world could
have readily breathed the air of the other.
There _was_ one particular life-form to be found that was really odd
by Earthly standards. Well, actually, there were _many_ such life-
forms in various local niches and corners, evolution had worked its
magic on myriad species. We have our own reasons for interest in this
particular example.
It was to be found in the deep oceans, it had its origins near a zone
of tectonic activity analogous to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge of Earth
(though this later geological feature did not yet happen to exist when
this life form first evolved, about 300 megayears BP). Here two great
'plates' were emerging from the mantle, and just as on Earth, volcanic
activity was rife, water circulated down and reemerged again, hot and
rich with dissolved minerals, and life-forms had adapted to take
advantage of the nutrients and energy this made available. Some of
these life-forms were derived directly from Earthly life-forms in
comparable niches, others had evolved locally from other life,
convergent evolution had produced creatures that often looked and
behaved similarly though of divergent origin.
Let us narrow our vision down to one particular side-fracture of a
transverse crack in the planetary crust, extending off the main line
of sea-floor spreading. In the shadow of a subaqueous volcano, the
local life-forms have evolved a novel solution to their local
challenges, they have formed a commune run by a fungus.
Not a fungus quite like anything on Earth, this fungus evolved from a
line of evolutionary development that diverged in the Ordovician, the
last time a direct ancestor of this organism lived on Earth. Like
almost all Solarigen life, the fungi had their origins in the oceans
of Earth, and this particular line of development had never been out
of the sea, whether on Earth or here. It was still, though,
recognizably a fungus, a Terran mycologist would instantly have
recognized that, though any such hypothetical mycologist would find it
to be a bizarre example of such.
The fungi have always been good at forming symbiotic relationships,
the ancestral form of this one particularly so. It had formed a
symbiosis in which it connected chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea
within the hot depths of the local rock to surface microbes that
provided vital nutrients unavailable at depth, enabling
specialization. With time, this evolving fungus proved able to form
symbiotic relationships with metazoans as well, and eventually it
stitched together a 'community' of different organisms that spanned a
mile or so of sea-floor around the volcano, and several kingdoms and
domains of life. This took about five million years, but the result
was succcessful enough that it began to slowly spread _as a unit_
beyond the trench in which it originated.
It did not work like most Solarigen life, within the symbiotic web
individual organisms continued to evolve and breed and even compete,
but the fungi interconnected organisms in niches that would normally
never have interacted directly, and regulated the interactions between
and within the species that made up the commune. The fungi itself
evolved and changed, but over time the communal organization became
ever more interconnected, interdependent, and organized. It drew
energy from the heat of the water around it, from chemosynthesis deep
in the local rock (specialized mycelia able to bore into the rock
carried the symbiotic organisms within them), and from carnivory of
fish and other local animal life. To an observer, it would have
looked like a web or mat of densely interconnected, faintly
bioluminescent 'cables' lying across the seafloor, sometimes clustered
around some non-fungal life form that was part of the commune.
It expanded slowly, a few millimeters a year across the sea floor, it
was a unique life-thing, and the niches around it were mostly full.
The fungal commune was enduring, but its expansion averaged no more
than a few millimeters per Terran year, and sometimes it gave ground.
The local volcano from which it drew much of its energy and nutrients
sometimes nearly destroyed it, forcing it to grow back and form a new
communal web, but each time it survived and returned, growing back to
fill its trench again.
It endured in this way for millions of Terran years, growing to be a
few miles across at its largest, sometimes knocked down to only a few
tiny surviving specks of organic matter at its low points, but over
time it always returned. So it might have endured for ages, save that
its surrounding environment changed radically.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
It happens very swiftly, as such things go. Over the course of a few
thousand orbits of the planet around its star, over 90% of all life on
the planet died out. Every domain, every kingdom, every niche, land,
sea, and air, herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore, sessile and mobile,
life was pared down to a relative handful of surviving creatures
representing less only a few percent of all previous species on the
planet endured the Great Dying that swept the Milky Way Galaxy. [1]
The fungal commune survived the Great Dying...barely. Most of its
food sources were removed, many of its symbiotes died, but the deep
chemosynthetic power source endured, and the fungal 'core' of the
commune could adapt itself to feed on the organic detritus that
littered the sea floor after the local version of the Great Dying.
Indeed, so all-consuming had this greatest of all mass extinctions
been that even the decay of the dead was delayed and slowed because so
many of the creatures that normally fuelled this process were
themselves also now dead.
By now the single original fungus that had been the 'founder' of the
communal organism had itself differentiated into several dozen
symbiotically-linked types. Now, surrounded by empty niches, the
commune proceeded to expand madly, consuming dead organic matter,
forming new inorganic fuel sources, spreading and adapting but
remaining a single interconnected whole. It rapidly spread beyond its
original, highly localized niche and filled empty 'roles', over the
course of a million years after the Great Dying ended, it had grown to
cover more than a thousand square miles of sea floor, and was
encroaching on the continental shelves on some directions.
It was like no other form of life anywhere else in the galaxy. It was
made up of a vast 'web' of different kinds of evolutionarily related
fungi, incorporating other kinds of life along the way in an ever-
adapting, dynamic collective organization that was in some ways like a
single organism itself. It could cycle nutrients across hundreds of
miles, move energy from one region to another to compensate for local
deficiencies, it could defend itself against attackers and it could
prey on other organisms as well.
Now that the Thing (for want of any better word to describe this
assemblage as a whole) was spreading into shallow waters, it
discovered a new way to make a living. Somewhere in this time, it
formed a new symbiosis, incorporating photosynthetic algae (much as
its distant cousins on Earth had done) and gaining the ability to
harvest starlight to make food. The ability of the Thing to
redistribute resources across thousands of miles meant that it could
use energy from coastal photosynthesis to fuel biological activity in
the stygian darkness of the ocean depths, or draw nutrients from those
depths up to the coasts for use in photosynthesis. As time passed,
the Thing even incorporated different _kinds_ of photosynthesizing
organisms to maximize efficiency.
Another million years saw the Thing reaching onto the dry lands, new
kinds of fungi penetrating the soils of the coast, interconnecting
with coastal foliage and evolving the ability to prey on land
animals. A million years after that, the Thing had evolved symbiotic
relationships with fish and other mobile creatures, using parasitic
techniques to modify their behavior. So many niches were filled by
now that this Thing was the largest living thing on the planet, by
far, though one might quibble over the precise definitions of whether
it was one Thing or many interconnected things. The Thing tended to
defy ordinary classifications, it was a law unto itself, unique in the
galaxy among a million worlds.
Now the Thing was large enough that it was, by itself, a significant
part of the total global ecosystem, and exerted considerable influence
upon that. The chemical balance of the seas and the atmosphere could
now be affected by the Thing, over long scales, and the Thing was
doing just that.
MORE LATER.
[1] On Earth, this event was called the Great Permian Extinction.
Johnny1a
As the Thing expanded, the planet continued to change underneath it.
The ocean in which the Thing had been born had been growing wider for
geological ages, but now that motion had reversed, a new subduction
zone had formed along the edge of the continent to the north, and that
continent was coming back toward the ancient spreading zone which had
once fractured it from another land mass.
The Thing had long since expanded to reached the northern shore of its
ocean, and extended its fungal tendrils into the soil and along the
shores of that northern landmass, now the new subduction zone began to
swallow the sea-floor on which the Thing rested. Though it was highly
mobile within itself, the Thing as a whole was mostly sessile, a vast
network of fungal mycelia criss-crossing each other across an ocean-
floor, interlinking countless different sorts of symbiotic life-forms,
some of them mobile and some sessile. But always it had existed in a
_spreading_ ocean, now its vast watery habitat was shrinking.
Further, the web of mycelia (some of them as thick as redwood trunks,
some microscopic, and everything in between) that lay on and in the
sea-floor were being broken as the northern continent came south,
drawn down with the descending plate. The oncoming plate was actually
moving rather swiftly as such things go, an average of almost six
centimeters a year, making for both a rapid reduction in habitat and a
lively tectonic/geologic regime along the northern coast line area.
The Thing had been born of volcanic activity, but this was different,
and the Thing had grown used to placid stability due to its immense
size and safety.
(It was a living thing (of a sort) massing in the millions of tons,
after all, few predatory creatures could trouble it. All by itself it
made up a very significant part of the total planetary biomass.)
It responded by adapting. Over time it found ways to make use of the
new deep-sea subduction trench, it sent tendrils into the depths and
discovered new resources of minerals and energy it could tap. Other
mycelia evolved to bridge that gap, regaining contact with the land.
Ten million years after the subduction zone opened up, the Thing had
adapted to make use of it, and to spread through the access way it
granted into the 'deep biosphere' that up until now had been mostly
isolated from the surface levels.
The Thing continued to grow in complexity, evolution was happening
_within_ it, transforming it to meet changing conditions, the Thing
had a life of its own now, directed by a separate set of controlling
data that operated independently of the cell nuclei of the fungi that
made up its scaffolding. It actually absorbed some other living
creatures into itself, more or less learning how to duplicate their
tissues for its own use, in an evolutionary development unparalleled
elsewhere in the Galaxy.
From 'absorbed' vertebrates and cephalopods, it learned how to make
muscle tissue to animate some parts of its vast structure, it used
this to grow mycelia in some structures that incorporated animal-like
muscle tissues, creating 'tentacles'. In other areas it created
structures much like bone to give some areas of its vast 'body' more
structural integrity. It began to grow neurons much like those of
vertebrates and cephalopods, to store and process information and
organize itself more effectively.
None of this was in any way intentional or conscious, it was all a
product of evolution acting on this weird immortal life-form, and it
happened over the course of tens of millions of Terran years. Its
individual fungal and other components were mortal, reproduced within
the commune, and were subject to selective pressures, some of them
natural and some the result of regulation by the communal organism.
This enabled evolution to change the communal organism, and the
partial centralized control over reproduction by the component
organisms kept evolution from tearing it apart.
Always at the heart of the whole thing was the webwork of fungi
descended from the original mutated form in a long-closed sea trench.
Now differentiated into hundreds of forms, all working in unison to
maintain the community (which enabled the fungi to reproduce with
unparalleled effectiveness and security), the fungal network kept
getting more complex as time passed. Now it incorporated a neural web
that ran throughout the fast mesh of ocean-spanning fungal growths,
elevating the Thing from a mindless organism to something more like an
animal/fungus/plant hybrid.
Then came the supernova.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
Supernovae are by no means rare, they happen quite regularly. It so
happened that this star system was passing near (as astrographical
distances go) an old red and massive red giant at the time that it
finally reached the spectacular last stage of its life cycle, erupting
into a vast supernova only 26 light-years from the star system we've
been observing. Twenty-six years and a few weeks afterward, the light
from the explosion reached the planet, followed shortly by a sleet of
hard radiation that punched right through the atmosphere, attenuated
but still dangerous, and brought about planetary mass extinction of
modest proportions.
Mass extinctions, like supernovae, tend to happen every so often to
living worlds, this one could have been far worse. The radiation
wiped out a significant number of land-dwelling species, but not
nearly all, and it inflicted only a modest direct blow to the oceans,
the life of the seas took more harm indirectly from ecological side-
effects of the land damage than it did from the radiation _per se_.
Sheltered by deep water, most of the Thing was untouched by the
radiation...but the parts of the Thing that were in the shallows or on
land were hit, and the radiation induced its share of mutations in the
fungi that made up the essence of the Thing. The Thing had its
defenses against mutations, of course, but enough happened now to
overwhelm them locally. The fungi that were so mutated as to die
quickly were not the major problem, they could be replaced. The major
problem was the _mildly_ damaged fungi, whose descendents continued to
function within the Thing...but which functioned wrongly.
Like a normal metazoan with multiple cancers, the Thing now found
itself malfunctioning radically, signals were off, some parts grew
when they should not, others failed to grow when they should. The
deep and still healthy parts of the Thing were affected because they
were so heavily interlocked with the damaged fringes near the shores,
what followed was a breakdown of the Thing's organization that
eventually shattered it into hundreds of separate communities spread
across the ocean, cut off from each other. Most died, but a few were
able to survive and begin to rebuild, and as they did they found
themselves in competition with the other surviving fragments, now
sufficiently 'different' that reintegration was impossible. Evolution
now imposed a competitive race amid the fragments of the ancient
Thing, an 'arms race' situation that accelerated change and
adaptation. This went over for fifteen million years.
By the time one particular 'patch' of the Thing had managed to spread
back out, consuming or killing its siblings and forming a new Thing,
conditions had changed on the planet. Partly this was the result of
the local star getting gradually hotter, as main sequence stars do.
This star was bigger than Sol, and was proceeding along its natural
path more quickly.
Partly it was a matter of geological changes deep within the planet,
extensive volcanic activity was breaking out over much of the planet.
The oceans were rising, from melting ice and thermal expansion of the
water, vast shallow seas were forming, and the planet was getting
hotter. The moisture content of the atmosphere rose, adding to the
greenhouse heating, when a new equilibrium formed, the planet was a
mild hothouse, still habitable but with a very different environment
than had historically been the case. The continents were clustered
into three great land masses, heavily interpenetrated by seas, and the
new Thing was spread out across much of the sea-floor, it was larger
than the previous version had ever come close to being, and much more
complex and sophisticated. The neural web that lay within it gave it
a diffuse mentality about equal to that of a Terrestrial frog.
The Thing covered much of the ocean-floor in a webwork of mycelia, but
its tendrils also reached _into_ the seafloor, filling the interstices
and extending down to the layers of the deep biosphere. Different
kids of fungi characterized it in different places, and it was
steadily adding to the planetary biomass. It drew up minerals from
the depths, and used chemosynthesis to add directly to the new biomass
of the biosphere, it used photosynthesis to manufacture more of
itself. So huge was the Thing by now that the carbon it pulled from
the atmosphere for its life-processes and growth was a key limiting
factor in global temperatures, much of what would have been carbon
dioxide gas in the atmosphere was now locked up inside a single living
Thing on the ocean floor. More carbon was sequestered by the Thing
under pressure in underground cavities, the Thing had evolved to do
this both because it stabilized the environment and helped the Thing,
and because it provided emergency 'food'.
By 100 megayears BP, a sort of new stability had come to the planet.
The Thing was now large enough that it almost _was_ the planetary
ecosystem, though lots of life-forms remained outside it, the Thing
was the central entity around which the entire planetary biosphere
more or less circled in homage. The continents moved, mountains rose
and eroded, periodic minor mass extinctions came and went..and the
Thing had evolved a repertoire of responses that enabled it to more or
less surmount each challenge almost as a matter of routine. It
actively adjusted itself to stabilize the planetary climate, and every
life niche, on land, sea, or air, was influenced by it one way or
another. It was getting 'smarter', too, by 100 megayears BP its
neural web gave it a collective intellect rivaling that of a bright
mammal, it might have been as intelligent as a cow or a horse overall,
with a vast information-processing ability that enabled it to act with
an 'instinctive brilliance' in surviving and adapting.
The Thing even tended to moderate the force of the mass extinctions,
because in the process of adapting _itself_ to meet whatever challenge
was occurring, it stabilized the other niches, turning what would have
been deep dips in biodiversity and living numbers into modest ones,
sometimes into shallow ones. This in turn _slowed_ evolutionary
change, since niches emptied less often. After about 100 megayears
BP, the planet appeared to slip into a slow, sedate, biological state
of semi-stasis.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
The apparent stasis was an illusion, of course, life _never_ stops
changing and adapting. An outside observer would have seen a world
that looked superficially similar across nearly 100 millions Terran
years. The climate stabilized under the active influence of the
Thing, which absorbed and emitted gases into the atmosphere to tune
the greenhouse effect, the biosphere was slower to change than most
worlds again because of the influence, direct and indirect, of the
Thing. The continents moved, the three continents at 100 megayears BP
had become nine smaller land masses in 31,251 BC, but the climate was
quite similar to what it had been before. Vast shallow seas still
marked the planet, the land that reached above water was thick with
animal and plant life. A thick layer of clouds helped stabilize the
temperature as well, the planet rarely saw directly sunlight, a double
belt of water clouds covered much of the planet in the 'temperate
zones' where most of the dry land was to be found. Even the 'open'
skies of the equator and poles was heavy with clouds, just not so much
as the temperate zones. One the 'desert belts' were regularly clear-
skied, and there was little land there in 31,251 BC.
The long period of apparent changelessness was also marked by changes
within the Thing, changes not visible to the casual observer. It grew
mildly larger, it grew much more complex and capable, and it grew
_smarter_. The neural web grew in complexity, local clusters formed
that approximated small brains, the behavior pattern of the Thing did
not reflect hwo intelligent it was becoming _theoretically_ possible
for it to become.
In the year 31,251 Gregorian, something fell out of the sky on the
planet. It could have been a tiny meteor, but it was also moving
_much_ faster than any plausible meteor...until it approached the
edges of the atmosphere, at which point it slowed down in a way no
meteor could ever do. Unfortunately, it did not slow down enough to
remain intact when it touched the ground on one of the small land
masses. It got close. It only split in two, it did not explode into
a million pieces as it would have done if it had decelerated. The
intelligent beings inside it mostly survived, though quite a number of
them were killed in the crash that ended the flight of their stolen
spacecraft.
Man had come to the planet Terrans would someday call Cytheria.
END OF INTERLUDE ONE but with MORE LATER (In another thread)