“But you can put a real spanner in the works of evolution.Take Earth, I mean our Earth, right now as an example. You’d see planned monospecific plantations that are a terrible idea ecologically but really useful for the lumber industry. You’d see dumbass little fucking dogs that have no practical use but fit in a handbag. You’d see fields of exactly the same crop as far as the eyes can see. And on this Earth, you see this fossil ecosystem alive and well five hundred million years past its use-by date. My hypothesis is, someone made this. There’s someone here, some bloody I-know-not-what, my loves, and it made this. This is its farmland or its plantation, or the grounds of its stately home.” She swallowed, the enormity of what she was saying catching up with her. “I mean, all our parallels broke from here, right? So here, Cam’s ancestors never evolved, but something did. And it evolved before the Cambrian; it evolved so goddamn early there was nothing but this nonsense as far as the eye could see. No plants, no animals, except this brain-looking stuff that isn’t either. Something arose from this mess and it made everything else, just started branching out worlds like a fancy candleholder.”

“Unless this is it,” Lee dropped into the following silence. Seeing all eyes on her, she flinched. “I just meant,” she clarified, “that what if the sentience we are looking for is this. We talk about engines and making things, but Cam’s people just do, don’t they? They don’t build things, they are things. So if this patchwork has been artificially kept the same way for millions of years, and we consider this evidence of intelligence—what if there isn’t a gardener after all? What if the garden is doing it to itself?”

That led to a longer silence. Beneath them, the living seabed continued to flow past, not an inch of it free of alien, quiescent life.

“Further information,” Cam said, in its own voice. Perhaps its equivalents were making similar announcements on the other ships. “We have now surveyed approximately nineteen per cent of the planetary surface between us. So far, we have found that this life we are seeing has one hundred per cent coverage, land and sea, poles to equator. These entities, or this composite entity, have or has achieved global coverage. No examples or traces of other multicellular life have been discovered.” It cocked its head to one side as though listening, and Kay wondered from whom it had appropriated this mannerism. “Also, to correct your earlier statement, Lee”—the girl jumped at the thing using her given name—“the organism or organisms we perceive here is or are not alive and well. We have found numerous regions of dead or dying biota. The expanse you are currently viewing beneath us is being actively broken down by bacterial agents.”