Something awoke when these creatures achieved a certain acreage, and what came to an awareness of itself was all of it. The world is a garden and the garden is a brain. Each individual life is a part of the whole, so that a consciousness arose back in the murky depths of time, one no later minds could conceive of. But it was vast and it was alone and it was aware of its loneliness. It became aware that its very presence, as a conglomerate entity, was imposing a status quo on the world that denied a thousand other alternatives. Using senses we cannot guess at, it understood that if it directed its great, slow thoughts like this—then it might push in a certain direction until a space was created. And possibility would flood into that space. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all. The appropriate waveforms would collapse into something different, a complementary world where events had followed another path entirely. Not cheap or easy to do, but it had the energy of a whole planet and literally nothing else to do with its time.

So, after a hundred million years of lying there, slowly coming to terms with what it was, the Ediacaran decreed: Let there be… not light, but something new.

And there was.

17.

I

The next step, as far as Julian could see, was for Dr. Khan to put her head together with various other brainy types—some of whom didn’t even have heads—to apply science to the situation. That was the extent of Julian’s personal grasp of the business. He took it on trust that they could fix things, now they had actually arrived here. If “here” was even the appropriate word for the space, or place, where they found themselves. Doubtless once the hard sums were done, they could just throw a celestial switch or apply a cosmic sticking plaster and then go home. The human Earth could continue in magnificent isolation without ever having to see another rat-creature or gigantic floating cockroach. In his fonder moments he was even drafting damage-limitation press releases in his head, to explain what had happened and thereby prevent them from having to know what had actually happened. He composed sentences about terrorist attacks and felt a heart-rending nostalgia for such familiar and commonplace threats.