A network was being formed. Abruptly, he knew that libraries were being raided in New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. What was their scheme? Would they literally pluck up the Sistine Chapel and disks of Bach and the entirety of the Parthenon or Angkor Wat and lift them into space, along with the geniuses of Earth? Somehow, that seemed obvious and very naive.

He had listened many times to Harry's "essay" on the tape. Ever since, he had been mulling it over, comparing Harry's ideas with what the nascent network was relaying to him.

In his head, a concept more than a word: grammars.

Hooked to that concept was a maze of connotations: grammar of a planet's ecosystem, from genetic material on up, how the species fit together as "words" in a "book," the structure of evolving plots and the implications for a denouement . . .

Grammar of society, how human groups interact as part of the overall ecosystem . . .

Fruit, gonads, a planet's reproductive system, a fertile pseudopod reaching up into space away from the surface and having to learn Jesus Jesus.

To learn about deep vacuum and gravitation and the wind between worlds, the ecosystem of Earth must evolve an "organ" or arm equipped with perception and logic, just as life had once adapted to the land by developing certain kinds of eyes and limbs and neurological structures. Sentences in Earth's book using the syntax of land-walking, space-walking, all implied by the original ecosystem grammar, all inherent. As on a thousand other worlds with similar living grammars. Humans were the Earth's organ for crossing between worlds and stars.

They speak Life. They know what to take to keep the essence, the basic meaning, of the planet intact.

That was what he was being told. Harry had said, on the tape,

"I’ve spent twenty years of my life as a biologist. You, Arthur, kept me up to date in other disciplines; you got my mind working fifteen years ago when you gave me Lovelock's book on 'Gaia.' Recent events have made me dig out some of my own old theories and speculations, made after reading Lovelock and Margulis. We've talked about them, off and on, but I was never so sure of myself that I put them down on paper. Now I'm pretty sure, but I'm too weak to put them on paper, so . . . this.