“Jonathan?” he heard Hollis say from across the room, but it seemed much farther than that. “Jonathan, what’s the matter?”

He was certain he had seen his pad lying near Thaw Tint’s console, alongside one of Alvin’s mechanical doves. And while it was true that the program had been erased, and that he would have to start reconstructing it from square one, surely the alien would not deny him this—well, kindness, if not mercy. Besides, the program now needed more revision than ever … and, yes, Jonathan suddenly knew why he needed very badly to be working on it again.

He had to return to the Titanic because from it he might still be able to launch lifeboats.

III

Origin of the Fittest

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

—Jim Powell

28

Spring, A.D. 2096

Deep in the Earth, the hydrothermals were still dreaming, as they had been doing for more than four billion years, evolving new life with which to invade the surface. Gaia, the fecund bitch goddess, was far from exhausted, determined again to display her fertility to the Sun. The recent eradication of life from her surface was merely one of countless interruptions.

The bottom of Manhattan Bay rioted with strange, white colonies of bacteria, some of them clustering into long tendrils that swayed in the currents as if to music. Beneath the place where Radio City had once stood, a new volcanic fissure, venting like a giant undersea snowblower, spewed white clouds of life out over the bay floor, as if preparing the stage for a new show in the music hall.

At Long Beach, great pillows of microbial life called stromatolites were forming a reef. Some of the bacteria could trace their ancestry to Hollis’s and Wayville’s breath, but mostly they were descended from the geysers that had broken through the foundations of City Hall, sending forth sulfides, and hot water, and heat-loving microbes—which,

as they streamed seaward, cut shallow channels through the graves of The Renaissance and The Breakers.

Living off carbon dioxide and mineral-laden hot water, a bacterial mat as wide as the Earth itself had formed a hidden biosphere which for most of man’s existence had thrived undetected beneath his feet. It was much like the world Tam had been exploring inside comet Sargenti-Peterson. But this biosphere, like Europa and Neptune, had never frozen to death. It was still quite alive, and even before the coming of the relativistic bombs it had dominated the Earth. Extending kilometers down, and girdling the planet, the sheer weight of the bacterial mat exceeded all the plants and animals on the continents and in the oceans.

Within each bacterium, the DNA was itself a microscopic biosphere, an invisible ecosystem built from competing bits of genetic material utterly indifferent to the needs of the cell in which they lived. The city builders had never understood this, had never appreciated the genetic maps they so vigorously charted as representing something that merely borrowed the body of a human or a bacterium for a while (it did not matter which) and then moved on. In the end, it was DNA that ruled humanity and the Earth. Everything else was vanity.