“Going to metastasize again,” he continued for her, “all over this planet.”

She looked at him and knew that, despite the hopelessness of their situation, she had him hooked. It was the first time he had shown a serious interest in anything she had to say; and this seemed to confirm her observation that there was a sudden change in him, a change that went deeper than mere fortification with whale meat.

“Maybe God equals DNA,” Jonathan said.

“Well, you’d have to go back before DNA actually— to gravitation. But here’s a couple of good questions to think about. We’ve known for a while now that occupying or renting our bodies isn’t the only way DNA survives. Eventually the planet evolved brains capable of resurrecting chromosomes after thousands or even millions of years. So long as the carriers of chromosomes managed to cover the Earth thickly enough, sneaking into every crack and crevice, it happened that wherever there arose an environment capable of preserving DNA, some small amount of it was bound to take up residence. So tell me, Wayville, do we define life as simply a property of the carbon atom, as an information storage system written on nucleic acid and read by protein? And if the answer is yes, should strands of DNA embedded in amber still be considered alive after tens of millions of years, and should the computers that store and replicate all that genetic information also be considered alive?”

There was silence in the cabin for quite a long time, not because Jonathan had no answers but because something on Hollis’s pad had caught her attention and she turned her back to him before he could respond. He could see that the buoys were reporting diminishing wind and rain. It was safe to go up and snoop around again. Such opportunities were rare, and the weather could take a turn for the worse at any moment, so they would have to hurry.

Jonathan watched the vent field drop away from Alvin’s floodlamps as Hollis pushed the engines up to full throttle. In seconds, the vents were out of sight, but he could not get the coming bacterial assault out of his mind. Behind the familiar bacteria waited a still-larger microbial army, deep in the folds and cracks of the planet’s crust, thriving athigh heat and pressure, buried so deep that the globe would have to be vaporized to prevent it from invading the unresisting surface. Earth— whose song had begun with the percussions of solar gravitational gatherings, meteoric bombardments, and geologic motion, and had swollen with the violent chorus of life, then shifted into the dissonant keys of technical civilization—had not ended its music with a shrieking coda. Deep inside, the planet still sang softly, holding back the lifeless dark.

Finally, he remarked, “Well, you’ve really put humanity in its place, haven’t you?”

“And man’s idea of purpose?”

“I can almost hear those bacterial genes laughing at us. It’s too damned ironic. Too appropriate. I keep remembering what my mother used to say about man and God.”