“I was hoping you weren’t going to go there,” Cutchen said.
“I have to. Because that’s what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was… well, possessed, he started ranting on about the helix. There was no doubt he was talking about DNA… the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world.”
“That’s kind of what Hayes was saying,” Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. “That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it.”
“Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was God. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material.”
“That’s pleasant.”
Sharkey nodded. “Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a mass migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en masse to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but intelligent life.”
“But that’s insane,” Cutchen said. “I’m sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That’s crazy.”
“Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they’ve been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. God knows how many colonies they’ve created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across space, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets orbiting a hundred stars, if not a thousand.” She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. “It’s fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found… it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities… in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places…”
Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic… or Gates’… and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn’t find one or it was so big he’d already been sucked down into it without knowing. “Okay,” he said. “How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I’m guessing.”
“No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an organic technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation… but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.
“But as to your question, they drifted here. They went into a dormant state, according to Gates, and drifted on what he called the solar winds. I suppose it’s the same way they drifted into this solar system. Gates mentioned them possibly manipulating fourth-dimensional space. You might remember that bit if you ever had any quantum physics… you jump into the fourth dimension at Point A and jump out at Point B. A to B could be ten feet away or ten million miles, it wouldn’t matter. You could transverse incalculable distances easily as a man stepping off his porch. Maybe that’s how they crossed interstellar voids. But if Lind’s memory of them was correct — and I tend to think it was — then, yes, they went into a sort of dormancy and drifted here.”
“Shit, Elaine, that would have taken eons,” Cutchen pointed out.
“So what? It wouldn’t have mattered to things like them. A thousand years or a hundred-thousand would be all the same to something that was essentially immortal and endless. Lind was in contact with that memory, Cutchy, a memory a billion years old and probably even two or three. And he experienced it… the dormancy, the drifting. Even the cold and lack of atmosphere were no deterrent to them. Nothing would be.”
“I’m still having trouble with this,” Cutchen admitted. “I mean, listen to what you’re saying here. Something like this… to put forth a plan, a grand design for this planet that wouldn’t see fruition for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. It’s just too incredible. That amount of time…”
“You’re looking at this as any being with a finite lifespan would. But time means nothing to them, nothing at all,” Sharkey said, realizing she was using the same arguments on him that Hayes had used on her.
Cutchen sighed. The bigness, the longevity of such an operation, the huge scale it must have been carried out on… all of this was flooring him. Not to mention that everything she said completely dwarfed man’s history, his importance, his very culture. It made the human race no more significant in the greater scheme of things than protozoans on a laboratory slide. It was very… sobering. “All right. So these Old Ones drifted here, started life with some master plan behind it all… then what? Just hoped for the best?”
“Hardly. Our evolutionary development would have been carefully monitored through the ages,” Sharkey told him, glancing back to her screen from time to time. “Remember, they colonized this world and they had no intention of leaving and still haven’t. They would not have left anything to mere chance. Gates wrote that there are great gaps in our own fossil record, times when our evolution jumped eons ahead for no apparent reason. 500,000 years ago, for example, the brains of our ancestors suddenly doubled in size if not tripled. It happened more than once, Gates said. These were the times, Cutchy, when those ancestors of ours were carefully manipulated by the Old Ones. Through selective breeding, genetic engineering, molecular biology, methods we can’t even guess at.”
“And… and they’ve been waiting for us… their children… all this time?”
Sharkey nodded. “Yes, waiting and watching through unimaginable gulfs of time while the continents shifted and the glaciers arrived, while the Paleozoic Era became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenzoic. While our ancestors evolved along lines already laid out for them. And at times, I would think, entire populations would have been taken to their cities and altered, then placed back again with selective mutations installed. They’ve waited and watched and now, if Gates is right, we’re ready for harvesting. Our intellects are sufficiently advanced to be of use to them. Down there in that warm lake, Cutchy, is the last relict population of a race as old as the stars.”