“That’s Earth!” Afra said. Then, immediately: “No, it can’t be. Wrong composition, and the core is much too dense.” She was absorbing the symbols for material and density automatically, seeing the planet as it was.
A second ember was acquired by the young system, also representing the death of an ancient star. Then a third and a fourth, each accruing what pitiful lagniappe it could from the scant debris of space. The last two were much larger cores than the first, and acquired more atmosphere for their dotage, but had no hope of rejuvenation. Four planets orbited the star, each far older as entities than it was.
A neighbor had problems. The picture shifted to cover it for a geologic moment. This star was much larger than the original one and had consumed its hydrogen — and helium — lavishly. In a scant few million years it had run its course. But its mass, and therefore its internal heat, was such that the conversions did not stop at carbon. Oxygen, sodium, silicon, calcium — all the way down to iron, 26 on the atomic scale, the elements formed in this stellar furnace. A series of thermal intensifications — cataclysmic storms — broke through the shell of helium even before its breakdown was complete, producing trace amounts of heavy metals up to lead; but the basic, energy-releasing conversions predominated. The demise of a large star was not a quiet matter.
When nothing remained at the core lighter than iron, the gravitic collapse resumed. The heat ascended to a hundred billion degrees. Strength was drawn from this collapse, and energy poured back into the core to form new matter. The heavier elements all the way up to uranium now were manufactured in quantity.
But at this final collapse the star rebounded in an explosion that splattered its mass across the galaxy: a supernova. A splendid spectrum of heavy elements shot past the more conservative viewpoint star and through its satellite system, and some of this was captured while some fell into the star itself. The system was richer than it had been, feeding greedily upon the gobbets of its neighbor’s destruction.
The original planet intercepted a fair share of this largesse, and gained perceptibly thereby, as did the others. But the largest fragments, mostly iron, fell into orbit and coalesced into planets in their own right. Now three small satellites circled within the four large ones.
“Mars, Earth, Venus!” Afra said, caught up in this adventure. “And the first planet we saw is Neptune — our planet!”
Schön still did not bother to comment. Ivo felt Schön’s concentration as he identified and captured the diverse threads of the macronic tapestry and organized them into a coherent and chronological visual history. This was a task that required all of Schön’s powers, the artistic with the computational and linguistic. They were nevertheless exceptional powers for an exceptional undertaking; Ivo had tended to lose sight of just how potent a mind his mentor-personality possessed. If a mouse born into Leo remained a mouse, a lion confined to the harness of a mouse remained a lion. Or, in this case, a Ram.
More time passed, and the slow accretions continued. A billion years after the first, a second nova developed in the immediate neighborhood. More rich debris angled by, and the sun’s family levied another tax on it, acquiring material for two more inner planets and a number of major moons.
“Mercury and — Vulcan?” Afra inquired. “Or is that Pluto, misplaced?” For there were now five inner planets — one more than could be accounted for.
Schön kept on working.
From distant space, travelers came. Most passed, merely deflected by Sol’s gravity, not captured. One, however, lurched into a wobbly elliptical orbit that passed close to that of planet Jupiter.
“Six inner planets?” Afra demanded in a tone of outrage.
It was not to be. Jupiter wrestled the newcomer around in a harsh initiation, twisting it inward toward the sun… and toward the orbit of the next inward planet. Too close. They drifted, interacted — and came together.
And sundered each other before they touched.
“Roche’s Limit squared,” Afra murmured.
One fragment shot out to intercept planet Saturn, and was captured there — too close. Roche’s Limit exerted itself again: the apprentice moon shattered, and the tiny fragments gradually coalesced into a discernible ring.
A major fragment of the original demolition traveled farther. It intercepted Neptune, where it too broke up, forming two tremendous moons and some fragments. One moon escaped the planet but not the system, and became the erratic outer minion Pluto; the other hooked in close to Neptune and remained as Triton.
Another major fragment angled across an inner orbit and interacted there, too large for capture, too small to escape. The two bodies formed the binary planet known as Earth and Luna.
Then a close shot at almost normal time. The landscape of Earth, seven hundred million years ago: strange continents, strange life on both land and sea. The moon came then, sweeping terribly close, a tenth of the distance it was to have at the time of Man. No romantic approach, this, but the awful threat of another application of the Limit. The tides of Earth swelled into calamity, gaping chasms split the surface of Luna. Mounds of water passed entirely over the continents, obliterating every feature upon them and leaving nothing but bare and level land. No land-based life survived, even in fossil, and much of the higher sea-life also perished in that violence. The progression of animate existence on Earth had been set back by a billion years: the greatest calamity it was ever to know.
“And now we make love by the light of Luna,” Afra said, “and plot it into our horoscopes as ‘feeling.’ ”
It was Harold’s turn not to comment.
All this, stemming from the single trans-Mars wreckage — yet the bulk of the refuse dispersed as powder or spiraled into the sun, to have no tangible impact. Debris remained to form a crude ring around the sun in the form of the asteroid belt, and a number of chunks eventually became retrograde moonlets. It would be long before the disorder wrought by this accident was smoothed over.
A third nova, more distant, provided another cloud of dust and particles, adding several tiny moons. Some of the swirls become comets, but the complexion of the system did not alter in any important way. Sol had its family, collected from all over the galaxy, portions of which were older and portions newer than itself. Life recovered from its setback on Earth and individual species crawled back upon the reemerging land and drifting continents in the wake of a receding moon.
One thing more: a solitary traveler came from the more thickly-settled center-section of the galaxy. It was a planetary body moving rather slowly, as though its kinetic energies had been spent by encounters with other systems. It looped about Sol in an extraordinarily wide pass, hesitated, and settled down to stay, averaging seven billion miles out.
“What is that?” Afra inquired.
“That thing must be twice the size of Jupiter!” Harold said. “How could it be there, in our system, and we not know it?” But no one answered.
Ivo half-suspected Schön of joking.
The motion stopped. The picture remained: the contemporary situation, updated to within a million years. They had witnessed in summary the astonishing formation and history of the Solar System.
“Beautiful, Ivo!” Harold exclaimed. “If you can do that, you can do anything. Congratulations.”
Ivo removed the macroscope paraphernalia. They all were smiling at him, and Afra was getting ready to speak. “I didn’t do it,” he said.
“How can you say that!” Beatryx protested. “Everything was so clear.”
But Afra and Harold had sobered immediately. “Schön?” Harold asked with sympathy.
Ivo nodded. “He said it would take me two weeks, and he was right. He said he could do it in an hour. So I dared him to, I guess.”