We had reached a state of stasis as while hurtling, but with no
sensation of speed, through the inner solar system. There is always a
quality to travel, whether it be on foot or by spaceship that has an
unending sense of never quite getting there, Zeno's paradox yet
again, which is so frustratingly experienced by children in the box-like
rubber-tyred vehicles of the times in which we find ourselves. I doubt
if vast improvements to surface transportation on planet Earth will
ever greatly alter this sensation and children will continue to require
being drugged with books and games on longer journeys as there are
restrictions on simply drugging them or ourselves, much as we would
like to do so.
I had to take into account that the MarkVI, in her recent stone to flesh
transformation, would have had little time to recap the history of the
human
race. We are all told that we are descended from survivors, I mention
this because I could detect no sense of urgency in the MarkVI's
manner, none of that panic that must have spontaneously
accompanied an arboreal encounter with a mamba, at least with
those who survived the encounter long enough to reproduce and
many of whom must be numbered amongst the ancestors of all of us.
On the other hand, it is all too easy to be descended from a male
victim of a catastrophic event, maybe he was an early amateur
vulcanologist or, more likely, a priest figure, who had already
impregnated a female, or a number of females, who in their turn went
on to give birth to a smorgasbord of potential ancestors but
themselves perished for a number of causes ranging from puerperal
fever to one those common gathering disasters that overtook the
unwary throughout the Palaeolithic, thus leaving a mass of ancestral
infants to whom the baton entitled survivor had been handed at a
very early age. Could it be that being descended from two victims
somehow increased one's own survival value, or being forced to
survive from infancy so radically enhanced one's position that one
could claim to be a fully fledged reproductive survivor from a very
early age? Don't we all stress the importance of an infant that has
survived a weekend in an eagle's eyrie? Aren't we all descendants of
victims?
Here I had to bring myself up short. The MarkVI was descended from
no one within the human gene pool. Her physical origins dated back
to the Frasnian, a time when the first forests were establishing
