Unable to orientate myself I remained as helpless as a tardigrade in
the Niagara River a toise or two upstream of the Horseshoe Falls.
The sudden change of ambience underlined for me that first and
foremost I must sharpen my focus within the unpredictable and
potentially treacherous surroundings of the LUCA. The important
matter in hand was to get to the control console of the ship, reissue
commands, and bring the vessel to safe landing within the confines of
Balmoral Castle, for the report I had witnessed had broadly hinted
that 500 million earth orbits of the sun would be necessary for niche
space regeneration and, as heaven knows, this would leave sentient
beings something of a squeezed space within which to alter the
planet's orbit before photosynthesis shut down, in the event of the
LUCA succeeding in its global pasteurisation of the planetary
superficies, a task implicit in the order I had so unwittingly and
recklessly conveyed to the ship at a time when I had regarded it as
little more than a species of furniture with an outboard motor
attached. Of course, I could more easily give up the unequal battle
and become the passive observer of the incineration of a Level Zero
inhabited planet, following which I would be instantly raised to the
unique condition of sole survivor of multicellular life, for apart from a
handful of astronauts whose existence would soon be curtailed by
lack of support from the mother world, my continued presence on the
LUCA would constitute the one and only vagile exemplar of the four-
and-half-billion-year experiment that had taken place on a Goldilocks
planet within the Orion-Cygnus Spiral Arm, with the dubious
exceptions of the MarkVI and the Engineer. Pestit I wholly discounted
as a genetic relation except perhaps in the very much larger sense of
a mutual descent from drifting bacteria within the vacuum of
interstellar space.
As Sir Kenneth, as I now referred to myself, I was faced with the
problem of negotiating a featureless endoscape in search of
companions who might be within a few pollex, and this is what I
naturally hoped for, of my current position, or already disbarked and
waiting some untold number of acti distant to observe the conclusion
of the LUCA's journey. For a horrible moment I had the suspicion that
when billiards had been referred to it was a hint that the LUCA and I
were to act as the cue, and the Moon and the Earth as the spheres.
But then, I reflected, there is some cause to believe that those more
generously endowed with material wealth have a tendency to
