Part XXXVIII

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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

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