And Eternity Part 24

"Viewpoint," Orlene said. "I still see no inherent conflict." The globe flashed.

"On the fifth day," Jolie said, "G.o.d created the great whales and all the fishes of the sea, and every winged fowl." Around them the creatures appeared, the ocean teeming with life, the sky showing birds.

"But are your days still a billion years long?" Vita demanded. "If you give them time. Evolution makes them evolve, so that's all right."

"The days can be that long if you wish," Jolie said. "G.o.d did it in the time he did it; it really doesn't matter."

"Then we still don't really have a conflict," Orlene said, and the globe flashed again.

"On the sixth day G.o.d made everything that was on the land," Jolie said, and all the creatures of the land appeared.

"Oh no you don't!" Vita cried. "Where are the dinosaurs?" A huge lumbering reptile appeared.

"You mean those bones G.o.d put in the ground to amuse scientists?"

"Yes, I mean those bones! The first creatures on land were the insects, and then the amphibians, and then the reptiles, and then the birds and the mammals. You claim the birds and whales came first, but whales aren't fish, they're mammals, and they couldn't have existed before mammals did. Even if your days are each a billion years long, you can't screw up the order of things like that!"

"But there were no dinosaurs," Jolie protested. "Life has always been as it is now, with all the present creatures and no others. G.o.d created them together, and then He created man in His own image to have dominion over them, and from that time to this it has been about six thousand years."

"What of the fossil record? It shows how the present animals evolved from the early ones."

"Do you mean that you have a chain of bones that shows an unbroken line from your dinosaurs to the modem creatures?"

"Well, not exactly. The dinosaurs died out. But the little mammals evolved after that, and we have their bones to prove it."

"You may have bones, but they are only what G.o.d put there. And I think even so, they do not have unbroken lines. For example, how good a line of bones do you have for human beings?"

"Uh, not too good, for people, I don't know why.

But-"

"Because your notion that man evolved from animals is a fantasy," Jolie said, warming to her subject. "Foolish men see a few bones and think that proves Evolution, but smart ones see that the bones are only bones, put in the ground the same time man himself was put on the Earth. If it were otherwise, the bone record would be continuous and it's not even close."

Vita was taken aback. "Gee, you really believe this stuff!" she exclaimed. "But you know, that doesn't prove anything. I saw a man once looking for a handful of change he'd dropped. He'd had to carry a bag of things into his house, then he came out later to round up the change, and all he could find was a few pennies. Know why? Because it was by a sidewalk, and some coins must've rolled into the gutter and gotten washed through the storm grate, and some fell in cracks between slabs, and some were lost in the gra.s.s-and there were people walking by all the time, and they would've picked them up and taken them away. So if you'd judged by what he found, you'd have said that all he dropped was two cents-but he really dropped over a dollar in change. Now you take those bones: some of them were dragged off and chewed to pieces by predators, some got washed into the sea, some got crushed by stones or just plain weathered away in the course of millions of years. Only a few ever got buried where maybe some scientist found them-and that's why the fossil record is so skimpy. I don't think G.o.d's a tease; He wouldn't put down wrong clues just to confuse people. He didn't do it at all; it happened by itself. We've found enough to show us the way of it, and that's what the fossil record proves."

"But G.o.d could have put down those bones," Jolie said. "Those bones don't prove how they were put down. You have one theory, I have another. Can we choose between them?"

Orlene shook her head. "I have to confess, I have my bias, but I can't honestly choose between them. It could have happened either way."

The crystal flashed. "We're much closer to home now," Roque said, peering into it. Indeed, they now stood in a setting that was almost modem, with a variety of broad-leafed trees nearby and fir trees in the distance. A deer was browsing several hundred feet away, and there was the sound of birds in the trees.

"But we aren't through with the subject yet," Jolie said. "You mentioned this soup from which life formed, as if this is easy. But the most primitive type of life is unimaginably complex! Even a single living cell has so many molecules, such intricate processes, that it would take a small library of texts just to write out the DNA code! The odds against such a perfectly functioning system coming together by chance are astronomical. Indeed, even your scientists will tell you that it would probably take longer than the whole age of the universe, as they figure it, from start to finish, for that to happen. It has to have been done by design-G.o.d's design."

' 'No it doesn't,'' Vita retorted.' "There may be hundreds of billions of planets just like ours in the universe, all with their soups, so the chances of it happening on at least one of them aren't that bad. But Evolution doesn't claim that a single living cell just popped into existence from soup. It happened by easy stages. Maybe just two molecules came together by chance, at first, and that worked better than the loose ones, so they stayed that way. Then, maybe a million years later, a third one b.u.mped into them, and if mat worked better, it stayed. That's natural selection. All those molecules churning around all the time, banging into each other, some combinations are bound to work together better than others. It may be chance that brings them together, but once they are together, it's not chance anymore. So the key proteins were formed in that soup, bit by bit. When one combination produced life, it was only a little step-but it worked better, so it kept on, and made copies of itself, and then things really got going. Mutation-"

"But almost all mutations are bad!" Jolie protested. "So those ones die. If one in a thousand mutations makes something better, then that's what survives. It just keeps going, getting better, because the worse ones either die or are less compet.i.tive. If more than one version works, then we get different species, and finally we have all the plants and creatures of the world today, including man. Mutation and natural selection, in little steps, with a lot of time-that accounts for everything. We sure don't need G.o.d to do it for us!"

Orlene shook her head. "It could have happened either way. G.o.d could have done it, or Evolution could have, or G.o.d could have used Evolution as His tool to do it."

The globe flashed. They now seemed to be quite close to home.

"We haven't settled this yet," Jolie said. "Even if Evolution could have done it, it still had to have an orderly universe. You claim that everything started in one big bang. How can an explosion lead to the systematic organization of galaxies and stars and planets we find? It could generate only chaos-and only G.o.d could have brought order out of that confusion."

"Not so," Vita argued. "In one of my math cla.s.ses they got into computer-aided designs. You could start with any shape and keep changing it randomly, and if you selected for what you wanted, you could come up with just ' about any picture you wanted. It's c.u.mulative. It might take a hundred steps or more, but it happened. I started with a V and made it into a flying bat, just by picking the right shapes the computer generated."

"But the universe had no one to pick shapes!" Jolie said. "Except G.o.d!"

Vita was taken aback. "You mean I'm arguing your case? No, I'm just saying that out of a random shape, order can come, if something selects for it. It doesn't have to be a person. In the case of the universe, I think it was gravity. When two bits of matter got together, they attracted others, just a little, and formed a ball in time. Eventually there were great stars, and when they got too big, they collapsed inward and made black holes, and they started sucking everything else in, making galaxies. We're just some of the fluff that hasn't gotten sucked into the hole yet. Some organization! I don't see it as any celestial design, just as part of the process. And life isn't all that great, either, it's really just the slime on the surface of our planet. But it's what we are."

"This is a horrible view!" Jolie protested.

"Well, it sure explains why mankind is so creepy!" Vita said. "Look at the way we're ruining the world, look at all the crime and sin and just plain grubbing for money! You think this is G.o.d's own image? Then G.o.d's a freak!"

"No, this is just the mortal testing G.o.d set up. But I agree, it isn't working very well, so any time now G.o.d will call a halt and settle accounts."

"We don't need G.o.d for that either! Pretty soon World War Three will come along and wipe us all out and it'll be done. We'll end with a bang, for sure!"

"That may be G.o.d's design," Jolie pointed out. But she did not look comfortable.

"Have we discussed this enough to enable you to come to a conclusion?" Roque asked Orlene.

"No, I can't decide either way," Orlene said. "They agree that the end of the world is coming."

Once more the globe flashed. But they still were not home.

"Evidently we are overlooking something," Roque said. "We seem to have brought the competing theories into alignment for our purpose, but Nox wants more of us. Unless we come to terms with that too-"

"The Incarnations!" Vita exclaimed. "Where do they fit into this?"

The globe flashed, and the scene around them changed.

They were back in the early Earth, before life appeared.

The globe glowed, and expanded, and floated up to head height. It turned, and one side brightened while the other went dark. Water appeared on it, and land.

"It's the world!" Vita said. "The sea, the land, day and night! Just as we discussed them!"

Then the light of it intensified, flickering about the surface and making the depths glow. It coalesced at the ocean.

"That's life!" Vita cried. "It came from the planet itself!"

But the flickering was not done. Part of it collected at the dark side and part at the light side. The dark side remained constant, but the light side flickering separated into two, and then into seven nuclei, with a number of pinpoints as well. These remained.

"I don't get it," Vita said, when it was apparent that no further change was coming. "What's the point?"

"I suspect that is what we are here to determine," Roque said. "Nox is showing us something, making a point. We merely have to grasp it."

"Light and darkness, the light fragmented," Orlene said. "At the time when life appeared on the face of the Earth. Seven major fragments, like the seven-" She broke off, the realization coming, as the globe abruptly expanded farther.

"Incarnations!" Vita cried. "The seven major Incarnations-all on the Day side! And on the Night side-"

"Only the Incarnation of Night," Jolie said. "She never fragmented. She still governs the dark."

"But that means that they all formed together, and the lesser ones too," Orlene said. "When life came to the world."

"No!" Vita said excitedly. "The world always had its spirit! Like a hamadryad, the spirit of a tree, only this is the big original spirit for the whole planet! Life came when the world's spirit settled around its rim-and the Incarnations are another expression of it!"

"To watch it and guide it and make sure it goes right," Jolie agreed. "As you say, like the nymph of a tree, the Incarnations exist with it yet apart from it, too, protecting it-and if it dies, so do they."

"And there was so much going on by day, when the animals were active, that it took a slew of Incarnations to handle it," Vita said. "But the night shift, when they're asleep, isn't so bad, so Nox stayed just as she was."

"And she's not part of the day, so she doesn't have a say in it, but she still cares about the world," Orlene said.

Now the motion resumed. The globe had become the scene surrounding them. The Incarnations floated nearby, each glowing, but their outlines and features were shrouded. They could be distinguished by external hints, however; one was great and bright, another like red flame, and another seemed somehow inverted or backwards: Chronos, existing in reverse.

"They don't look human," Vita remarked.

"This is before human beings existed," Roque said. "Perhaps other creatures a.s.sumed the Offices."

"But there were no other creatures before man!" Jolie protested.

"Yes, there were," he replied. "We established that a Biblical day could be any length, and man was the last to be created. You can accept that."

She nodded, surprised. "So the Offices continued right up to the present, with human beings taking over all of them except for Night."

"And Nox may not be human, but she can a.s.sume the form when she wants to," Orlene said. "So now we understand the framework in which we exist: whether science or magic governs. Evolution or Creationism, the immortal Incarnations are with us. Human beings may step into the Offices for a while, but they are merely like the presidents of companies, doing what they are supposed to. The power is apart from the Officeholders. The Incarnations are immortal, though implemented by mortals."

"But why is Nox showing us all this?" Vita asked. "Why does she care about us at all? We are n.o.bodies, even among mortals!"

"I think she is showing us why," Jolie said. Indeed, the scene was changing as they talked. Modem buildings appeared around them, and cars and carpets and saucers. Then, abruptly, it ended in a blinding flash.

They blinked, trying to see. But as their vision cleared, all they saw was molten rock and horrendous cloud cover. "Back to the start?" Jolie asked. "No life at all?"

"World War Three!" Vita exclaimed. "Oh, it's coming, and not too far off!"

"But can't the Incarnations stop it?" Orlene asked, appalled.

"Perhaps they can-but they will need our help,"

Roque said.

There was another flash, and they found themselves in a building. They were on a bed, the three women coalesced into one, with "Vita, take the body," Orlene said.

Huh? Then Vita caught on, and resumed control of her body.

They were back where they had started-in Luna's house, in the guest room, amidst the act of love. It seemed that no time at all had pa.s.sed since Nox had interrupted.

When Luna returned, she found a chastened house guest. "Is something wrong?" she asked, immediately responsive to the mood.

"Not exactly," Orlene said. "But perhaps yes. Is the end of the world approaching?"

Luna paused, then abruptly took a seat. "What happened?"

"It is complicated, but the essence is that Nox visited and showed us a vision that explained a great deal-and suggested that World War Three is not far off."

Luna nodded. "Now you have a notion why our research is so pressing. We are trying to head off the disaster that is looming. Not even Satan wants that, but somehow it keeps building. If we don't find a way to head it off, in perhaps five years it will happen. But we know it doesn't have to happen-if we can do what has to be done."

"What is that?" Orlene asked, awed.

"I am not yet free to tell you that."

Jolie suffered a flash of something, perhaps a memory, but could not capture it. Had she once known more about Luna's research?

"But how can we help, if we don't know anything?"

"I suspect you can help, but it is vital that you not know the manner of it. I suggest that you go on about your quest, and after that we shall be in touch again."

"But how can I do something as personal as looking for my baby, when the world may end thereafter?" Orlene asked.

"Nox sent you on that quest, and Nox showed you the problem with the world," Luna said. "I suspect that Nox is no more interested in seeing the world end than we are, but your quest must in some way relate. Complete it, and perhaps then we shall understand."

Orlene gazed at her with mixed emotions. But there did not seem to be any better course to follow.

Chapter 10 - WAR.

They returned to Purgatory, using the h.e.l.levator, knowing that another year would pa.s.s for every day and night they were here. Two days was their limit; they dared not risk more than that, because that was when the big event was to take place among the mortals, whatever it was. If Luna's effort failed, then the next three years would see the development of World War Three. As they traveled, they discussed what they had seen in Nox's vision. Why had she done it? Why hadn't she gone to one of the Incarnations directly, or to G.o.d Himself? Not one of the three of them seemed worthy of her direct attention for even a minor matter, let alone World War Three!

Well, you know we weren't the only ones in that vision, Vita thought. I thought Roque got dragged along by accident, because he was, well, close. Jolie, who had the body for the trip, laughed at the understatement. But maybe it was for him, Vita continued.

"Because he's a judge," Orlene said. "Or-"

Because he's under consideration for an Office! Jolie thought. Again something nagged at the recesses of her consciousness, but could not be captured.

And maybe that Office could have some effect! Vita concluded, excited.

It did seem to make sense. "But what Office would that be? The one that relates to war?"

And we are going to visit Mars now! Orlene thought. It did seem to make sense. If Roque were slated to become the Incarnation of War, the vision would ensure that he get right on the job of avoiding WW in. Nox evidently could not affect the events of Day directly, but this would be an excellent way to affect them indirectly.

"I think we had better observe Mars most carefully," Jolie concluded.

They presented themselves at the front gate of the Cause of War. The drawbridge descended immediately, and the portcullis lifted. Two lovely women came out, garbed in flowing gauzy outfits reminiscent of medieval royalty. One was in pastel pink, the other in pastel blue.