Spongy masses like red lotuses clung to the air bubble. Every few seconds one would expel a cloud of black things like wrinkled bits of carbon paper into the gas where they were attacked by tiny motes I could hardly see even with the lens. Black became silver. It fell back to the liquid like globules of mercury, and coursed toward the jelly that was emitting a froth of bubbles. Something in the froth made the silver beads reverse direction. They reddened, sent out threads and alveoli, until they reached the main bubble again as lotuses.
The reason the lotuses didn't crowd each other out was because every eight or nine seconds a swarm of green paramecia devoured most of them. I couldn't tell where they came from; I never saw one of them split or get eaten, but they must have had something to do with the thorn-balls — if only because there were either thorn-balls or paramecia floating in the liquid, but never both at once.
A black spore in the jelly wiggled, then burst the surface as a white worm. Exhausted, it laid a couple of eggs, rested until it developed fins and a tail, then swam to the bubble where lay more eggs among the lotuses. Its fins grew larger, its tail shriveled splotches of orange and blue would appear, till it took off like a weird butterfly to sail around the inside of the bubble. The motes that silvered the black offspring of the lotus must have eaten the parti-coloured fan because it just grew thinner and frailer till it disappeared. The eggs by the Lotus would hatch into bloated fish forms that swam back through the froth to vomit a glob of jelly on the mass at the bottom, then collapse. The first eggs didn't do much except turn into black spores when they were covered with enough jelly.
All this was going on amidst a kaleidoscope of frail, wilting flowers and blooming jeweled webs, vines and worms, warts and jelly fish, symbiotes and saprophytes, while rainbow herds of algae careened back and forth like glittering confetti. One rough-rinded galoot, so big you could see him without the eyepiece, squatted on the wall, feeding on jelly, batting his eye-spots while the tide surged through tears of gills.
I blinked as I took it from my eye.
"That looks complicated." I handed it back to him.
"Not really." He slipped it around his neck. "Took me two weeks with a notebook to get the whole thing figured out. You saw the big fellow?"
"The one who winked?"
"Yes. Its reproductive cycle is about two hours, which trips you up at first. Everything else goes so fast. But once you see him mate with the thing that looks like a spider web with sequins — same creature, different sex — and watch the offspring aggregate into paramecia, then dissolve again, the whole thing falls into — "
"One creature!" I said. "The whole thing is a single creature!"
An nodded vigorously. "Has to be to stay self-contained." The grin on his face whipped away like a snapped window shade. A very serious look was underneath. "Even after I saw the big fellow mate, it took me a week to understand it was all one."
"But if goofus and the fishnet have paramecia — " I began. It seemed logical when I made the guess.
"You've seen one before."
I shook my head. "Not like that one, anyway. I once saw something similar, but it was much bigger, about six feet across."
An's seriousness was replaced by quivering horror. I mean he really started to shake. "How could you ... ever even see all the ... stuff inside, much less catalogue it? You say ... this is complicated?"
"Hey, relax. Relax!" I said. He did. Like that. "It was much simpler," I explained and went on to describe the one our kids had made so many years ago as best I remembered.
"Oh," An said at last, his face set in its original impassivity. "It wasn't microorganisms. Simple. Yes." He looked at the pavement. "Very simple." When he looked up, another expression had scrambled his features. It took a moment to identify. "I don't see the point at all!"
There was surprising physical surety in the boy's movement; his nervousness was a cat's, not a human's. But it was one of the psychological qualities of golden.
"Well," I said, "it showed the kids a picture of the way the cycles of life progress."
An rattled his chain. "That is why they gave us these things. But everything in the one you had was so primitive. It wasn't a very good picture."
"Don't knock it," I told him. "When I was a kid, all I had was an ant-colony. I got my infantile Weltanschauung watching a bunch of bugs running around between two plates of glass. I think I would have been better prepared by a couple of hungry rats on a treadmill. Or maybe a torus-shaped fish tank alternating sharks with schools of piranhas: Get them all chasing around after each other real fast — "
"Ecology wouldn't balance," An said. "You'd need snails to get rid of the waste. Then a lot of plants to re-oxygenate the water, and some sort of herbivore to keep down the plants because they'd tend to choke out everything since neither the sharks nor the piranhas would eat them." Kids and their damn literal minds. "And if the herbivores had some way to keep the sharks off, then you might do it."
"What's wrong with the first one I described?"
The explanation worked around the muscles of his face. "The lizards, the segment worms, the plants, worts, all their cycles were completely circular. They were born, grew up, reproduced, maybe took care of the kids a while, then died. Their only function was reproduction. That's a pretty awful picture." He made an unintelligible face.
Something about this wise-alecky kid who was golden, younger than Alegra, older than Ratlit, I liked.
"There are stages in here," An tapped his globe with his pinky nail, "that don't get started on their most important functions till after they've reproduced and grown up through a couple more metamorphoses as well. Those little green worms are a sterile end stage of the blue feathery things. But they put out free phosphates that the algae live on. Everything else, just about, lives on the algae — except the thorn balls. They eat the worms when they die. There's phagoytes in there that ingest the dust-things when they get out of the bubble and start infecting the liquid." All at once he got very excited. "Each of us in the class got one of these! They made us figure them out! Then we had to prepare these recordings on whether the reproductive process was the primary function in life or an adjunctive one." Something white frothed the corners of his mouth. "I think grownups should just leave their kids the hell alone, go on and do something else, stop bothering us! That's what I said! That's what I told them!" He stopped, his tongue flicked the foam at the cusp of his lips; he seemed all right again.
"Sometimes," I said evenly, "if you leave them alone and forget about them, you end up with monsters who aren't kids any more. If you'd been left alone, you wouldn't have had a chance to put your two cents in in the first place, and you wouldn't have that thing around your neck." And he was really trying to follow what I was saying. A moment past his rage, his face was as open and receptive as a two-year-old's. God, I want to stop thinking about Antoni!
"That's not what I mean." He wrapped his arms around his shoulders and bit on his forearm pensively.
"An, you're not stupid, kid-boy. You're cocky, but I don't think you're mean. You're golden." There was all my resentment, out now, Ratlit. There it is, Alegra. I didn't grow up with the word, so it meant something different to me. An looked up to ingest my meaning. The toothmarks were white on his skin, then red around that. "How long have you been one?"
He watched me, arms still folded. "They found out when I was seven."
"That long ago?"