Bower put her hand back by her side and the image faded, returning them to the sea of stars on the vast, sprawling tree.
“Is that it?” Elvis asked. “Is that what they came for? Beetles?”
“Not just beetles,” Bower replied, gesturing to the gigantic tree towering thousands of feet above them. “All of life.”
She pointed at the lights glistening in the thicket of roots hundreds of feet below them, stretching out across the cloud tops like a tangled bush.
“Do you see that? Do you see the way the matt and tangle down there looks like a root-bound plant? At a guess, I’d say that’s the microbial world, with its reliance on asexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer. Oh, my mother and father would love this stuff.”
“Did you say horizontal sex?” Elvis asked. From his tone, Bower knew he was being facetious.
Bower went to repeat herself, and then thought of a simpler explanation in just two words. “No sex.”
“No sex,” Elvis repeated, looking at the roots as they crisscrossed each other. “Bummer.”
Bower laughed. “This is the tree of life. For the most part, complex organisms rely on sex passing gradual, successive change down through countless generations, and in this way, life has slowly branched out from a common point of origin, just like a tree, but microbes are more like a public library, constantly swapping books between themselves.”
“Huh,” Elvis replied.
She could see he was lost in thought.
“Like a library?” Elvis said absentmindedly. From his tone of voice, she could tell this wasn’t a question, it was an inquisitive statement.
Bower felt jubilant, playful. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was the excitement of discovery, but in that moment she felt mischievous.
“Are you feeling a little like those microbes in the library?” she asked. “Not getting any sex?”
Elvis bust out laughing. That got his attention, she thought, smiling.
“No, it’s not that,” he replied, grinning. “When you said, library, it sparked something in my thinking.”
Elvis turned, gesturing to the other trees dotting the celestial plane, each of them resplendent with millions of lights glowing like stars.
“Perhaps that’s what this is,” he said. “Some kind of interstellar library.”
Bower was surprised by Elvis; he’d made a remarkably astute observation, one she’d overlooked.
“Do you think,” he began hesitantly. “Do you think those other trees would show us life on other worlds?”
Elvis seemed unsure of himself. He shouldn’t have been, she figured.
They were both out of their element, but given her upbringing at the feet of a university biology professor, Bower was comfortable with what she was seeing. Whenever her mother had lacked a babysitter, she’d taken young Elizabeth Bower into her lectures, setting her to one side with some dolls and coloring pencils while she taught. In the same way in which most kids would play with Lego blocks, Bower had fond memories of playing with anatomical models of the brain and a segmented model of a frog. She’d spent her childhood playing with fake hearts and not-so-fake skeletons. And yet, she hadn’t seen this. Elvis was right. She smiled at his insight. For all his gun-toting, macho image, he’d seen something she missed, and that impressed her.
“Yes,” she said, knowing the certainty in her voice would give him confidence
“So they’re like scientists, or something?” he asked.
“I guess so. I suspect if we examined this tree in detail, we’d be able to trace life back to its origins. See those inner nodes, devoid of light? Those are the extinct parent species that led down to this point. Once, they shone like these species do today.”
“So this is like missing links and stuff?” Elvis asked.
His voice carried a slight hint of disdain, and Bower wondered about his upbringing, if he’d been exposed to creationist dogma instead of science.
“There are no missing links,” Bower replied gently, feeling she needed to take some time to clarify this point. “We may not have seen all the links, but none of them are missing. Chronologically, the chain is unbroken. If it weren’t, these life forms wouldn’t exist.”
Elvis was silent, and she suspected he wasn’t convinced.
“Evolution can seem a little intimidating, but it’s actually quite simple. Animals are like a lump of soft plastic. You can shape them. We do this all the time. Ten thousand years ago, there were no dogs. Wolves roamed the wilds. Not only did we tame them, we molded them to suit our every whim and fancy. We bred them selectively over countless generations to form Chihuahuas and Great Danes.
“And today, you might ask, where are the missing links between them? Where are the Great Chihuahuas? And of course, there are none. Chihuahuas and Great Danes aren’t linked to each other, they’re linked backwards in time, through some distant, common ancestor not too far removed from a wolf.
“When it comes to natural selection the only difference is, nobody chose to have thousands of species of beetles. They are the result of selective pressure from predators and disease, limited food and even things as seemingly innocuous as fussy females or feisty males.
“I know it’s hard to imagine, but the largest trees on Earth were once seedlings, and the same is true of life springing forth from its humble beginnings billions of years ago.”
“Huh,” was all she could get out of Elvis. He was non-committal. Well, she thought, we all need baby steps.
The Stellas were becoming agitated, circling around them in the air.
“Come,” they said in unison.
Although this was a request, Bower felt herself pulled away from the tree as though she were caught in a rip at the beach, being dragged with the swell of the waves.
“No! We need more time,” she cried.
Bower and Elvis were caught in an updraft, swirling high above the massive tree-like structures with their clusters of star-like lights glowing beneath them.
From up high, they could see the breadth and length of the alien vessel, if it could be called a vessel. To the rear of the craft, easily a hundred miles away, a vast rocky cliff arose. At that distance, the sharp shapes were impossible to resolve into anything other than a ragged mountain range breaking through the cloud tops.
The transparent dome stretched out overhead. Beyond the dome, Bower could see the gently curving slope of Earth passing to one side of the craft. She had given up on trying to figure out which way was up. In space, all ways were up, and yet without realizing it, she’d instinctively assumed up was aligned with the craft, but the alien vessel must have been positioned almost side-on to Earth, making her feel lopsided once she saw the planet. Earth curved away before them.
The sun set. For Bower, the view was counterintuitive. On Earth, sunset was marked by a tiny glowing ball of fire slowly dipping below an immense horizon. In space, sunset was sudden. Earth simply blocked the nearest star for a short while.
As they flew on within the vast alien craft, Bower felt she could have reached out and touched the dome, but the slick surface was probably still hundreds of feet above them. The dome was comprised of interlocking hexagonal tiles as clear as glass, with just the finest of seams running between them. Bower felt as though she were on the inside of a gigantic compound eye, looking out from within some vast insect as someone else looked in.
Their flight-path took them forward to the bow of the great interstellar ship, where most of the alien activity seemed to concentrate.
“I will never get used to that,” Elvis said, pointing at hundreds of spiky red aliens blowing past them like tumbleweeds.
They descended into what looked like an open football stadium, with thousands of tiered levels enclosing a low platform. The three alien creatures they’d once affectionately referred to as Stella touched down gracefully before them.