Yet she was more. The joy that Carl and Lani felt brought her occasional pangs; Saul’s wistful nostalgia for her embodiment gave real pain. But though she understood and felt all this, she came to see it as a subset of the larger issues that confronted her. These frail people were bound up in the true passing life that the laws of natural selection had decreed-their deaths were written into their bones. Even Saul, her fellow immortal, rode the hormone tide. They felt deeply and thought upon the mortal questions.

In the Oort Cloud there circled beneath a sheen of unblinking stars a trillion cometary nuclei, more land than ever promised any ragged band of wanderers. The colonists would have Carl as their Joshua—an irony that had undoubtedly already occurred to Saul—and he would lead them forth.

But while Virginia would help them, and tend to their needs as best she could, she also had her own unique destiny as the first in a new kind.

If she represented a new phylum, the first law must be survival. That was why she now looked upon the attack from Earth as an unplanned, fortunate outcome of mankind’s stupidity. Earth could have had her, could have overcome its fears and welcomed the new phylum. But now she was embarked upon a new course, one eventually to her advantage.

She needed time to think, to explore.

The old species of Homo sapiens on Earth would inevitably spread, first into the solar system, then perhaps beyond. They had already shown their hostility to the strangeness encased in the iceworlds. Their fears would take centuries to abate.

Virginia knew, even if her human cargo did not, that there would never be a return to the kingdom of the Hot. Human societies, once grown apart, seldom can meet again on even, friendly terms. Far worse for two phylums.

She had time for poetry, for endless Byzantine pathways of contemplation. She even thought that she could glimpse the way it must be, when they reached the great cloud of worlds which drew them out.

The human species would have a divided destiny now, strands that could progress for a while along separate courses. There would be less pain if they remained aloof.

She calculated the probable evolution of Carl Osborn’s new species of Man, and of her own phylum, and was pleased. Reproduction, adaptation—these problems were vast, but she felt herself equal to them.

And as for Planetary Humanity… By her calculations, the new phylum and the old species would not meet again for four thousand years. Good. There was time enough to think about it.