“So what are the directions in evolution?” I asked. “Toward greater intelligence? Toward some sort of godlike hive mind?” I was curious about her perception of the Lions and Tigers and Bears.

“Hive mind,” said Aenea. “Ugghh. Can you conceive of anything more boring or distasteful?” I said nothing. I had rather imagined that this was the direction of her teachings about learning the language of the dead and all that. I made a note to listen better the next time she taught. “Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing,” said my young friend. “A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere… consensual idiocy.”

“Okay,” I said, still confused. “What direction does evolution take?”

“Toward more life,” said Aenea. “Life likes life. It’s pretty much that simple. But more amazingly, nonlife likes life as well… and wants to get into it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Aenea nodded. “Back on pre-Hegira Old Earth… in the 1920’s… there was a geologist from a nation-state called Russia who understood this stuff. His name was Vladimir Vernadsky and he coined the phrase “biosphere,” which—if things happen the way I think they will—should take on new meaning for both of us soon.”

“Why?” I said.

“You’ll see, my friend,” said Aenea, touching my gloved hand with hers. “Anyway, Vernadsky wrote in 1926—‘Atoms, once drawn into the torrent of living matter, do not readily leave it.’”

I thought about this for a moment. I did not know much science—what I had picked up came from Grandam and the Taliesin library—but this made sense to me.

“It was phrased more scientifically twelve hundred years ago as Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea. “The essence of it is that evolution doesn’t back up… exceptions like the Old Earth whale trying to become a fish again after living as a land mammal are just the rare exception. Life moves on… it constantly finds new niches to invade.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Such as when humanity left Old Earth in its seed-ships and Hawking-drive vessels.”

“Not really,” said Aenea. “First of all, we did that prematurely because of the influence of the Core and the fact that Old Earth was dying because of a black hole in its belly… also the Core’s work. Secondly, because of the Hawking drive, we could jump through our arm of the galaxy to find Earth-like worlds high on the Solmev Scale… most of which we terraformed anyway and seeded with Old Earth life-forms, starting with soil bacteria and earthworms and moving up to the ducks you used to hunt in the Hyperion fens.”

I nodded. But I was thinking, How else should we have done it as a species moving out into space? What’s wrong with going to places that looked and smelled somewhat like home… especially when home wasn’t going to be there to go back to? “There’s something more interesting in Vernadsky’s observations and Dollo’s Law,” said Aenea.

“What’s that, kiddo?” I was still thinking about ducks.

“Life doesn’t retreat.”

“How so?” As soon as I asked the question I understood.

“Yeah,” said my friend, seeing my understanding. “As soon as life gets a foothold somewhere, it stays. You name it… arctic cold, the Old Mars frozen desert, boiling hot springs, a sheer rockface such as here on T’ien Shan, even in autonomous intelligence programs… once life gets its proverbial foot in the door, it stays forever.”

“So what are the implications of that?” I said.

“Simply that left to its own devices… which are clever devices… life will someday fill the universe,” said Aenea. “It will be a green galaxy to begin with, then off to our neighboring clusters and galaxies.”

“That’s a disturbing thought,” I said.

She paused to look at me. “Why, Raul? I think it’s beautiful.”

“Green planets I’ve seen,” I said. “A green atmosphere is imaginable, but weird.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t have to be just plants. Life adapts… birds, men and women in flying machines, you and me in paragliders, people adapted to flight…”

“That hasn’t happened yet,” I said. “But what I meant was, well, to have a green galaxy, people and animals and…”

“And living machines,” said Aenea. “And androids… artificial life of a thousand forms…”

“Yeah, people, animals, machines, androids, whatever… would have to adapt to space… I don’t see how…”

“We have,” said Aenea. “And more will before too long.” We reached the next three hundredth step and paused to pant.

“What other directions are there in evolution that we’ve ignored?” I said when we began to climb again.

“Increasing diversity and complexity,” said Aenea. “Scientists argued back and forth about these directions for centuries, but there’s no doubt that evolution favors—in the very long run—both these attributes. And of the two, diversity is the more important.”

“Why?” I said. She must have been growing tired of that syllable. I sounded like a three-year-old child even to myself.

“Scientists used to think that basic evolutionary designs kept multiplying,” said Aenea. “That’s called disparity. But that turned out not to be the case. Variety in basic plans tends to decrease as life’s antientropic potential—evolution—increases. Look at all the orphans of Old Earth, for instance—same basic DNA, of course, but also the same basic plans: evolved from forms with tubular guts, radial symmetry, eyes, feeding mouths, two sexes… pretty much from the same mold.”

“But I thought you said diversity was important,” I said.

“It is,” said Aenea. “But diversity is different than basic-plan disparity. Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design… thousands of related species… tens of thousands.”

“Trilobites,” I said, getting the idea.

“Yes,” said Aenea, “and when…”

“Beetles,” I said. “All those goddamn species of beetles.”

Aenea grinned at me through her mask.

“Precisely. And when…”

“Bugs,” I said. “Every world I’ve been on has the same goddamn swarms of bugs. Mosquitoes. Endless varieties of…”

“You’ve got it,” said Aenea. “Life shifts into high gear when the basic plan for an organism is settled and new niches open up. Life settles into the new niches by tweaking the diversity within the basic shape of those organisms. New species. There are thousands of new species of plants and animals that have come into existence in just the last millennium since interstellar flight started… and not all bio-engineered, some just adapted at a furious rate to the new Earth-like worlds they were dumped down on.”

“Triaspens,” I said, remembering just Hyperion. “Everblues. Woman-grove root. Tesla trees?”

“They were native,” said Aenea.

“So the diversity’s good,” I said, trying to find the original threads of this discussion.

“Diversity’s good,” agreed Aenea. “As I said, it lets life shift into high gear and get on with its mindless business of greening up the universe. But there’s at least one Old Earth species that hasn’t diversified much at all… at least not on the friendly worlds it colonized.”

“Us,” I said. “Humans.”

Aenea nodded grimly. “We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals,” she said. “Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the Pax, and the Core are stopping it.”

“Does the need to diversify extend to human institutions?” I said. “Religions? Social systems?” I was thinking about the people who had helped me on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Dem Ria, Dem Loa, and their families. I was thinking about the Amoiete Spectrum Helix and its complicated and convoluted beliefs.

“Absolutely,” said Aenea. “Look over there.”

A. Bettik had paused at a slab of marble upon which words were carved in Chinese and early Web English: