The Wreeds took a Forhilnor cell and vacuumed all the DNA from the nucleus. They then carefully inserted into that cell diploid sets of chromosomes from Geedas and K’t’ben and Zhu, chromosomes that had divided so many times already that their telomeres had been reduced to nothing. And this cell, containing the 132 chromosomes from the three different races, was carefully placed into the artificial womb, where it floated in a vat of liquid containing purine and pyrimidine bases.

And then something astonishing happened — something that caused my heart to jump, that caused Hollus’s eyestalks to move to their maximum separation. There was a flash of bright light; the Merelcas’s sensors revealed that a particle beam had shot out of the precise center of the black entity, passing right through to the artificial womb.

Peering in with a magnifying scanner, the interactions were astonishing.

Chromosomes from the three worlds seemed to seek each other out, joining up into longer strands. Some consisted of two Forhilnor chromosomes joined together, with a Wreed chromosome at the end; Hollus had talked about the Forhilnor equivalent of Down syndrome and of how telomere-lacking chromosomes could join end to end, an innate ability, seemingly useless, even detrimental, but now . . .

Other chains consisted of human chromosomes sandwiched between Forhilnor and Wreed chromosomes. Still others consisted of human chromosomes at either end of a Wreed. A few chains were only two chromosomes long; usually a human and a Forhilnor. And six of the Wreed chromosomes remained unaltered.

It was obvious now that strands of DNA had built into them the ability to do more — much more — than simply die or form tumors after their telomeres had been eliminated. Indeed, telomere-less chromosomes were ready for the long-awaited next step. And now that intelligent lifeforms from multiple worlds had finally, with a little prodding, come into existence simultaneously, these chromosomes were at last able to take that step.

I now understood why cancer existed — why God needed cells that could continue to divide even after their telomeres were exhausted. The tumors in isolated lifeforms were merely an unfortunate side effect; as T’kna had said, “The specific deployment of reality that included cancer, presumably undesirable, must have also contained something much desired.” And the much-desired thing was this: the ability to link chromosomes, to join species, to concatenate lifeforms — the biochemical potential to create something new, something more.

I dubbed the combined chromosomes supersomes.

And they did what regular chromosomes do: they reproduced, unzipping down their entire length, separating into two parts, adding in corresponding bases from the nutrient soup — a cytosine pairing with every guanine; a thymine for every adenine — to fill in their now-missing halves.

Something fascinating happened the first time the supersomes reproduced: the strand got shorter. Large sequences of intronic DNA — junk — dropped out during the copying process. Although the supersomes contained three times as much active DNA as did regular chromosomes, the resulting strings were much more compact. The supersomes did not push the theoretical limit of the size for biological cells; indeed, they packed even more information into a smaller space.

And, of course, when the supersomes reproduced, the cell containing them divided, creating two daughter cells.

And then those cells divided.

And on and on.

Prior to the middle of the Cambrian, life had had a fundamental constraint imposed by the fact that fertilized cells could not divide more than ten times, severely limiting the complexity of the resulting organism.

Then the Cambrian explosion occurred, and life suddenly got more sophisticated.

But there were still limits. A fetus could grow only so large — baby humans and Wreeds and Forhilnors all massed on the order of five kilograms. Larger babies would have required impossibly wide birth canals; yes, bigger bodies could have accommodated bigger brains via live birth — but much of the additional brain mass would end up being devoted to controlling the larger body. Maybe, just maybe, a whale was as intelligent as a human — but it wasn’t more intelligent. Life had apparently reached its ultimate level of complexity.

But the supersome-driven fetus continued to grow larger and larger in its artificial womb. We had expected it to stop on its own at some point: oh, a Forhilnor might stumble into life with a double-length chromosome; a human child might survive for a time having three chromosome twenty-ones. But this combination, this wild genetic concoction, this mishmash, was surely too much, surely pushed the limits of the possible too far. Most pregnancies — be they Wreed or Forhilnor or human — spontaneously abort early on as something goes wrong in the embryo’s development, usually before the mother is even aware that she’s pregnant.

But our fetus, our impossible triple hybrid, did not.

In all three species, ontogeny — the development of the fetus — seems to recapitulate phylogeny — the evolutionary history of that organism. Human embryos develop then discard gills, tails, and other apparent echoes of their evolutionary past.

This fetus was going through stages, too, changing its morphology. It was incredible — like watching the Cambrian explosion play out in front of my own eyes, a hundred different body plans tried and discarded. Radial symmetry, quadrilateral symmetry, bilateral symmetry. Spiracles and gills and lungs and other things none of us recognized. Tails and appendages unnamed, compound eyes and eyestalks, segmented bodies and contiguous ones.

No one had ever quite figured out what ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny was all about, but it wasn’t a real replay of the organism’s evolutionary history — that was apparent since the forms didn’t match those found in the fossil record. But now its purpose seemed clear: DNA must contain an optimization routine, trying every variation that might be possible before selecting which set of adaptations to express. We were seeing not just terrestrial and Beta Hydrian and Delta Pavonian solutions, but also blendings of all three.

Finally, after four months, the fetus seemed to settle on a body plan, a fundamental architecture different from that of human or Forhilnor or Wreed. The fetus’s body consisted of a horseshoe-shaped tube, girdled by a hoop of material from which six limbs depended. There was an internal skeleton, visibly forming through the translucent material of the body, but it was made not of smooth bone but rather of bundles of braided material.

We gave the embryo a name. We called her Wibadal, the Forhilnor word for peace.

She was another child I would not live to see grow up.

But, like my own Ricky, I’m sure she would be adopted, cared for, nurtured, if not by the crew of the Merelcas, then by the vast, palmate blackness sprawling across the sky.

God was the programmer.

The laws of physics and the fundamental constants were the source code.

The universe was the application, running now for 13.9 billion years, leading up to this moment.

That the ability to transcend, to discard biology, came too soon in a race’s life was a bug, a flaw in the design, a complication never intended. But finally, with careful manipulation, the programmer had worked around that bug.

And Wibadal?

Wibadal was the output. The point of it all.

I wished her well.

It was the ancient progression, the engine that had always driven evolution. One life ends; another begins.

I went into cryofreeze again, passing the next eleven months with my body, and its degenerations, arrested. But when Wibadal’s gestation was finally complete, Hollus reawakened me for what, we both knew, would be the last time.