CBS Daylight News, January 1, 1997, hosts Tricia Revere and Alan Hack: Revere: Were you in Times Square or watching it on TV?

Hack: TV. I value my life. Revere: I’ve never seen anything like it. An absolute frenzy.

Hack: They think it’s our last year on Earth. (Shakes his head at comment off camera) The hell with that. Let’s be real. They do. So they’re going to party.

46

The wonder of it was that Arthur still felt like a private individual. He had driven Marty through drizzling rain to school, in a fit of parental solicitude — the school bus was perfectly adequate and stopped less than fifty yards from the front door. Returning, while parking in the carport, he had heard distant voices, some speaking English, most not. He had sat in the car with eyes closed, listening as if he were on some ham radio or satellite dish connection, but the voices had stopped, replaced only by a humming expectancy.

He had walked into the house, removing his overcoat. Francine had met him with a cup of hot cocoa. His eyes misting, he had sipped the cocoa, put it down on the kitchen counter, and hugged her. She had moved against him with more and more enthusiasm, verging on desperation, and he had led her into the bedroom, where they had made love.

He had not been “watched.”

When not carrying out specific tasks, he was as free — within rational limits — as anybody he knew. He would not even contemplate leaving his zone of activity, the northwestern area of the United States. And if he tried to do so, he would be prevented. But there was plenty of work to do here, and more would be coming later on…

He lay with his head on his wife’s ample tummy, hand around one breast, dozing lightly. She curled a lock of his hair in one finger and watched him with that womanly calmness he had so often marveled at. There had been passion, even obsession, in their bed that morning, yet now she was as placid as a crockery madonna.

He could tell her about the spider. Nothing would prevent him. He lifted his head and was about to speak, but then stopped. So who’s in charge? Is it me, hesitating, or something else? It was him. She had enough to think about without learning her husband was possessed. That word amused and irritated him. It did not describe what was happening…

Why don’t they take her, too? Possess her?

Because they didn’t need her, and their resources were limited. Suddenly his spine tingled and his neck tightened. Only one or two thousand…What if nobody in his family was among that chosen group? None of his friends, colleagues, acquaintances? What if he was not?

“Something wrong, Art?” she asked, stroking his forehead.

He shook his head and caressed her nipple.

“You make me feel like something other than a mother and PTA member,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Oh, I am,” he said. “Thoroughly.”

The rain gusted against the windows and a cold wind howled under the eaves. Ominous, patently ominous, yet it made him feel safe and warm. He could lie nude beside his woman in an enclosed warm bedroom and feel himself a master of infinite space. His body did not yet understand.

A network was being formed. Abruptly, he knew that libraries were being raided in New York, Washington, B.C., and elsewhere. What was their scheme? Would they literally pluck up the Sistine Chapel and disks of Bach and the entirety of the Parthenon or Angkor Wat and lift them into space, along with the geniuses of Earth? Somehow, that seemed obvious and very naive.

He had listened many times to Harry’s “essay” on the tape. Ever since, he had been mulling it over, comparing Harry’s ideas with what the nascent network was relaying to him.

In his head, a concept more than a word: grammars.

Hooked to that concept was a maze of connotations: grammar of a planet’s ecosystem, from genetic material on up, how the species fit together as “words” in a “book,” the structure of evolving plots and the implications for a denouement…

Grammar of society, how human groups interact as part of the overall ecosystem…

Fruit, gonads, a planet’s reproductive system, a fertile pseudopod reaching up into space away from the surface and having to learn Jesus Jesus.

To learn about deep vacuum and gravitation and the wind between worlds, the ecosystem of Earth must evolve an “organ” or arm equipped with perception and logic, just as life had once adapted to the land by developing certain kinds of eyes and limbs and neurological structures. Sentences in Earth’s book using the syntax of land-walking, space-walking, all implied by the original ecosystem grammar, all inherent. As on a thousand other worlds with similar living grammars. Humans were the Earth’s organ for crossing between worlds and stars.

They speak Life. They know what to take to keep the essence, the basic meaning, of the planet intact.

That was what he was being told. Harry had said, on the tape,

”I’ve spent twenty years of my life as a biologist. You, Arthur, kept me up to date in other disciplines; you got my mind working fifteen years ago when you gave me Lovelock’s book on ‘Gaia.’ Recent events have made me dig out some of my own old theories and speculations, made after reading Lovelock and Margulis. We’ve talked about them, off and on, but I was never so sure of myself that I put them down on paper. Now I’m pretty sure, but I’m too weak to put them on paper, so…this.

”Gaia is the entire Earth, and she’s come alive, she’s been an organic whole, a single creature, for over two billion years now. We can’t make complete analogies between Gaia and human beings, or dogs or cats or birds, because until recently we’ve never studied actual independent organisms. Dogs and cats and birds — and humans-are not independent. We are bits and pieces of Gaia. So is every other living thing on the Earth. Imagine a single cell trying to make analogies between its cytoplasm and organelles, and the role it plays in a human body; it’s going to be misled if it compares too rigidly.

”So Gaia, the Earth, is the first independent organism we’ve studied. I’ll call her a ‘planetism.’ A planetism is made up of plants and animals and microorganisms, and these are made up of cells, or are themselves cells. Cells are made up of cytoplasm and organelles and so on. An organism regulates itself with hormones, neurotransmitters, and it does its work and gets its nutrition with enzymes and other substances…all organized, on schedule, synergistic. Self-controlled.

”Gaia does her work with ecosystems. Like any organism, a planetism has a schedule and certain goals to meet. She grows and develops and goes through different stages in her life. Sometimes she undergoes radical shifts, destroying whole ecosystems. Maybe she’s experimenting in ways that smaller organisms cannot; she reaches a dead end, clears some of the slate, and starts over. I don’t know. But ultimately she has to do what all living things do — mature and reproduce.

”How can a planetism make others like herself? She came into being — probably — without outside interference, though maybe she’s the offspring of another planetism. Maybe life was seeded here a long, long time ago. I don’t think so, frankly. I think most planetisms have no parents, at least not right now, and so they’re free to develop on their own schedule. This takes a long, long time, but eventually she finds a way to reproduce. She develops a reproductive strategy.

”The planetism has found ways to use more and more of her raw materials and surface area. She dominated the oceans, then spread plants and animals out to conquer the barren continents. These plants and animals had somehow become specially suited to life on land. I suspect more than random chance was at work, but I’m too weak to argue about that now. It’s irrelevant to my scheme.