Hive

“Sure, now they are . . . but what about 500 million years ago? A billion? Maybe that’s why they came here, because they knew their world . . . Uranus or Neptune . . . was doomed. And maybe they just came seeking our warm oceans. Gates thinks that they are originally marine organisms, but given their durability, they can adapt themselves to just about any environment. Gates thinks that myths and legends concerning winged demons and flying monsters might be race memories of them, impressions from the dawn of our race that survived in the form of folktale and legend. Regardless, they’ve been here since the beginning. Our beginning and the beginning of all life on this world.”

“I was hoping you weren’t going to go there,” Cutchen said.

“I have to. Because that’s what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was . . . well, possessed, he started ranting on about the helix. There was no doubt he was talking about DNA . . . the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world.”

“That’s kind of what Hayes was saying,” Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. “That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it.”

“Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was God. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material.”

“That’s pleasant.”

Sharkey nodded. “Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a mass migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en masse to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but intelligent life.”

“But that’s insane,” Cutchen said. “I’m sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That’s crazy.”

“Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they’ve been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. God knows how many colonies they’ve created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across space, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets orbiting a hundred stars, if not a thousand.” She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. “It’s fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found . . . it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities . . . in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places . . . “

Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic . . . or Gates’ . . . and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn’t find one or it was so big he’d already been sucked down into it without knowing. “Okay,” he said. “How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I’m guessing.”

“No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an organic technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation . . . but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.