Shadows Out of Time

Finally the naked rock crust cooled enough for water to reach it. In a worldwide pall of steam, hot rain came down at last. It rained for thousands of years. Raw new oceans surged across the land, filling the basins. I kept sight of the mass that had been an island in a sea of seething magma, the island that would one day be Leng. Somehow I knew that. Somehow a weird anomaly of time preserved it from being altered. Tectonic plates ground together, subducted, formed continents and supercontinents, yet that strange highland with a shape that looked, to me, like a swimming platypus seen from above, never changed much and yet could never quite be plainly seen.

Shallow steaming seas covered nearly all the surface. The person, the thing I had seemed to be, with its partly molten rocky body, had vanished, and I seemed to have no physical form now, but to drift like a phantom. In a limitless swamp filled with crawling vapor, I saw a pulsating mass huge as a hill that was alive, and, I supposed, organic, pulpy and gray-white. A hundred million things like itself, but tiny, rolled off its sides like drops of sweat and vanished in the muck. I’m a scientist, and still, the thing was revolting. Had that, wherever it came from, been the source of earthly life based on protein, the first selfreplicating molecules that would be driven by the sun’s energy to more and more complex forms?

If it was, I understood for the first time since I’d been a child why so many people like fairy tales better.

Leng at one time became submerged, stayed deep in green water for ages, and then emerged again. It had accumulated chalk and sand in layers, then lost them to erosion, but its original rock was never reduced to dust, or changed its primal shape, almost as if time was dividing like a river to flow around it. Even when the Asian continent formed around Leng, it only assimilated the plateau, never crushed or transformed it, and Leng’s distinctive shape remained.

I’ve said it made me think of a swimming platypus seen from above. So it did. The body was arched in two-thirds of a circle, the broad duck-bill nearly parallel to the tail, as though the creature was turning sharply in the water, with a small offshoot of the main plateau resembling one web-footed foreleg. That, a remote part of me thought, should be easy to recognize in a satellite photograph — if Leng showed up in such pictures. But that was not certain.