Thrust: A Novel

“Geologic time has caught up with the lifetime of a human being,” she continues. “Look at the water.” The children move like a single organism to gaze at the water around them. “The acid in the ocean and the glacial melts happened in my father’s lifetime; in this way, time changed. Slipped forever. So geologic change has shrunk to the size of a story we can tell one another in a single sitting.

“But that means we have a hard job to do. We have to figure out the words to the story together.”

A girl squats down and puts her hand in the water with reverence.

“Some of the first multicelled animals were worms. Sponges. Arthropods. Soft jelly creatures like beautiful bags, delicate disks. Then, after the Cambrian explosion, most of the modern animal forms emerged. Early corals, mollusks and clams, nautiloids and bryozoa and echinoderms. Early plankton. Then the first green plants and fungi on land. Almost like the land and water kissed, and that gave rise to life and color.”

“The fish in the oceans. Coral,” a boy says, beaming with belonging.

“Correct,” Laisvė says. “Next, mosses and ferns. Seed-bearing plants making a break for it. Trees. The first land vertebrates. Frogs. Mice. Salamanders. Mountains becoming mountains. Early sharks and winged insects radiating suddenly, like a flash, larger than your hand.”

The children hold their hands up, mimicking her.

“Did life make the water happy in the beginning? Was the water lonely?” asks a girl with an amphibious extension on her prosthetic leg.

Is it lonely underwater?

“I think life made the water very happy, yes,” Laisvė says. Tears threaten to flood her eyes without her permission. “But then something like a planetary heart attack happened, maybe the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Nearly all life on the planet became extinct. Can you imagine this moment? All life disappears, just as things are really getting interesting?”

The children’s eyes go wide. Some of their mouths drop open.

“Is that when the dinosaurs dropped dead?”

“No, that was a different extinction. Maybe the Chicxulub impact. A huge comet or asteroid, something between ten and eighty kilometers in diameter, blasts open a crater underneath the Yucatán peninsula. The K-Pg extinction event. Suddenly, three-quarters of animal and plant species on earth were wiped out. Extinctions are always happening, though. Death into life into death into life.”

Laisvė senses a tendril of fear in the group of children. She kneels down with them. “But glorious things happen all the time too,” she says. “Leatherback sea turtles and green sea turtles survived. Crocodiles. Birds survived. Such beautiful birds. Horseshoe crabs!” She makes fake pincers with her hands and the children laugh. “Sharks. Platypuses. Bees. So even though the K-Pg extinction may have devastated life on Earth, it also created an enormous evolutionary opportunity, radical adaptive radiation, sudden and prolific divergence into new species, shapes, sizes, forms. Bears. Horses. Bats. Birds. Fish. Whales. Primates…”

“Us,” several children say.

“Eventually, yes. But listen. The time of recognizable human beings is so tiny — too small to be visible against geologic time. Our lives, our history, our species, haven’t even come close to beginning. Your existence is not yet even recordable, not when you try to measure it against geologic time, against the Earth’s story of herself. The tsunami that drowned the Sea Wall and The Brook was like a single raindrop.”

The children hush and consider this.

Laisvė thinks of Aster and Svajonė.

She holds the handful of dirt out again as she tells the story. The worm wriggles.

“Fungi are six times heavier than the mass of all animals combined on the planet. Including human animals. Do they look like anything else to you?” The children gather around her hand.

“Dendrites?”

“Neurons?”

“Star systems?”

Laisvė smiles through tears. She then repeats the words she loves most from the language of geologic time. The children repeat them, creating a kind of chorus.

Cambrian

Proterozoic

Archean

Hadean

Anthropocene

Holocene

Pleistocene

Pliocene

Miocene

Oligocene

Eocene

Paleocene

Cretaceous

Jurassic

Triassic

Permian

Carboniferous

Devonian

Silurian

Ordovician

The words make a kind of poem, and when the children pull the words apart, stories of plants and animals emerge and fill their dreams. If their future is not to be made from nuclear families and cities and countries and governments and nations and wars, perhaps it will be made of stories connecting all forms of existence, a story in which even their humanity is just a thread, like the harmony of cosmic strings in space.