Chapter Four

1

Wherein lies yesterday?  Scientists speak of a double helix.  It might have been like in that movie where the alien disintegrates into an Icelandic river, but I don’t think so.  Everyone knows that aliens fail to frequent Iceland.  Iceland is too cold for conscious alienation, however original the isolation or extrasensory the terrestrial.

        But we are already starting off on the wrong foot here.  I was planning on starting a discourse on the evolution of life, right back to the clay crystals near the thermal heating vents at the bottom of the ocean, or else back to some transpermian origin point beyond the stars.  Possibly Halley’s comet.  Possibly Mars.  Possibly everywhere.  Life like background radiation.

        He said that it was all in our DNA.  Or maybe it was RNA.  I’m not sure.  What I am sure about is that the presence of that alien fails to account for several million years of evolution, no matter how closely aligned his arrival may have been with the cooling down of the planet.  You just can’t get here from there.

        But I can tell you about mirrors.  Mirrors that reflect our images back at us.  Mirrors that reflect us back at our images.  Light bounces off a surface, and all is illuminated.  One might also think of DNA as a kind of mirror – or perhaps I should say a system of mirrors – bouncing messages from one generation to the next, back and forth through time.  On the quantum side of things, a strand of DNA (or is it RNA?) might be viewed as a chain, or perhaps a ladder, and this chain links the distant past to the present end of the world.  On the quantum side of things, the arrow of time points any way we want it to.  That is, on the quantum side of things.

        So when she tells us about the end of the world we have to go right back to the beginning.  Our DNA compels us to do so.  We cannot just start with the beginning of the end and work from there.  No, we have to go right back to the beginning of the beginning, and from that point trace the Great Error’s route through our soon-to-be-halted evolution.  Were they or you or I to start with contemporary events, we would be lying.  Lying next to unstable mirrors is a dangerous undertaking, because sometimes mirrors shatter.  This is the wherein where yesterday lies.

2

At the beginning of things (and this is not our true beginning), there was Theia.  Theia was a planet that followed our own around the sun, in a nearly identical orbit.  No one thinks about Theia much these days, probably because she killed herself before life on Earth was even possible, or probable, or at least engineered by an alien or aliens from a Ridley Scott movie.

        Theia was a planet, and planets cannot love.  As such, the story of our love has not begun yet, and Theia orbits at the margins of this story.  Planets are not even alive.  They cannot feel.  They are barren, unless they harbor life.  I think.

        According to one theory, Theia was about the size of Mars.  Gravitational perturbations caused her to collide with our infant Earth roughly 30 to 50 million years after the formation of the solar system, though there is some evidence that this collision may have occurred more recently.  After impact, Theia’s iron core penetrated right down to the center of the Earth, and much of both Theia’s and the Earth’s mantles were ejected into orbit, forming the moon.

        This is one theory, anyway.  Just looking at moon rocks, it’s hard to tell.  It may be that Theia and the infant Earth truly were alive, and that planets mate in some other fashion, known only to fashionable planets.  Meiosis on a planetary level, I think, with the Earth as a single gamete.  Recombination on a global scale.  Or else a hermaphroditic mode of reproduction.  Or, self-organizing systems aside, a traffic accident in a void.  

The empty places were always full of eyes.  One single spherelike being that looks outward or inward only at itself, seeing aspects of itself, never seeing the whole.  Mirrors elongate.  Mirrors shatter.  In the end they will never know anyway.

“We are not finished yet,” said The Character From a Science Fiction Novel That Has Yet To Be Written, “The electron is pushing us back all the way to the beginning of the end.”

        The supposed impact with Theia brought to a close the Hadean era of Earth’s history.  Developments during the Hadean era included continual meteorite bombardment, large-scale volcanism, and the formation of liquid water.  So as you can see, it all goes back to extraterrestrials.  That is what they tell him in his sleep.  That is what they tell her in her silent time.  That is the story they tell.  A planet orbits over the surface of space and is reflected in the infinite.  It collides with its own likeness, and we are born out of Nothing.  So sayeth the Preacher.  So sayeth the man who holds the door.  So sayeth the creature that will not perish in the flames.