Orion in the Dying Time Part 31

Yet it seemed to me that time and brain size were not the only requirements for the development of intelligence. Intelligence requires interaction among individuals, communication. Had Albert Einstein been left in a wilderness at birth and never met another human being, he would never have developed the ability to speak, let alone do physics.

Most modem reptile species lay their eggs and never return to them, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves. So did most of the dinosaurs, although at least one species of duckbilled dinosaurs apparently cared for their young. For this novel I proposed that the reptilians that evolved on the fict.i.tious planet Shaydan orbiting the equally fict.i.tious star Sheol evolved intelligence through motherly care and a form of telepathy.

The telepathy is something of a cheat, I admit. But think of your own childhood experiences. Did not your mother have moments of startling telepathic powers?

The astronomical setting for this novel is accurate-up to a point. It is entirely possible to "rebuild" the solar system with a small unstable dwarf star at the same distance from the sun that the planet Jupiter is now. The gravitational perturbations on the earth and the other inner planets of our solar system would be negligible. The sun's companion star could have one or more planets...o...b..ting around it, just as the planet Jupiter now possesses sixteen or more moons.

Ask any astronomer, though, and he or she will tell you that there is no way Jupiter could be the remnant of a star that exploded. No natural way, is what they implicitly are saying. For the novelist, however, it is possible to use deliberate changes caused by forces other than blind nature. In this novel the dwarf star Sheol evolves into our familiar planet Jupiter through the determined efforts of Orion and the Creators.

The breakup of Sheol's one planet causes a rain of meteors on Earth that triggers the Time of Great Dying, the t.i.tanic wave of extinctions that wiped out not merely the dinosaurs but thousands of other species of land, sea, and air some sixty-five millions years ago. The end of the Cretaceous saw the slate of life on Earth wiped almost clean.

The nearly emptied world that existed after the great Cretaceous calamity contained abundant empty ecological niches that new forms of life could move into. The age of mammals began, leading ultimately to the earliest hominids.

A great cataclysm did indeed shake the earth some sixty-five million years ago. It caused caused the end of the Cretaceous Period, just as a similar disaster some two hundred fifty million years ago caused the end of the Permian Period and led to the rise of the dinosaurs. the end of the Cretaceous Period, just as a similar disaster some two hundred fifty million years ago caused the end of the Permian Period and led to the rise of the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs began in a planetwide catastrophe that scrubbed away more than half the species then occupying the earth. They died in a paroxysm of similar proportions. The available evidence strongly points to a bombardment of meteors and/or comets that was either accompanied by or actually triggered tectonic s.h.i.+fts of the landma.s.ses that altered sea levels and climate all around the globe.

Stephen Jay Gould and his fellow biologists tell us that these disasters were works of blind nature, brief moments in the grand flow of the eons that forced evolution into new pathways. To the novelist, however, it is irresistibly tempting to a.s.sign these evolutionary forces to purposeful characters. It makes for a much more interesting story. It allows us to contemplate the works of nature in moral terms. It turns the blindly uncaring forces of nature into choices choices made by thinking, feeling characters who know the differences between good and evil. made by thinking, feeling characters who know the differences between good and evil.

For myself, I think there is probably much more to the Time of Great Dying than a cataclysmic rain of fire from the heavens, dramatic though that may be. As the Cretaceous was nearing its end a new form of life arose on Earth: a life-form so ubiquitous and lowly that we seldom give it much thought unless we are forced to deal with it directly. That life-form is gra.s.s.

Gra.s.ses are one of the most successful forms of life on Earth. All the cereal grains that feed humankind are types of gra.s.ses, for example. They first appeared on Earth in the late Cretaceous and shouldered earlier forms of vegetation out of existence.

Did gra.s.s kill the dinosaurs? Animals that feed on gra.s.ses today are equipped with very specialized teeth and digestive systems to crop and metabolize a food that contains a high percentage of tough silica. Could the herbivorous dinosaurs handle the gra.s.ses that replaced the earlier vegetation? If they could not and starved, the carnivorous dinosaurs that preyed on the herbivores would have died off, too.

This is mere speculation, however. And it does not explain why so many other life-forms-from plankton to plesiosaurs-died off at the same time. Yet it is instructive to consider that the so-called Time of Great Dying was also a period of birth for new life-forms, the gra.s.ses in particular.

So much for what we know of paleontology, and what we speculate. This book is a novel, a work of fiction, and of science fiction at that.

The basic scientific underpinning for this tale is as sound as careful research can make it, although I have taken liberties with agreed-upon scientific canon where I felt it necessary for the sake of the story. As I have throughout all of Orion's adventures, I have endeavored to use the stuff of myth and legend as a means to explore the human soul; more particularly, to explore the relations.h.i.+p of humankind and its G.o.ds.

With an exploding star and a shattered planet we link astronomical events with death and birth on Earth. Intelligent reptiles give rise to the legends of devils that haunt the dark hours of every human culture. Dinosaurs that somehow survived into prehistoric human times lead to our legends of dragons.

And a single human being, created to obey the whims of the G.o.ds, strives not merely to survive but to understand, not blindly to obey but to learn how to be a G.o.d himself.

These are the ingredients of science fiction. The science must be accurate, yet the author must be free to invent new possibilities-as long as no one can show that they are totally impossible in the real world. The characters must be believable, no matter how fantastic their adventures. They must feel and love and bleed even as you and I do, otherwise we do not have a story to read, we have a treatise.

This is what I am trying to do with these tales of Orion. His story is not completed yet.

Ben Bova West Hartford, Connecticut