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dioxide fast enough to keep the planet temperate as the star burns hotter. What if there's a species somewhere that decided that in order to develop planets suitable for colonization, they should send out the descolada virus in advance-- thousands of years in advance, maybe-- to intelligently transform planets into exactly the conditions they need? And then when they arrive, ready to set up housekeeping, maybe they have the countervirus that switches off the descolada so that they can establish a real gaialogy."
"Or maybe they developed the virus so that it doesn't interfere with them or the animals they need," said Wiggin. "Maybe they destroyed all the nonessential life on every world."
"Either way, it explains everything. The problems I've been facing, that I can't make sense of the impossibly unnatural arrangements of molecules within the descolada-- they continue to exist only because the virus works constantly to maintain all those internal contradictions. But I could never conceive of how such a self-contradictory molecule evolved in the first place. All this is answered if I know that somehow it was designed and made. What Wang-mu said Qing-jao complained about, that the descolada couldn't evolve and Lusitania's gaialogy couldn't exist in nature. Well, it doesn't exist in nature. It's an artificial virus and an artificial gaialogy."
"You mean this actually helps?" asked Wang-mu.
Their faces showed that they had virtually forgotten she was still part of the conversation, in their excitement.
"I don't know yet," said Ela. "But it's a new way of looking at it. For one thing, if I can start with the assumption that everything in the virus has a purpose, instead of the normal jumble of switched- on and switched-off genes that occur in nature-- well, that'll help. And just knowing it was designed gives me hope that I can undesign it. Or redesign it."
"Don't get ahead of yourself," said Wiggin. "This is still just a hypothesis."
"It rings true," said Ela. "It has the feel of truth. It explains so much."
"I feel that way, too," said Wiggin. "But we have to try it out with the people who are most affected by it."
"Where's Planter?" asked Ela. "We can talk to Planter."
"And Human and Rooter," said Wiggin. "We have to try this idea with the fathertrees."
"This is going to hit them like a hurricane," said Ela. Then she seemed to realize the implications of her own words. "It is, really, not just a figure of speech, it's going to hurt. To find out that their whole world is a terraforming project."
"More important than their world," said Wiggin. "Themselves. The third life. The descolada gave them everything they are and the most fundamental facts of their life. Remember, our best guess is that they evolved as mammal-like creatures who mated directly, male to female, the little mothers