Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sound of the waves rolling in and rolling back out has echoed across this world for hundreds of millions of years, a long reach toward eternity.
Not once in that span has it ceased rocking and crossing this blue world, sometimes gently, sometimes powerfully; stormy as the morning, calm as the deep of night.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
The sea rolls in and rolls back out. One hundred billion shimmering stars rise between the wave crests, only to sink back into the vastness of the waves with the first dim light of dawn.
On a night of exceptional darkness, a faint shooting star cuts across the void, trailing a long tail of light, then falls behind the nacreous line of the horizon, its glow becoming an unfading scar—a memory in the space between the stars.
Gradually, the constellations change their shapes; white stars take the place of blue stars, red stars take the place of orange, each making way for the next as they slide past each other to weave new shapes in the sky.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
Time that knows no haste flows over the waves as they roll in and roll back out, through night and into day and into night again.
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The vast flow of time leaves traces of its passage across everything without exception. It moves within everything that is, mischievously touching, changing—sometimes destroying. Not even the sea is spared, for over one hundred billion days and nights, the starlight that falls upon its surface, the wind and rain that blow across it, the brilliance of the burning sun that warms it, and the snow that whirls in eddies around its frozen waves, all are absorbed and reduced into individual molecules, tiny motes that show no hint of their vast history. In the bottomless sediments only a vague memory remains.
The sea: it contains within itself the long, long story of time, a perpetual record of shapes that will never be seen again.
Of wind and cloud and wave, of bright days and dark nights.
The sea has always been time’s closest confidant.
Surging and receding . . .
Surging and receding . . .
Hundreds of billions of days and nights roll in and roll back out again. All the while the waves sound ceaselessly, rolling and roiling in unending motion.
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And yet, there was a time before the waves. In those far and distant days, when the planet still boiled with accretion heat and the furious energy spewed forth by the molten rock and metal beneath its surface, hydrogen and oxygen swirled in wild clouds of incandescent gas, having yet to combine into the new substance they would one day become. The great sphere’s surface was crisscrossed with fissures; explosive gas and molten lava gushed high into the sky like crashing waves, there to twist and scatter. Primal mountains and hills reared up, only to sink once again into the lava. Sheets of flame like waterfalls bloomed across half of the planet.
The orange sun that dominated this solar system with its strong magnetic field ceaselessly blasted the landscape with precise quanta of radiation and heat, triggering minute physical and chemical changes in the planet’s depths and across its surface.
The result of two billion years of long, long toil was about to make itself apparent.
Thick, thick clouds filled the sky, barring the sun from reaching a surface still ravaged by wild flames. Through the ashen shadows, glowing lava flows rushed like rapids, colliding with other similar streams to send forth hundreds of thousands of sparks that rose and fell like a burning ocean. The undersides of the clouds were lit eerily by the light of those explosions, and the fiery slag of the surface seemed capable of destroying the very planet that birthed it.
Bursts of lightning flashed inside the thick cloud layer, sending occasional pillars of electricity shooting up toward the tops of the clouds. Meteor showers rained down again and again, puncturing the savagely swirling atmosphere. Many of the descending fragments scored direct hits on the fiery mud below. The giant conflagrations that lit the thick, dark clouds and the firestorms that followed made this world a thing of terrible beauty, though there were none to see it.
The grand gala of creation was approaching its conclusion. The stage for the next event was already prepared beneath the sea of flame that covered the planet’s surface.
Yet it would be another long, long time before the true lead players arrived.
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It all began eons earlier still, as tiny particles of interstellar matter were pushed by the faint waves of light radiating from distant stars, gathering one by one in this region that had been mere empty space. Objects as small as one hundred millionth of a millimeter cannot move far in an hour propelled only by weightless light; yet they had come, slowly but steadily, from the far corners of the almost-void. After an impossibly long time, this collection of interstellar matter had gradually formed into a dense cloud of floating gas.
This frigid cloud—close to minus 160 degrees Celsius—hung like a veil between the stars, receiving their energy, becoming a cloud of light—an emission nebula, streaming a vast luminescence of its own. And still the various particles in this veil of brightness continued to pull at each other, the greater absorbing the lesser, forming innumerable tiny masses. Smaller masses spun into larger masses, and larger masses grew larger yet. Eventually, the largest accretion came to control the gravitational field of the entire system. This great monarch of matter had already begun to breathe—its hydrogen fusion reaction the very essence of power. The other, lesser bodies were swept into place by that shining nuclear power to form a solar system.
The orange star at its center consumed an entire 564 million tons of hydrogen every second, creating 560 million tons of helium. The remaining four million tons of matter were converted into a stupendous amount of energy that spread throughout the surrounding space.
This particular sun held ten planets within its grasp. The closest kept a distance of fifty-seven million kilometers from the star; the planet in the farthest orbit kept an average distance of roughly sixty billion kilometers.
The third planet from the system’s center had a diameter of twelve thousand kilometers and completed a full circuit of the sun in about 365 days. The long, long flow of time brought tremendous change to the substance of this planet. Its own gravitational field caused it to contract, creating tens of thousands of degrees of accretion heat in its core. This sum of fire was compounded by heat released from radioactive particles over their long decay. Together these two energy sources melted and scorched the crust that had begun to form over the planet’s surface.
The process of transformation was accelerated when the planet began to release the incredible heat that had built up within its core. The lava that spewed forth changed the chemical composition of the surface, creating countless new compounds and releasing even more complex chemicals into the air to become part of the atmosphere.
At long last, water steam shot from the heated mantle, roiling beneath the thick clouds, glowing like fragments of a crimson mirror.
After countless years, this water steam became a fog that dropped back down toward the surface. Still, pillars of flame reached into the sky, and scalding hot winds scoured the surface. Incandescent lava moved in great rivers of fire, scorching the barren terrain. Heated clouds burst, sending the fog scattering back into the air. But gradually, the water steam grew thicker, forming droplets, until the fog became rain, falling from great thunderheads. It would be tens of millions of years more until that rain began to reach the surface.