Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a… - Robert Charles Wilson

It never fails to astonish me," Carol said. "The tenacity of love.

Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.