Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing ple… - Robert Charles Wilson

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.”
Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.”

Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.