The Helianx Proposition/page 52
When Noe finally felt it was safe enough to venture back out onto dry land the dust had settled and the skies were clear. What sHe remembered of the landscape had radically changed. Earthquakes generated by the intense impact of the asteroid had rearranged coastlines and sHe saw mountains that had been wrenched apart by rifts in the earth below. Rivers cascaded down through valleys where previously there had just been a desert plateau. Firestorms had ripped across the globe, incinerating almost all the old growth trees, leaving only a tangled mass of new vegetation struggling for its place in the sun.
A pervasive silence layover the thick, new jungle and where before the constant roars and cries of predators and victims had filled the air, now Noe could hear only the faint squeaks and warbles of the smallest of creatures. All of the large reptiles had disappeared, as had most species of small mammals and the reptiles that lived off a diet of stolen dinosaur eggs.
Space rocks had always fallen on the planet, some more destructive than others, and intermittent periods of intense volcanic activity had created greenhouse effects which had also led to some mass extinctions, but the asteroid that landed so recently on the northern continent, and all its volcanic consequences, had clearly wreaked more havoc than any previous catastrophe. This became even more evident to Noe as sHe slowly swam hir way northward. As sHe approached to within a thousand miles of the impact crater, the tiny glass beads that had rained down on the surface of the planet soon after the impact, lay thick on the shallow ocean bed like an iridescent mirror.
Unrecognized by the surviving creatures on this devastated world was the intense psychic shock created by the cosmic collision. The Rock Devas, with whom Noe had already formed a warm musical relationship, were the least disturbed, since they seemed to have an innate understanding of cosmic violence. But even their songs had acquired a new and maudlin tone. The Nature Spirits themselves were not directly affected by the physical fallout, since they had been warned in good time by their superiors to step back into the safety of their own dimension. However, when they returned to nurture the new growth, their confidence was severely dented by the devastated world they found languishing all around them.
Noe understood how vital it was that the orderly processes of evolutionary development needed to continue if sHe was eventually to succeed in hir mission. Whether or not the computers had predicted the asteroid's impact, sHe had no memory of having been briefed about it; or, indeed, told how to react if such an event was to occur. SHe knew she had no choice but to allow hir deeper instincts to take over, and hope that all sHe had absorbed in hir long cosmic odyssey would spontaneously coalesce into songs that would encourage and support emerging life. Focussing on this intuition, Noe moved hir consciousness aside and let the deepest revelations of hir ancient culture pour through hir in wave after wave of melody that echoed over the wasted landscape, the subtle harmonics stroking the dormant life force wide awake again.
