Morvinus padded his way across the epidermis of the pod ship Andredi. There was now no longer anything between him and deep space but the suction cups under his four lizard's feet. The air sacs in his mouth could easily store a few minutes of air, allowing him to greedily gulp down the equivalent of barnacles on this whale in space.  

The life forms were little more than viruses and bacteria gone dormant in space, awaiting more fertile ground with sufficient moisture and atmosphere to come to life, things they would no doubt find inside his gut. The savory blend of tastes in his mouth alerted him to the fact that this was left over planetary debris from an exploded world. The elaborate RNA and DNA protein-rich complexes usually required nothing less.  

But on occasion, the right combination of hydrocarbons would find themselves a little island of space dust and moisture to self-organize into RNA and DNA molecules that in turn could self-organize further into viruses. It didn't happen often. But it did tend to occur on the moist skin of the pod ships that sweated out moisture as part of maintaining their own self-regulating atmosphere at the desired humidity levels.  

It took a lot of space dust to assemble hydrogen and oxygen atoms into H20, hence the pods' reliance on being infested by smaller life forms and striking up a symbiotic relationship with them in order to facilitate their feeding.  

Alas, Morvinus usually enjoyed his sojourns outside the pod ship, as hypnotized by the unimpaired view of the stars as ever. But these days they weren't the spiritual safaris they once were.  

He overlooked the surface of the Andredi, crawling with feeding lothra-lizard people-courtesy of the recent explosion of life forms on the ship. Less than ten percent of them could survive on the surface out here, much less feed. All the same, he prayed for the Andredi to have a muscle spasm that would jettison the lot of them into space and return his quiet outer sanctum to the peaceful respite it once was.  

Still, all in all, it wasn't too unlike crawling up the inside of the dome on Mars, for which he always caught endless shit. To really escape, he'd let his mind go back there. To the days when finding solitude sticking to the underside of a surface with little or no traction was rather a rare specialty of his. Once upon a time, Morvinus, even as a Prime-an unupgraded human-was the greatest extreme sports stuntman that ever lived, if you believed his PR department.  

* * *

Inside the Andredi, Kloister and Ratishan extruded silk-like threads from which they dangled, much like they dangled from bungee cords once upon a time on Mars, back in their extreme sports days. Now they were participating in a different extreme sport-avoiding the lothra.  

Frakas, in a desperate attempt to complexify the Andredi's ecosystem, had created them as food for the lizard people. The big spiders like Kloister and Ratishan were usually off limits, as they were more than a match for the reptiles. But their smaller progeny, which they seemed to lay in record numbers, kept the lothra jumping. "Joy" - such as it was - had returned to the Andredi for the lothra with the fulfillment of base desires; they immensely enjoyed the sport of hunting spider-men and other arachnid-human hybrids aboard ship. It kept them largely occupied and reduced the time they had for plotting Frakas's demise.  

In turn, the larger spiders like Kloister and Ratishan, if they survived long enough, could live to enjoy sucking the blood of reptiles that never truly died. They merely went dormant until they could replace their blood reserves and so reinsert themselves into the game of life - Frakas style.  

Ratishan had to admit, the fun of eluding capture, along with the delight at setting his own traps, completely absorbed him. His largely robotic undercarriage and nervous system also supplied heightened senses and reflexes, adding to the amusement of the game. He had the nano assemblers to thank for the complex alloys that made him up, which the machines could cobble together out of sheer dirt.  

The diversification of the arachnid world beyond spiders meant that both Traylana and Regana, who Ratishan once counted among his friends, could come into their own as skippers, able to ski the mucous membranes of the pod ship Andredi as readily as some of the lizards stuck to it. Ratishan had remembered enjoying their contributions to extreme gaming on Mars, where they skied the insides and outsides of the countless tubes within tubes that framed their world, including the giant domes. Their skis, modified for the purpose, responding to electrostatic charges enough to hold them to the complex polymer surfaces, while bending and flexing enough to hug the curves of the tubes they were flitting across like water-skipper pond insects.  

But these sentiments Ratishan knew would be fleeting. In time the memories of his former life on Mars and the yearnings which triggered them would entirely give way to his new desires, to hunt and be hunted by reptiles. His misgivings about Frakas remained ever-present, but they too were receding into the background against more pressing concerns, like day to day survival.  

The supreme irony? Ratishan remembered voting to give Frakas free reign over them. He was one of two men at a crucial time in Martian history with the necessary larger-than-life qualities to lead them out of crisis. The other one didn't want the job. Whatever happened to Draxor, anyway? Was the philosopher-king of the galaxy still lending commentary from the sidelines in the sterile hope someone would listen? Or had he finally been spurred to take up arms against Frakas?  

Alas, Frakas may have had a mind second to none, but he was proving as deficient in some areas as he was excessive in others. As each of Ratishan's eight legs could testify. 

* * *

The lizards he'd ripped off the surface of Sharantis under the light of a pale blue sun were proving Darwin deliciously wrong. They exploded into a cornucopia of mutations within one generation to make sure to occupy as many niches in the food chain as possible.  

Better still, Frakas was finding that they simply self-evolved a caste system between them, dividing up labors on the Andredi without being told, without anyone so much as suggesting it. All they asked for their trouble were the individualized food stuffs that justified their niche-existence. That in turn was provided by Frakas's nano-assemblers. Primitive nanotechnology certainly; he was still trying to advance it enough beyond mere food processing to be of much use to him. Meanwhile, the more advanced medical nano was proving immutable to self-evolving algorithms, limiting their use in that field, as well. But cranking out a wide variety of edibles, this the little buggers could readily do.  

He had had the machines feeding the mother ships in the fleet off space dust they collected and upgraded to meet the pods' dietary needs. The occasional waylay in planetary orbit was a small price to pay for filling his coffers for those long sojourns in space where even space dust was hard to come by. The mining vessels that were a carryover from his days on Mars saw to the procurement of the raw ingredients for the nano-assemblers. How easy it had proven to supply both his pod fleet and his self-organizing society of lothra with what they needed.  

And now, after little less than a month, every last human stowed away inside the pod armada had been transferred to their upgraded reptilian bodies. No doubt some would debate the use of the term "upgrade." But most were finding their way into the new caste system just fine. Their individualized duties, so heavily inscribed into their genes, went far to allay the fears most mortals possess in traversing space.  

If things were progressing a little too neatly, and a little too trouble-free on some fronts, he had found himself entirely stymied on others. And the two phenomena were entirely correlated. He had made absolutely no headway in enticing the pod armada to veer its migratory path away from the light of the pale blue suns. That meant little hope of evolving anything but cold-blooded reptilian species that could make do with the weaker suns. Because the pods maintained a fixed distance from the pale blue suns, it meant he only had access to worlds that were in the same orbit - if there were any. So it was only those worlds whose evolution he could affect, either by elevating existing life forms after genetically modifying them in the hothouse environs of the pod ships and then returning them to the planet, or by jumpstarting life all together on those worlds if none had taken root.  

Furthermore, Draxor's prophetic remarks were coming back to haunt him. In the absence of true diversity of thought, he wouldn't have the standout ideas he needed to penetrate the veil behind which the last of the secrets of the pod beings lay. For all the biodiversity of his lizard people, they were all "of a kind." Precisely what Draxor had warned against.  

Too much variety of a certain type was not going to kickstart the future. He needed to be holistic in his thinking along all four quadrants, not just the two he and Draxor represented, of the scientific and the spiritual realms. The other two quadrants were equally important in the four quadrant approach to evolution proposed by Ken Wilber-a 21st century philosopher he had dismissed at the time as being unnecessarily complicated. Alas, he was turning out to be damn minimalist, having isolated the least criteria for evolving humanity as opposed to devolving her in the absence of factoring in one of the four quadrants. 

It would do no good to curse the gods and himself for not listening to wiser counsel.  

The pod ships folded space about themselves to jump to the next star system with a blue sun. Only they knew the coordinates of that next habitable system for them, based on the one in a million seeds they dropped finding just the right environment after folding space blindly hither and yon, some ending up inside suns, others in planetary cores, others in the colds of empty space or the thicks of dark matter.  

One way or another he had to think his way out of the closed loop in which he'd found himself. There may be only one sure method, to genetically modify the pod ships to thrive in the light of any colored sun. Each strain would maintain its migratory loop tuned to its precise bandwidth of sunlight. His master ship and his master ship alone, the Andredi, would be the chameleon, able to adapt to any concourse through the heavens, allowing him to supervise the evolutionary projects in each of the quadrants. The scheme, if it worked, would open much of the heavens to his evolutionary jump-starting program.  

What's more, he could take this adaptation back with him to 2250 - his jumping off point. Time traveling back again and again until in that one fateful year the entire universe would erupt with life. A Renaissance of life in spacetime seeded by him! But alas, genetics wasn't Frakas's forte; his specialty was melding artificial, silicon based life with carbon based lifeforms. It would take him hundreds of years to develop the necessary acumen to the degree of sophistication needed.  

As to the pod beings returning home or at least circling back to the point of origin for Frakas - how long would it take them to do that? He wondered. Did they circle through the cosmos every five hundred years? Every five thousand? Presumably as they procreated and found more pale blue suns, the loops would get stretched out even longer, taking much more time to get back home.  

"Coming home" on his own time clock would entail enticing the pod beings with their already advanced abilities to fold space, to fold time as well. Per Einstein, the two were already rather correlated. So the tweaks to the creatures' nervous systems would be minimal. And Frakas was scientist enough with his many fields of mathematics and science rolled into his person to procure such a measly refinement. No, the real stumbling block was the genetics, not the time travel.  

What would he do with all his time in the meanwhile? The tweak to the creatures' control box to procure the time jump back to 2250-Draxor's era-would take him a few hours at best-once he had everything else worked out. What was he to do with the hundreds or even thousands of years between now and his return home? The time it would take him to turn himself into a master geneticist. Making himself immortal was the first thing he'd done back on Mars to give him time to seed the heavens. Well, there were Merlin's genes in the refrigerator. He'd always thought magic belonged in fairy tales. But, just in case he couldn't solve every problem with his intellect alone, maybe he could stack the deck a little. 

How many times he had laughed at the notion of Zen monks spending their days melting snow or levitating coffee tables. The fools could spend lifetimes doing that without getting anywhere. Hell, a veritable prodigy would need nearly a full lifetime to master the simplest of the Zen master's alleged mind tricks. But due to a strange quirk of fate, Frakas had all the time in the world. A few hundred or a few thousand years might be time enough for the most pointless undertaking to bear fruit.  

And so with that thought in mind, he hastened his pace to the gene storage banks where he eagerly awaited the opportunity to inject himself with Merlin's genes. If only the gene modification of the pod ships were so easy. If only he had the genes of a master geneticist stored in his gene bank. The fact that he had Merlin's genes itself was only on account of a quirk of fate. He had dug them up somewhat non-presciently in advance of leaving Earth for Mars for the last time, owing to a service he had chosen to do Draxor, not out of anything he'd chosen to do for himself.  

No good deed...