The children, his grand-children, were playing in the paddock at the back of the house where their ponies were kept. They were picking dandelion seed heads and blowing the beautifully formed parachuted seeds away. James smiled and drew heavily on his cigar. Sol had undoubtedly taught them, or taught his daughters who had passed it on. It was a game he and Sol had played as children, blowing the seeds all away, each puff counting an hour. A silly inconsequential game, but just the sort of idiosyncratic thing his old friend Sol loved.
James was sitting on the back porch smoking his weekly cigar, waiting for the weekend guests to arrive. Sol was also coming for the weekend, Jane had told him just this morning. So what, he wondered, had enticed him this time? He was a regular dinner party guest at their New York apartment overlooking the Park, where Jane had developed an enviable reputation as a New York hostess, but he almost never came to their country retreat, preferring his own cabin in the mountains.
Why did Jane invite him when she knew this was such an important weekend for him? Sol always seemed to set out to insult his guests, especially the ones with a religious bent, but Jane had just shrugged. “I invited him to keep me company. To leaven the dough so to speak.” It made him smile. The filthy rich could be incredibly dull he had to agree, and the powerful very often too frightened of consequences to say anything at all. It was something he and Sol often bantered about, just how such dull people could reach the pinnacles of power. “Chance, pure chance,” Sol would argue. “Nothing to do with the survival of the fittest. Just luck.”
“Nothing to do with will and ambition?”
But it was not just the fundamental Christians he went after. “Six million Jews killed in the Holocaust! What about the killing fields of Cambodia, Kosevo, Ruwanda? Tribal resource wars, competition for resources. A drought in Australia kills millions of birds, a force of nature, the holocaust a force of nature.”
“How can you say that when you are Jewish.”
“I can say it because I am Jewish.”
“How do you live with such a grim view of life?”
“Like a bird singing happily on its perch with no expectations.”
James liked to think Sol was just envious of his enormous wealth and power which enabled him to have presidents as weekend guests and the richest and most powerful as dinner guests. Although Sol was hardly a failure, being emeritus professor at Harvard, and with a world-wide reputation in the field of social insects, he was considered to be heir to Darwin's legacy.
James' cigar had died. He didn't bother to relight it. It occurred to him that Sol would not be able to do the damage which was possible in the narrow confines of a dinner party. His presence would be diluted by numbers as the main function was to be outdoors, a barbecue of sorts. He felt oddly relieved.
Jane appeared for breakfast, a cup of coffee. His “plain” beautiful Jane. She caught his eye and smiled before leaving. It was enough.
James and Sol as students had vied for her attention. She had chosen him and he didn't know why. Sol had once said it was all a matter of biology, that he was the most suited to be the father of her children. What did that mean? He suspected they had slept together. Maybe still did, and maybe one of their children was really Sol's. He seemed closer to his children, their closest confidante, even Jane agreed. Sol had never married.
James left the porch, picked up the cigar and began a stroll down the lane into the woods. His purpose in inviting them all, the rich and famous, the powerful, was to first of all to inform them of his plans before going public, and to invite them to join him in his latest enterprise, his last hurrah. All his children were there, and his grand-children, to tell them that his immense fortune was all to be spent on trying to find the means of taking humanity off the planet, into the universe. The children all had their own individual lives and would have no worries about inheriting little from him. In that, they were thankful to Jane who insisted that they pursue their own destinies apart from their father, that they should not expect to inherit his great wealth.
As James walked along, he relit his cigar in an effort to marshal his thoughts. It was to be an off the cuff speech, after the feast. All he needed was the first line, the introduction and everything would follow smoothly, practised as he was in public speaking. But Sol being there promised to put him off his stride. He could sense and predict all of Sol's objections to his cause, his ridicule.
The planet was stuffed, James agreed with Sol. Everyone did. “Like army ants we are devouring everything in front of us. We are an insatiable, rapacious, species. As cavemen we moved to every corner of the planet's habitat, from polar regions to the tropics. With our packs of dogs we took down the great megafauna, gathering momentum. We are devouring all the planet's resources to satisfy the biological necessity to replicate, to reproduce.”
“We are like an alien species that has mined this planet for its resources, animate and inanimate, nothing has escaped us. We have utterly gutted this planet. Now you are going to tell me that it is time to move on to gut more planets?”
“We are facing a huge die off of our species, if we don't do something.”
“A die off is necessary so that our numbers will adjust to what the planet can sustain. Only then will we learn.”
James drew heavily on the cigar and leant over the fence as he expelled the smoke. Yes. It was useful to take on board Sol's criticisms. It gave a perspective. That was his beginning.
Biological success. But was that all there was to it? Wasn't there more to it than biology? Was there not a purpose to it all, a reason for being?
But there was Sol again. “The only purpose is to reproduce.”
James wanted to say more, in the face of Sol's view of the world. Should he talk about man's destiny, about humanity's great achievements?
“Manifest destiny! What makes you think we are special, with the god given right to lord it over every other species on this planet? Homo sapiens' achievements! Nothing more than the peacock's tail. A story to tell on the way to seduction.”
“Maths? Physics? “
“A fiction. Just another construct of the human mind, to ensnare, seduce, enhance our chances of survival.”
James continued walking, smoking. Maybe, he thought, getting off the planet
is part of the biological scheme of things. He had walked around the woodlot and come back to the house. The children were still playing, the dandelions forgotten. He picked up one they had missed, twirled it in his fingers and with one breathe blew the parachuted seeds away.
“As you say, perhaps it is just biology. This effort of mine, just a seed blown away though the universe. Our species has about come to maturity, to florescence, like a dandelion head. Let me blow and dispense our seed as far and wide as the winds blow. Most will not take but a few will. We are at the mercy of our biology. We are in charge of nothing. We will be blown wherever chance and necessity takes us. Yes, that was it.”
"The dandelion is called the rustic oracle; its flowers always open about 5 A.M. and shut at 8 P.M., serving the shepherd for a clock." Source: Folkard (448. 309), from "The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought," by Alexander F. Chamberlain
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