Carbon Inevitable

"We found carbon," Doc said. I'm sure it was Doc. Submind isn't much for ego.

"You stopped at Saturn because you found carbon?" I asked. "You mean Titan?" These were follow-up questions to my ill-conceived initial query about an intelligent virus hanging around in the rings of Saturn.

Doc laughed. "Titan isn't much use to us," she said, this time with that disconnected voice I've decided is Doc letting Submind speak for itself. "We stopped here because this is a third generation star."

"Right. Carbon, heavy metals. For your previous hosts?" I asked.

The silence was very heavy, like it was accelerating.

"You didn't just drift through interstellar space and then 'decide' to stop here," I said.

"Your logic is always surprising, Dizzy," Doc said. "You are partially correct. If our previous hosts had survived the journey, life on Earth would have been very different."

"Good on us," I said.

"Nothing personal," Doc said, or it might have been Submind. "Humans are not so delicate as the Clee, and we have high hopes for our next journey."

"Should we be doing that?" I asked.

"Why not?" Doc asked. "Carbon makes life inevitable. Life makes sentience inevitable. It's only a matter of genesis or survival, and sentient life is good at survival. Millions of years of practice..."

"Oh," I said. "In that case, I'll be safely in the past before it's time to worry."

Doc frowned at me.

I shrugged. "The other day I was having a conversation with a chimpanzee, and I started wondering why I didn't think it was strange. Then I realized I did think it was strange, and there was nothing to do but accept it. Now I have questions."

Still frowning, Doc made shooing motions. I was done anyway.