There were no spectacular new body plans or life cycles here, no strategies for feeding or reproduction that hadn’t been tried out back on Earth, but at a molecular level everything worked differently, and there was a vast labyrinth of utterly novel biochemical pathways to be mapped. Yet the Transmuters made it almost impossible to care. Their absence – or their perfect camouflage – monopolised everyone’s attention, transforming the intricate machinery of the biosphere into a very long footnote to a far more mesmerising blank page.
