I told him that Chimene was one of those planets where a colony of bacteria had mutated and escaped, consuming all life in the biosphere, disassembling and totally remaking the planet’s surface into a mat of purplish–brown, hugely intelligent bacteria—all in a matter of days. “And the eschatologists think it only took a few years for them to infect the whole April cluster,” I said. “Ten thousand stars swarming with your harmless bacteria.” Of all the gods in the galaxy, the eschatologists feared the April colonial intelligence the most.
