It was, indeed, a bad habit, this toying with people. But as the years flickered by it grew easier. They all forgave so, almost as if they expected it… demanded it of her. And because she tested everybody, taking contrary positions without prejudice, fewer and fewer people seemed to believe she meant anything she said at all!

Perhaps, Jen admitted honestly, that would be the world’s long-term revenge on her. To attribute everything she said to jest. That would be some fate for the so-called “mother of the modern Gaian paradigm.”

Jen stroked Baby’s trunk, scratching the bulging forehead where induced neoteny had given the elephant-mammoth hybrid an enlarged cortex. Baby’s brow-fur was long and oily, and gave off a pungent, tangy, yet somehow pleasant odor. The worldwide network of genetic arks had a surfeit of pachyderms, even this new breed — “Mammon-telephas” — with half its genes salvaged from a 20,000-year-old cadaver exposed by the retreating Canadian tundra. So many of them bred true, in fact, that there were some to spare for experiments in extended childhood in mammals. Under strict supervision by the science tribunals and animal rights committees, of course.

Certainly the creature seemed happy enough. “How about it, Baby?” Jen murmured. “Are you glad to be smarter than the average elephant? Or would you rather be out on the plains, rolling in mud, uprooting trees, complaining about ticks, and getting pregnant before you’re ten?”

The pink-tipped trunk curled around her hand. She stroked it, tenderly. “You’re awfully important to yourself, aren’t you? And you are part of the whole.

“But do you really matter, Baby? Do I?”

Actually, she had meant every word she said to Pauline — about how even mass extinctions would be essentially meaningless in the long run. A lifetime spent building the theoretical foundations of biology had convinced her of that. The homeostasis of the planet — of Gaia — was powerful enough to survive even great cataclysms.