The story consists of a number of individual "voices" describing their moment of contact with an enigmatic alien organism that drifts slowly through the solar system. Each of these individuals imposes his or her own interpretation on what the organism is—the organism serves as a blank slate on which personal concerns are projected. At the end of the story, in the fugue section, the individuals are brought together again for a climax, and then the original theme of First Contact comes back for the grand finale.

It's worth noting that "Organism" tells the story of First Contact between humans and the League of Peoples. That makes it the foundation for all of the novels I've published so far.

"Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream": It's seldom that I can actually trace the genesis of a story, but "Three Hearings…" is an exception. The night of January 1, 1996, I couldn't sleep; and when I got out of bed to find something to do with myself, I happened to pick up a how-to-write-poetry book I'd been meaning to read. (There's this nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, "Jeez, I really should know something about poetry. And microbiology. And Chinese folklore." That voice is why I keep writing science fiction instead of something respectable, like murder mysteries.)

Anyway, I opened the poetry book at random and found a short poem called "The Oxen" by Thomas Hardy. The poem is based on a folk tradition that oxen supposedly kneel on Christmas Eve, just as they knelt before the baby Jesus on the first Christmas. Hardy wistfully thinks about the legend and says he would like someone to say to him, "Let's go into the fields to see the oxen kneeling." Even better, he'd like to see that they are kneeling. To me, the poem was about becoming tired of modern sophistication: nostalgically wishing for simplicity and simple proofs of faith.