It was hydra, and about ready to bud. She placed it in her cup, and presently the daughter parted from the mother.
Hydra was virtually immortal, and would go on living as long as it could find food, which might be for a thousand years, and every time it was a little short of food it would produce another daughter. Such immortality was not worth having. Life that was worth anything was precarious.
And the history of life on earth was the history of steadily decreasing fertility. Species ran out, families ran out, but always in the effort to get a finer product. A water lily, living but for days, was infinitely better than hydra.
Chapter 90. Thorium
She dropped the two animals back into the water and began to row homeward through the hush of the Sunday afternoon, her bashfulness returning. She could not understand why, having admitted so much, she still hung back.
But Marvin might well be patient, for it had taken thousands of millions of years to coax the bashful atoms into her young body. Once her carbon had burned in the white incandescent smoke around the sun, and later fled embraces through the storms of earth and countless creatures that never would be man. She was at least as old as thorium, which lay radioactive for twenty billion years before any lover seduced it into a gas-mantle, and which even then refused to glow till a trifle of cerium set it off.
She rowed her lilies home, and trimmed their porous stems, and floated them in a wide bowl of glass, where they presently closed their eyes for the night. And her father, coming to supper and seeing them on the table, beamed with delight. “I’m sorry, daddy, that they are all closed up.”
“What, apologizing for lilies? Horace would say that even this gold is better hid. But there’s a heart of gold that has been hid from her old father almost too many nights.”
“Why,” said Jean, “I’ve told you a lot of intimate things—for instance that I happened along in the greatest year that ever was, when Madame Curie found radium.”
“Yes, child, but you have been almost as unknown to me as radium is. I might count your life by seconds, and plead that every second brought a new Jean. I have loved them all, and fancied all the millions mine, but I catch but glimpses of you as you grow.”