© 1997

The end had come quietly. It wasn't asteroids falling out of the sky as some thought it would be, and it wasn't volcanoes erupting all over the planet as the religious nuts had predicted, and it wasn't windstorms or hurricanes or acid rain or much of anything.

It was just quiet.

The planet had only danced a longer step in the endless cycles of warming and cooling, and this time it went cold. Very cold. First it snowed, and then it snowed more, and then it didn't stop. And the ice sheets crept forward until they covered everything. And the oceans froze and the land froze and the animals froze and the plants froze. And the people huddled together until they froze. And it was quiet.

In the icy vastness of space it was so cold that nothing moved. And it was quiet for a decade. Then for two. Then for a million, and then for millions more.

And the cycle began again, and somehow, some way, the frosted globe reversed course. It began to warm up.

And it was still quiet.

And through the eons continents collided with each other, oceans retreated, mountains were pushed up from under and were dissolved back down by the rain and wind. And somewhere, somehow, the molecules and elements and energy recombined a trillion times. A trillion trillion times. Again. And life began its unlikely quest to tame the planet. Again.

First it was enzymes, and much later cells, and millions of years later there were plants and simple creatures scavenging for survival on the reborn world. And though it would take millions of years more, finally animals evolved who could think and talk and take control their own destiny.

And they subjugated the planet and all the life on it. And it had taken a millennium of millennia.

And in the end, it was quiet. It was a disease that conquered them this time. Vanquished them all. It began in the jungles and spread to the cities, and though there was panic and though there were riots and though there were wars and suffering and killing, in the end it was the little germ that was the victor. Every living thing succumbed, and it was quiet. Again.

And for thousands of millions of years every trace of those lives was erased. Mountains collapsed, and environments changed. And the snow came and went, and the deserts became fertile and the fruited plains became arid.