Free Mr g by Alan Lightman

I might say so without giving offense—we are family after all, and one should be able to say these things to family—you are acting
greedy
. Plain greedy, and it does not become you.
    I was stung by Aunt P’s remarks. Too often, she found fault with something I did, or frowned at me in that unpleasant way of hers, or simply woke up on the wrong side of something or other. She was not entitled to speak to me that way, or to Uncle D for that matter. For eons of time, she had been walking all over Uncle, treating him as worth less than nothing, and he had just accepted it, hardly fighting back. But it diminished both of them. Greedy! How was I greedy? What was the harm of wanting to fill up a few more universes? In my opinion, Aunt P was off base, way off base. And why had she said such a mean-spirited and hurtful thing to me? She was compensating for something, something lacking in herself. Well, her barbed comments were not worth a reply. I was not about to lower myself. Who did she think she was talking to?
    I went for a long walk in the Void. I am not sure what I was thinking, but I wanted to be alone. Time passed. What did it matter how much time passed, anyway? Time passed. I traveled great distances. I went this way and that, scarcely noticing the hills and the valleys of nothingness, the folds upon folds of emptiness, the utter vacuum. I am not sure what I was thinking, or how much time elapsed. It might have been eons. I reminisced about epochs past, before the invention of time, when Aunt Penelope and Uncle Deva and I all spoke at once. None of us could hear the other, as we were all talking on top of one another, but it was part of how we related, and there was a certain pleasantness and familiarity to it. I reminisced about potential thoughts I had had, long before I decided to create anything, when even the thought of creating something was only a potentiality, a possibility. How sleepy we all were. I marveled at how Aunt P and Uncle D had changed during the infinite time I had known them, but especially in recent epochs. They seemed to be growing closer to each other in some ways, keeping their distance in others. And I thought of my own changing sensitivities, how I had been aware of the ubiquitous music filling the Void only after the creation of time. Before then, music, happening all at once, seemed just another aspect of existence, like the nature of thought. So much had happened in a relatively short period of time, certainly short compared to the unending sprawl of existence before. I walked and walked and walked, huge distances in the Void, but huge distances in the Void are infinitesimal compared to the infinite. Eons passed.
    When I came back to where I had started, there was Aunt Penelope, exactly where she had been before, as if not even a single atomic hydrogen tick had gone by. And I realized that she had been correct. I had been greedy. In the past infinity of time, I had never known myself to be greedy, but then again I had never had anything to be greedy about. Matter was a recent invention. I had been greedy. I felt embarrassed. Immediately, I let go of the fat, empty spheroid with the mottled exterior, and it flew away in haste, joining the myriad other empty universes zipping about. I’m sorry, I said to my aunt. You are right. I was acting greedy. One universe at a time. We will see this one through. Thank you, said Aunt P. One of your admirable qualities, Nephew, is that you admit your mistakes. Not like certain other parties who will go unnamed.

The Origins of Life
    After my humbling conversation with Aunt Penelope, I decided to attend again to Aalam-104729. Since my last visit, a number of fascinating changes had occurred. As a result of the nuclear reactions in the first generation of stars, the most abundant elements in the universe were hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon, so I expected many molecules to have formed from these elements. And I was right. Water, consisting of two