FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:

I keep thinking about Sharky Star-rover. Last night I dreamt I had a copy of the book in my hands, but when I opened it, the print was blurred and I couldn’t make out a single word, no matter how close I held the volume to my face.

There was this one scene in the book, set on a lushly landscaped planet. Sharky, having fallen exhausted from being chased by some fierce hirsute denizens of the land, looked up at a beautiful tree that seemed to lunge toward the sky from his prone vantage point. It had, I seem to recall, a jagged irregular bark that, in the planet’s gloomy darkness, glowed luminescently in abstract bloblike patterns. One particular blob reminded him of Jameson, who’d been captured by the natives. The last sight Sharky had had of Jameson, it had looked to him like the captors were considering boiling him for their evening meal. (I can’t remember whether Jameson was rescued by Sharky or fate—for some mysterious reason the really exciting adventures seem to have slipped my memory. I don’t even think Jameson was edible.) Anyway, Sharky—saddened by thinking of Jameson—starts to consider this oddly barked tree in more detail. Far above him, on snakelike branches, its leaves were ugly, furry, and dripping with an oily liquid, drops of which fell like miniature deadly bombs around Sharky. He did nothing to try to avoid the drops, but none of them hit him and he thought they even curved in their downward flight as if to miss him intentionally.

He stared at the tree for a long time. He had never seen one like it. His mind contemplated all the trees, all the landscapes, all the natural phenomena he had seen on his travels. Before, it had all impressed him, reminded him of the vast scope of the universe. Now, he wondered if that impression was an illusion. The universe was not so darn gosh-awful big, he thought, we are just too small to appreciate its finitude. This tree might be the only one of its kind on this planet, it might be found nowhere else in the universe, but it was just a tree. Other planets had trees, some did not. He knew that, of kinds of trees, there was only a finite number existing in the universe. Whatever the number was, it was not often increased by one more. That thought made Sharky think of how small the universe was. Perhaps, he thought, people had always been wrong in contemplating their insignificance in the universe. They, too, represented merely a finite number in a finite universe. Insignificance was not the point, that was only investing the number with an unnecessary emotional aspect. If trees contemplated the varieties of human being, or even the varieties of sentient creatures in the universe, they could come to their own similar conclusions about the significance or insignificance of trees. Then he began to laugh. (I remember the scene of his laughter very vividly.) Significance or insignificance, finity or infinity, the tree was extremely beautiful at that moment. For him. Nobody else would ever experience this moment, he thought, no matter who rushed in and sprawled beneath this tree.

As I search the universe for a place to escape to, I often consider Sharky’s momentary dilemma. Are our possibilities for escape so finite that we’ll eventually have to climb into the nets of a Cylon trap? Or should we continue to consider them infinite, or at least as a high number—say, the number of kinds of trees in the universe—in order to invest those possibilities with hope?