For millennia they have waited, these embryo worlds. Long have they kept their secret. Long have they concealed their precious interiors from a harsh cosmos unsympathetic to life. Their exteriors, cold and dead to the outside universe, offer little hint to the liquid warmth that lies within. There are hidden jewels embedded in the black velvet of space.
They wait for the spark that can awaken them from the slumber of unrealised potential to full awareness. The arrival of the tiny creatures from the distant blue world, with all its miraculous variety of form. Their sheer determination to live anywhere, in any environment however harsh, is the key that will one day bring all these worlds to life:
The hot liquid carbon dioxide cauldron of Venus. Beneath its dense atmosphere the mountaintops glow in the darkness of night, an eery silver sheen of tellurium and lead sulphide.
The early hot Earth was covered in dense clouds of water vapour, obscuring the surface. From space it might have appeared as an undifferentiated whitish grey globe. It was a blank sheet from which any potentiality could arise.
The outer layers of Mars are lined with the cracks of ancient lava tubes. The caverns are covered with the fossilised remnants of fungal webs woven into the planet's interior, marks left by the last remaining extremophile fungi as they clung to the dying core for warmth.
There are those who dream of a Martian resurrection. One day the Martian dragon will emerge from its tomb, as the plumes of hot lava once rose from Olympus Mons.
From the surface of the inner moons, Jupiter looms so large that it takes up the entire sky, so much so that it becomes the sky. The Great Red Spot is an Eye of Providence, an all-seeing eye.
The liquid warmth of Europa and Enceladus are protected underneath thick shells of ice, exoskeletons against the void without. Within them are primordial oceans, many times deeper than that of Earth. Their molten metal cores are the yokes surrounded by amniotic fluid.
Europa and Io are polar opposites, ice and fire. Liquid rock, liquid water - both are necessary to the egg.
Saturn is encased in rings composed of billions of icy beads. The shepherd moons create spiralling gravity waves which ripple inwards. It is an immense vinyl record inscribed with some unknowable music.
The Oil rains of Titan are concentrated hydrocarbons gushing out of volcanoes which fall back down as liquid, forming seas lakes and rivers beneath the hazy sky. There is more here than all the oil and gas on Earth.
There are many more embryo worlds, such as Ganymede and Callisto, constructed of concentric shells of water and ice in various phase states. Their inner oceans of liquid warmth await fertilisation by the ingenuity of the creatures from the distant blue world, the golden womb where life began. They will arrive in vessels of steel riding pulses of gas, the spermatozoa which carry the spark of life to other eggs. Fabergé civilisations will take root.
With the water they find they will settle these worlds and find new homes. In doing so they will transform them, and be transformed in turn. Their offspring will be the product of these new terrains. New Terrans will be created from these Terra Nova. Out of the amniotic fluid of the inner oceans new forms will emerge into the universe, post-humans who will go on to the bring the entire galaxy into the light of sentience. The desire path to the cosmos awaits.
Until that day arrives, they can only wait, and sleep.
