The Signature of All Things

drink calciferous water straight from the stone. Over time, this mix of moss and mineral will itself turn into travertine marble. Within that hard, creamy-white marble surface, one will forever see veins of blue, green, and gray—the traces of the antediluvian moss settlements. St. Peter’s Basilica itself was built from the stuff, both created by and stained with the bodies of ancient moss colonies.
    Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. Moss, Alma learned, is the first sign of botanic life to reappear on land that has been burned or otherwise stripped down to barrenness. Moss has the temerity to begin luring the forest back to life. It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.
    The only thing mosses need is time, and it was beginning to appear to Alma that the world had plenty of time to offer. Other scholars, she noticed, were starting to suggest the same notion. By the 1830s, Alma had already read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology ,which proposed that the planet was far older than anyone had yet realized—perhaps even millions of years old. She admired the more recent work of John Phillips, who by 1841 had presented a geological timeline even older than Lyell’s estimates. Phillips believed that Earth had been through three epochs of natural history already (the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic), and he had identified fossilized flora and fauna from each period—including fossilized mosses.
    This notion of an unthinkably ancient world did not shock Alma, though it did shock a good many other people, as it directly contradictedthe Bible’s teachings. But Alma had her own peculiar theories about time, which were only bolstered by the fossil records in primordial ocean shale to which Lyell and Phillips had referred in their studies. Alma had come to believe, in fact, that there were several different sorts of time that operated simultaneously throughout the cosmos; as a diligent taxonomist, she had even gone so far as to differentiate and name them. Firstly, Alma had determined, there was such a thing as Human Time, which was a narrative of limited, mortal memory, based upon the flawed recollections of recorded history. Human Time was a short and horizontal mechanism. It stretched out straight and narrow, from the fairly recent past to the barely imaginable future. The most striking characteristic of Human Time, however, was that it moved with such amazing quickness. It was a snap of the finger across the universe. Most unfortunately for Alma, her mortal days—like everyone else’s mortal days—fell within the purview of Human Time. Thus, she would not be here long, as she was most painfully aware. She was a mere blink of existence, as was everyone else.
    At the other end of the spectrum, Alma postulated, there was Divine Time—an incomprehensible eternity in which galaxies grew, and where God dwelled. She knew nothing about Divine Time. Nobody did. In fact, she became easily irritated at people who claimed to have any comprehension whatsoever of Divine Time. She had no interest in studying Divine Time, because she believed there was no way for a human mind to comprehend it. It was time outside of time. So she left it alone. Nonetheless, she sensed that it existed, and she suspected that it hovered in some kind of massive, infinite stasis.
    Closer to home, returning to earth, Alma also believed in something she called Geological Time—about which Charles Lyell and John Phillips had recently written so convincingly. Natural history fell into this category. Geological Time moved at a pace that felt nearly eternal, nearly divine. It moved at the pace of stone and mountains. Geological Time was in no hurry, and had been ticking along, some scholars were now suggesting, far longer than anyone had yet surmised.
    But somewhere between Geological Time and Human Time, Alma posited, there was something else—Moss Time. By comparison to Geological Time, Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million.But relative to Human Time, Moss Time was achingly slow. To the unschooled human