The Investigation Of Gaia

Alpha and Gaia are nodes of the galactic brain.

Christian Brannock and Laurinda Ashcroft are human uploads into Alpha and Gaia, respectively.

Brannock is also integrated into Wayfarer, a manifestation of Alpha.

Alpha and other nodes need information about three aspects of Gaia's stewardship of Earth:

Gaia in linkage with Wayfarer will invest weeks of almost total concentration for both of them to conduct him through her database of millions of years of observations across Earth;

meanwhile, Brannock and Laurinda will experience Gaia's historical emulations;

another downloaded secondary personality of Wayfarer will travel physically in a four-armed body to survey the current Terrestrial environment - and will encounter the man, Kalava.

We the readers follow the two secondary personalities - one in the emulations, the other on Earth - not Wayfarer in linkage with Gaia fast-forwarding the database. The secondaries have comprehensible and describable real time sensory experiences. A novel cannot become entirely trans-human and abstract - can it?

Some passages are sketches of a future history. We are told once that Brannock has seen combat. A fuller treatment would have given us perhaps a short story set during his time in the Commonwealth of Nations' Conflict Mediation Service - which sounds like a grandiose name for another army. Another echo of Heinlein's Future History, the CMS sounds like the Space Patrol which gets one short story in The Green Hills Of Earth and some mentions in other installments.

I think that it is impossible to read through Genesis once and to retain much of its concentrated information. I had certainly forgotten most of it before the current rereading.