“And is that how you see us?” John asked bitterly. “Are we just animals in an ecology to you?”
Alia seemed genuinely puzzled by this line of questioning. “How else would you want to be thought of?”
I said, “There is much debate about geoengineering projects. You must know that. We aren’t sure if we have the right to meddle on a planetary scale.”
Alia seemed baffled by this. “But you are already, umm, meddling.” She paused, as if accessing more data. “Consider the Earth. Twenty percent of the land and a good proportion of the sea is covered by artificial ecosystems, each containing a small number of species, selected and bred for one consumer—”
“Farms,” Sonia said.
“Yes. You have changed the very geomorphology of the planet: you have carved vast chunks out of mountains and landscapes, you have built new lakes, and reclaimed other lands from the sea, and you have created entirely artificial land forms of a type never seen before.”
Gea interrupted, “But all this must be trivial compared to the great transformation of your time, an age when mankind has covered a Galaxy.”
“Oh, of course. In the future we do it bigger and better. But planet-shaping, geoengineering, meddling, is what people do. Human history has always been a tangle of environmental changes, human responses, accidents… Human will is only one component. Just accept it!”
“There she goes again,” John groused. “Talking about us as if we’re nothing but animals. Like beavers, mindlessly building dams.”
I understood his resentment. But I remembered that this wasn’t the “true” Alia. She was deliberately slowing her speech, speaking to us as if we were children. To her, I thought, maybe we really were as busy and mindless, as productive and destructive, as bower birds or beavers.
Sonia leaned forward, as fascinated as John was on edge. “You must know the future.”
Alia said, “In a way.”
“What happens? What happens to us? Do you know how we die?”
“Not all of you.” She said brightly, “I know how Michael Poole dies. I have seen his life, the whole of it — like a book, complete from beginning to end—”
I snapped, “I don’t want to know.”
She bowed her head.
“But the future,” Sonia pressed. “The bigger picture. Just the fact that you are here, you exist, says that we’re not going to go extinct any time soon.”
“So mankind will make it through the Bottleneck,” John said.
Sonia asked, “And then what?”
“And then, expansion,” Alia said brightly. “Off the planet. To the stars!”
Sonia frowned. “Yes, but what happens?…”
It soon became clear she knew little in detail about the unraveling of history beyond our present — indeed, beyond my own lifetime. But then, why should she? If I were dropped, say, into the middle of the last Ice Age, what could I say to curious hunter-gatherers who asked about their future? It will get warmer. A lot warmer. And then, expansion. Out of your refuges, all the way to the Moon!…
And besides, she seemed to imply, the future wasn’t as fixed as all that.
Rosa asked, “And are there other cultures out there? Extraterrestrial aliens, civilizations among the stars?”
“Oh, yes,” Alia said. “Or there used to be. Some of their biologies have merged with ours. And you can still find ruins.”
Sonia said, “Ruins? What happened to them?”
“We did,” Tom said dryly. “Ask the Sumatran rhino.”
There was a long silence.
Rosa leaned forward and faced Alia. “I think it’s time we got to the point. Don’t you?”
“The point?”
“There is a reason you are here,” Rosa said. “You have a purpose. And it is to do with Michael.” She turned to me.
I said, “I have seen — apparitions — of Morag all my life. Morag, my wife. Since before I met her even, since I was a kid. You must know this. I want to know what that haunting meant. Was it to do with you, Alia? Your Witnessing?”
Again Alia looked oddly crestfallen, as much as I could read her small face, her apelike body language — as if she was actually jealous of Morag. “Yes,” she said. “It was the Witnessing.”
As a Witness she had access to my whole life. She could dip into it at will, like a random-access file. She was naturally drawn to the key events of my life — and for her, that meant the times invested with the most emotion, the most joy, the most pain.
She said, “We are so far apart in time we don’t always communicate very well. Not in language, in symbols.” I thought of our failure to decode her speech; I knew that was true. “But emotion comes through,” she said. “Raw, powerful emotion can punch through species barriers, even through time. But Witnessing is always leaky…”
The Witnessing was a muddling-up of future and past. She talked about her information surfaces again,
her holograms. All that Witnessing had damaged the holograms, somehow: it had worn holes in the fabric of my life. And through those holes I glimpsed other times, other places.
“Like the pages of a much-loved book,” Rosa said. “So worn through by a tracing finger they become transparent, and you can read the next page.”
At an intensely Witnessed moment you could get leaks, she said, traces of events from other times in your life showing through. And since Morag had been associated with the most intensely joyful and painful moments of my life, and it was those instants that had been rubbed through and linked up, what I mostly glimpsed was her. It was as if all my life with Morag had been joined together in a single eternal moment.
Alia said, “I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better.”
Rosa nodded, as if satisfied. “So Witnessing muddles future and past. I wonder if this rationalizes away every ghost story in the past — the few which were not simply delusional.”
Alia said to me, “In fact Witnessing is supposed to be neutral. You aren’t supposed to perturb your subject. Not many people know it has this kind of effect.”
John laughed. “So even in the far future we are polluters! If you need a good compensation lawyer, Michael—”
“Shut up, John.”
Rosa said coldly, “And since from Michael’s perspective you are a creature from eternity, from outside his life altogether, your intrusion has damaged his whole life.”
Alia said, “But Michael’s case was special.”
“How?”
“Because I am here. I had to push hard to break through, to be here. The distortion of your timeline was — exceptional.”
Rosa murmured, “Michael, what are you thinking?”
I shrugged. “I thought I was seeing Morag. I always imagined she wanted to come back to me. I’m disappointed that it was all just some jerky time-traveler fuck-up from the future. I’m pissed that it was nothing but you all the time.” I spat the words at Alia. I wanted to hurt her.
Her face crumpled further. But she said earnestly, “Michael, she was there, in the hauntings, the visitations. Yes, I was the Witness. But what you saw was her. And the revenant, the flesh-and-blood resurrection — that was Morag, too, Michael, in every way that it could be her.”
“Ah, yes,” Rosa snapped. “The revenant. And why was she brought back?” She used her sharp exorcist’s voice again. “You told me your name, but you have yet to tell me the full truth. What is your purpose, creature?”
Alia turned to me. “You are special, Michael Poole,” she said. “You must know that by now — it is true, whether you like it or not. You are truly a pivot of history, in this age, and your name is known into the far future.”
“Here we go,” Tom said, and he linked his hands behind his head. “The really nutty stuff.”