“We gave Michael Poole his Morag,” Leropa said. “Not a copy — she was Morag! Restored, identical in every way philosophy can identify. Morag was selected for the sake of Michael Poole. And for you, Alia…”

But Alia had learned that nothing the Transcendence did was for her, but only ever for itself. And she knew that if you wanted to understand the Transcendence, you had to think things through, to think like the Transcendence itself.

“History was changed,” she said.

“A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way.”

“But Poole knew Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality.

He remembered her dying.”

“Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole’s loss if he isn’t aware of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. “In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been, was, terminated at a premature birth.”

“Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration.”

“But there’s a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities…” A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.

And even that wasn’t the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence’s infinite ambition. If this goes on…

Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then all of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.

It wasn’t as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if every possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might ever have lived under any contingency was to be born — and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.

“History will be meaningless,” she murmured. “The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored…”

“All wrongs righted,” Leropa declaimed. “All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!”

Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?

But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite — and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.

But getting Morag back wasn’t making Michael Poole happy.

That one hard fact cut through her chain of thought, and suddenly the bewildering madness of it all overwhelmed Alia. Suddenly she was aware of her body, a distant scrap of flesh in the shadow of a ruined cathedral, that thrashed and curled over on itself.

I startled awake, spooked.

I turned over. Morag was sitting up in bed, a baggy T-shirt draped over her body. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her face lifted up. I could see her quite clearly, the smooth lines of her arms, the oval of her uplifted face, even though the only light in that pokey Deadhorse hotel room was the dial of a small alarm clock. It was as if she were bathed with light from some source I couldn’t see, a warm glow, like the glow from a hearth.

Her lips moved and her tongue flickered. She started muttering, a kind of high-pitched gabbling. It was the high-speed “speech,” full of mysterious, unfathomable complexity, that we had been able to record before.

“Light,” I snapped. The room’s lights cut on with a buzz, and the room filled with the washed-out glow of fluorescents.

Morag stopped her rocking. In the flat bright light she just looked like a woman, like Morag, unreasonably sexy in my baggy T-shirt. But I could see the way the mattress was compressed under her weight. She smiled at me. “Are you OK?”

“No,” I said. “You know how that stuff freaks me out. Shit, Morag.” I sat up, pushing a pillow behind my back, and pulled the duvet up over my chest, protectively. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not much,” she said. “We’ve been through this, Michael.” She was quite relaxed, her voice almost dreamy. She rocked gently, bathed in that light from nowhere. “I’m happy just to sit here. I like to watch you sleep.”

“Well, it bothers me.” It was true; it stopped me from sleeping. I was always aware of her watching me, no matter how silent and still she was.

She teased me. “We used to stay awake all night, once. You didn’t complain then. Remember that time in Edinburgh?” I did remember; as guests of a nuclear energy facility on the coast of the Firth of Forth we’d gotten to stay in Holyrood House, the seat of the old royals. She said, “You, me, a couple of bottles of champagne, a little baby oil—”

She said this in a seductive, silky way she had always reserved for our most intimate moments, and the memory of it turned me on immediately. “OK,” I said. “It’s as if I can smell the baby oil. But—”

But there was something wrong. She was Morag — I felt that deeply. But it was as if there were another presence in the room with us, another identity embedded in Morag. I had no idea how to express this. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were even clear to me.

And besides, at that moment I felt like shit, my eyes gritty, my throat dry, my head heavy with that overfull feeling you get when you haven’t given sleep a chance to clear it out. “I’m getting too old for this,” I said feebly.

“Then go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes, rocking gently.

I lay back and closed my eyes. In my head I sought the elusive rhythms of sleep, tried to dig up fragments of the dream state I’d been in before I woke. But I couldn’t ignore that heavy rocking, back and forth, back and forth, as the bed tipped this way and that, creaking gently.

I looked at her again. She had turned her face away, looking to the ceiling, as if seeking something I couldn’t see.

“I can hear them all the time, you know,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Voices… It’s like a river running, but just out of my sight, beyond a screen of trees, maybe. It’s always there in the background, and if I let myself hear it, it sort of washes through me. I sometimes think that if I could just push through that barrier, step through the last trees to the river—”

“What? What would you see?”

She closed her eyes, concentrating, peering inward. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I can almost understand. Like when you are at school, and you’re struggling to grasp some concept. You see it in outline, you grasp a few steps of the chain of logic. But then you drop it all, like juggling too many balls, and it all goes away. Or maybe it’s like a download.”

“A download? What are you talking about, Morag? Who is trying to download into your head?”