“And Rosa?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s keep it down to Earth, shall we?”

Maybe he was right. Three Pooles was probably enough craziness for any one room. I turned to Gea. “So where do we start? What is Alia?”

Gea rolled complacently. “First, she wasn’t a VR. No doubt she was a projection of some sort, as she tried to explain to us. But equally she was real, as real as you are, Michael. Her body responded to our attempts to scan it, with X-rays, MRI, thermal imagers, other technologies. She shed strands of hair! With that we were even able to perform a genomic analysis.”

Gea said that Alia was human — almost.

As Rosa had guessed, that apelike form appeared to be an adaptation to zero gravity. A starship on a long-duration voyage was in an evolutionary sense like an island on Earth, where stranded animals routinely become dwarfs to spread out a limited food supply among more individuals. So the crew found their children growing smaller. And, in low or zero gravity, as the generations ticked by the children’s forms had reverted to an ancient apelike plan, with more of a balance of length between arms and legs — a design more suitable for climbing.

Surprisingly, Gea said, the basic body-plan changes seemed to be the result of natural selection rather than deliberate engineering. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but it seems there are some changes the genes find “easy” to make, such as relative growth rates, and faced with a challenging new environment, selection reaches for the easy options first. How strange, though, that these far-future people, projected into the unimaginable environment of space, had found their bodies reaching deep back in time for genetic memories of vanished African forest canopies.

“There is also some redesign of the joints,” Gea said. “For instance it looks as if Alia, like a baboon, could dangle from one arm and turn, allowing the arm to turn a full rotation in its socket.” But such redesign seemed radical for a “mere” half-million years, Gea said; perhaps this was an expression of engineered genes.

John grunted. “Next time you see her, throw her a banana and ask her to do some tricks.”

“Shut up,” I said mildly.

Gea talked us through more subtle changes, all of which pointed to an advancement over the Homo sapiens standard model circa the twenty-first century. The skeleton had been redesigned; Alia had more ribs than I did, perhaps to hold her organs in place more effectively, and so avoid hernias. Although she was designed for swinging around in weightlessness, Alia had thicker bones, vertebrae, discs in her back. She would be less prone to osteoporosis than I was, and would do a better job of functioning in high gravity, if she had to. Gea showed us images of a redesigned throat. Alia had no epiglottis, but there was a raised trachea, a kind of extension to her windpipe, so that food and drink could never get mixed up with the air she breathed; she was very unlikely to choke.

There were detailed modifications to her eyes, too. The optic nerve seemed to be attached to the retina more firmly, so that there was less chance of suffering a detached retina, and there were rings of tiny muscles around Alia’s pupils. “She seems to have a zoom facility,” Gea said dryly.

And Gea talked about Alia’s genome. Her existence was governed by DNA just as mine was, so we were both obviously products of the same lineage of life, both ultimately products of Earth. But Alia’s DNA showed divergences.

“Some of these changes appear to be the result of genetic drift, of natu-ral selection,” Gea said. “But others appeared to be engineered. We can only guess at the purpose of most of this. It may be she has a general regenerative ability, for instance. Cut off a finger, and another will grow in its place.”

John drew a softscreen toward him and made rapid notes. “Somebody ought to patent this stuff,” he said. “Just a thought.”

Tom sneered. “Uncle, how crass to be thinking of commercial gain at a time like this.”

John was unperturbed; he had endured such insults all his life. “Just doing my job. If there’s profit to be made, why not by us?”

Gea moved on to still stranger aspects of Alia’s anatomy. Much of what she had described so far had been extrapolations of the human. But there were signs of much more peculiar developments. Gea had imaged hard, impenetrable knots in Alia’s bloodstream, motes that might have been technological, remote descendants of the nanomachines of our age, perhaps.

And there even were traces of other life-forms in Alia’s body. For instance there was a kind of sheathing around portions of her nervous system, its function unknown — perhaps it was there for protection from deep-space radiation. It seemed obviously alive, and was based on an amino acid chemistry, just as Alia was. But it did not share Alia’s genome — indeed there was no trace of DNA to be found in it at all.

“Alien life,” I said slowly. “Not from Earth, because not based on DNA. She has a kind of symbiosis with alien life-forms.”

“So it seems.”

For long heartbeats we sat there, trying to digest this latest bit of news. I think I was the most imaginative of the three of us, the most open-minded. But even I was struggling with this. Here was not just a woman from the future, here was ET — and not sitting in a flying saucer looking back at me, but wrapped around the neurons of this remote descendant.

“All of this is evidence of advancement, in the broadest sense,” Gea said now. “Many past developments life’s capabilities have depended on symbiosis, the cooperation of one kind of life-form with another, or even the incorporation of one into the other.” Even complex cells were the result of one such merger, she said. Mitochondria, once independent creatures, were now used as miniature power plants within our own cells.

“And so what might come next,” I said, trying to follow her chain of thought, “is more mergers. Of our bodies with machines, and biology with technology. Or of our Earth-derived life-forms with life from another biosphere altogether, alien life.”

“Just as we see with Alia,” Gea said.

John scowled at the little robot. “I don’t think I like you telling me I’m inferior to that monkey woman.”

Gea said, “Then who would you like to tell you?”

Tom grinned, and I suppressed a laugh.

John leaned over the robot. “And what about you, sparky? If humanity is progressing onward and upward, what’s going to become of you?”

“I suspect we artificial types will play our part in your development,” Gea said, as unfazed as ever. “We know that Alia is actually far more intelligent than any modern human being. With all respect. We have the evidence of her speech for that, her ‘true speech,’ the accelerated gabble we recorded from Morag. I strongly suspect that she is also more conscious than any human alive today, in the truest sense. She has a deeper mind, and surely a deeper sense of herself. Some humans fear that artificial minds will make humans obsolescent. But Alia shows us that humans will not become obsolescent, any time soon. So what has happened? Perhaps there has been a competition with the machines, a selection pressure to become smarter.”

John said, “Or perhaps we just absorbed you. Perhaps you’re just another symbiote.”

“Perhaps. But we may have chosen not to participate in such a symbiosis. After all that is the great benefit of sentience — choice. And if that’s so, who knows what our destiny may be?” And she rolled back and forth, a half-kilogram of painted tin.

I spoke to Rosa later that day. She showed up in my hotel room, a small, dense, black figure. She listened patiently as I summarized what Gea had told us.

“Even what Alia told us of cosmology made sense,” I said. “Or at least it didn’t contradict what we know.”