I had been a cosmology fan all my life. I was encouraged by uncle George, who said I was lucky to be alive at a time when cosmology was moving out of the realm of philosophy and into hard science. There had been the emergence of quantum gravity, and the great astrophysical satellite studies of the first part of the century that had mapped the relics of universal birth in fine detail, all of which had enabled us to put together a firm biography of the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. Of course being a fan of all this stuff hadn’t helped me spot the approaching Higgs revolution, which had developed from all this.
But as part of the new understanding, we knew the universe was finite.
I said, “We haven’t mapped the topology of the universe yet — that is, its shape. But for sure, a finite, closed form of the kind Alia hinted at fits what we know.”
“Perhaps that finiteness is necessary for the development of life, of mind, in some way,” Rosa mused. “If the universe were infinite, just dissipating into the dark, perhaps mind would simply fizzle out, too. Perhaps everything is connected.”
“Maybe you should ask Alia about that.”
“It’s you she’s interested in, not me,” Rosa said. “And what of the human future she sketched — all these ‘Expansions’ across the Galaxy?”
“That seems all too plausible, too,” I said.
“Yes,” Rosa said. “We humans seem to have been an unstable lot from the beginning. Unlike other animals, even our hominid forebears, we aren’t content simply to find a role in the ecology. And in the future, it seems, that same restlessness will drive us on beyond the Earth. We will encounter others out there, and those others will go the way of the mammoth and the Neandertal, their last relics incorporated into the very bodies of their destroyers.”
“Umm,” I said. “Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?” This was an old conundrum, dating back nearly a century. The universe is so old that there has been time for it to be colonized many times over, before humans even evolved — so if extraterrestrial aliens exist, why don’t we see any sign of them? “One candidate solution is that there is a killer species out there, a voracious predator that swoops down and assimilates any culture foolish enough to attract the notice of the bad guys. It’s a chastening thought that some day we may be the predators; we may be the instigator of a Fermi Paradox of our own…”
Rosa nodded. “But does it have to be that way? I grew up in a society which was quite different. The way we lived in the Order will always have its critics. But the Order was able to deliver very high population densities, very large numbers of human beings living orderly human lives, and all without harming anybody else. So I have firsthand experience of how humans can get along with each other without needing to trash the Galaxy to do it.”
I guessed I knew far more about her Order than she could imagine. But I didn’t want her to know about George’s manuscript; he had made it clear he had never told her about it.
“Rosa, you speculated about evolutionary purposes for ghosts, how maybe they evolved to help us through bottlenecks of the past. Are you disappointed that the visitations are just” — I shrugged — “technological after all?”
She smiled. “It is never a good idea to be disappointed by the truth. And besides, maybe I did hit on a deeper meaning. Perhaps the visitations, the Witnesses, did somehow aid us through those bottleneck times, even if unwittingly. Perhaps humanity was able to survive, and grow to cover a Galaxy, precisely because the likes of Alia closed the time loops from past to future.”
“That sounds like a time paradox.”
“Alia is a traveler from the future. Her very presence here must be perturbing all our lives, already changing the future, and yet she is here even so. What can be more paradoxical than that?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t help us much right now, does it?” I got up and paced around the room, my thinking muddy, unsatisfactory. “The whole thing seems so old-fashioned. Welcome O Visitor from the Incredi-ble Year Five Hundred Thousand!… It’s a 1940s dream.” I suppose I was thinking of George again, the heaps of decaying science fiction novels he had given me.
“Those dreams were a product of the age,” Rosa said. “The twentieth century was a time of cheap energy, of technological optimism. And so we dreamed expansive, progressive dreams. Now people turn inward. The children are taught to do so — all those introspection classes in the schools! We live in a time of constraint, when one dare not dream that things might be different, for any possibility of difference seems even worse than what we have.
“But a deeper part of us knows that something is missing. We are a species that has lived through immense calamities in the past — vast climatic upheavals, huge natural disasters, plagues and famines, the rise and fall of empires. We have been shaped by such events. Even if we don’t realize it, we yearn for the epic, the apocalyptic. And now the epic has found us. It has found you, Michael.” As always she spoke calmly, but her tone was warm.
“You think I should call her back?”
“Of course. What else is there to do? You must resolve this, Michael. But you must not be humble before her.”
“Humble?”
“She has come here for her own purposes, her own agenda, it seems. But we don’t have to accept that agenda. Perhaps even Alia has limits.
“We know so much more now than I ever imagined we would learn, when I was a child in the 1960s. And Alia, with a half million years’ advantage over us, must know far more yet. But what of the deepest issues of all? Does she know why anything exists at all, rather than nothing? Before such questions, the details of cosmological unfoldings seem rather trivial, don’t you think? And if we can pose questions she can’t answer, perhaps Alia’s people are no smarter than we are, for all their redesigned rib cages and alien symbiotes.” Her eyes glittered, hard, knowing, skeptical.
That night, alone in my room, I called her. It felt absurd to be sitting on my bed, calling the name of a creature who wouldn’t be born for half a million years until after my bones were dust, if she ever existed at all.
Yet she came. There were no special effects, no flashes or bangs or swirls of light. One instant she wasn’t there, the next she was, a part of my reality as solid as the bed in my room, the table, the chairs. She looked out of place. With her slightly stooped stance and that long crimson fur hanging from her limbs, she did look like an escaped ape. But she smiled at me.
She glanced around the room. She rubbed a cautious finger along the back of a chair, pulled it out, and tried sitting on it. But she didn’t look comfortable, with her knees tucked up and her arms dangling to the ground. So with a lithe, graceful swing, she leapt up to the tabletop and sat in a kind of lotus position.
She said, “I’ve Witnessed you all my life, but I don’t know much about your social protocol. Is it OK to sit on your table?”
I shrugged. “It’s not even my table.”
“You called me,” she said. The warmth in her voice was obvious.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“Would you have come anyhow?”
“No,” she said firmly. “You had to call. You have to want this.”
I wondered, Want what? “Listen, Alia, if you’re from the future, why don’t you help us?”
“Help you? How?”
“We’re struggling to get through this Bottleneck. Our hydrate-stabilizer scheme is a lash-up; you must see that. Why don’t you give us some help — some technology guidance, maybe?”
She eyed me, and I thought I could see the true answer in her expression. Because it would be as useful as handing a laser rifle to an australopithecine. She seemed to understand tact, however. She said, “You don’t need our help, Michael. Not in that way. You’ll make it through without us. Isn’t that better?”