Maybe. But I had to ask. “This means a lot to you, Alia. Your Witnessing of me, this visitation. I can see that.”

“Yes—”

“I mean a lot. Don’t I?”

Her eyes, in that mask of fur, were bright as stars. “I grew up with you. When I saw you, especially when you were unhappy—” She reached out a strong, long-fingered hand toward me, then drew it back. “I wanted more. I wanted to touch you. Of course I could not.”

Shit, I thought. I found myself pitying her. But if I had to be Witnessed, maybe I was lucky to have happened on somebody who was affectionate toward me. If I had found an enemy far down the corridors of time, the consequences could have been very different. Deep beneath these feelings of pity, though, I was angry, angry that my whole life had been fucked over by the carelessness of these future voyeurs.

And then Alia made it worse.

She leaned close to me. “Michael, once I was joined with your child. Your second son. In Hypostatic Union, which—”

My son who died. I felt cold. “You Witnessed him?”

“More than that. It was closer than Witnessing. I felt what he felt. I lived his life. He didn’t suffer. He even knew joy, in his way—”

I moved sharply away from her. “Christ. What gives you the right?”

She looked at me, shocked. “I wanted to tell you about him, to help you.” Then she dropped her gaze, humbly. “I’m sorry.”

“I… Oh, shit.” How was I supposed to cope with this stuff? “Look, I don’t mean to hurt you. I know this isn’t your fault.”

“You always wanted Morag. And that was what you always saw. And in the end she was returned to you.”

“Yes. But we weren’t happy. Perhaps it was impossible we ever could have been.”

“I was sad for you,” she said. She sounded sincere and I believed her. “But,” she said, “it was because you couldn’t be happy with Morag that I’m here now. And why I must ask you to help us.”

“Us? I don’t understand, Alia.”

“There is much I must tell you,” she said. “About the Transcendence. And Redemption…”

And as she spoke, a doorway to the ultimate destiny of mankind opened before me.

When Rosa saw the virtual record of my latest conversation with Alia, she seemed electrified.

She called us together. Once again the Pooles gathered in another Deadhorse hotel room: me, Tom, John, and Aunt Rosa projected from Seville.

This time Tom had wanted to bring Sonia, but she ducked out, for the same reason we had left her out before: “Poole family business,” she said. Somewhat to my surprise, Gea dropped out as well this time. She gave the same excuse: “Family business.” But by “family” Gea meant not just us Pooles but the human family. This was an issue for the species, and our artificial companions weren’t going to be able to help us now. A deep instinct, though, prompted me as usual to bring in at least one independent mind, in Shelley Magwood. She griped about how busy she was, but she came anyway.

We all knew why we were there. They had all heard Alia’s strange invitation to me, recorded by the hotel’s security systems and by monitors Gea had left with me. We played it through again. The record was hard for me to listen to over again, however, in that room, with us all sitting around a scuffed tabletop, with cups of coffee and bottles of water and softscreens before us, common sense cut in.

As she listened Rosa’s small body was hunched, her eyes glittering. Her hungry intensity scared me.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said abruptly, unable to bear the mood. “It’s a cold Alaskan day. A Monday. This morning I ate Cheerios and drank coffee and watched football highlights. Out there people are taking their kids to school and putting in the laundry and going to work. And here we are talking about how we’re going to deal with the far future of mankind. Are we all just crazy?”

John grunted. “What do you mean, we? It’s you who’s being subpoenaed by the ape-people, as far as I can make out.”

Shelley was tapping at a softscreen on the tabletop. She murmured, “Nobody’s crazy. I saw the records Gea has been making, and her analysis of Alia, the chimp-thing. I don’t know what the hell is happening here. But this is real.”

“OK,” said Tom. “But even if you buy all that stuff, now we have to go one jump further. We have to believe that this — Transcendence, this mish-mash of superbrains — wants my dad to save them. My dad, sitting there like a barrel of goose fat, is going off to the far future to save mankind.”

“Nicely put, son,” I said.

“It’s another clichй, Dad. Like those old stories you used to read me as a kid. The decadent humans of the far future need our primitive vigor to save them.”

“You enjoyed that stuff at the time,” I said defensively.

“Yes, but as stories. Not as a career move.”

Rosa, dark, intense, solemn, said, “Shelley is right. We all saw Morag — so did the world. And we Pooles all saw Alia. Our best strategy is to assume that everything we have been told is real. Suppose, then, that Alia is telling the truth. Suppose that all of human history, folded back on itself, really is funneling through this moment, into the conscience of one man, of Michael Poole. Suppose it is true! The question then is, what must we do about it?”

John surprised me by being constructive.

“In my business the key to success is to work out what the other guy really wants — your client, your legal opponent, the jury, even the judge. You may not be planning to give him what he wants, but if you know it you have a chance of manipulating him. So I think we have to consider what this ‘Transcendence’ of Alia’s, this vastly advanced composite entity, might want. ”

Shelley was scanning through material on her softscreen. “That’s not so easy to answer. Since Michael asked me to join in with this, I’ve been digging up old references on how we thought far-future beings, or maybe advanced aliens, would behave, what they would do. And you know what? All we ever did, it seems to me, was to project ourselves up into the sky.

“Look at this stuff.” She displayed some tabletop VRs for us. “Here you have Dyson spheres, cultures taking apart worlds to enclose their suns and so trapping every bit of energy. And for what? Living space, uncountable trillions of square kilometers of elbow room. This isn’t the future,” Shelley said, “not any kind of future. These are the concerns of the mid-twentieth century, energy supplies, demographics, population explosions, painted over the sky. And all Dyson was talking about was the infrastructure of a civilization. He didn’t seem to have much to say about what an advanced culture would do with all its power.”

Tom nodded. “Except to fill up the Galaxy with endless copies of its own kind. Just as we do.”

Rosa said, “But there are other precedents in our intellectual history of attempts to analyze the motives of more-than-human minds.”

John pulled a face. “I have a feeling you’re going to get all theological again.”

Rosa smiled, aloof. “Isn’t that why I’m here? There can be no more superior intelligence than God’s. What is Christian theology but a two-thousand-year-old quest to read His Mind — what is all our devotion but an effort to understand His desires and to act accordingly?

“Believe me, the universe Alia comes from, a universe that may soon be dominated by a superior consciousness, really isn’t so different from the universe imagined by Christians. For example the old Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism. Russell said he would ask God why he should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor.”

“And we want to break the silence,” Shelley said.

“Yes. We long to talk to the aliens, as we have always longed to talk to God.”