There will be costs. There are costs in anything you do. Alia’s vision of mankind spread across the Galaxy, an arena for trillions upon trillions of human lives, was magnificent, but it was a Galaxy we emptied out along the way. And in a sense it all started here. But the future isn’t fixed; I’ve learned that. So maybe even the downside isn’t inevitable. Maybe we can have it all. Why not?

I’m starting to believe what Alia told me, that people of the future really will look back on our age as a time to admire, a time you’d wish you’d lived through.

John has a house not far away from me. But he is often off in New York, Washington, or Geneva, pursuing his own projects, heroic in his own legalistic way. And he’s at last writing his book on his new ethics-based economics paradigm, his new kind of money.

I don’t see much of his Happy kids. It doesn’t feel like much of a loss.

I haven’t seen Rosa for some time. She gave up her ministry in Seville, and has, well, disappeared. As if into a hole in the ground.

I suspect that the Coalescence has come back into her life, somehow. It was always a shadow behind her, a depth of darkness into which I could never pry. Maybe it called her back — but from George’s account that seems unlikely; it would have no use for her, a failed drone who did her job but got too smart for her own good. Maybe, on the other hand, she tracked it down, or some descendant of it after the great scattering in Rome. Maybe she’s at least able to figure out what the meaning of it all was for her. I hope so.

Tom and Sonia are working on relief efforts in Siberia once more. Now that the Refrigerator project is rolling out there’s a lot to be done. Sonia has resigned her army commission to work with Tom. I keep a room in my apartment for them. They store some of their stuff there, so they have a permanent place in my life. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like, however. I don’t know what the future holds for them, but I think they’ll be happy together.

We are all getting rich, incidentally.

John moved fast to patent as much as he could of the information derived from images and scans of Alia, and indeed Morag, in the name of EI and ourselves; he was able to make a convincing case to the company’s lawyers that if not for us Pooles this windfall from the future wouldn’t have fallen into their laps anyhow. The genomic studies seem likely to yield fruit quickly. Longevity treatments may be the first big payoff: EI even has a trademarked name for their soon-to-be-announced product range, AntiSenescence, or AS. They are paying us for licences to investigate the material, and in future we’ll take a small but serious cut of the profits.

I don’t have any qualms about profiting from my experiences. I suffered enough; I guess I’ve a right.

Shelley has expressed doubts about polluting the timeline. After all we are patenting genetic and other enhancements that have been fed to us from the future; we will be introducing them centuries, millennia before they are “due.” I don’t worry about that, any more than about the nonexistence of the Kuiper Anomaly. I take my lead from Alia, who seemed to have a robust view of time paradoxes. The universe can take a few punches from us without disappearing up its own paradoxical fundament. Things will work out somehow — or maybe they already have.

Anyhow when this all unravels the Pooles are going to be rich. We’ve always been engineers, we’ve always been meddlers, and now we will have money, and money means the power to do things. I guess my own race is run. But I wonder what the Pooles will do with all that power in the future.

Sometimes I think all our adventures, we Pooles, are to do with a quest for God. Rosa’s Coalescence, if George’s analysis was right, was certainly superhuman, but no god, nothing but a mindless multiplication. Alia hinted that at mankind’s peak we went to war at the center of the Galaxy, and what we found there was very strange, unimaginably ancient, and powerful. So that generation found God, and, exultantly, used Him as a weapon. And in Alia’s time, we looked for God in the last place He might be hiding — deep within ourselves. But He wasn’t there either.

As for me, I’ve returned to my work on the interstellar-probe application of the Higgs technology.

You’d think that my exposure to the future might have crushed my confidence in what we can achieve. Alia, after all, was born on a starship, a ship that had been cruising for half a million years. How can my trivial little unmanned probe, a one-shot water rocket, compare to that? But I don’t feel like that at all. This is what I can build, this is what I can contribute. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without me.

I love it. I feel like I’m playing. I feel as if I’m a kid on the beach once more, ten years old, throwing Frisbees with uncle George.

Suddenly, though, the starship study has become a lot more urgent. NASA engineers have been poring over our results, and there is talk of some serious money being pumped our way. The motive is clear. The Kuiper Anomaly has vanished.

That strange, tetrahedral object drifting among the dead comets and ice moons of the outer solar system, only discovered within my own lifetime, has suddenly disappeared. There’s not a trace of its passage; it just went. And so people want to find a way to get out there, to find out what the hell is happening. It’s ironic that the probe’s disappearance has created more interest and alarm than its presence ever did. But while the Anomaly was evidence that there had once been other minds, its removal is proof that those minds are still acting.

I know, as very few others do, that the true purpose of the Kuiper Anomaly was to mediate the linking of the future with the past; it was the channel through which the Transcendent generation was able to reach us — reach me. When the Transcendence collapsed, its great projects abandoned, the construction and launch of the probe in their future was aborted — and so it never reached our past.

I think reality has changed. I think the probe never existed, and I don’t think that exploring astronauts are going to find any trace that anything was ever out there at all. Of course that begs the question of how come I remember the thing, how come there are libraries full of forty years’ worth of space-telescopic records of its presence. I try not to think about that.

I’m glad it’s gone, though. The Kuiper Anomaly was a physical mani-festation of the meddling of the Transcendents in our time. The more I think about the vast scope of their ambition, the more I resent their galling instrumentalism. Maybe I have more of Tom in me than I imagine.

But we have options.

Think about it. They are up there in the far future, off in the highest branches of a great tree. But we are at the tree’s roots. And if we cut off the tree at the trunk, the highest branch will come crashing to the ground. If nobody was to have another child ever again, for instance, then not one of the Transcendents could ever be born. There are no doubt less drastic ways to fight a war with the future.

I’m not advocating any of this. But perhaps we should wargame options.

If the future ever attacks us again, we should fight back.

Today is January 1st, 2048. The digital millennium has come and gone, and all those date registers in all those antique processors have absorbed the extra binary digit without so much as a squeak; there is no news of any problems anywhere. Another disaster averted. Happy New Year.

Sometimes, however, I despair.

I look around at the world, I follow the news, and I count up all we’ve lost even in my own lifetime. And I know, from my contact with Alia, that Earth’s ecology won’t recover from the tremendous shock we have inflicted, not even in half a million years.