“There were no butterflies in the Mesozoic era,” the pedant couldn’t help saying—but he knew what I meant. “Yes, you can get back. I’m sorry I didn’t ask politely. It just seemed...such a very dangerous time.”
“Is it really that bad?” I asked, curiously. “So the ecocatastrophe’s scheduled to unfold quickly enough to cause a major economic collapse before the century’s end?”
“Worse,” the time-traveler replied tersely.
“How much worse? Extinction of the species?”
“Yes.”
“Before the end of the century?”
“Yes.”
“So, when I say Can I get back? I really ought to be asking Do I have to go back?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, after a few moments thought. “Do I?”
“Yes. I’m sorry about that—but you wouldn’t like my world.”
“Why? It must be a lot better than 2006 if the thought of being stranded there is so utterly terrifying. I wouldn’t be that bothered about being the only human being alive, you know, even if I were in a zoo. I’m not long divorced, you see—I’ve no ties and I’m suffering a certain amount of endemic disenchantment with the world of corporate insurance. Anyway, it would beat imminent extinction.”
“You still wouldn’t like it,” the time-traveler insisted.
“I might,” I insisted, in my turn. “What exactly were you doing in the twenty-first century, anyhow, if it’s such a frightening time?”
“Passing through. Is there any way that we can settle this quickly and be on our way? If I don’t get to where I’m going soon enough, I won’t be anywhere—and neither will you.”
That raised all sorts of questions. How could time be a problem to a time-traveler—even one who’d crashed his machine? What would happen to us if we didn’t get to the lay-by? How come we were stuck at all, given that the chameleon had such awesome powers that he was able to conjure up guns out of nowhere? It was obvious, though, that he really was in a hurry. He was obviously up against some kind of deadline.
I wound down my window and threw the revolver out into limbo. Then I put the car into gear again, and moved off. “I figure you owe me one for that,” I said. “I know you didn’t really understand what you were doing, but some people might get upset at being treated the way you’ve treated me. Personally, I’m still happy to get you to wherever you need to be, even if I do have to take a detour outside the universe, but I want to know where you come from, and why I wouldn’t like it, and what you were doing in these parts. I don’t want any more terse bullshit, like just saying yes and passing through. You owe me as much of an explanation as you can give me, okay?”
He thought about it for a few seconds, and then he said “Okay”—exactly as I would have done if I’d have been in his shoes, instead of him being in mine.
* * * *
I can’t put what he told me in his words, because most of his words weren’t in English, although I seemed to understand them well enough at the time. He obviously still had tricks up his sleeve, even if they hadn’t done him any good when I took him by surprise and turned the tables on him.
What he told me, in a nutshell, is that life on Earth a billion years hence is very different from life now. Evolution has moved on, as you might expect, although you’d still be able to identify most of the animal species that exist as analogues of the ones that have existed for the last few hundred million years. Some are adapted for life as herbivores and some for life as carnivores; some fly, some swim and some crawl. The most important difference is that all the animal species that exist then, and most of the plants too, are conscious and intelligent.
That might seem surprising to you, given that you’re probably used to thinking of humans as the top of the evolutionary tree, but human intelligence will come to seem like an evolutionary disaster in the not-too-distant future, when the species becomes extinct. The intelligence that’s widespread a billion years hence is the result of an adaptive radiation a long way in the future, by which time the whole apparatus of complex animal species will have rediversified from worms a dozen times over. There’ll be a lot of interesting times between now and then, so I’m told, although he couldn’t give me details. The inhabitants of the future a billion years from now don’t call the Earth’s ecosphere by a name equivalent to our Gaia; they call it after a mythical creature whose nearest contemporary equivalent is the phoenix.
There are creatures that look not unlike humans in that future world. At any rate, they’re as similar to humans as humans are to baboons. They don’t live much like humans, though. The human monopoly on contemporary intelligence makes animal husbandry uncomplicated, but in a world where all animals are intelligent the politics of meat-eating are much more complicated. Even the politics of herbivore lifestyles can be awkward, in an era when so many plant species are as smart and knowledgeable as animals—smarter and more knowledgeable, he said, if the claims made by some of the million-year-old trees and fungi can be believed. He didn’t seem to believe it himself.
You might think that the situation would be a recipe for all-out warfare, with herbivores forming alliances to wipe out carnivorous species and carnivores trying to enslave or lobotomize whole populations of herbivores, but it doesn’t work that way. Smart predators are very well aware that what’s good for their prey species is good for them—and that what’s good for the plants that feed their prey species is also good for them. Similarly, the prey species recognize that it wouldn’t actually be a good idea to exterminate their predators, because the consequent explosion of their own populations would only lead to famine and warfare—though not to disease, since the larger creatures in this future have long since come to a proper understanding with their indwelling bacteria and viruses. The top predators are, of course, vulnerable to exactly such population explosions, and have to be smart enough to find their own ways to avoid them, partly by birth-control and partly by regulating inter-and intraspecific competition.
To cut to the bottom line, prey species a billion years hence— and the smarter plants that feed herbivorous prey species—accept that a certain proportion of their population will go to feed other species. Just as the predators take measures to regulate their own numbers, the prey and smart plant species do their utmost to take control of the process, and manipulate it to their advantage. A billion years hence, evolutionary selection is a wholly conscious process, with every intelligent species devoting itself to eugenic planning— and because every species is doing it, they all compete to do it as artfully and as productively as possible.
Some species are content to be as they are, and merely seek to refine their own imagined perfection, but the great majority are intent on further change, on metamorphosis into something finer. There are, inevitably, disagreements, both within and between species, as to the directions that the evolution of individual species and the collective ensemble ought to take. Politics a billion years hence is an extremely complicated business, although there’s only one fundamental political philosophy, whose name can best be translated as “creationism”. A billion years hence, evolution isn’t something that intelligent beings merely believe in, or don’t, but something that every intelligent species is actually doing—a cause to which everyone is committed, and work that everyone takes seriously.
No matter how much they may disagree about details, everyone who lives a billion years hence is interested in intelligent design. Everyone, the traveler assured me, is trying with all his might to make the design of life and the design of destiny better than any kind of nature could ever contrive unaided. No one then seriously expects that the Phoenix will never die again, but everyone is determined to make sure that it becomes as glorious as possible before some cosmic accident puts an end to their particular adventure. It certainly sounded like a world that was—will be—very different from this one. I think he was trying to be kind when he said I wouldn’t like it, trying to soften the blow of his not being able to take
me with him.
Obviously, I couldn’t get my head around all of this immediately, and I knew that we were running out of time. Rather than simply let him ramble on—as he surely would have done—I started asking questions again, in the hope of focusing his account on matters of more immediate interest.
“And the time travel is part of that project, is it?” I asked him. “You’re trying to apply intelligent design to the past as well as the future—laying the foundations for your wonderful world by inventing things like the bacterial flagellum and dumping them in the pre-Cambrian. Why doesn’t it lead to paradoxes? Or are you just hiving off new alternative prehistories into an infinite manifold of possible worlds?”
“Time travel is part of the project,” he agreed, “but not in the way you mean. There’s only one Earth, only one history of life. We need to understand it, but we can’t change it. We can sample it, in certain relatively unobtrusive ways, but it’s mostly a matter of copying information for future use.”
“Only one Earth and only one history of life?” I said. “What about all the other worlds in the universe—all the other Phoenixes? Surely ours will develop space travel eventually, even if humans die out before we can master the trick—and even if our world doesn’t, some of the others surely will.”
“Maybe,” he said. “We don’t know. Our view is that space travel simply isn’t practical.”
“Unlike time travel?”
“Time travel is definitely practical, provided that you’re very careful. The lay-by’s just up ahead.”
If the road was really a road, then the lay-by was probably really a lay-by—but I didn’t believe it. I pulled off just the same, and parked the car. There was nothing outside but the shadows of trees; I couldn’t tell whether they were oaks or ashes.
“Where were you going, in your very careful fashion, when that deer got in your way?” I wanted to know.
“Home,” he said. He was being annoying again, probably to pay me back for the ironic remark about his very careful fashion.
“Where had you been, then?” I asked. “Collecting dinosaurs?”
“Much further back than that,” he told me. “Collecting alternatives to DNA, from the era when there was a chemical contest to determine the fundamentals of Earthly life. You can imagine how many individual moments I had to pass through in a five-billion-year journey. They were all supposed to be vacant of solid material—until you changed history.”
“Me!” At first I was outraged, but then I caught on to what he meant. I’d been supposed to hit the deer. The deer shouldn’t have jumped sideways. But he was still wrong. It hadn’t been me who’s changed history—his history—but the deer. I remembered the way it had looked at me before it left the scene of the accident...if it really had been an accident.
The time traveler had implied that history couldn’t be changed, but what he’d actually said was that he and his kind couldn’t change it, and it seemed to me that his remarks about the practicality of time travel might imply that he actually meant “wouldn’t” rather than “couldn’t”. For them, perhaps, there really might be only one time-track, one history of Earthly life...but they weren’t arrogant enough to think that they would be the end of the Phoenix’s story, or the very last word in intelligent design, and they weren’t stupid enough to think that everything they couldn’t do was necessarily impossible or impractical.
“Your friends might not be able to come and pick you up,” I said. “If that bloody animal wiped out the history of the next billion years, your entire world might have been blanked out of existence.”
“They’re already here,” he countered, smugly, pointing to the driving mirror.
When I’d pulled into the lay-by it had only been big enough to accommodate one car, but now there was an empty space behind us, in which another vehicle was forming. It didn’t have its headlights on, but its shadowy form was uncannily similar to a Volkswagen Polo.
The thing that got out of the driving seat, however, didn’t look anything like me. It was wearing a plastic bag, but it looked vaguely reminiscent of a shaggy crocodile walking on its hind legs, although it bore about as much resemblance to a twenty-first-century croc as a twenty-first-century croc does to a lichen-encrusted warthog.
The time-traveler turned towards me, and stuck out his hand. “I’m truly sorry about the gun,” he said. “I didn’t know you as well then as I do now. You’ve been you for an entire lifetime, so you’re probably used to that awful chaos and confusion of motive and desire, fantasy and perception, but it was all extremely strange and disturbing to me.”
He opened the door as he was speaking. The car’s internal light came on. I saw that the cuts and bruises had almost healed, and that his features were almost exactly like those I see in a mirror when I shave—except, of course, that they were the wrong way round. I’m not the most symmetrical person in the world, alas.
Automatically, I took the hand in my own and shook it.
“You couldn’t give me a few tips, I suppose,” I said. “Tactics for avoiding the worst effects of the world’s impending end—that sort of thing.”
“Study Stone Age survival techniques and move to Antarctica,” he said. “That’s if you want to drag it out. Otherwise, don’t wait too long before buying that antique revolver and blowing your brains out.”
“I really would like to come with you,” I said. “I might not like your world, but....”
“No can do, Jim,” he said. “Very sorry. Thanks for the lift. Just turn around and go back the way we came. You’ll be home in no time at all.” Then he shut the door, and walked back to the other car with the shaggy crocodile in the plastic bag. They seemed to be arguing about something as they went, but they certainly weren’t doing it in English.
The time-traveler got into the other Volkswagen’s passenger seat. The vehicle moved off a minute or so later, swerving past me and continuing along the road in the direction of the unknown.
For a couple of minutes I thought about following it, but I knew that time travel couldn’t possibly be as simple as that, and that I’d probably get lost in limbo. Doomed or not, the familiar world seemed the more attractive option. I put the car into gear, did another three-point turn, and headed back the way I’d come.
I had a lot to think about, and whatever the time traveler had said about “no time at all” I’d had a very long day. I was so used to the fake road being empty that I wasn’t really paying attention. I didn’t notice the road become real again, and I didn’t see the deer until it was far too late.
It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I think, and not fully grown at that. I braked hard, but I knew it wouldn’t be hard enough, because the damn thing just stood stock still until I hit it. In the last split second before the impact, I stopped wondering whether it might be the same deer as before, realizing that it had to be exactly the same deer. This time, though, it wasn’t going to leap aside. This time, the time traveler’s history would be conserved.
The luckless deer slammed into the windscreen, and the windscreen broke. A deer—even one that’s hardly more than a fawn— can really make a mess of your face when it’s traveling along with the shards of a windscreen at God-only-knows-how-many miles per hour, but it didn’t knock me unconscious. To tell the truth, I think most of the blood must have been the deer’s, not mine. I was able to bring the car to a halt, unbuckle my seat belt and step out on to the road.
“The bastard,” I said. “I wonder whether he and his mate fixed things so that it never bloody happened, or whether the dent in history was just snapping back into shape.” I was glad, though, that I still remembered every moment of what had happened, even if it hadn’t happened any longer. Neither he nor history had been able to take that away from me.
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, of course. How could I begin to guess what the temporal AA, or the natural resilience of the time-stream, might be able to achieve?
I stuck the deer in the boot, although rumor has it that co
llecting road kill still counts as poaching in the eyes of the law. I got a friend in the business to butcher it for me, and split the legs and rump with him. Unfortunately, every time I eat a bit I remember the way the damn thing looked at me that first time, immediately after it had caused the time machine to crash. I don’t know for sure, but it still seems to me that the deer had known what it was doing. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, it still does—but in ours, it seems, intelligent designers seem to be content to work in less ambitious and more mysterious ways.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER THREE
Taking Things Seriously
In most of the places that Steve had hung out in the course of his life, a story like Jim’s would have got a round of deeply ironic but sincerely admiring applause, assuming that the audience could have tolerated its enormous length—which was unlikely, given the shortage of modern attention spans. Even respectful applause, however, was evidently not de rigueur at AlAbAn meetings. When Jim finished he was greeted with a polite murmur of approval and an assortment of sage nods.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 5