Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Astounding,” Rosa said. “You left Earth behind half a million years ago. You traveled across the stars. And yet you took the savannah with you, didn’t you?”

Sonia said, “You mentioned rats. Are there animals where you came from?”

“Animals? There are rats everywhere. They don’t all sing. There are bugs and birds.” Birds flocked on her starship, she said; I couldn’t think of a more exotic, charming image. “Earth’s biosphere shows more diversity than any other human world in the Galaxy, however. That’s one reason we know it really is Earth, the original.”

“Like Africa,” Rosa said. “There is more genetic variation there, too. As Africa is for us, the home of mankind, so Earth is for these future people.”

Sonia prompted, “And there are still animals on Earth?”

“Birds. Snakes. Insects. Bugs. That’s all, really.”

“They are the supertaxa,” Gea said. “Taxa have different evolutionary rates. Some speciate more rapidly than others; some lineages last longer than others; and some taxa — the birds, snakes, rats and mice, various weeds — have both a high speciation rate and a high longevity. And so when an extinction event strikes, the supertaxa provide the great survivors. What Alia describes is exactly what I would have expected to find on an Earth of the future, after our extinction event is done. Snakes and rats and birds.”

“But no big animals?” Sonia asked wistfully.

Gea said, “I want to show you something.” She produced a VR image of a lumpy-looking animal: a rhino, but covered in shaggy brown fur.

Alia gaped. “Megafauna!”

Tom said, “That’s a Sumatran rhino, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Gea said. “An unusual form, adapted for living in hilly rainforests. It went extinct, earlier this year. The last of them died in a zoo in Germany.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Alia sounded as if this creature was as exotic as a dinosaur, to her. She glanced at me. “Michael, have you?”

“I’m not a wildlife buff,” I said. “If you followed me around all my life you’ll know that.”

Gea said, “The Sumatran rhino was a living fossil. It is the least changed of all large-mammal lineages since the Oligocene, thirty million years ago, halfway back to the dinosaurs. We live in extraordinary times. That species endured for thirty million years. Even the people in this room had the opportunity to meet it, to touch it, just months ago. And now it has vanished, a geological instant after its encounter with humanity. Just like that. As all the megafauna which survived the Ice Age have gone, one by one.”

Sonia said wistfully, “And they never came back, according to Alia. You’d think they could have been brought back from the DNA.”

“Perhaps there was never room,” Rosa said. “Not if the world remained owned by humans. For we would not allow anything bigger and hungrier than us to survive.”

“Besides, evolution goes forward, not backward,” Gea said. “The mega-mammals, once gone, will never return.”

Alia was watching us. “You all sound so guilty!”

Tom said, “Do people in the future look back on our time?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And do they judge us?”

“Judge you?” Alia laughed, a strange whooping sound, but then bit it off. “I’m sorry. I know this concerns you, in this age. If not, if you didn’t have this awareness, I guess you wouldn’t be attempting the hydrate stabilization project.”

“You know about that?” I asked.

“Of course. I Witness you, Michael Poole. But why should you be judged? Look — if one species of bird out-competes another, are you going to talk about morals? Of course not. It’s just a question of competition for space in an ecology.”

“And is that how you see us?” John asked bitterly. “Are we just animals in an ecology to you?”

Alia seemed genuinely puzzled by this line of questioning. “How else would you want to be thought of?”

I said, “There is much debate about geoengineering projects. You must know that. We aren’t sure if we have the right to meddle on a planetary scale.”

Alia seemed baffled by this. “But you are already, umm, meddling.” She paused, as if accessing more data. “Consider the Earth. Twenty percent of the land and a good proportion of the sea is covered by artificial ecosystems, each containing a small number of species, selected and bred for one consumer—”

“Farms,” Sonia said.

“Yes. You have changed the very geomorphology of the planet: you have carved vast chunks out of mountains and landscapes, you have built new lakes, and reclaimed other lands from the sea, and you have created entirely artificial land forms of a type never seen before.”

Gea interrupted, “But all this must be trivial compared to the great transformation of your time, an age when mankind has covered a Galaxy.”

“Oh, of course. In the future we do it bigger and better. But planet-shaping, geoengineering, meddling, is what people do. Human history has always been a tangle of environmental changes, human responses, accidents… Human will is only one component. Just accept it!”

“There she goes again,” John groused. “Talking about us as if we’re nothing but animals. Like beavers, mindlessly building dams.”

I understood his resentment. But I remembered that this wasn’t the “true” Alia. She was deliberately slowing her speech, speaking to us as if we were children. To her, I thought, maybe we really were as busy and mindless, as productive and destructive, as bower birds or beavers.

Sonia leaned forward, as fascinated as John was on edge. “You must know the future.”

Alia said, “In a way.”

“ What happens? What happens to us? Do you know how we die?”

“Not all of you.” She said brightly, “I know how Michael Poole dies. I have seen his life, the whole of it — like a book, complete from beginning to end—”

I snapped, “I don’t want to know.”

She bowed her head.

“But the future,” Sonia pressed. “The bigger picture. Just the fact that you are here, you exist, says that we’re not going to go extinct any time soon.”

“So mankind will make it through the Bottleneck,” John said.

Sonia asked, “And then what?”

“And then, expansion,” Alia said brightly. “Off the planet. To the stars!”

Sonia frowned. “Yes, but what happens?… ”

It soon became clear she knew little in detail about the unraveling of history beyond our present — indeed, beyond my own lifetime. But then, why should she? If I were dropped, say, into the middle of the last Ice Age, what could I say to curious hunter-gatherers who asked about their future? It will get warmer. A lot warmer. And then, expansion. Out of your refuges, all the way to the Moon!…

And besides, she seemed to imply, the future wasn’t as fixed as all that.

Rosa asked, “And are there other cultures out there? Extraterrestrial aliens, civilizations among the stars?”

“Oh, yes,” Alia said. “Or there used to be. Some of their biologies have merged with ours. And you can still find ruins.”

Sonia said, “Ruins? What happened to them?”

“We did,” Tom said dryly. “Ask the Sumatran rhino.”

There was a long silence.

Rosa leaned forward and faced Alia. “I think it’s time we got to the point. Don’t you?”

“The point?”

“There is a reason you are here,” Rosa said. “You have a purpose. And it is to do with Michael.” She turned to me.

I said, “I have seen — apparitions — of Morag all my life. Morag, my wife. Since before I met her even, since I was a kid. You must know this. I want to know what that haunting meant. Was it to do with you, Alia? Your Witnessing?”