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