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
