muttered something that might have included the words “your fault” and “stupid asshole”, but he’d obviously inherited my habit of strangling undiplomatic remarks as well as my physical appearance. He pulled himself together and said: “What now? Do you want me to drive?”
I looked out at the bare patch of road illuminated by the headlights. It didn’t seem unreal, but I knew that it was only pretending to be a bit of English B-road. It was actually a very different highway.
“Where or when were we driving to?” I asked him. “Surely not all the way home? Converting second-hand Volkswagen Polos into time machines can’t be that easy.”
“A…lay-by,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Presumably, you could get a signal on your unwristwatch, even though I couldn’t get one on my mobile, so you were able to call the temporal AA. One up to future technology. Are you thirty-first century or forty-first? If you were still counting by means of calendars, that is.”
His eyes were fixed on the barrel of the gun, and he was literally quaking with fear, but he forced himself to reply, seemingly trying to humor me and make sure that I didn’t do anything violent. “It’s not a matter of centuries,” he said. “My era is a billion years from yours.”
“A billion years,” I repeated. “You just crashed a time machine from a billion years in the future into a twenty-first-century oak tree?”
“It wasn’t an oak,” the time-traveler said. “It was an ash.”
“You picked up the language very cleverly,” I observed. “Almost as cleverly as you picked up my appearance. What do you really look like, inside your plastic bag?”
“Would you like me to drive?” he asked, again—in a manner suggestive of some urgency.
“All you had to do was say,” I told him. “All you had to do was say: Please don’t take me to A-and-E in Ringwood, because I need medical help from my own kind. All you had to do was say: There’s this little interdimensional lay-by not a million miles from Nomansland, and if you could drop me there I’d be ever so grateful. And I’d have said: Sure—always assuming that I can get back again. Can I get back again? I mean, you wouldn’t want to rip me out of the time-stream permanently, would you? That would be tantamount to changing history, and I know how sensitive you time-travelers are about that sort of thing. Even if we humans are no more to you than a Mesozoic butterfly might be to us, you never know what changes might unfold over a billion years if you were to take me out…not to mention my poor little Volkswagen.”
“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
