“And,” I said, wondering, “it’s coming out of the mouth of my dead wife.”

Again my words sparked Tom off. He stood up, pushing back his chair. “No,” he shouted. “It’s not her.That’s the point — can’t you see? Whatever is animating that fake shell, whatever is producing these alien words, it is not her. ” And he stormed out of the room, without looking back.

Sonia hurried after him, with a mouthed “Sorry” to me.

The meeting broke up. I was left with the patient VR image of Rosa, and the graphs that scrolled in the air around her.

I apologized for Tom.

“Give him time,” Rosa said. “After all it is a strange business. His mother is trying to talk to you…”

“If it is Morag.”

“You believe it is, don’t you? But we face this odd mixture of emotional power — she is your wife, after all, and Tom’s mother, there can hardly be stronger emotional bonds — coupled with this strange symbolic overcomplexity. She has something she needs to tell us, that seems clear, but she doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

I had no answer. I just sat there, my head and limbs heavy; I felt simply overwhelmed by all I had learned.

Rosa watched me carefully. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. It’s all a lot to take in.” I rubbed my temples. “So much is going on, so fucking much. I’m trying to push forward the hydrate project. I’m trying to deal with Tom, and John, and everybody else. Even Shelley. Even you. And I have this business of Morag, which only seems to get stranger and stranger. I don’t want to hurt anybody, Rosa. Especially not Tom.”

“I know that,” Rosa said gently. “You think you are weak. Don’t you, Michael?”

I shrugged. “What else should I think?”

“You are buffeted. You are surrounded by epochal events in our history; you are at the center of an extraordinary storm. And at the same time you are being subjected to these extraordinary manipulations and messages.”

I forced a smile. “Messages from beyond the grave?”

“From somewhere else, certainly. We may yet learn there is some connection between all these different sorts of strangeness in your life, and things will get more complicated still.”

Just as her brother had hinted, I thought uneasily. But I had enough conspiracy theories in my life.

Rosa said, “But in the middle of the storm you keep going, Michael. You keep trying to do your best for everybody. You know, you remind me of Saint Christopher.”

I tried to remember my Catholic lore. “The patron of travelers?”

“Yes. The story is he offered to carry the Christ child across a river. But the child got heavier and heavier. The child told Christopher it was because he was carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. And yet Christopher kept on going, one foot after another, until he completed the crossing. That is exactly what you are doing, Michael, and you will continue to do so, until you reach the other side.” She smiled. “I don’t think you are weak at all.”

There was a soft chime. Evidently Rosa heard it, too, for she was disturbed in her sanctum in Seville, as I was.

The call was from John. My uncle George, Rosa’s brother, was dying.

When Alia emerged from her Hypostatic Union, Reath brought her away from the claustrophobic antiquity of Earth and back to the comparatively familiar confines of his ship, which patiently followed its slow orbit about the old planet. The six of them, Alia, Drea, Reath, and the Campocs, sat in a huddle in Alia’s cabin, as she tried to describe her experience.

“How fascinating,” Reath said. “You begin even without a sense of self. Then comes a feeling for events, disconnected in your awareness. You have to learn sequence, order, separation. How remarkable that time comes before space! Does phylogeny recapitulate cosmology?”

Drea had her arm around her sister. “Reath, can’t you shut up? Alia, you say you saw Michael Poole’s face?”

Alia sighed. “I think so. But I was looking out from inside a prematurely born baby’s head. A dying baby.”

Reath said, “In Poole’s era even very young babies were innately programmed to respond to human faces. An evolutionary relic of obvious utility. It’s not impossible you made out his face.”

“I recognized the event,” Alia whispered. “The birth. I’ve seen it many times, in the tank. I even Witnessed it again after I came out, to check.”

“The child was Poole’s,” Drea prompted.

“His second son. Killed by a heart defect. The mother died, too — Morag. It was an incident that shaped Poole’s whole life, subsequently. I’ve seen it many times.”

“But never from the inside,” Reath said grimly.

“No. Not that way…”

Alia understood now. She had lived out the child’s life, its whole life from conception to death. She felt as if she had been away for eight months — though only eight hours had passed for the others. This was the Second Level of the Redemption. At this higher level, you didn’t watch a life from the outside, unlike the conceptual simplicity of Witnessing; you saw it from the inside. You lived it through heartbeat by heartbeat from the moment of conception to the finality of death, and you shared every scrap of sensation, every feeling, every thought. All you didn’t have was will.

“It wasn’t much of a life,” Alia said. “Less than eight months — not that time meant much at first. But I lived through it all.”

Drea shook her head. “What’s the point of going through all that pain? It’s so morbid. ”

“I think I can see the theory,” Reath said. “At the heart of the Redemption is a desire for atonement, bringing the past into oneself. Perhaps that can be achieved through a reconciliation, a unification of oneself with a figure from the past. Witnessing was a first step. But by going to this Second Level, by suffering with that figure, by living through such a life, the anguish of the past can be” — he waved a hand — “internalized sufficiently.”

Bale said skeptically, “Sufficiently for what?”

“To make this strange superhuman guilt go away.”

Seer laughed. “So is that the truth behind our glorious Transcendence, our superhuman future? It’s all just a grim nostalgia for the womb?”

“I still say it’s morbid,” Drea said.

After a day in orbit Alia descended to Earth. She met Leropa once more in the attenuated shadows of the ruined cathedral.

“Reath speaks of atonement,” Alia said. “He says that perhaps by joining with a figure from the past you can expiate its pain.”

“Reath is a wise man,” Leropa said.

“So I was united with Poole’s lost son.”

“Yes. The Second Level is a Hypostatic Union with the past, a union of substances beneath external differences, the trivialities of locations in space and time. You felt that poor child’s small joy, his pain. And you will never forget, will you?”

“No,” Alia said fervently. “And this is the redeeming?”

“It is the beginning,” Leropa said.

Alia frowned. “I have to do this again?”

Leropa seemed surprised by the question. “Of course—”

“I have to live through a whole human life, again?”

“It isn’t so bad,” Leropa said. “Subjective time, the time of the hypostasis, passes more rapidly than externally. To join with Michael Poole himself, for example, a life spanning nearly a hundred years, would take only a few days.”

“But a hundred years,” Alia said, “for me. A hundred years of being trapped, helpless, in some tormented body of the past. How could I survive that?”

“Oh, but you would. You’re strong, I can see that. And then of course—”

Alia saw it immediately. “I would have to do it again. Another life to be endured. And again and again.” But the present was a surface surrounding a great ocean of past; the dead far outnumbered the living. “How many lives must I live through, Leropa?”