We had it coalesce as a divergence point perhaps one hundred thousand years beforehand. We had little control over precisely what that other Earth might look like. Many thought it would be exactly the same as our own, barring a few names and details, because our mastery of the world was obviously inevitable.

When we opened a gate to that world, though, we were dumbfounded. The world we stepped into had been given a hundred millennia to diverge, and diverge it most certainly had. In this world, the currents of chance had shifted, and our own kind had lived in miserable decline for fifty thousand years after the branch point before shuffling into myth and palaeontology. In their place had come the others, spilling out of Africa into Asia and Europe. They brought their own songs and tools, their burial customs and strange ideas. We had created a strange new world, and it had such strange people in it.

In short, we had created you.

16.

I

The previous night, Lee and Mal had come across the two government types talking with a new Nissa arrival. They’d come in midway, but eventually they’d worked out that what they were being given, in Californian-accented English, was it. This was the story of the world, insofar as the Nissa understood it. So they’d sat and listened to Auruthmer (or Professor Ruth Emerson, as UCAL records had her). And then they’d gone to bed far too late, shaken and disturbed by what they’d learned.

This morning the sky was busy. Stepping into the glare of dawn, Lee saw multiple broad shadows crossing the rolling landscape. Up above, a dozen colossal trilobites performed a slow-motion circling dance, no two quite the same. Some had vast sweeps of spines, others were smooth and rounded. There were profusions of eyes, single broad bands of facets, stalks or blind-seeming crescents of shell. She understood a little about them, now. They were the Wayfarers, as Auruthmer called them. They were Earth’s oldest children, whose self-awareness spanned half a billion years. In that time they had transcended most of what made life life—at least by the standards of Lee, student of biology. They seldom produced offspring; they evolved at need; they could build and dismantle molecules and needed almost no sustenance from outside; they lived forever. And yet, godlike though they seemed, they were still children of Earth. These few had therefore returned from their travels in their motherworld’s time of need.

The human delegation was gathering, blinking in the dawn light. Mal clasped Lee’s hand as they both stared up. Lee considered that, somehow, this was what her friend had been looking for all her life: an escape from the ordinary, the door to fairyland. A girl who’d never fit in, searching for a place nobody could fit in.