I would run after her sometimes, but running in soft wet sand is hard work even when you’re ten. I never seemed to get any closer, no matter how hard I ran. And she would shrug, and step back, and if I looked away she was gone.

It was only much later that I worked out who she was, how important she would become to me.

Uncle George never saw her, not during his one and only viewing of a spaceship launch from the beach. I wish he had. I’d have appreciated talking it over with him. I didn’t know much about ghosts when I was ten; I know only a little more now. George knew a lot of things, and he had an open mind. Maybe he could have answered a simple question: can you be haunted by spirits, not from the past, but from the future?

For, you see, the mysterious woman on the beach, who visited me intermittently all my young life, was another visitor from the future. She was Morag, my dead wife.

The future folding down into the present.

The girl from the future was called Alia.

She was born on a starship, fifteen thousand light-years from Earth. She lived half a million years after Michael Poole died. And yet she grew up knowing Poole as intimately as any of his family.

She had Witnessed his life almost since her mother and father had first brought her home from the birthing pods, when her hands and feet could grasp nothing but the fur on her mother’s chest, and the world was an undifferentiated place of bright glowing shapes and smiling faces. Michael Poole had been there for her even then, right from the beginning.

But she was thirty-five years old now, almost old enough to be considered an adult. Michael Poole was a relic from childhood, his little life like a favorite story she listened to over and over. She would always turn to him when she needed comfort. But he was a small, sentimental part of her life, his story tucked away in the Witnessing tank, unconsidered for days on end.