Diaspora

Yatima said, “Swift they’ve seen firsthand. Though they might be surprised by some of the changes since they left.”

Paolo added wryly, “And how long we took to see past the distractions.”

“No one’s perfect.” Yatima hesitated. “I was in on the technical side more than you, but I’ll still need you to help piece things together.”

“Why?” Paolo swung restlessly around the girder he was holding.

“Are we going to tell them what happened on Poincare?”

“Of course.”

“Then they’ll need to know more about Orlando.”

12. HEAVY

Carter-Zimmerman polis, interstellar space

85 274 532 121 904 CST

4 July 4936, 1:15:19.058 UT

Orlando Venetti woke for the twelfth time in nine centuries, clear-headed and hopeful, fully expecting to find that Voltaire C-Z had reached its destination. The previous wake-up calls had all been triggered by bulletins from other clones of the polis, but this time he’d fallen asleep knowing that no more arrivals were due before their own. It was Voltaire’s turn to make news—even if that simply meant adding one more set of barren worlds to the catalogue of post-Orphean anticlimaxes.

He rolled over and checked the bedside clock, its glowing symbols disembodied in the blackness of the cabin. It was seventeen years before arrival. Someone on another C-Z must have made a belated discovery, important enough for his exoself to wake him. Orlando felt cheated; he’d run out of enthusiasm for the revelations of the other polises, light years away and decades ago.

He lay swearing for a while, then memories of a dream began to surface. Liana and Paolo had been arguing with him in the house in Atlanta, both trying to convince him that Paolo was her son. Liana had even shown him images of the birth. When Orlando had tried to explain about psychogenesis, Paolo had smirked and said, “Try doing that in a test tube!” Orlando had realized then that he had no choice: he was going to have to tell them about Lacerta. And though he’d been imagining that Paolo would escape unharmed, he could see now that this was impossible. Paolo was flesh, too. The robots would find three blackened corpses in the ruins.

Orlando closed his eyes and waited for the pain to recede. He’d told Paolo that he’d be staying frozen en route, utterly inert; he hadn’t admitted to anyone that he’d chosen to dream instead. A wise omission, given Fomalhaut. That slumbering clone would have formally diverged into a separate individual; random noise in the embodiment software guaranteed that, even without different sensory inputs. But Orlando didn’t think of it as a death; even his waking Earth-self’s suicide didn’t amount to that. He’d always intended to merge with every willing clone at the end of the Diaspora, and the loss of one or two of them along the way seemed no more tragic than losing his memories of one or two days in every thousand.

He left the cabin and walked barefoot through the cool grass to the edge of the flying island. The scape was dark as any moonless night on Earth, but the ground was even and the route familiar. He had gladly rid himself of the tedious business of defecation, but he was no more willing to give up the pleasure of emptying his bladder than he was willing to give up the possibility of sex. Both acts were entirely arbitrary, now that they were divorced from any biological imperative, but that only brought them closer to other meaningless pleasures, like music. If Beethoven deserved to endure, so did urination. He manipulated the stream into Lissajous figures as it vanished into the starry blackness beneath the jutting rock.

He’d forced only a little of his own nature onto Paolo—like any good bridger, just enough to let the two of them understand each other—and he’d gladly see subsequent generations embrace all the possibilities of software existence. But redesigning himself in an attempt to do the same in person would have been nothing but self-mutilation. That was why he dreamt the old way: confused, unconvincing, uncontrollable dreams, not the lucid, detailed, wish-fulfillment fantasies or cloyingly therapeutic psychodramas of the assimilated. His faithfully mammalian dreams would never bring Liana back; nor would they drag him down some tortuous path of allegory and catharsis designed to reconcile him to her loss. They revealed nothing, meant nothing, changed nothing. But to excise or disfigure them would have been like taking a knife to his flesh.

Voltaire lay low in the sky, in the direction Orlando thought of as east. It was a dim reddish speck at this distance, about as bright as Mercury seen from Earth, an ancient K5 star only one sixth as luminous as the sun. Five terrestrial planets, and five gas giants more in Neptune’s league than Jupiter’s, had been observed or inferred long before the Diaspora’s launch, but individual spectra for the inner planets had continued to elude both the colossal instruments back home and the extremely modest equipment carried by the polis itself.

“What are you offering? Sanctuary?” He gazed at the star. Not likely. Just a few more barren planets. A few more lessons in the fragility of life, and the indifference of the forces that created and destroyed it.

Back in the cabin, Orlando considered ignoring the call and going straight hack to sleep. It would either be bad news—another Fomalhaut, or worse, or evidence of life so subtle that it had taken a century or two of exploration to uncover. Maybe one of the moons of one of the gas giants orbiting 51 Pegasus had yielded a few fossilized microbes in some previously uncharted crevice. Evidence of a third biosphere would be hugely significant, but he was tired of poring over the details of distant worlds in the pre-dawn darkness.

Then again, maybe the Orphean squid had finally gained an inkling of the nature of their floating universes. Orlando laughed wearily. He was jealous, but he was hooked; the chance of a development in squid culture was enough to puncture his indifference.

He clapped his hands, and the cabin fit up. He sat on his bed and addressed the wall screen. “Report.” Text appeared, summarizing his exoself’s reasons for waking him. Orlando could not abide non-sentient software that talked back.

The news was local, though the chain of events behind it had started hack on Earth. Someone in Earth C-Z had designed an improved miniature spectroscope, which could he constructed by nanoware modifications to the existing polis-borne model. The local astronomy software had taken it upon itself to do just that, and thanks to the new instrument the atmospheric chemistry of Voltaire’s ten planets had now been determined.

The first surprise was that the innermost planet, Swift, possessed an atmosphere rather different than expected: mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen, at a fifth the total pressure of Earth’s, but there were also significant traces of hydrogen sulphide and water vapor. With only 60 percent of Earth’s gravity, and a surface temperature averaging 70 degrees Celsius, virtually all of Swift’s water should have been lost in the twelve billion years since its formation—broken down by UV into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen escaping into space.

The second surprise was that the hydrogen sulphide appeared not to be in thermodynamic equilibrium with the rest of the atmosphere. It was either being outgassed from the planet’s interior—unlikely, after twelve billion years—or it was a by-product of some form of non-equilibrium chemical process driven by the light from Voltaire. Quite possibly life.

But the third surprise set Orlando’s skin tingling, outweighing any drab visions of boiling lakes full of malodorous bacteria. The spectra also showed that the molecules in Swift’s atmosphere contained no ordinary hydrogen, no carbon-12, no nitrogen-14, no oxygen-16, no sulfur-32. Not a trace of the most cosmically abundant isotopes, though they were present in the normal proportions on Voltaire’s nine other planets. On Swift, there was only deuterium, carbon-13, nitrogen-15, oxygen-18, sulfur-34: the heaviest stable isotope of each element.

That explained why water vapor was still present, these heavier molecules would stay closer to the surface of the planet, and when they were split the deuterium would have more of a chance to stick around and recombine. But not even the preferential loss of lighter isotopes could explain these impossibly skewed abundances; Swift’s atmosphere contained hundreds of thousands of times more deuterium than it should have possessed when the planet was formed. The software was noncommittal about the implications, but Orlando had no doubt. Someone had transmuted these elements. Someone had deliberately weighed down this planet’s atmosphere, in order to prolong its life.

13. SWIFT

Carter-Zimmerman polis, Swift orbit

85 801 536 954 849 CST

16 March 4953, 15:29:12.003 UT

Yatima rode the probe beside Orlando’s, seeing both as sleek, finned cars about three delta long, hovering above Swift’s flat red desert. The real probes were spheres half a millimeter wide, powered by the light of Voltaire, largely borne up by the wind but occasionally generating lift by spinning, moving forward by pumping atmospheric gases through a network of channels coated with molecular cilia. Even with elaborate piloting software, turning the car’s steering wheel didn’t always have the desired effect.

“Oasis.”

Orlando looked around. “Where?”

“On your left.” Yatima hadn’t turned yet, not wanting to sideswipe Orlando. It was unlikely that the probes themselves would touch, and it would hardly matter it they did, but one of the first things ve’d done after arriving from Konishi was hardwire a strong aversion to collisions into vis navigators. People in Carter-Zimmerman did not take kindly to other people trying to occupy the same portion of a scape.

Orlando swung his car around, and they headed for the oasis. It was a puddle of water a few meters wide—tens of kilodelta, at their current scale—trapped beneath a polymer membrane. Surface tension gently stretched the membrane into a convex mirror, reflecting an expanse of pale crimson sky that seemed to hover a few centimeters below the ground. Pure water boiled at around 60 degrees in Swift’s thin atmosphere, so rain could only fall on the night side, but when enough run-off gathered on a patch of spores, the whole dessicated micro-ecology came back to life, and fought to hold on to the water for as long as possible. The membrane limited evaporation, and a mixture of other chemicals raised the boiling point by up to ten degrees, but by mid-afternoon of a 507-hour day only a fraction of the oases formed overnight remained. Still, Swift life could cope with being boiled dry at least as comfortably as most primitive Earth life could cope with being frozen.

Close up, they could see through the partially reflective surface into the dazzling world below. Broad helical carnivorous weeds shone in gold and turquoise; one swarm of mites avoiding their poisoned fronds were a deep, rich red, another were (pre-Lacerta Earth) sky blue. All Swift life made heavy use of sulfur chemistry; carbon dominated, but some primordial accident seemed to have pushed sulfur into sharing the structural role, and the intensity of the colors was one side effect.

“Maybe all of this was engineered from scratch,” Yatima mused. “For decorative purposes. Maybe Swift was sterile and airless, and someone came along and built this ecosystem, molecule by molecule. Using heavy isotopes to make it last a little longer. Like sculpting in gold, to avoid corrosion.”

“No. Wherever the Transmuters are now, this must have been their native biosphere.” Orlando seemed grimly convinced, as if the alternative was too decadent and frivolous to contemplate. “They would have substituted the isotopes slowly, feeding them into the existing atmosphere over millennia. It was a mark of respect that they didn’t wrap their home in a protective sphere, or shift its orbit, or modify its sun. They slipped in a change at the lowest possible level, underneath the biochemistry.”

Yatima guided vis car over the puddle. Vivid green eels several millimeters long undulated by, much faster than the probe. A red-and-yellow twelve-legged spider walked upside-down on the membrane, picking out the flatslugs that lived embedded in it. Yatima didn’t have much sympathy for the prey; they blithely fed on the protective polymers that almost every other species took the trouble to synthesize and excrete. Then again, it was a niche begging to be filled, and none of these creatures did anything with a conscious purpose.

“If they cared so much about their biological cousins, they can’t have been expecting Lacerta. There’s no sign of any built-in protection against a gamma ray burst.”

Orlando was unswayed. “Maybe the only thing they could have done that would have made a difference were anathema to them. And they must have known that even if there were massive extinctions, they’d given the biosphere enough general resilience to recover.”

They’d found few fossils on Swift, so it was difficult to judge the extent to which life had been disrupted by the burst. Models showed that most of the existing species would have coped relatively well, but that was hardly surprising; they were the ones that had survived, not a representative sample of pre-Lacerta life. The heritable material here cycled between five different molecular coding schemes in successive generations; some species used a “pure” scheme, all Alpha leading to all Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon, while others had mixtures o all five in every generation. Some biologists claimed to have identified a genetic bottleneck due to Lacerta, but Yatima wasn’t convinced that anyone understood Swift’s biochemistry well enough yet to say what a normal level of diversity would have been.

“So where are they now? Have they been swallowed by an Introdus, or scattered by a Diaspora? If you can read their minds about everything else, that ought to be an easy question to answer.”

Orlando replied with sublime confidence, “Would I be here, if I thought I was wasting my time?” His tone was ironic, but Yatima didn’t believe he was entirely joking.

They’d scoured the planet from orbit, looking for cities, for ruins, for mass anomalies, for buried structures. But a civilization as advanced as the Transmuters could have miniaturized their polises beyond any chance of detection. One faint hope was that since they’d bothered to intervene in the fate of Swift’s organic life, they might show themselves at the oases now and then. Yatima wasn’t optimistic. If they were still on the planet they could hardly be unaware of their visitors, but they hadn’t chosen to make contact. And if they didn’t want to be seen, they were unlikely to send big, clumsy, millimeter-wide drones plowing through these puddles. Yatima watched a rare translucent creature swim by beneath the probe, propelled by a jet of water it created by contracting its whole hollow body. Ve’d thought ve’d be prepared to study a world like this, patiently helping the biologists extract the kind of insights into evolutionary principles offered by even the most modest extraterrestrial biosphere. There were no spectacular new body plans or life cycles here, no strategies for feeding or reproduction that hadn’t been tried out back on Earth, but at a molecular level everything worked differently, and there was a vast labyrinth of utterly novel biochemical pathways to be mapped. Yet the Transmuters made it almost impossible to care. Their absence—or their perfect camouflage—monopolized everyone’s attention, transforming the intricate machinery of the biosphere into a very long footnote to a far more mesmerizing blank page.

Ve turned to Orlando. “I don’t think they’re in hiding. How shy could they be, after giving the atmosphere a spectrum that screams, 'Civilization! Come and visit!’ We only noticed it close up, but it wouldn’t take a huge technological advance to spot it from thousands of light years away.

Orlando didn’t reply; he’d been staring down into the puddle, and he continued to watch a swarm of crimson larvae molting, and eating each other’s discarded skins. Yatima understood the stake he had in making contact with the Transmuters. By the end of the Diaspora, when his scattered clones had reconverged, the Earth would be habitable again—but he could never feel secure about returning to the flesh until Lacerta had been explained. Any Coalition theory was likely to remain as suspect as the original belief that Lac G-1’s neutron stars would take seven million years to collide. But if the Transmuters had firsthand knowledge of the galaxy’s dynamics on a timescale of millions of years—and were beneficent enough to transform this planet’s atmosphere, atom by atom, just to save their distant relatives from extinction—surely they wouldn’t begrudge an infant civilization a little information and advice on its own long-term survival.

“Okay.” Orlando looked up. “Maybe the spectrum was meant to stand out like a beacon. Maybe that’s the whole point. They could have preserved the atmosphere in a thousand other ways, but they chose a method that would get them noticed.”

“You mean they went out of their way to attract attention? Why?”

“To bring people here.”

“Then why are they being so unsociable? Or are they just waiting to ambush us?”

“Very funny.” Orlando met vis gaze. “You’re right, though: they’re not hiding from us, that’s absurd. They’re gone. But they must have left something behind. Something they wanted us to see.”

Yatima gestured at the oasis.

Orlando laughed. “You think they built this as an ornamental pond, and invited the whole galaxy to come and admire it?”

“It doesn’t look like much now,” Yatima admitted. “But even loaded with deuterium and oxygen-18 it’s been drying out slowly. Six billion years ago it might have been spectacular.”

Orlando was not persuaded. “Maybe we’re both wrong about the biosphere. Maybe there was no life here at all when the Transmuters left; it could have evolved later. The persistence of water vapor might he nothing but a side effect of the method they chose to make Swift stand out to anyone with a decent spectroscope and a glimmering of intelligence.”

“And we just haven’t searched hard enough for whatever it is we were meant to find? The lure wasn’t exactly subtle, so the payoff should be just as hard to miss. Either it’s turned to dust, or we’re looking at the dregs of it right now.”

Orlando was silent for a moment, then he said bitterly, “Then they should have used a beacon that turned to dust, too.”

Yatima resisted pointing out the technical problems with choosing isotopes with suitable half-lives. Ve said, “They might have visited other planets, and left something more enduring. The next C-Z to arrive might find some kind of artifact…” Ve trailed off, distracted. Another possibility was hovering on the edge of consciousness; ve waited a few tau, but it wouldn’t break through. Keeping vis icon in the Swift scape—along with vis linear input, in case Orlando spoke—ve shifted vis gestalt viewpoint to a map of vis own mind.

The scape portrayed a vast, three-dimensional network of interlinked neuron-like objects, but they were symbols, not junctions in the lowest-level network that dealt with individual pulses of data. Each symbol glowed with an intensity proportional to the reinforcement it was receiving from the others already dominating the network: vis conscious preoccupations. Simple linear cascades were rapidly tried out, then inhibited as stale or vis mind would have been paralyzed by positive feedback loops of hot/cold, wet/dry banality—but novel combinations of symbols were firing all the time, and if they resonated strongly enough with the current activity, their alliance could be reinforced, and even rise to consciousness. Thought was a lot like biochemistry; there were millions of random collisions going on all the time, but it was the need to form a product with the right shape to adhere firmly to an existing template that advanced the process in a coherent way.

The map was a slow-notion replay; Yatima was looking at the firing patterns behind the nagging sensation that hadn’t quite gelled, not the real-time firing caused by the act of looking at the map. And, color-coded by the map’s software, the relevant alliance was easy to pick out, though by chance it hadn’t quite crossed the threshold into self-supporting activity. Symbols had fired for isotope, enduring, obvious… and neutron.

Yatima was baffled for a moment, then the sense of connections falling into place welled up again, and ve knew exactly what ve hadn’t quite thought before. If the heavy, but stable, isotopes in Swift’s atmosphere were meant to attract attention to something enduring, what could be more enduring than the atoms themselves? The isotopes weren’t a message from the Transmuters saying, “Come and search this world for our libraries full of hard-won knowledge… even though they might have turned to dust” or “Come and marvel at this life we created… even though it might have gone extinct.”

The isotopes were saying, “Come and look at these isotopes.”

Orlando screamed, “You idiot! What are you doing?”

Yatima jumped back fully to the Swift scape. Vis car was shown half submerged in the oasis—and it was clear that either the probe itself or its gas jets had punctured the membrane. As the car ascended, the exposed water erupted into bubbles tens of delta wide, which burst into clouds of rapidly dissipated steam. Even as the surface boiled, the torn edges of the membrane sent sticky tendrils flying across the gap, and a few of these threads met and merged, crisscrossing the wound with a loose gauze to act as an anchor for repolymerization. But the hole was too large, and the rush of steam and the churning of the water shredded the tenuous scaffolding. The membrane ruptured further. The process was unstoppable now.

Orlando was standing on the seat of his car, shouting and gesticulating. “You idiot! You’ve killed them! You fucking idiot!” Yatima hesitated, then jumped Konishi-style straight into the car and seized him by the shoulders.

“It’s all right! Orlando, they’ll survive! They’re adapted for it!” He pushed ver away, flailing his arms, bellowing with grief and rage. Yatima didn’t try to touch him again, but ve kept his eyes on him, and repeated calmly, “They’ll survive.” That wasn’t entirely true; only about one in three individual creatures made it through boiling and rehydration.

Ve glanced down; the whole oasis was little more than a patch of mud now, a sticky residue holding on to a few polymer-coated bubbles of steam, expanding slowly toward breaking point. All the colors of Swift life had merged into a faintly iridescent brown, without so much as an outline of any recognizable body plan. The solid geometry of the functioning organisms had been compressed into a mixture of two-dimensional proximity and chemical markers, but the process wasn’t always reversible, nor was the coding entirely unambiguous. Even members of different species caught in a dry-out together sometimes rehydrated as mutual genetic chimeras, co-opting spores from each other to serve as tissues in their reconstituted bodies.

“Where were you?” Orlando’s face radiated horror and contempt. “Those were real, living creatures—and you couldn’t even keep your eyes on them!”

“There must have been a sudden downdraft. The autopilot would have kept the probe out of the water if there’d been any way of doing that.”

“You shouldn’t have been so low to start with!”

They’d both been flying at the same altitude. Yatima said, “Look, I’m sorry it happened. The safety margin for the probes will have to be increased. But a grain of sand in the wind could have done it just as easily. And the membrane was going to burst from sheer vapor pressure in the next ten minutes anyway. You know that.”

The rage went out of Orlando’s eyes. He turned away, covering his face with his arms. Yatima waited in silence; ve’d come to realize long ago that there was nothing else ve could do.

After a while, ve said, “I think I know what the Transmuters wanted us to find.”

“I doubt it.”

“What do you add to hydrogen to make deuterium? What do you add to carbon-12 to make carbon-13?”

Orlando turned toward ver, visibly wiping away invisible tears. His public icon could mask or reveal, at will, his private sense of embodiment, but he’d never really learned to operate the two levels seamlessly—and now that his anger had subsided, he looked fragile enough to collapse and wither on the spot. It would only take one more disappointment. Yatima said gently, “It’s been staring us in the face.”

“Neutrons?”

“Yes.”

“Neutrons are neutrons. What is there to find? What is there to travel eighty-two light years for?”

“Neutrons are wormholes.” Yatima raised vis hands and created a standard Kozuch diagram, with one end branching into three. “And if Blanca’s dead clone was right, the Transmuters had all the degrees of freedom they could need to make Swift’s neutrons unique.”

14. EMBEDDED

Carter-Zimmerman polis, Swift orbit

85 801 737 882 747 CST

18 March 4953, 23:17:59.901 UT

Yatima had arranged to meet Orlando in a scape of Lilliput Base, a twenty-meter dome full of scientific instruments located on an equatorial plateau, far from the temperate lowlands where the oases formed. The dome and everything in it had been built by conventional nanomachines, but the raw materials would have been impossible to obtain in situ without far more sophisticated technology. A former Star Puppy called Enif, who’d switched outlooks upon reaching 51 Pegasus and taken up nuclear physics with a vengeance, had succeeded in constructing the first femtomachines about a century before C-Z Voltaire’s arrival. Using the loosely-bound neutrons of halo nuclei in a manner analogous to the electron clouds of a normal atom, he’d managed to build “molecules” five orders of magnitude smaller than those with electron bonds, and then worked his way up to femtomachines able to ferry neutrons and protons to and from individual nuclei, holding the necessary increments of binding energy as deformations in their own structure. The invention had turned out to be priceless on Swift; not only were the normal, light isotopes of the five transmuted elements essential for some experiments, many other elements were rare on the planet’s surface in any form.

They’d had to wait two days for a bay to become free. Yatima entered the scape just as the previous apparatus, designed to search for traces of oxygen-16 in ancient mineral grains, was dissolving back into reservoirs of its constituent elements. Scaled at one centimeter to a delta, the meter-square hay looked big enough for any conceivable experiment, but in fact it was going to be a tight fit. Yatima had found plans for a neutron phase-shift analyzer in the library, designed by Michael Sinclair no less, a former student of Renata Kozuch. When Blanca’s proposed extensions to Kozuch Theory had reached Earth, most physicists had simply dismissed the new model as metaphysical nonsense, but Sinclair had scrutinized it carefully, hoping to devise an experimental test that would go beyond its success in explaining, after the fact, the length of the Forge’s traversable wormholes.

Orlando appeared. The scape software didn’t seem to know quite what to do with his exhalations; the Lilliput dome was maintained at high vacuum, and at first a faint cloud of ice crystals materialized and fell in front of him as his breath expanded and cooled, but after a moment some subsystem changed its mind and starred magicking the apparent contamination out of existence as soon as it left his mouth.

After raising a lattice of scaffolding, the bay’s nanomachines began work on the analyzer, drawing threads of barium, copper, and ytterbium from the reservoirs and spinning them into delicate gray coils of superconducting wire for the magnetic beam splitter—an odd name for the component, when the “beans” in this case would consist of a single neutron. Orlando regarded their handiwork dubiously. “You really think the Transmuters were relying on someone doing an experiment as subtle as this?”

Yatima shrugged. “What’s subtle? The shift between the spectrum of deuterium and hydrogen is a few parts in ten thousand, but we can’t imagine anyone missing it.”

Orlando said dryly, “Deuterium at six thousand times the normal abundance isn’t subtle. Water vapor weighing twenty percent extra isn’t subtle. But particles that behave exactly like neutrons until you split them into two quantum states, rotate one by more than 720 degrees, then recombine them to check their relative phase? Somehow I think that might qualify.”

“Maybe. But the Transmuters didn’t have much choice; you can’t make neutrons twenty percent heavier. All they could do was wrap them in other layers that would draw attention to them. What makes Swift special? The heavy isotopes in the atmosphere. What makes those isotopes special? The extra neutrons they contain. What makes those neutrons special? There’s only one thing you can change about a neutron, without turning it into something else entirely. The length of the wormhole.”

Orlando seemed about to object, but then he raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. There was no point arguing; they’d soon have an answer, one way or the other.

In Blanca’s extension of Kozuch Theory, as in the traditional version, most elementary particle wormholes were as short as they were narrow; the two mouths, the two particles, shared the same microscopic 6-sphere. That was the most probable state for a wormhole created out of the vacuum, and unlike traversable wormholes they weren’t free to adjust their length once they were formed. But there was no theoretical reason why longer ones couldn’t exist: chains of short ones joined end-to-end, a string of linked microspheres looping out into the extra six macroscopic dimensions. Once created, they’d be stable; it was just a matter of knowing how to make them in the first place. Ordinary splicing methods—brute-force collisions—simply merged the two microspheres into one.

Sinclair had tested a few trillion electrons, protons, and neutrons, and found no long ones at all, but that didn’t prove that they were physically impossible, it merely confirmed that they were naturally rare. And if the Transmuters had wished to leave behind a single, enduring scientific legacy, Yatima could think of no better choice. Long neutrons had the potential to illuminate a fundamental question that might otherwise take an infant civilization millennia to resolve. Locked up in stable isotopes on a planet orbiting a slow-burning sun, they’d remain accessible for thirty or forty billion years. It was even possible that they’d shed some light on the diametrically opposite problem to their own creation: keeping traversable wormholes short, the secret to bridging the galaxy.

The nanomachines moved on from the beam splitter to a second set of coils, designed to rotate one quantum state of the neutron when it traveled simultaneously down two alternative paths. At first glance, there was no obvious way to tell a long particle from a short one; neither possessed a traversable wormhole, so you couldn’t send a signal through and time it. But Sinclair had realized that the usual classification of particles into fermions and bosons became slightly more complex when long particles were allowed. The classical properties of a fermion were having a spin of half a unit, obeying the Pauli exclusion principle (which kept all the electrons in an atom, and neutrons and protons in a nucleus, from falling together into the same, lowest-energy state), and responding to a 360-degree rotation by slipping 180 degrees out of phase with its unrotated version. A fermion needed two full rotations, 720 degrees, to come back into phase. Bosons needed only one rotation to end up exactly as they began.

Any long particle made up of an odd number of individual fermions would retain the first two fermionic properties, but if it also included any bosons, their presence would show up in the pattern of phase changes when the particle was rotated. A long particle with a wormhole sequence of “fermion-boson-fermion-fermion” would go out of phase and back like a simple fermion after one and two rotations, but a third rotation would bring it back into phase again immediately. Successive rotations could probe the wormhole’s structure at ever greater depths: for each individual fermion in the chain it would take two rotations to restore the particle’s phase, while for each boson it would take just one. As Orlando had put it—groping for a three-dimensional analogy when Yatima had started spouting group theory and topology—it was like sliding down into the particle’s wormhole on the banister of a spiral staircase. Sometimes after going full circle, a twist in the banister left you upside down, so you had to go round once more before the staircase appeared right—way up again. Other times, a single turn left everything looking normal.

As the nanomachines put the finishing touched the apparatus, wiring the neutron source and detectors to the bays data link, Yatima thought of contacting Blanca. But the one time they’d met, the Voltaire clone had shown no interest whatsoever in vis dead Fomalhaut-self’s ideas. Blanca had declined, everywhere, to rush the flesher equivalent—the de facto post-arrival standard adopted throughout the Diaspora—and as a consequence ve’d become rather isolated. Sinclair might have liked to witness the experiment, but he’d have to wait 82 years; he hadn’t taken part in the Diaspora at all.

Yatima gestured at a switch on the side of the neutron source; it was just a scape object grafted onto their view of the machine, but throwing it would transmit the signal down to Lilliput to cycle the first neutron through. “Do you want to do the honors?”

Orlando hesitated. “I’m still not sure what I’m hoping for. Exotic physics from the Transmuters… or the entertainment value of seeing you try to squirm out of this if you’re wrong.”

Yatima smiled serenely. “The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch.”

Orlando stepped forward and did it. The display screen beside it—another scape object—was instantly filled with symbols scrolling past in an unreadable blur. Yatima had been expecting a short pattern, recurring after five or six rotations at most—or if the neutrons were sadly normal, just two. A few segments would have been enough to prove the point, but maybe the Transmuters had had no control over the total length.

Orlando said, “Is this equipment failure, or wild success?”

“Wild success, I hope.”

Yatima sent the screen gestalt instructions to rewind. The start of the data showed the neutron slipping in and out of phase with repeated rotations:

-++-+-+++-+-++++-+-+-+-+++++…

Directly below was the interpretation: FbFFbbFFFbbbFFFFbbbb…

Orlando read aloud, “Fermion, boson, fermion, fermion, boson, boson…”

Yatima said, “It’s not a hoax, I swear.”

“I believe you.” The counting went up to 126, then the pattern stopped and something far less decipherable took over. Orlando looked almost fearful. “It’s a message. They’ve left us a message.”

“We don’t know that.”

“It could be the equivalent of their whole polis library. Tied on a single neutron wormhole, like knots on a string.” He was beaming unsteadily now; Yatima wondered if his embodiment software would let him pass out from shock.

“Or it might just be proof of artificiality. An improbable sequence, so no one mistakes this for a natural phenomenon and screws up their physics trying to explain it that way. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Orlando nodded, and wiped his forehead with his palm. He gestured at the screen to scroll forward to the latest data; the torrent continued, but it was visibly slower. Each test for a different number of rotations had to he performed several times to get reliable statistics and after a billion rotations and an interference measurement, you couldn’t just rotate the neutron one more time for test one-billion-and-one, you had to start again from scratch.

They waited for the pattern to recur. After twenty-two minutes, the neutron decayed without repeating itself. In theory, the resulting proton should have retained the same hidden structure, but Yatima hadn’t made any provision to capture it, and the whole machine would have had to he rebuilt to handle a charged particle.

Ve instructed the analyzer to shift to a much higher rotation frequency. The second neutron rapidly yielded exactly the same sequence as the first, and survived long enough to start repeating, after six times ten-to-the-eighteenth segments. Six exabytes of data wasn’t exactly a polis library, but it left room for a lot more than a maker’s imprint or some idle subatomic graffiti.

The screen translated the sequence into Orlando’s stylized spiral staircase, a twisted ribbon reminiscent of DNA, but far longer than any genome or mind seed. Until this moment, Yatima had never really felt the hand of an alien civilization here; the isotope signature was unambiguous, but too amorphous to convey anything more than its own artificiality. They’d found no ruins, no monuments, no shards—and it was impossible to say whether the oasis life had been the Transmuters’ biological cousins, their artificial pets, or just an accident with no connection to them at all. But now the planet was revealed to be dense with artifacts older than any skyscraper or pyramid, richer than any papyrus or optical disk. And every picogram of atmospheric carbon dioxide held three hundred billion of them.

Ve turned to Orlando. “Do we spread the news now, or try for an interpretation first?” The library was bursting with pattern analysis software, three millennia’s worth of attempts to he prepared for this moment. People had already run most of it on various Swift genomes, looking for hidden messages without success.

Orlando managed a conspiratorial grin. “It’s not like breaking into a tomb. We can’t damage this just by looking at it.”

Yatima jumped to the xenolinguistics indexscape, a room full of display cases holding mock Rosetta stones, fragile scrolls and manuscripts, and quaint electromechanical code-breaking machines. Ve built a pipeline from the store of neutron data to a string of these analysis programs. Orlando had followed ver, and they stood in the carpeted room watching silently as a swarm of blue-white fireflies, representing the data, moved from icon to icon.

The twelfth icon in the chain was an ancient cathode ray tube display, representing an absurdly naive program that Yatima had only included because it would take so little time to run. The instant the fireflies alighted on its bakelite case, the screen burst into life.

The image began with a single, short vertical line, then zoomed out slowly to reveal dozens, then hundreds, of similar lines. Yatima didn’t recognize the pattern, but the software had: the bottom end points of the lines marked the positions of stars—Voltaire and its backdrop from a certain angle, about fifty million years ago. Oddly enough, it wasn’t a perspective view but an orthogonal projection. Did that say something about the Transmuters’ perceptual system? Yatima caught verself; maps of the Earth had been made looking like everything from flattened orange peel to a reflection of the planet in a giant distorting mirror. None of them revealed a thing about fleshers’ ordinary vision.

Orlando exhaled heavily. “Pixel arrays? It’s that simple?” He sounded almost disappointed, but then he laughed, elated. “Good old two-dimensional images, changing with time! How’s that for an antidote to abstractionism?” After a moment he added, “Even if it is just a fragment of the data.” Yatima was receiving gestalt tags broadcast by the cathode-ray tube icon, packed with supplementary information, but Orlando was tortuously reading the same things in linear text from a translation window pasted into the scape by his exoself.

From the motion of the stars, the time between each frame was determined to he about 200 years; the software displayed 50 frames, 10,000 years, per tau. The whole view was heavily stylized, and the image was binary: not even a gray scale, just black and white. But the software had concluded that the vertical lines attached to each star were a kind of luminosity scale, giving the distance at which the energy density of the star’s radiation fell to 61 femtojoules per cubic meter, coincidentally or not, the same as the cosmic microwave background. For Voltaire, this distance was about one eighteenth of a light year; for the sun, about one seventh. The orthogonal projection enabled the “luminosity lines” for a few hundred stars to be visible simultaneously, all at the same scale; a realistic perspective from anywhere in the galaxy would have shown all but a few diminished by distance to the point of invisibility, making the intended meaning much more obscure. As the view continued to expand, though, all the stars’ lines were soon reduced to identical, single-pixel specks anyway. Yatima was puzzled, but reserved judgment.

When the whole Milky Way was visible, not quite edge-on, the zoom-out stopped. Then a short vertical line appeared suddenly: twelve hundred light years long, pointing up from the plane of the galactic disk, vanishing after just one frame. Yatima had been wondering how the map would portray sources of radiation that shone for less than 200 years; the simplest method would be to match their total energy to an ordinary star’s output over two centuries. On that basis, a twelve-hundred-lightyear luminosity line corresponded to a burst of radiation comparable to the output of the sun over fourteen billion years. The kind of burst produced by two colliding neutron stars.

Neutrons to warn of neutron stars? Was that another level of the isotopes’ multilayered meaning?

Every two or three hundred thousand years, another burst appeared somewhere in the galaxy. Smaller lines flashed up more frequently, most of them probably supernovae; a few corresponded to known remnants. Orlando asked soberly, “So is this history, or prediction?”

“Well, from the pattern of heavy isotopes in the crust, it looks like the Transmuters processed the atmosphere at least a billion years ago.” So if their predictions of these events in their far future were accurate, it would prove that they’d understood the dynamics of neutron star binaries far better than C-Z or gleisner astronomers. It was impossible to judge their record on these ancient bursts, predating even flesher gamma-ray astronomy, but if it turned out that they’d correctly anticipated the time of Lac G-1’s collision, they’d have shown themselves to be extraordinarily trustworthy forecasters.

Yatima glanced at Orlando, his eyes locked on the screen. The Transmuters could promise him a flesher’s eternity without another Lacerta. They could guarantee a safe return to Earth, and everything he’d once valued.

Around 100,000 years before the present, the scale began to change again. Yatima watched uneasily as the Andromeda galaxy, the whole Local Group, and then ever more distant galactic clusters came into view. Then at 26,000 BP a line appeared, almost two billion light years long, skewering the tiny Milky Way.

The image zoomed back in rapidly, just in time to show a gamma-ray burst at 2000 BP: Lac G-1. The Transmuters had correctly predicted the time of the burst to the nearest 200-year frame, and its position and energy to the nearest pixel.

Orlando remained silent as the map ran on for another twenty million years. In all that time, it showed no more gamma-ray bursts near enough to Earth to harm the biosphere.

But if the map’s predictions were all equally reliable, then 26,000 years ago there’d been an event in the galactic core that rendered every ordinary burst irrelevant. In a thousand more years, the consequences would finally sweep through the region—and even if the Diaspora, the gleisners, and the Earth-based polises began to flee at once, when the pulse of radiation finally washed over them it would be thirty million times more intense than Lacerta.

Paolo said firmly, “It’s not possible. You’d need six or seven billion solar masses undergoing gravitational collapse to release that much energy.”

Yatima had asked to meet him to talk about Orlando, not to debate the meaning of the neutron data for the thousandth time. But Paolo seemed determined to dispose of the core burst itself before he’d listen to a word on any other subject, and maybe that was fair enough. Belief or disbelief in the event formed the ground beneath everything else, now.

“The galactic core contains more than enough mass, depending on where you draw the boundary.”

“Yes, but those stars are all in orbit. They’re not about to fall together into a giant black hole.”

Yatima laughed humorlessly. “Lac G-1’s neutron stars were in orbit, too. They weren’t supposed to fall together for another seven million years. So I wouldn’t stake my life on conservation of angular momentum until I found out where it all went with Lacerta.”

Paolo shrugged dismissively. The burden of proof wasn’t his. Even if it was being read correctly, the Transmuters’ message wasn’t necessarily honest; even if it was honestly intended, that didn’t mean it was infallibly true. And the failure to explain Lacerta hardly meant that conservation laws could be discarded at will. If it had been a purely theoretical argument, Yatima would have happily conceded every point.

Ve glanced around the Heart, trying to gauge the mood. People were talking quietly in small groups, edgy and subdued, but far from despairing. Since the neutron data had been released, Yatima had seen as wide a spectrum of responses in Voltaire C-Z as ve’d witnessed among the fleshers when they’d heard about Lacerta. Many citizens had simply refused to accept that the core burst was a real possibility—and a few had succumbed to paranoid fantasies to rival any flesher’s, declaring that the Transmuters’ message had been planted in order to induce a state of panic and decay among “rival” civilizations. Others were searching for ways to survive the event. Arranging to be in the shadow of a planet could shield the polises from gamma rays, but the neutrino flux would be unavoidable, and intense enough to damage even the most robust molecular structures. The most plausible scheme Yatima had heard so far involved encoding every polis’s data as a pattern of deep trenches on a planetary surface, and then building a vast army of non-sentient robots on a variety of scales, from nanoware up, so numerous that there was a chance that the relatively few survivors would he capable of reconstructing the polis.

“Suppose this burst really is on its way, and the message is a warning.” Paolo settled back in his chair, and regarded Yatima amiably. “Then having gone to the trouble of creating a whole planet’s worth of coded neutrons out of the goodness of their hearts, why didn’t the Transmuters leave us something more than the unpalatable facts? A few survival tips might have come in handy.”

“Don’t give up on the rest of the data yet; it might contain all kinds of things. Preferably instructions for shortening traversable wormholes. Failing that, a reliable technique for sealing and reopening their mouths; then we could hide inside one as a stream of nanomachines until the burst is over.”

Contemplating that scenario gave Yatima severe claustrophobia, but Gabriel had gone even further and suggested that the undeciphered bulk of the neutron data might be the Transmuters themselves: digital snapshots entombed in the particles in the hope that post core-burst life, once such a thing evolved, would stumble upon them and obligingly restore them to active existence. If that was the case, they’d left no obvious clues for anyone aspiring to join them in their sanctuary—and if they’d known about the burst a billion years ago, it seemed far more likely that they’d set off for another galaxy, whether by wormhole or by more conventional means.

Paolo said, “So you think they used a straightforward pixel array for the warning, but then switched to some diabolical encryption technique for all the helpful advice? Why? A little winnowing of the species, maybe?”

Yatima shook vis head and answered plainly, ignoring the sarcasm. “Everything they’ve done has seemed bizarre or ambiguous at first—and then obvious and transparent once we’ve made sense of it. I don’t believe any of it’s been willfully obscure. And I don’t believe their minds were so different from ours that we’re in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes.

“But they couldn’t have avoided making a few assumptions about the way we’d think, and the kind of technology we’d be using—and some of those assumptions are bound to be wrong. I can easily imagine a space-faring civilization that wouldn’t have tried the neutron phase experiment in a million years. So maybe the meaning of the rest of the data will be inaccessible to us… but if it is, that won’t be out of malice, and it won’t be because their whole conceptual framework was beyond our comprehension. It will just be sheer bad luck.”

Paulo gave up his smirk of tolerant amusement, as if reluctantly conceding that this was an appealing vision of the Transmuters, however naive. Yatima seized the moment.

“And whatever you think about the map yourself, just remember that Orlando can’t dismiss it the way you can. Everything about this drags him back to Lacerta.”

“I know that.” He regarded Yatima irritably. “But the fact that it brings back painful memories doesn’t make him right.”

“No.” Yatima steeled verself, and pressed on. “All I’m saying is, if he asks you to take steps to make yourself safe—”

“I’m not going to humor him.” Paolo laughed indignantly. “And I don’t need some ex-Konishi solipsist to tell me about the traumas of carnevale.”

“No?” Yatima scrutinized his face. “Maybe your mental architecture’s closer to his, but you act like you have no idea what he’s been through.”

Paolo averted his eyes. “I know about Liana. But what could he have done? Forced her to use the Introdus? They both made the same decision. It wasn’t his fault.” He looked up defiantly. “And saving me from the core burst won’t bring her back.”

“No. It might not hurt Orlando, though.”

After a while, Paolo said sullenly, “I could live with wasting a thousand years coding myself into some planet’s topography, while being ridiculed by every sane person in the Diaspora. But if I start giving in to him, where does it end? If he thinks I’m migrating back to the flesh with him afterward—”

Yatima laughed. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t. And once he has lots of little flesher children, he’ll probably disown you altogether. Write you off as an unfortunate mistake. You’ll never hear from him again.”

Paolo looked uncertain, then openly wounded.

Yatima said, “That was a joke.”

Blanca floated in a tranquil ocean made up of distinct layers of pastel-colored fluids, each about a quarter of a delta deep, separated by sheets of opaque blue colloid. The only light seemed to come from a diffuse and all-pervasive bioluminescence. As Yatima swam across the scape toward ver, ve wondered whether ve should ask politely about this strange world’s physics before pressing ver to explain the cryptic invitation.

“Hello Orphan.” As Yatima’s viewpoint moved from layer to layer, the intersections of the colloid sheets with Blanca’s solid black absence looked like a diagram for a method of portraying a surface’s critical points as a sequence of curves. One rough ellipse through vis shoulders spawned two ovals on either side on the plane below; each of these split into five smaller ovals, which vanished just before the trunk’s ellipse fissioned. Unable to see the whole icon at once, Yatima found Blanca’s gestalt almost unreadable. “It’s been a while.”

“More for you than me. How are you?” This clone had become estranged from Gabriel soon after arrival, and as far as Yatima knew, no one else had spoken to ver since vis own last visit.

Blanca ignored the question, or took it as rhetorical. “That was interesting data you sent me.”

“I’m glad you had a look at it. Everyone else is stumped.” Yatima had mailed ver a tag pointing to the neutron sequence, despite vis apparent lack of interest in Swift and the Transmuters; it seemed only right to let every clone of ver know that the Fomalhaut Blanca had been vindicated.

“It reminded me of Earth biochemistry.”

“Really? In what way?” People had tried interpreting the data beyond the pixel array as a Swiftian genome, but Yatima doubted that even the quirkiest old SETI software would have attempted anything as absurd as a reading based on the DNA code.

“Just some rough analogies with protein folding. Both turned out to be specific examples of a much more general problem in N dimensions… but I won’t bore you with that.” Blanca made a series of holes in the colloid sheets in front of ver, creating a transparent void, a sphere about two delta wide. Ve thrust vis hands into this arena, and a tangled structure appeared between them, like an intricately warped chain of heads. The structure was complex, but somehow not quite organic-looking. More like a nanomachine that someone had been forced to design from a single, linear molecule, shaped by nothing but the angles of the bonds between consecutive atoms.

Blanca said, “There was nothing to decipher, nothing to decode. You’ve read all the messages that were there to be read. The rest of the neutron sequence isn’t data at all; it’s there to control the shape of the wormhole.”

“The shape? What difference does the shape make?”

“It enables it to act as a kind of catalyst.”

Yatima was dazed, but part of ver was thinking: How stupid of me. Of course. The neutrons served as an attention grabbing beacon from a distance, then a warning message close-up; ve should have guessed that there was an entirely separate third function buried in the remaining structure. “What does it do? Make other long neutrons? They built just one, and it replicated itself all over the planet?”

Blanca spun the wormhole, but not in any visible dimension; it flexed oddly as the view rotated into other hyperplanes. “No. Think about it, Yatima. It can’t catalyze anything here. It has no shape in this universe, it’s just another neutron to us.”

Ve extended the wormhole into a Kozuch diagram and began demonstrating some interactions with ordinary, short particles. “If you hit it with a neutrino, an antineutrino, an electron, or a positron, the effect propagates all the way along its length.” Yatima watched, mesmerized; with each collision, even though the wormholes didn’t splice, the structure deformed in a distinctive way, like a protein switching between metastable conformations.

“Okay. We can change its shape. But what does that achieve?”

“It makes certain vacuum wormholes real. It creates a stream of particles.”

“Creates them where?” The long neutron threaded its way through billions of adjacent universes, but since the wormhole didn’t open up into any of them, its presence barely registered. If it couldn’t catalyze anything here, it had even less chance of doing so in any universe it merely passed through.

Blanca sent gestalt instructions to the diagram, and suddenly the catalyst was threaded with dozens of tangled, translucent membranes. As each electron or neutrino struck, and the catalyst changed shape, one of these faintly sketched vacuum wormholes became two real wormhole mouths racing apart through the space in which the catalyst was embedded.

That space was the macrosphere. The long neutrons were machines for creating particles in the macrosphere.

Yatima performed an elated backflip through the layered ocean, and found verself upside down. “Let me kiss your feet. You’re a genius.”

Blanca laughed, a remote sound from a hidden part of vis body. “It was a trivial problem. If you weren’t rushing like a flesher, you would have solved it yourself long ago.

Yatima shook vis head. “I doubt it.” Ve hesitated. “So do you think the Transmuters could have—?”

“Migrated? Upward! Why not? It’s a closer escape route than heading for Andromeda.”

Yatima tried to imagine it: a Diaspora into the macrosphere. “Wait. If our whole universe, our whole space-time, is the standard fiber for macrosphere physics, then our entire history only corresponds to an instant of macrosphere time. Their equivalent of a Planck moment. So how could the Transmuters create a sequence of particles, spread out in time?”

Blanca gestured at a portion of the catalyst. “Look more closely at this domain. Macrosphere space-time is woven out of vacuum wormholes, just like ours. It’s the same kind of Kozuch-Penrose network, only five-plus-one dimensions instead of three-plus-one.” Yatima righted verself for a better view, and peered at the multi-lobed knot Blanca was pointing to; it seemed to hook into the ghostly structures of the vacuum like a grapple. “They’ve pinned our time to macrosphere time. What would have been a fleeting Planck moment endures as a kind of singularity. And that singularity can emit and absorb particles in macrosphere time.”

Yatima’s mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn’t indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they’d hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure.

“Wait. You said emit… and absorb? What happens if the singularity absorbs a macrosphere particle?”

“A small proportion of the catalysts change state. Which causes a small proportion of the long neutrons here to undergo beta decay, even if they’re in supposedly stable nuclei. If you monitored a ton of Swift’s atmosphere, you could detect absorption events with an efficiency of about one in ten billion.” Yatima had positioned vis viewpoint in the same layer as Blanca’s head, and ve caught a characteristic tilt of amusement. “So it might be worth trying. The Transmuters’ macrosphere clones could be blasting messages at the singularity even as we speak.”

“After a billion years? I doubt it. But they might still be nearby; the originals would have fled the galaxy, but the clones would have had no special reason to travel far from the singularity. So if we went into the macrosphere ourselves, we might still have a good chance of finding them.”

If they could make contact with the Transmuters, they’d have a chance to learn the reasons for both Lacerta and the core burst, helping to convince the skeptics to protect themselves. And if there was no other choice, anyone who was willing could hide in the macrosphere to escape the burst.

Yatima was beginning to feel a kind of vertigo. The Fomalhaut Blanca’s remote, hypothetical, six-dimensional universe of universes had suddenly become as real as the space of the Diaspora itself. As real, and perhaps accessible. For a space-faring civilization to step into the macrosphere was like a bacterium in a rain drop finding a way to stride across continents—and there was a vestigial ancestral temptation to respond to the scale and strangeness of this revelation with paralytic awe. Yatima struggled to concentrate on the practicalities.

“If we could work out macrosphere physics in enough detail, do you think we could cause the singularity to emit a stream of particles that coalesced into a functioning C-Z clone? Or maybe we could start with a cloud of raw materials, then create nanomachines to fabricate the polis?”

Blanca said, “You’re going to need something more like femtomachines, I think. Femtomachines larger than the universe. Do you want the laws of macrosphere physics?” Ve moved down through the scape a few layers, then reached into the blue colloid. As Yatima approached, Blanca opened vis dark palm to expose a single blue speck, which was radiating a gestalt tag.

“What is this?”

“Five spatial dimensions, one time. A 4-sphere as the standard fiber. Physics, chemistry, cosmology, the bulk properties of matter, interactions with radiation, some possible biologies… everything.”

“When did you do this?”

“I’ve had a lot of time, Orphan. I’ve explored a lot of worlds.” Ve spread vis arms to encompass the whole scape. “Every point you see is a different set of rules.” Ve ran a hand below the blue sheer from which ve’d plucked the macrosphere rules, “These are six-dimensional space-times. Below is five. Notice how its thinner. But seven is thinner too. Even numbers of dimensions have richer possibilities.”

The speck had escaped from Blanca’s hand and was drifting hack toward its place in the indexscape, but Yatima had memorized the tag.

“Will you come with me, Blanca? Into the macrosphere?”

Blanca laughed, swimming in worlds, drowning in possibilities.

“I don’t think so, Orphan. What would be the use? I’ve already seen it.”