Incandescence

5

Twelve thousand years after walking the plank, Rakesh woke on the floor of his tent. He was lying face-down on a blue and gold sleeping mat; he drew in a deep breath to savor the rich scent of its fibers. This was the tent he’d carried with him on all his travels on Shab-e-Noor, and it remained with him wherever he went. His first sight upon waking after any journey was the interior of this elegant cocoon.

He rolled on to his back and gazed up at the apex. As he moved, his joints and muscles felt subtly different than they had back in the node; a proprioceptive cue he’d chosen to let him know when he was not embodied was unmistakably absent now. It was both disturbing and exhilarating to be reminded that this was the first time since he’d left home that he’d taken on material form. Instead of being software linked into a scape, his body—and his tent—had been built to order by this planet’s machinery, and left to engage with the physical world. He held a hand up in front of his face; there was no difference to be seen, but when he turned his palm away the tendons in his forearms repeated the message.

Dawn was still a couple of hours away, but the finely woven mesh of the tent’s fabric admitted a tantalizing blue-white sheen. It was like the starlight he’d seen before falling asleep while traveling on his home world, except that this light was brighter. Shab-e-Noor’s sky was a blaze of spectacular globular clusters. Rakesh tried for a moment to picture the stars that could outshine those desert skies at midnight, then gave up and simply willed the tent to reveal them.

He smiled uneasily, dazzled by the beauty at the same time as his chest tightened with a kind of vertigo. The sheer number, density and brightness of the stars were staggering. Perhaps the wisps of ionized gas that shone in the clusters over Shab-e-Noor were more delicately beautiful, but that was like comparing a handful of flowers with a looming forest. The difference in scale was impossible to ignore; anything that was close enough could fill the sky this way, but there was a richness, a detailed, endlessly varying texture to the bulge that no mere cluster could have mimicked. Rakesh had no trouble believing that he was gazing into the heart of the galaxy, an empire of stars twenty thousand light years wide.

He left the tent and looked around for Parantham, but there was no one in sight. He was in the middle of a grassy field, and the only sound he could hear was a nearby stream. He found it easily in the starlight, splashed his face and took a few mouthfuls of sweet, icy water. He had lived embodied for his first thousand years, and the time he’d spent in the scapes of the node had been less than a tenth of that, but the return to the flesh was still disorienting. This body, like the one he’d been born with, was efficient and flexible, with very modest material needs, so being subject to the laws of physics would not amount to much of an inconvenience. Nevertheless, it felt odd to be on such intimate terms with the physical world again, without a single layer of simulation, mediation, or obfuscation. It was like being naked for the first time in a century.

Rakesh called out to Parantham, and she responded with her location: she was in a small town called Faravani, fifteen kilometers away. Rakesh had never traveled the Amalgam’s network with a companion before, and it hadn’t occurred to him that their transmissions might end up being routed to different locations upon landfall. It was lucky that the planet, Massa, had been able to fulfill their individual requests for congenial environments without putting them on opposite sides of the globe. He could have asked the local transport facility to take him apart and reassemble him in the town, but he was in no hurry. He pocketed the tent, then closed his eyes, pictured his location on a map of the area, and set out on foot.

Tramping across the dew-soaked fields, Rakesh felt a strange pang of homesickness. It wasn’t that the smells and sounds of this unfamiliar world evoked any sharp resonance with particular memories, but the simple act of walking a few kilometers through such prosaic terrain in the predawn light was redolent of embodied life. He had walked for pleasure in the scapes of the node, but his surroundings—whether they were spectacular, soothing, or deliberately difficult to traverse—had always been contrived, chosen with a purpose in mind. Taking this mundane, slightly muddy trek just to get from A to B was a quintessentially corporeal experience.

He reached Faravani just after sunrise. Massa had no native life; its first settlers had traveled four thousand light years, from a world that belonged to the P2 panspermia. Most of the locals still wore the ancestral phenotype, a quadruped with hairless, leathery skin, their backs about as high as Rakesh’s chest. They communicated with sounds well within his own range of hearing and vocalization, so he chose to comprehend and speak their language himself, greeting the quads who were emerging from their shelters for some early morning exercise. In the node he’d grown lazy and simply perceived everyone to be speaking in his own tongue, but it was far more satisfying to deal directly with these real-time hisses and clicks, hearing all of the genuine sounds and knowing exactly what they meant, instead of wrapping the whole experience in an auditory hallucination of an approximate translation.

When he met up with Parantham outside the town’s guest shelter, he found that she’d gone one step further.

“I see you’ve made yourself at home,” he teased her.

“Flesh is flesh,” she hissed through her quad mouth. “The shape makes no difference to me.”

Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored—rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence—she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.

“So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?” he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they’d spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa’s planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there’d been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl’s experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.

“I’ve told everyone in sight that I’m heading into the bulge,” she said, “but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.”

Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof’s communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.

That had been three hundred millennia ago. Since then, though nothing had changed in the basic principles, the machinery that bridged the networks had been extensively refined. The bulge was now encircled by gamma ray transmitters that could hit the nodes of the Aloof’s network with pinpoint accuracy, and receivers that monitored the small portion of every communications beam that overshot its target node and spilled out of the Aloof’s territory into the galactic disk, making it possible to extract the piggybacked data once it reached its destination. And though Lahl had been faced with the choice of traveling unencrypted or taking the slow road, most travelers had been able to avail themselves of quantum keys, stockpiled over the millennia, ready to be used as the need arose.

The Aloof could not have failed to be aware of this blatant technological parasitism, yet they had acted neither to stamp it out, nor to facilitate the process. Rakesh couldn’t help admiring the sheer consistency of their response. They had balanced their wish for privacy with a truly cosmic indifference: swatting probes and spores back into the disk without the least sign of impatience or intemperance, and placidly accepting this trickle of foreign data because it was, quite simply, harmless and irrelevant. Whatever their strange arm’s-length interaction with Lahl implied, Rakesh was in no rush to mistake it for the start of some larger, more generalized thaw. If history meant anything, the Aloof would be rigidly pursuing the same dictates as ever, and it was only the extraordinarily rare contingency that the DNA-infested meteor represented that had caused them to drag a couple of citizens of the Amalgam in as bit players. That the invitation was a rarity was undeniable, but nothing more could be read into it: there was no evidence that the Aloof’s isolation was an act of fanaticism that would only be compromised in the direst of emergencies, or that their contact with Lahl represented some kind of wilting of long-held cultural norms in the face of an otherwise insoluble crisis. The one pattern to the Aloof’s actions, in as much as any could be discerned, was that they appeared to make carefully measured responses, designed to meet very clear goals. If recruiting the help of outsiders for the first time in one and a half million years was necessary to meet those goals, why would they hesitate? Stubbornness? Timidity? Inertia? It was comforting to imagine that only such petty and irrational reasons could have caused them to spurn their neighbors for so long, but a far more humbling possibility remained: they had simply never found the Amalgam the least bit useful or relevant before.

Rakesh said, “Are you desperate to move on? Even if there’s no news to be found here, it seems a shame to jump planet after just a couple of hours.”

Parantham flicked her ears in agreement. “I’ve never been much of a gratuitous tourist, but after such a long journey we can surely look around.” Rakesh was relieved. Though he’d felt as if he’d steeled himself for anything as he’d departed from the node, having just escaped from Csi’s manipulations he was relishing this chance to catch his breath before delivering himself into the hands of the Aloof.

The town of Faravani was a loosely spaced assembly of shelters, gardens and sculptures. Winding between them were swaths of empty land, covered by the same wild vegetation as grew in the surrounding fields. Rather than suggesting a state of decay, though, as if this unkempt space had been neglected or abandoned, it made the more obviously artificial elements of the town look as if they’d been freshly delivered, carefully laid down in a pristine field just a month or two before.

The quads trotted playfully around this maze in groups of three or four, some racing each other, some moving more sedately. Like most citizens of the Amalgam who chose to be embodied, they clearly relished their physicality, with all of the specific abilities and constraints that came with it. Having one kind of body rather than another was a supremely arbitrary choice, but the restrictions it imposed gave a shape to everything you experienced. Early in his third century, Rakesh had played around with different bodies for a while, but wandering through that vastly larger space of possibilities had made him feel like no one at all.

“Don’t you get disoriented?” he asked Parantham. “Four legs one day, two the next?” He swung his gaze from shoulder to shoulder, a quad gesture that referred to his own body. “This is part of what unifies me, what makes me feel that the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the one who went to sleep.”

“I don’t actually sleep, Rakesh,” she reminded him.

“Well, no, but that’s not the point.”

She rolled her neck pensively. “I understand what you’re talking about: inhabiting a particular kind of body has its own unique flavor. The way the joints and muscles interact, the way all their degrees of freedom are linked together, paints a beautiful shape in phase space. I enjoy exploring those constraints. But I don’t need them to be the same for my entire life. They’re not part of my identity.”

A trio of quads passed them at a gallop, and Parantham took off after them. Rakesh watched, smiling, knowing better than to try to catch up. He felt a fresh pang of homesickness; it would have been nice to have someone in human form to race against.

After a few minutes Parantham circled back to him, breathing heavily, then the three locals joined them and she made introductions. Sida, Fith and Paba had been friends since childhood. They’d traveled the planet together, but they’d never left Massa. When Parantham had mentioned her plans the trio had been intrigued, and they were determined to learn more.

They found a shaded spot in a nearby garden, and the three friends listened attentively as Rakesh described the encounter with Lahl.

When he’d finished, Paba asked, “Why is it so important to you to find this new DNA world?”

“It’s not,” Rakesh confessed. “Not in itself. I’m not obsessed with my molecular family tree, or with completing the map of the panspermias. If this putative world hadn’t been inside the bulge, and if it hadn’t been important enough to the Aloof for them to make contact with a traveler just to pass on the news, then I doubt I would have gone looking for it.”

Fith said, “So your real interest is a kind of reflection of the Aloof’s?”

Rakesh shifted on the grass. “I suppose it is, partly. But I’d never been all that interested in the Aloof before, either. And I don’t really hold out much hope that they’re going to reveal any more to Parantham and me than they did to Lahl.” He did his best with his human body to make the quads’ gesture for conceding imperfection and uncertainty. “Maybe it sounds frivolous, to travel so far and risk so much when I can’t claim a lifelong passion for any single element of what we might find in there. Taken together, though, it’s a different story. The sum of these parts is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

“Some people need a mystery to pursue,” Sida mused. “Not everyone, though. Some people can turn a pleasurable routine into an art form: food, exercise, conversation, companionship. The same few leitmotifs repeating for decades. Add some travel every now and then to break up the pattern, and you can spin it out into a satisfying life lasting thousands of years.”

“Is that your own plan?” asked Parantham.

“No.” Sida inclined her head toward her companions. “We might have chosen to ignore the bulge staring down at us, but we’re still chasing mysteries of our own.”

“I see.” Parantham left no doubt that she wanted to hear more.

Fith said, “There are plenty of Interesting Truths to be found, even now.”

Though the quad words were slightly ambiguous, Rakesh understood immediately: “Interesting Truths” referred to a kind of theorem which captured subtle unifying insights between broad classes of mathematical structures. In between strict isomorphisms—where the same structure recurred exactly in different guises—and the loosest of poetic analogies, Interesting Truths gathered together a panoply of apparently disparate systems by showing them all to be reflections of each other, albeit in a suitably warped mirror. Knowing, for example, that multiplying two positive numbers was really the same thing as adding their logarithms revealed an exact correspondence between two algebraic systems that was useful, but not very deep. Seeing how a more sophisticated version of the same linkage could be established for a vast array of more complex systems—from rotations in space to the symmetries of subatomic particles—unified great tracts of physics and mathematics, without collapsing them all into mere copies of a single example.

Paba offered them a description of the work that the three friends were pursuing. Rakesh absorbed only the first-level summary, but even that was enough to make him giddy. Starting with foundations in the solid ground of number theory and topology, a glorious edifice of generalisations and ever-broader theorems ascended, swirling into the stratosphere. High up, far beyond Rakesh’s own habitual understanding, no less than five compelling new structures that the trio had identified had started to reveal intriguing echoes of each other, as if they were, secretly, variations on a single theme. The elusive common thread had yet to be delineated, but it seemed plausible to Rakesh (albeit with all the fine details glossed over) that sufficient effort would eventually reveal one dazzlingly beautiful and powerful insight that accounted for the subtle fivefold symmetries they had charted.

Parantham said, “So much for the cliché that embodiment is the antithesis of abstraction.” She sounded impressed, and Rakesh suspected that she’d looked more closely at the work-in-progress than he had.

“I’ve always believed the opposite,” Fith replied firmly. “You don’t need to turn every mathematical space into a kind of scape, and literally inhabit it, in order to understand it. Anchored in three dimensions, obeying mundane physics, we can still reason about any system you care to describe with sufficient clarity. That’s what general intelligence means, after all.”

“How long have you been searching for something like this?” Rakesh asked.

“Thirteen hundred years,” Paba replied. Rakesh glanced at her précis; that was most of her life. “Not full-time,” she added. “Over the years, for one or two days in every ten or twenty as the mood has struck us.”

Sida said, “I’ve known people who’ve given their whole lives over to the same kind of search, but if they find nothing in a century or two they usually become discouraged. The only way we could do this was by refusing to make it the be-all and end-all. The only way we could afford to try was by ensuring that we could also afford to fail.”

“That sounds like a good strategy,” Rakesh said. He had never been drawn to the same ethereal heights himself, but he wondered if travelers could benefit from a similar approach. His youthful vow to leave his home world after exactly one thousand years, as if he’d expected fate to hand him the ideal destination at that very moment, seemed increasingly foolish. He might have passed another two or three centuries happily on Shab-e-Noor, if he’d found some way to make himself receptive to the kind of serendipity that had ultimately rescued him from the limbo of the node, without subjecting himself to the same miserable feeling that every day without success was wasted.

The five of them sat talking until noon, then the quads took them to the guest shelter to eat. Rakesh’s body was flexible enough to make use of almost anything—or at the very least to survive its ingestion without harm—but the quads had a garden that was equally flexible. Instructed in his tastes, within half an hour the plants were able to form fruits and leaves that even his wild ancestors would have found nourishing and delicious. Fith insisted on cooking them into a spicy stew, using tools rather than his mouth to manipulate the ingredients, no doubt having been briefed by Massa’s library on certain peoples’ preference for food wholly unmasticated by others.

This, Rakesh thought, was the Amalgam at its best. Even these citizens who shared no molecular ancestry with him had made him welcome on their planet, in their town, at their meal. They had shared their ideas and discoveries, and listened attentively to his own stories and opinions.

His next hosts would be very different. For one and a half million years, the Aloof had made it clear that they needed no one’s company, no one’s stories, and no one’s opinions but their own.

Nevertheless, it seemed that they wanted something now: some contact, some flow of information. It had started with Lahl, but Rakesh had no idea where it would end, or what the transaction would finally amount to. A disinterested exchange of scientific data? An act of trade, of mutual benefit? Munificence? Misunderstanding? Deception? Enslavement?

He and Parantham stayed with their friends until the stars of the bulge filled the sky, then they prepared themselves to walk among them.