Diaspora

by Greg Egan

  Eventually the courtyard behind the foundry became so crowded that Orlando dragged everyone off to an outdoor restaurant. By dusk, when Liana joined them, the questions were finally beginning to dry up, and most of the crowd had split off into smaller groups who were busily discussing the visitors among themselves.

  So the four of them sat and talked beneath the stars — which were dulled and heavily filtered by the narrow spectral window of the atmosphere. “Of course we’ve seen them from space,” Inoshiro boasted. “In the polises, the orbital probes are just another address.”

  Orlando said, “I keep wanting to insist: ‘Ah, but you haven’t seen them with your own eyes!’ Except... you have. In exactly the same way that you’ve seen anything at all.”

  Liana leaned on his shoulder and added teasingly, “Which is the same way anyone sees anything. Just because our own minds are being run a few centimeters away from our own cameras, that doesn’t make our experiences magically superior.”

  Orlando conceded, “No. This does, though.”

  They kissed. Yatima wondered if Blanca and Gabriel ever did that — if Blanca had modified verself to make it possible, and pleasant. No wonder Blanca’s parents disapproved. Gabriel being gendered wasn’t such a big deal, as an abstract question of self-definition — but almost everyone in Carter-Zimmerman also pretended to have a tangible body. In Konishi, the whole idea of solidity, of atavistic delusions of corporeality, was generally equated with obstruction and coercion. Once your icon could so much as block another’s path in a public scape, autonomy was violated. Re-connecting the pleasures of love to concepts like force and friction was simply barbaric.

  Liana asked, “What are the gleisners up to? Do you know? Last we heard, they were doing something in the asteroid belt — but that was almost a hundred years ago. Have any of them left the solar system?”

  Inoshiro said, “Not in person. They’ve sent probes to a few nearby stars, but nothing sentient yet — and when they do, it will be them-in-their-whole-bodies, all the way.” Ve laughed. “They’re obsessed with not becoming polis citizens. They think if they dare take their heads off their shoulders to save a bit of mass, next thing they’ll be abandoning reality entirely.”

  Orlando said contemptuously, “Give them another thousand years, and they’ll be pissing up and down the Milky Way, marking their territory like dogs.”

  Yatima protested, “That’s not fair! They might have bizarre priorities ... but they’re still civilized. More or less.”

  Liana said, “Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They’d probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they’ve just surveyed it from orbit. They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.”

  Orlando was unconvinced. “If all you want to do is gather astrophysical data, there’s no need to leave the solar system. I’ve seen plans: seeding whole worlds with self-replicating factories, filling the galaxy with Von Neumann machines —”

  Liana shook her head. “If that sort of thing was ever meant seriously, it was pre-Introdus — before gleisners even existed. Anything contemporary is just propaganda: Protocols of the Elders of Machinehood stuff. We’re the ones still closest to the old drives. If anyone screws up and goes exponential, it will probably be us.”

  Some other bridgers joined in, and the debate dragged on for hours. One agronomist argued, through an interpreter: If space travel wasn’t just a fantasy for immature cultures, then where were all the aliens? Yatima glanced up at the drab sky every now and then, and imagined a gleisner spacecraft swooping down and carrying them off to the stars. Maybe some rescue beacon had started up in the gleisner bodies when they’d reactivated them ... It was an absurd notion, but it was strange to ponder the fact that it wasn’t literally impossible. Even in the most dazzling astronomical scape, where you could pretend to jump across the light years and see the surface of Sirius in the best high-resolution composite of simulation and telescope-based data ... you could never be kidnapped by mad astronauts.

  Just after midnight, Orlando asked Liana, “So who’s getting up at four in the morning to escort our guests to the border?”

  “You are.”

  “Then I’d better get some sleep.”

  Inoshiro was amazed. “You still have to do that? You haven’t engineered it out?”

  Liana made a choking sound. “That’d be like ‘engineering-out’ the liver! Sleep’s integral to mammalian physiology; try taking it away, and you’d end up with psychotic, immune-compromised cretins.”

  Orlando added grumpily, “It’s also very nice. You don’t know what you’re missing.” He kissed Liana again, and left them.

  The crowd in the restaurant thinned out slowly — and then most of the bridgers who remained fell asleep in their chairs — but Liana sat with them in the growing silence.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said. “Now we have some kind of bridge to Konishi — and through you, to the whole Coalition. Even if you can’t return ... talk about us, inside. Don’t let us vanish from your minds completely.”

  Inoshiro said earnestly, “We’ll come back! And we’ll bring our friends. Once they understand that you’re not all savages out here, everyone will want to visit you.”

  Liana laughed gently. “Yeah? And the Introdus will run backward, and the dead will rise from their graves? I’ll look forward to that.” She reached across the table and brushed Inoshiro’s cheek with her hand. “You’re a strange child. I’m going to miss you.”

  Yatima waited for Inoshiro’s outraged response: I am not a child! But instead, ve put vis hand to vis face, where she’d touched ver, and said nothing.

  Orlando escorted them all the way to the border. He bid them farewell, and talked about seeing them again, but Yatima suspected that he, too, didn’t believe they’d ever return. When he’d vanished into the jungle, Yatima stepped over the border and summoned the drone. It alighted on the back of vis neck, and burrowed in to make contact with vis processor. The gleisner’s neck, the gleisner’s processor.

  Inoshiro said, “You go. I’m staying.”

  Yatima groaned. “You don’t mean that.”

  Inoshiro stared back at ver, forlorn but resolute. “I was born in the wrong place. This is where I belong.”

  “Oh, get serious! If you want to migrate, there’s always Ashton-Laval! And if you want to escape your parents, you can do that anywhere!”

  Inoshiro sat down in the undergrowth, vanishing up to vis waist, and spread vis arms out in the foliage. “I’ve started feeling things. It’s not just tags anymore — not just an abstract overlay.” Ve brought vis hands together against vis chest, then thumped the chassis. “It happens to me, it happens on my skin. I must have formed some kind of map of the data ... and now my self symbol’s absorbed it, incorporated it.” Ve laughed miserably. “Maybe it’s a family weakness. My part-sibling takes an embodied lover ... and now here I am, with a fucking sense of touch.” Ve looked up at Yatima, eyes wide, gestalt for horror. “I can’t go back now. It’d be like ... tearing off my skin.”

  Yatima said flatly, “You know that’s not true. What do you think’s going to happen to you? Pain? As soon as the tags stop coming, the whole illusion will dissolve.” Ve was trying to be reassuring, but ve struggled to imagine what it must be like: some kind of intrusion of the world into Inoshiro’s icon? It was confusing enough when the interface adjusted vis own icon’s symbol to the actual posture of vis gleisner body — but that was more like playing along with the conventions of a game; there was no deep sense of violation.

  Inoshiro said, “They’ll let me live with them. I don’t need food, I don’t need anything they value. I’ll make myself useful. They’ll let me stay.”

  Yatima stepped back over the border; the drone broke free and retreated, buzzing angrily. Ve knelt down beside Inoshiro and said gently, “Tell the truth: you’d go mad within a week. One scape, like this, forever? And once the novelty wore off, the
y’d treat you like a freak.”

  “Not Liana!”

  “Yeah? What do you think she’d become? Your lover? Or yet another parent?”

  Inoshiro covered vis face with vis hands. “Just crawl back to Konishi, will you? Go lose yourself in the Mines.”

  Yatima stayed where ve was. Birds squawked, the sky brightened. Their twenty-four hours expired. They still had one more day before their old Konishi-selves awoke in their place — but with each passing minute, now, the sense of polis life moving on and leaving them behind grew stronger.

  Yatima thought of dragging Inoshiro over the line, and instructing the drone to pluck ver from vis body. The drone wasn’t smart enough to understand anything they’d done; it wouldn’t realize it was violating Inoshiro’s autonomy.

  And that idea was disturbing enough, but there was another possibility. Yatima still had the last updated snapshot of Inoshiro’s mind, transmitted in the restaurant in the early hours of the morning. Inoshiro wouldn’t have sent it after ve’d made up vis mind to stay — and if Yatima woke that snapshot inside the polis, it wouldn’t matter what happened to this gleisner-clone ...

  Yatima erased the snapshot. This wasn’t quicksand. This wasn’t anything they’d foreseen.

  Ve knelt, and waited. The tags from vis knees reporting the texture of the ground became an irritating, monotonous stream, and the strange fixed shape forced upon vis icon grew even more annoying — perhaps because they both mirrored vis frustration so well. Was this how it had started, for Inoshiro? If ve stayed here much longer, would ve begin to identify with vis own map of vis own gleisner body?

  After almost an hour, Inoshiro rose to vis feet and walked out of the enclave. Yatima followed ver, sick with relief.

  The drone landed on Inoshiro’s neck; ve reached up as if to slap it away, but stopped verself. Ve asked calmly, “Do you think we’ll ever come back?”

  Yatima thought about it, long and hard. Without the unrepeatable allure which had brought them here, would this place, and these friends, ever again be worth eight hundred times more than all the rest?

  “I doubt it.”

  * * *

  Part Two

  « ^ »

  When Paolo woke and joined ver in the scape, Yatima said, “I’m trying to decide what we should tell them. When they ask why we came after them.”

  Paolo laughed grimly. “Tell them about Lacerta.”

  “They’ll know about Lacerta.”

  “As a blip on a map. They won’t know what it did. They won’t know what it meant.”

  “No.” Yatima gazed at Weyl, at the center of the blue shift. Ve didn’t want to antagonize Paolo with questions about Atlanta, but ve didn’t want to shut him out either. “You know Karpal, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Paolo accepted the present tense with a faint smile.

  “And wasn’t he on the moon, running TERAGO —”

  Paolo said coldly, “He did everything he could. It wasn’t his fault the whole planet was sleepwalking.”

  “I agree. I don’t blame him for anything.” Yatima spread vis arms, conciliatory. “I just wondered if he’d ever talked about it. If he ever told you his side of things.”

  Paolo nodded grudgingly. “He talked about it. Once.”

  * * *

  4

  –

  Lizard Heart

  « ^ »

  Bullialdus observatory, Moon

  24 046 104 526 757 CST

  2 April 2996, 16:42:03.911 UT

  Karpal lay on his back on the regolith for a full lunar month, staring up into the crystalline stillness of the universe and daring it to show him something new. He’d done this five times before, but nothing had ever changed within reach of his unaided vision. The planets moved along their predictable orbits, and sometimes a bright asteroid or comet was visible, but they were like spacecraft wandering by: obstacles in the foreground, not part of the view. Once you’d seen Jupiter close-up, firsthand, you began to think of it more as a source of light pollution and electromagnetic noise than as an object of serious astronomical interest. Karpal wanted a supernova to blossom out of the darkness unforeseen, a distant apocalypse to set the neutrino detectors screaming — not some placid conjunction of the solar system’s clockwork, as noteworthy and exciting as a supply shuttle arriving on time.

  When the Earth was new again, a dim reddish disk beside the blazing sun, Karpal rose to his feet and swung his arms cautiously, checking that none of his actuators had been weakened by thermal stress. If they had, it wouldn’t take long for his nanoware to smooth away the microfractures, but each joint still needed to be tested by use in order to notice the problem and call for repairs.

  He was fine. He walked slowly back to the instrumentation shack at the edge of Bullialdus crater; the structure was open to the vacuum, but it sheltered the equipment to some degree from temperature extremes, hard radiation and micrometeorites. Looming behind it was the crater wall, seventy kilometers wide; Karpal could just make out the laser station on top of the wall, directly above the shack. The beams themselves were invisible from any vantage, since there was nothing to scatter the light, but Karpal couldn’t picture Bullialdus from above without mentally inscribing a blue L, a right-angle linking three points on the rim.

  Bullialdus was a gravitational wave detector, part of a solar-system-wide observatory known as TERAGO. A single laser beam was split, sent along perpendicular journeys, then recombined; as the space around the crater was stretched and squeezed by as little as one part in ten-to-the-twenty-fourth, the crests and troughs of the two streams of light were shifted in and out of alignment, causing fluctuations in their combined intensity which tracked the subtle changes of geometry. One detector, alone, could no more pinpoint the source of the distortions it measured than a thermometer lying on the regolith could gauge the exact position of the sun, but by combining the timing of events at Bullialdus with data from the nineteen other TERAGO sites, it was possible to reconstruct each wavefront’s passage through the solar system, revealing its direction with enough precision, usually, to match it to a known object in the sky, or at least make an educated guess.

  Karpal entered the shack, his home for the last nine years. Nothing had changed in his absence, and little had changed since his arrival; the racks of optical computers and signal processors lining the walls looked as gleamingly pristine as ever, and his emergency spares kit and macro repair tools had barely been moved from where he’d first placed them. He wasn’t quite alone on the moon — there were a dozen gleisners doing paleoselenology up at the north pole — but he was yet to receive a visitor.

  Almost every other gleisner was in the asteroid belt, either working on the interstellar fleet, providing some kind of support service, or generally playing camp follower. He could have been there himself, in the thick of it — the TERAGO data was accessible anywhere, and being physically present at one site offered few advantages when overseeing repairs for all twenty — but he’d been tempted by the solitude here, and the chance to work without distractions, devoting himself to a single problem for a week, or a month, or a year. Lying on the regolith gazing up at the sky for a month at a time hadn’t been in his original plans, but he’d always expected to go slightly crazy, and this seemed like a mild enough eccentricity. At first, he’d been afraid of missing an important event: a supernova, or a distant galactic core’s black hole swallowing a globular cluster or two. Every speck of data was logged, of course, but even when the gravitational waves had taken millennia to arrive there was a certain thrill of immediacy about monitoring them in real time; to Karpal, now was a transect of space-time ten billion years deep, converging on his instruments and senses at the speed of light.

  Later, the risk of being away from his post became part of the attraction. Part of the dare.

  Karpal checked the main display screen, and laughed softly in pulse-coded infrared; the faint heat echoed back at him from the walls of the shack. He’d missed nothing. On the list of known
sources, Lac G-1 was highlighted as showing an anomaly — but it was always showing anomalies; this no longer qualified as news.

  As well as recording any sudden catastrophes, TERAGO was constantly monitoring a few hundred periodic sources. It took an event of rare violence to produce a burst of gravitational radiation sufficiently intense to be picked up halfway across the universe, but even routine orbital motion created a weak but dependable stream of gravitational waves. If the objects involved were as massive as stars, orbited each other rapidly, and weren’t too remote, TERAGO could tune into their motion like a hydrophone eavesdropping on a churning propeller.

  Lacerta G-1 was a pair of neutron stars, a mere hundred light years away. Though neutron stars were far too small to be observed directly — about twenty kilometers wide, at most — they packed the magnetic and gravitational fields of a full-sized star into that tiny volume, and the effects on any surrounding matter could be spectacular. Most were discovered as pulsars, their spinning magnetic fields creating a rotating beam of radio waves by dragging charged particles around in circles at close to lightspeed, or as X-ray sources, siphoning material from a gas cloud or a normal companion star and heating it millions of degrees by compression and shock waves on its way down their tight, steep gravity well. Lac G-1 was billions of years old, though; any local reservoir of gas or dust which might have been used to make X-rays was long gone, and any radio emissions had either grown too weak to detect, or were being beamed in unfavorable directions. So the system was quiet across the electromagnetic spectrum, and it was only the gravitational radiation from the dead stars’ slowly decaying orbit that betrayed their existence.

  This tranquillity wouldn’t last forever. G-1a and G-1b were separated by just half a million kilometers, and over the next seven million years gravitational waves would carry away all the angular momentum that kept them apart. When they finally collided, most of their kinetic energy would be converted into an intense flash of neutrinos, faintly tinged with gamma rays, before they merged to form a black hole. At a distance, the neutrinos would be relatively harmless and the “tinge” would carry a far greater sting; even a hundred light years would be uncomfortably close, for organic life. Whether or not the fleshers were still around when it happened, Karpal liked to think that someone would take on the daunting engineering challenge of protecting the Earth’s biosphere, by placing a sufficiently large and opaque shield in the path of the gamma ray burst. Now there was a good use for Jupiter. It wouldn’t be an easy task, though; Lac G-1 was too far above the ecliptic to be masked by merely nudging either planet into a convenient point on its current orbit.