by Greg Egan
Because most of the leaves in this “canopy” were almost vertical, they obstructed the probes’ view far less than if they’d faced the sky, and random gaps in the foliage exposed considerable two-dimensional vistas. A dazzling range of forest-dwellers had been observed, from large, carnivorous exothermic flyers and gliders — all eight-limbed, if wings were counted — to patches of something like fungus apparently feeding directly on the trees themselves. The sheer volume of forest available for observation, and the lack of both diurnal and seasonal rhythms, had allowed the xenologists to deduce many life cycles relatively quickly; very few species reproduced in synchrony, and those that did were only in lock-step over small regions, so individuals of every species at every age could be found somewhere. There were young born live and self-sufficient, while others developed in everything from pouches to egglike sacs in nests or hanging clusters, nodules under Janus bark, dead, paralyzed, or oblivious prey, and even the corpses of their parents.
Inland, the forest blocked the ocean light, but life spilled into the shadow. Some animals migrated away from the coast to raise their young, closely followed by predators, but there were also local species, starting with plants feeding on nutrients washed out of the forest. Poincaréan life employed no single, universal solvent, but half a dozen common molecules were liquid at coastal temperatures. Rain rarely fell on the forest itself, and the major rivers flowing from the barren interior to be vaporized when they hit the magma ocean contained little organic material, but enough high-altitude dew ran down the Janus trees and found its way inland, enriched with debris, to power a secondary ecosystem comprising several thousand species.
Including the Hermits.
Elena summoned up networks of estimated energy and nutrient flows for predation, grazing, parasitism, and symbiotic relationships. “The wider the analysis, the more the evidence mounts up. It’s not just that they have no predators and no visible parasites; they also face no population pressure, no food shortages, no disease. Every other species is subject to chaotic population dynamics; even the Janus trees show signs of overcrowding and die-offs. But the Hermits sit in the middle of all those wild swings, untouched. It’s as if the whole biosphere has been customized to shield them from anything unpleasant.”
She displayed a 5-image, and Orlando reluctantly switched his vision to view it properly. The Hermits, Elena explained, were limbless, mollusk-like creatures, living in stationary structures half excreted like shells, half dug out like burrows. They appeared to spend most of their lives inside these caves, feeding on hapless passers-by who fell into a slippery trench that led straight to the Hermits’ mouthparts. No carnivore had evolved the tools required to winkle them out, and though many species were smart enough to avoid the trenches, there were always plenty of victims. And of the six million Hermits observed from orbit, none had yet been seen either to breed, or to die.
Karpal was skeptical. “They’re just a timid, sedentary species that’s had good luck for the brief time we’ve been watching. I wouldn’t be tempted to extrapolate their lifespan to six million times the observation period; we’ve yet to see any significant temperature fluctuations in the crust, and when they come along they must cause havoc. We should shift our resources to the deserts; if the Transmuters are on Poincaré at all, they’ll be as far away from the native life as possible. Why would they intervene on behalf of these creatures?”
Elena replied stiffly, “I’m not suggesting that they did. The Poincaréans could have engineered the whole setup for themselves.”
“Have you caught them doing anything remotely like biotechnology?”
“No. But once they’d put themselves in an invulnerable niche, why would they need to make any more changes?”
Orlando said, “Even if they’re intelligent enough to have done that ... if their idea of Utopia is spending eternity sitting in a cave waiting for food to slide down their throats, what are they going to know about the Transmuters? Ten thousand blazing star ships might have flown past Poincaré a billion years ago, but even if the Hermits have been around that long, they’re not going to remember. They’re not going to care.”
“We don’t know that. Does Carter-Zimmerman on Earth look like a hive of intellectual curiosity? Can you tell what’s stored in the polis library from one glance at the protective hull?”
Karpal groaned. “Now you’re taking Orpheus to heart. One biological computer on one planet in another universe hardly proves —”
Elena retorted, “One natural biological computer hardly proves that they’re common products of evolution. But why shouldn’t Poincaréan life engineer them? No one objects to the notion that every technological civilization might undergo its own Introdus. If the Poincaréans were skilled in biotechnology, why shouldn’t they create a suitably tailored living species, instead of a machine?”
Paolo interjected cheerfully, “I agree! The Hermits could be living polises, with the whole ecosystem as their power supply. But they need not have been built by native Poincaréans. If the Transmuters arrived here and found no intelligent life, they might have tweaked the ecosystem to make a safe niche for themselves, then created the Hermits and migrated into them to while away the time in 3-scapes.”
Elena laughed uncertainly, as if she suspected she was being mocked. “While away the time until what?”
“Until something evolved here — a species worth talking to. Or someone arrived, like us.”
The debate dragged on, but no conclusions were reached. On the evidence, the Hermits might have been anything from random beneficiaries of natural selection to the secret masters of Poincaré.
A vote was taken, and Karpal lost. The deserts were too vast to search, with no clear target. The expedition would concentrate its resources on the Hermits.
Orlando moved slowly across the luminous rock, grit registering painlessly on the sole of his single, broad, undulating foot. He felt naked and vulnerable outside his cave; twenty kilotau playing Hermit, riding this puppet on the hypersurface of Poincaré, and he could empathize that much. Or perhaps he just preferred the view through the narrow tunnel because it helped cut the five-dimensional landscape down to size.
When he knew he was in sight of his neighbor, he extruded nine batons and performed gesture 17, the only sequence he hadn’t tried before. It felt almost as if he was spreading his hands and waggling his fingers, executing a fragment of sign language committed to memory without knowing its meaning.
He waited, peering down the tunnel into the pearly light of the alien’s multiply-reflected body heat.
Nothing.
Real Hermits left their caves almost exclusively fot the purpose of building new ones; whether they outgrew the old ones, wanted a better food supply, or were moving away from some source of danger or discomfort remained obscure. Occasionally two naked Hermits crossed paths; nine megatau of ground-level observations by a swarm of atmospheric probes had yielded a grand total of seventeen such encounters. They did not appear to fight or to copulate, unless they managed to do so at a distance with secretions too subtle to detect, but they did extrude several stalk-like organs — up to twelve hypercylinders which Elena had dubbed “batons” — and wave them at each other as they passed.
The theory was that these were acts of communication, but with such a tiny sample of encounters to analyze it was impossible to infer anything about the hypothetical Hermitian language. In desperation, the xenologists had constructed a thousand Hermit robots and had them dig and excrete caves of their own, unnaturally close to real ones, in the hope that this would provoke some kind of response. It hadn’t, though there was still the possibility of a robot-Hermit encounter if one of the neighbors ever decided to leave and build a new cave.
Non-sentient software usually controlled the robots, but a few citizens had taken to riding them as puppets, and Orlando had dutifully joined in. He was beginning to suspect that the Hermits were every bit as stupid as they seemed, which was more a relief than a disappointment; havi
ng wasted so much time on them wouldn’t be half as bad as being forced to accept that an intelligent species had willingly engineered itself into this cul-de-sac.
Orlando tried to look up at the sky, but his body was unable to comply; the infrared-sensitive hypersurface of his face could not be tilted that far. The Hermits — and many other Poincaréans — observed their surroundings by a form of interferometry; instead of using lenses to form an image, they employed arrays of photoreceptors and analyzed the phase differences between the radiation striking different points of the array. Limited to non-invasive observations of living Hermits and microprobe autopsies of other species’ corpses, no one really knew how the Hermits saw their world, but the color and spacing of the receptors supported one obvious guess: they could see by the thermal glow of the landscape itself. Heated by their bodies, their caves were slightly warmer than most surrounding rock, so they spent their lives cocooned in light. In his own cave, Orlando had adjusted the brightness he perceived until he found the ambiance vaguely comforting, but that was as far as he was prepared to go in finding Hermit experiences pleasurable. When small spiked octapods slid into his mouth, he turned and spat them out through the cave’s second tunnel. However stupid these creatures were, he wasn’t willing to slaughter them for the sake of empathizing with the Hermits, or to try to authenticate an act of mimicry that had probably been flawed from the start.
His exoself pasted a window of text into the scape, a weirdly disorienting intrusion. The two-dimensional object occupied a negligible portion of his field of view — in both hyperal directions it was slender as a cobweb — but the words still seized his attention as if they’d been thrust into his face in a 3-scape, blocking out everything else. When he scanned the window consciously to read the news, he felt a strong sense of déjà vu, as if he’d already taken in the whole page at a glance.
Swift C-Z had lost contact with them for almost three hundred years. On the macrosphere side, the link had never fallen silent: the stream of photons created by the singularity had stuttered straight from one data packet time-stamped 4955 UT, to another from 5242. But the citizens of Swift C-Z had just emerged from a long nightmare, wondering year after year if the reciprocal beta decays would ever resume.
Orlando jumped back to the Floating Island, the cabin, his 3-body. He sat on the bed, shivering. They weren’t stranded. Not yet. The room was familiar, comforting, plausible — but it was all a lie. None of it could exist outside the polis: the wooden floor, the mattress, his body, were all physically impossible. He’d traveled too far. He could not hold on to the old world, here. And he could not embrace the new.
He couldn’t stop shivering. He stared up at the ceiling, waiting for it to split open and allow the reality around him to come flooding in. Waiting for the macrosphere to strike like lightning. He whispered, “I should have died in Atlanta.”
Liana replied distinctly, “No one should have died. And no one should die in the core burst. Why don’t you stop bleating and do something useful?”
Orlando wasn’t fooled or confused for a moment — it was an auditory hallucination, a product of stress — but he grabbed the words like a lifeline. Liana would have goaded him out of self-pity; that much of her survived in his head.
He forced himself to concentrate. Somehow, the singularity had slipped — which meant the Transmuters’ long-neutron anchor, binding the home universe to macrosphere time, was losing its grip. Yatima, Blanca, and all the other dazzlingly brilliant experts in extended Kozuch Theory had failed to predict anything of the kind — which meant no one would know if, or when, or by how many centuries it might slip again.
But once or twice more could easily be enough to carry them right past the core burst.
The news might jolt the others into cloning the polis and searching for the Transmuters elsewhere. But even without another singularity slip they’d barely have time to visit two or three more stars. And while every instinct he possessed told him that the Hermits were dumb animals, every instinct he possessed was too far from the world that had shaped it to know gauche from droit.
Playing Hermit would never be enough to reach them. Riding a robot, reshaping his body image, crawling around on the hypersurface would never be enough. It was no use pretending that a single mind could embrace Earth and Poincaré, U and U-star, three dimensions and five. Escape and crash. No one could bend that much; he had to break.
Orlando told his exoself, “Build a copy of the cabin. Here.” He gestured at one wall and it turned to glass; behind it, like an uninverted mirror image, the room was repeated in every detail. “Thicken it into a 5-scape.” Nothing seemed to change, but he was seeing only the three-dimensional shadow.
He steeled himself. “Now clone me in there, in my 5-body, with all macrospherean visual symbols.”
Suddenly he was inside the 5-scape. He laughed, hugging himself with all four arms, trying not to hyperventilate. “No Alice jokes, Liana, please.” He had to concentrate to find the two-dimensional slice of the tesseract wall that revealed the adjoining three-dimensional cabin; it was like staring at a tiny peep-hole. His paper-doll original, the unchanged Orlando, pressed a hand against the glass in a vaguely reassuring gesture, trying not to appear too relieved. And in truth, in spite of the panic he felt, he was relieved himself not to be confined in that claustrophobic sliver of a world any more.
He caught his breath. “Now adjoin the robot’s scape.” The opposite wall became transparent, and behind it he could see the hypersurface of Poincaré; the robot was still standing a few delta from the entrance to the real Hermit’s cave.
“Remove the robot. Clone me in there, with the Hermit body-image and senses, and Elena’s gestural language. And —” He hesitated. This was it, the spiral down. “Tear out every symbol relating to my old body, my old senses.”
Ve was on the hypersurface. Through a floating four-dimensional window, he could see — with the xenologists’ best-guess Hermitian vision — the 5-cabin and its occupant, all the colors translated into false heat tones. The whole scene was obviously physically impossible: surreal, absurd. The 3-scape of the original cabin was too small and too far away to see at all. Ve looked around at the gently glowing landscape; everything appeared more natural now, more intelligible, more harmonious.
Elena had invented a gestural language for the Hermits’ batons; there was no pretense of capturing real Hermitian, but the artificial version did allow citizens to think in gestural impulses and images instead of their native tongue, and to communicate with their exoselves without violating the simulation of Hermit anatomy.
Ve extruded all twelve batons, and instructed vis exoself to duplicate the scape, then clone ver yet again with further modifications. Some came from the xenologists’ observations of other species’ behavior, some came from Blanca’s old notes on possible macrospherean mental structures, and some came from vis own immediate sense of the symbols ve required in order to fit this body and this world more closely.
The third altered clone of Orlando peered back down the tunnel of scapes, past vis immediate progenitor, searching in vain for a glimpse of vis incomprehensible great-grandparent. There was a world where that being had lived ... but ve could neither name it nor clearly imagine it. With the symbols gone for most of the original’s episodic memories, the clone’s strongest inheritance was a sense of urgency, yet the edges of the lost memories still ached, like the vestiges of some plotless, senseless, unrecoverable dream of love and belonging.
After a while, ve turned away from the window. The Hermit’s cave itself was still beyond reach, but it was easier now to go forward than back.
Orlando paced the cabin, ignoring messages from Paolo and Yatima. The seventh clone had taken control of the robot nine kilotau ago, and almost immediately managed to persuade the real Hermit to leave its cave. They’d been miming and gesticulating at each other ever since.
When the robot finally left the Hermit to converse with the sixth clone, Orlando could see all the
others watching intently; even the first clone seemed riveted, as if he was extracting some aesthetic pleasure from the five-dimensional baton-waving despite being blind to its meaning.
Orlando waited, his guts knotted, as the message passed up the chain toward him. What would happen to these messengers — more like children than clones — once they’d served their purpose? Bridgers had never been isolated; everyone had been linked to a large, overlapping subset of the whole community. What he’d done was an insane perversion of that ethos.
“There’s good news and bad news.” His four-legged clone was standing behind the wall, face changing shape slightly as his head moved in unseen dimensions. Orlando stepped up to the glass.
“They’re intelligent? The Hermits —”
“Yes. Elena was right. They tweaked the ecosystem. More than we guessed. They’re not just immune to climate change and population swings; they’re immune to mutation, new species arising — anything short of Poincaré going supernova. Everything’s still free to evolve around them, but they sit at a fixed point in the system while it changes.”
Orlando was staggered; that kind of long-term dynamic equilibrium was far beyond anything the exuberants of Earth had ever contemplated. It was at least as impressive as tying neutrons in knots. “They’re not ... the Transmuters? Reduced to this?”
His clone’s shadow-face shimmered with mirth. “No! They’re native to Poincaré, they’ve never left, they’ve never traveled. But don’t look so disgusted. They’ve had their age of barbarism, and they’ve had disasters to rival Lacerta. This is their sanctuary, now. Their invulnerable Atlanta. How can we begrudge them that?”
Orlando had no reply.
The clone said, “But they do remember the Transmuters. And they know where they’ve gone.”