Diaspora

"Shall we go and see the trimming now? With Inoshiro and Gabriel?"

"Gabriel!"

"I'll take that as a yes."

Blanca jumped, the orphan followed—and the cloistered square dissolved into a billion stars.

The orphan examined the strange new scape. Between them, the stars shone in almost every frequency from kilometer-long radio waves to high-energy gamma rays. The "color space" of gestalt could be extended indefinitely, and the orphan had chanced on a few astronomical images in the library which employed a similar palette, but most terrestrial scenes and most scapes never went beyond infrared and ultraviolet. Even the satellite views of planetary surfaces seemed drab and muted in comparison; the planets were too cold to blaze across the spectrum like this. There were hints of subtle order in the riot of color series of emission and absorption lines, smooth contours of thermal radiation but the infotrope, dazzled, gave in to the overload and simply let the data flow through it; analysis would have to wait for a thousand more clues. The stars were geometrically featureless—pointlike, distant, their scape addresses impossible to compute—but the orphan had a fleeting mental image of the act of moving toward them, and imagined, for an instant, the possibility of seeing them up close.

The orphan spotted a cluster of citizens nearby, and once it shifted its attention from the backdrop of stars it began to notice dozens of small groups scattered around the scape. Some of their icons reflected the ambient radiation, but most were simply visible by decree, making no pretense of interacting with the starlight.

Inoshiro said, "Why did you have to bring that along?"

As the orphan turned toward ver, it caught sight of a star far brighter than all the rest, much smaller than the familiar sight in the Earth's sky, but unfiltered by the usual blanket of gases and dust.

"The sun?"

Gabriel said, "Yes, that's the sun." The golden-furred citizen floated beside Blanca, who was visible as sharply as ever, darker even than the cool thin background radiation between the stars.

Inoshiro whined, "Why did you bring Yatima? It's too young! It won't understand anything!"

Blanca said, "Just ignore ver, Yatima."

Yatima! Yatima! The orphan knew exactly where Yatima was, and what ve looked like, without any need to part the navigators and check. The fourth citizen's icon had stabilized as the tall flesher in the purple robe who'd adopted the lion cub, in the library.

Inoshiro addressed the orphan. "Don't worry Yatima, I'll try to explain it to you. If the gleisners didn't trim this asteroid, then in three hundred thousand years—ten thousand teratau—there'd be a chance it might hit the Earth. And the sooner they trim it, the less energy it takes. But they couldn't do it before, because the equations are chaotic, so they couldn't model the approach well enough until now."

The orphan understood none of this. "Blanca wanted me to see the trimming! But I wanted to play a new game!"

Inoshiro laughed. "So what did ve do? Kidnap you?"

"I followed ver and ve jumped and jumped… and I followed ver!" The orphan made a few short jumps around the three of them, trying to illustrate the point, though it didn't really convey the business of leaping right out of one scape into another.

Inoshiro said, "Ssh. Here it comes."

The orphan followed vis gaze to an irregular lump of rock in the distance-lit by the sun, one half in deep shadow—moving swiftly and steadily toward the loose assembly of citizens. The scape software decorated the asteroid's image with gestalt tags packed with information about its chemical composition, its mass, its spin, its orbital parameters; the orphan recognized some of these flavors from the library, but it had no real grasp yet of what they meant. "One slip of the laser, and the fleshers die in pain!" Inoshiro's pewter eyes gleamed.

Blanca said dryly, "And just three hundred millennia to try again."

Inoshiro turned to the orphan and added reassuringly, "But we'd he all right. Even if it wiped out Konishi on Earth, we're backed-up all over the solar system."

The asteroid was close enough now for the orphan to compute its scape address and its size. It was still some hundred times more distant than the farthest citizen, but it was approaching rapidly. The waiting spectators were arranged in a roughly spherical shell, about ten times as large as the asteroid itself—and the orphan could see at once that if it maintained its trajectory, the asteroid would pass right through the center of that imaginary sphere.