Diaspora

He could choose to alternate between sets of symbols, one for 3-scapes and one for 5-scapes, with his exoself holding the untranslatable portion of his memories in storage. In effect, he would become two people, serial clones. Would that he so had? There were already a thousand of him, scattered across the Diaspora. But he'd come here to meet the Transmuters in person, not to give birth to a macrospherean twin who'd do it on his behalf. And the Diaspora's clones would all willingly merge and return to the restored Earth—if that was possible—but what would become of a clone who'd go insane from sensory deprivation in a rain forest, who'd stand beneath a midnight desert sky and scream with frustration at the pinhole view?

Orlando stripped away the enhancements completely, and felt like an amnesiac or an amputee. He stared at Poincare from the Flight Deck, more stupefied and frustrated than ever.

Paolo asked him how he was coping. He said, "I'm fine. Everything is fine."

He understood what was happening: he'd come as far as he could travel, while still hoping to return. There were no stable orbits here: you either approached this world at speed, grabbed what you needed, and retreated—or you let yourself be captured, and you spiraled down to collision.

"It's a subtle effect, but everywhere I've looked the whole ecosystem is slightly skewed in their favor. It's not that they dominate in terms of numbers or resource use, but there are certain links in the food chain—all of them ultimately beneficial to this species—that seem too robust, too reliable to be natural."

Elena was addressing most of U-star C-Z, eighty-five citizens assembled in a small meeting hall: a 3-scape for a change, and Orlando was grateful that someone else felt like a rest from macrospherean reality. The detailed mapping of Poincare had revealed no obvious signs of technological civilization, but the xenologists had identified tens of thousands of species of plant and animal life. As on Swift, it remained possible that the Transmuters were hiding somewhere in a well-concealed polis, but now Elena claimed to have found evidence of bioengineering, and the supposed beneficiaries seemed to he camouflaged by nothing more than the modest scale of their efforts.

The xenologists had pieced together tentative ecological models for all the species large enough to be visible from orbit in the ten regions they'd singled out for analysis; microbiota remained a matter for speculation. The giant "towers," now called Janus trees, grew along much of the coast, powered by the light shining up from the molten ocean. Each individual tree had a lateral asymmetry that looked utterly bizarre to Orlando, with leaves growing larger, more vertical and more sparsely distributed toward the inland side. The same morphological shift continued from tree to tree, between those directly exposed to the ocean light and the four or five less privileged ranks behind them. The leaves of the first rank were a vivid banana yellow on their ocean-facing hypersurface, and bright purple on the back. The second rank used the same purple to catch the waste energy of the first rank, and blue-green to radiate away its own. By the fourth and fifth rank, the leaves' pigments were all tuned to hues of "near-infrared," leaving them pale gray in "visible light." These color translations were faithful to the ordering of wavelengths, but the visible/infrared distinction was necessarily arbitrary, since it was clear that different species of Poincare life were sensitive to different portions of the spectrum.

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 egg-like sacs in nests or hanging clusters, nodules under Janus bark, dead, paralyzed, or oblivious prey, and even the corpses of their parents.