Diaspora

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 Poincare, 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 for 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, hut 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; having 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 he tilted that far. The Hermits—and many other Poincareans 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.