Diaspora

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 Poincare, 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 Poincare; 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.