Diaspora

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 had 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 Poincare 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 Poincare, they've never left, they've never traveled. But don't 'took 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."

"Where?" Even the closest star might take too long to reach, if the singularity slipped again. "Are they in the desert? In a polis?"

"No."

"Which star, then?" Maybe there was still hope, if they used all their fuel for a fast one-way voyage, and relied on signaling back to the station rather than returning physically.

"No star—or none that the Hermits could point to. They're not in the macrosphere at all."

"You mean… they found a way to enter another four-dimensional universe? To break in?" Orlando hardly dared believe it; if it was true, they could bring everyone through to the macrosphere, wait for the radiation to pass, then borrow the Transmuters' trick to get back to the home universe itself—whether or not any robots survived on Kafka or Swift.

The clone smiled wistfully. "Not quite. But the good news is, the second macrosphere is four-dimensional."

Part Seven

Paolo stared into the red-shift, back toward the singularity.

"I wish it had been me in his place."

Yatima said, "Bridging with the Hermits didn't destroy him. And maybe he was better suited for the task than anyone."

Paolo shook his head. "It was still too much."

"Better than just coming along for the ride. Better than being superfluous."

Paolo turned to ver and said ruefully, "Tell me about it."

17

PARTITION OF UNITY

Carter-Zimmerman polis, U*

Orlando had given up on 5-scapes, so he stood in a shadow-scape of the Long Nucleon Facility, waiting to bid Paolo farewell, The scape was a dense maze of plumbing and wiring, with every pipe and cable in the real, penteractal building squashed together into a crowded cubical space.