Diaspora

"You want me to find sanctuary, and still be dissatisfied?"

"Just a bit."

"You want me to dream in five dimensions?"

"Now and then."

Orlando spoke to his exoself, preparing the way, then stretched out a hand to the clone.

18

CENTERS OF CREATION

Carter-Zimmerman polis, U**

After seventy-nine days in the second macrosphere, Paolo still wanted to shout for joy. The singularity had turned out to lie deep within an elliptical galaxy, and the sky around Satellite Pinatubo was clogged with stars again. Poincare had possessed a terrible beauty, all its own, but seeing the familiar spectral classes scattered into new constellations sent a shudder of pleasant alienness through him that was utterly different from anything he'd felt in the macrosphere.

Elena, sitting beside him, swung her legs from the girder. "What's the relative volume of galactic to intergalactic space?"

"You mean here? I'm not sure."

Karpal said, "First estimate from the observatory data is about one in a thousand, depending on how you define the haloes."

"So is it just luck that we're not a million light years from the nearest star?"

"Ah." Paolo thought it over. "You think the Transmuters chose the singularity's position? How?"

"Vacuum is vacuum," Karpal ventured. "Until they created the singularity, it would have been meaningless to ask which point of space-time here was the macrosphere. Until that moment, there was only a set of indistinguishable quantum histories that included every possibility. So it's not as if they were stuck with any particular, preordained point."

Elena said, "No, but if they'd collapsed that set of histories at random, the most likely result would have been a singularity out in intergalactic space. So either they were very lucky, or they were able to bias the collapse."

"I say they biased the collapse. Using the shape of the wormhole. Making it bind preferentially to a certain level of gravitational curvature."

"Perhaps." Elena laughed, frustrated. "One more question to ask, if we ever catch up with them."

Paolo glanced at their destination, Noether, a hot, ultraviolet-tinged star with two waterless terrestrial planets. The Transmuters might well have chosen to settle in this four-dimensional universe in preference to the first macrosphere, but Paolo didn't have high hopes that they would have picked the Noether system as their new home; when they'd arrived, it wouldn't even have been the closest star, let alone the most hospitable. If these planets were deserted, it would only take one more singularity slip to eliminate any possibility of finding the Transmuters in time. He'd suggested to Orlando that many citizens would probably be willing to take refuge in the macrosphere, regardless; after all, if the neutron map had been misinterpreted and it was all a false alarm, there'd be nothing to stop them returning. Orlando had not been impressed. "A handful of people isn't enough. We have to convince everyone."

A segmented worm with six flesher legs appeared in the scape, winding its way around the girder. Paolo startled; the icon was exactly like Hermann's, but Hermann hadn't even entered the first macrosphere. And the worm wasn't radiating any signature tag at kill.

Paolo turned to Elena. "Is this some kind of juke"'

She looked at Karpal; he shook his head. "Not unless the joke's on all of us."

The worm drew nearer, eye-stalks quivering. Elena called out, "Who are you?" Anyone was welcome in Satellite Pinatubo, but appearing without a signature was very poor etiquette.

The worm replied, in Hermann's voice, "You don't wish to call me Hermann?"

Karpal asked coolly, "Are you Hermann?"

"No."

"Then we'd rather not call you Hermann."

The worm tipped its head from side to side, in a very Hermannesque way. "Then call me Contingency Handler."

Elena said, "We'd rather not call you that either. Who are you?"

The worm looked dejected. "I don't know what kind of answer you require."

Paolo examined the icon carefully, but there was no clue to its true nature. Some very odd programs ran in crevices of the polis, all of them supposedly well-understood and constrained, but over the millennia a few had surfaced in unexpected places. "What kind of software are you? Do you know that much?" If it was not a citizen, they'd be able to invoke operating system utilities to scrutinize it thoroughly, but it seemed only polite to ask it directly, first.

"I'm a Contingency Handler."

Paolo had never heard of such a thing. "You're not sentient?"

"No."

"Why are you using our friend's icon?"

"Because you know I can't be him, so that should cause the least confusion." The worm almost succeeded in making this sound reasonable.

Karpal asked, "Why are you talking to us at all?"

"One of my functions is to greet new arrivals."

Paolo laughed. "Elena and I are home-born, and if you're Karpal's automatic welcoming party, you're fifteen hundred years too late."