Diaspora

Elena took Paolo's hand and spoke to him privately. "I don't think it means new arrivals to C-Z."

Paolo stared at the worm. It waved its eye-stalks endearingly. "Where did you originate? What part of the polis?"

It seemed to have trouble parsing the question. It replied tentatively, "The outside part?"

"I don't believe you." He turned to Elena. "Come on! This is a hoax! How could anyone break into the hardware in interstellar space, enter a scape, and imitate Hermann?"

The worm said, "Your data protocols were easy to determine from inspection. The appearance of Hermann was encoded in your minds."

Paolo felt his certainty wavering. The Transmuters might be able to do it: read and decode the whole polis in mid-flight, laying bare their nature, their language, their secrets. Their Orphean selves had done as much with the carpets, short of actively entering the squid's world and making contact with them.

Elena asked the worm, "Who created you?"

"Another Contingency Handler."

"And who created that?"

"Another Contingency Handler."

"How many Contingency Handlers are there in this chain?"

"Nine thousand and seventeen."

"And then what?"

The worm pondered the question. "You're not interested in any level of non-sentient software, are you!!!"

Elena replied patiently, "We're interested in everything, but first we'd like to know about the sentient beings who created the system that spawned you."

The worm waved one leg at the sky. "They evolved on a planet, but they're more diffuse now, each individual spread out across the space between a million stars. That makes them much slower to act than you, which is why they can't greet you in person."

Karpal asked, "A planet in this universe?"

"No. They came here in the same manner as you, but not by the same route." It created a diagram of nested spheres floating beside the girder, showing a path leading up through a hierarchy of no less than seven universes. A second path, linking just three universes, met the first path at the top level; C-Z's own route, presumably. The worm's creators hadn't arrived via the same macrosphere; they'd never been near Poincare, let alone Swift. They were not the Transmuters.

Paolo was growing skeptical again. Maybe this was Hermann, disguised as an imitation of himself, an unheralded migrant via the singularity links or a stowaway just out of hiding. Certainly, no one else would attempt such a convoluted prank.

He said sarcastically, "Seven levels? Why so few?"

"That was the length of their journey. They chose to stop here."

"But there are more levels? They could have gone further?"

"Yes."

"How can you know that?"

The worm replaced the diagram with another, showing two neutron stars in orbit. "The fate of such a system puzzles you?" It gazed at Paolo earnestly; he nodded, unable to reply. Not even Hermann would joke about Lacerta.

The neutron stars circled each other slowly, confined to a translucent plane representing their universe. The worm added two more planes, above and below, with stars drifting across them at random: adjacent universes, separated by one quantum of distance in the macrospherean dimensions. "The interaction between these universes is very weak, but there are critical values of angular momentum where it reaches a maximum."

Karpal interjected angrily, "We know that! But it's too weak to explain Lac G- 1! The effect is orders of magnitude less than gravitational radiation. And there's no chance of a runaway spiral; once the system loses angular momentum and falls below the critical value, the coupling strength plummets and the whole process becomes even slower!"

The worm said, "With one or two levels, or six or seven, that would be true. A tiny amount of angular momentum would be lost due to random interactions with bodies in adjacent universes, and the effect would be insignificant. But each four-dimensional universe is not surrounded merely in six dimensions by adjacent universes in the same macrosphere. Nor is it surrounded only in ten dimensions, by universes in other macrospheres. There are an infinite number of levels, an infinite number of extra dimensions. So every four-dimensional universe interacts with an infinite number of adjacent universes."

The two extra planes in the diagram doubled into four, then eight, boxing the orbiting neutron stars in a cube. Then the cube mutated into a series of polyhedrons with an ever-increasing number of faces, each face representing part of an adjacent universe. The polyhedrons blurred into a sphere, swarming with stars passing "nearby" in a continuum of neighboring universes—all of them weakly tugging on the neutron-star binary.