Diaspora

Waiting for the long-nucleon facility to he completed, Yatima viewed images, relayed through two singularities, of the first wave of core-burst refugees arriving in U-star C-Z. Blanca was there, and Gabriel twice; some versions of him must have declined to merge. Yatima searched for Inoshiro, but the refugees were all from the Diaspora. No one had yet arrived from Earth.

In the fourth macrosphere, they carried out remote spectroscopy on the hundred nearest star systems. There was a planet labeled with heavy isotopes, 270 light years away. They named it Blanca. By the time they reached it, the core burst would have annihilated Swift, and the whole migration out of the home universe would he ancient history.

Yatima had vis exoself freeze ver for the journey.

When ve woke, and jumped from vis homescape Satellite Pinatubo, Paolo said flatly, "We've lost contact."

"How? Where?"

"The polis orbiting Yang-Mills can't communicate with the singularity station. The beacon seems to have vanished from the sky."

Yatima's first response was relief. A malfunction in the station's communications hardware wasn't as bad as one of the singularities slipping or decaying. They'd receive no more news from the lower levels, but there was nothing to stop them physically returning, repairing the fallible hardware along the way.

Unless the station had not only lost contact with the distant polis, it had also lost track of the Planck-sized singularity right beside it. The entire second macrosphere could vanish like a fiber in a haystack.

Yatima tried to read Paolo's gestalt. He'd clearly had time to think of the same scenario. "Are you okay?"

Paolo shrugged. "I knew the risks."

"We can turn back anytime you want to."

"If the station's been seriously damaged, we're already too late. The singularity's either been lost by now, or it hasn't; a few thousand years either way before we return won't make the slightest difference."

"Except that we'll know our fate sooner."

Paolo shook his head, with a determined smile.

"What if we go back, and find that everything's working perfectly except for the communications link? We'll feel like complete idiots. We'll have wasted centuries fur nothing."

"We could keep going here, but send clones of our selves back into the third macrosphere, to ride the polis to the station and check it out."

Paolo looked down impatiently at planet Blanca's cratered surface. "I don't want to do that. I don't want to split myself again, just to half turn back. Do you?"

Yatima said, "No."

"Then let's drop the seeds, and move on."

Paolo had spent some time awake in the fourth macrosphere, immersing himself in five-plus-one-dimensional physics, and he'd managed to design a vastly improved spectroscope. With this, they located the Transmuters' marker from the vicinity of the fifth macrosphere's singularity, on the second-closest star, which they dubbed Weyl.

The marker was still covering the rotational pole.

Yatima had vis exoself bring ver out of hibernation at the mid-point of the journey. Ve stood on the 5-space version of Satellite Pinatubo, feeling verself dissolving into the sparse sky. It was meaningless to ask how many universes each handful of vacuum here contained. The Handler's revelations meant that even in the home universe, there were an infinite number of levels below them.

Maybe there was life and civilization, star-farers and long-particle engineers in every universe. But even the Striders, even the Transmuters, could only ascend a finite distance. There could be a Diaspora slowly working its way up from a hundred thousand levels below the home universe, which no one horn in the Milky Way would ever know about.

But their own Diaspora had already overlapped with the Transmuters'. The space around them was infinite, but if they clung to the trail they'd never lose them. It was only a matter of time and persistence before they caught up.

Later, Paolo woke and joined ver. They sat on a girder, planning their meeting with the Transmuters. And the more they talked about it, the more confident Yatima felt that they didn't have far to go.

In the sixth macrosphere, there was an artifact drifting freely in space, a billion kilometers from the singularity.

It was an irregular shape, roughly spheroidal, two hundred and forty kilometers wide—the size of a large asteroid. It was not greatly pitted, but they were a long way from any star system full of debris. The surface was probably one or two million years old.

It was hard to obtain a spectrum in the faint starlight, and after waiting passively for a megatau for any signs of life, and then as long again for a response to a wide spectrum of radio and infrared signals, they agreed to risk brushing the surface gently with a laser.

They were not incinerated in retaliation.