Diaspora

It was a four-legged, four-armed creature, with one arm stretched high above its head. No fingers; perhaps this was a stylized, post-Introdus version of the ancestral form. The tip of one foot was in the sixth macrosphere. The highest point of the Transmuter's raised arm was in the level just beneath them, reaching up.

To the infinite number of levels above. To all the worlds it would never see, never touch, never understand.

They examined the record of communications failures. There'd been more than seven million broken links, and over ninety billion years of identified slippage in total. Statistically, by now it was beyond belief that at least one of the hundreds of trillions of singularities in the chain hadn't been lost by the machinery. And even if they could return to the second macrosphere—or some level above, if that universe had been deserted as its stars ran out of fuel—there'd be nothing for them. The Earth culture they'd known would either have merged with others from the second macrosphere, or simply evolved beyond recognition.

Yatima shut off the flow of gestalt from the log book and looked around the star-filled scape. "What now?"

Paolo said, "The other versions of me would have done everything I'm capable of doing. And lived better lives than any I could make for myself, here."

"We could keep traveling. Search for local civilizations."

"That could he a long, lonely voyage."

"If you want more company, we can always make some."

Paolo laughed. "You do have a beautiful icon, Yatima, but I can't see us making psychoblasts together,

"No." After a while Yatima said, "I'm not ready to stop. Not yet. Are you afraid to die alone?"

"It won't be death." Paolo seemed calm now, perfectly resolved. "The Transmuters didn't die; they played out every possibility within themselves. And I believe I've done the same, back in U-double-star… or maybe I'm still doing it, somewhere. But I've found what I came to find, here. There's nothing more for me. That's not death. It's completion."

"I understand."

Paolo took ancestral form, and immediately started trembling and perspiring. "Ah. Flesher instincts. Bad idea." He changed back, then laughed with relief. "That's better." He hesitated. "What will you do?"

"Go exploring, I think."

He touched Yatima's shoulder. "Good luck, then."

Paolo closed his eyes, and followed the Transmuters.

Yatima felt a wave of grief wash over ver, but Paolo was right; other versions had lived for him, nothing had been lost.

And as the grief decayed into loneliness, Yatima was tempted to apply the same logic. Vis' own clones must have done everything ve was contemplating, and more, long ago.

That wasn't enough, though. There were still some discoveries ve needed to make for verself.

Yatima surveyed the sky of this universe one last time, then jumped to the copy of the Truth Mines ve'd carried all the way from Konishi.

To play out everything ve was, to be complete, ve had to find the invariants of consciousness: the parameters of vis mind that had remained unchanged all the way from orphan psychoblast to stranded explorer.

Yatima looked around the jewel-studded tunnel, and sensed the gestalt tags of axioms and definitions radiating from the walls. Everything else from vis life in the home universe had been diluted into insignificance by the scale of their journey, but this timeless world still made perfect sense. In the end, there was only mathematics.

Ve began to review the simple concepts nearby—open sets, connectedness, continuity—waking old memories, resurrecting ossified symbols. It would be a long, hard journey to the coal face, but this time there'd he no distractions.

GLOSSARY

Address: A string of bits that specifies a source or destination for data, such as a file in a library, a camera on a satellite, or a location in a scape. Different addresses can be of different lengths, and the same data can have multiple addresses.

Boson: All elementary particles can be classified as either bosons or fermions; the bosons include photons and gluons. The quantum wave function for two or more identical bosons is unchanged if any two particles are swapped, and the wave function for a single boson is unchanged if the particle is rotated by 360 degrees. Bosons have a spin which is an integer multiple of the fundamental unit of angular momentum. In Kozuch Theory, all these properties arise from the topology of the particle's wormhole.

Citizen: Conscious software which has been granted a set of inalienable rights in a particular polis. These rights vary from polis to polis, but always include inviolability, a pro rata share of processing power, and unimpeded access to public data.

Coalition of Polises: (1) The community of all polis citizens. (2) The physical computer network which comprises all polises.