Diaspora

Ve and Inoshiro had constructed this scape together, an orbital way station where refugees could wake to a view of the world they'd left behind as surely as if they'd physically ascended beyond its acid snow and its blinding sky; in reality, they were a hundred meters underground in the middle of a wasteland, but there was no point confronting them with that claustrophobic and irrelevant fact. Now the station was deserted; the last refugees had moved on, and there'd be no more. Famine had taken the last surviving enclaves, but even if they'd hung on for a few more years, plankton and land vegetation were dying so rapidly that the planet would soon be fatally starved of oxygen. The age of flesh was over.

There'd been talk of returning, designing a robust new biosphere from the safety of the polises and then synthesizing it, molecule by molecule, species by species. Maybe that would happen, though support for the idea was already waning. It was one thing to endure hardship in order to go on living in a familiar form, another to he reincarnated in an alien body in an alien world, for the sake of nothing but the philosophy of embodiment. The easiest way by far for the refugees to re-create the lives they'd once led was to remain in the polises and simulate their lost world, and Yatima suspected that in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.

Inoshiro arrived, looking calmer than ever. The final trips they'd made together had been grueling; Yatima could still see the emaciated fleshers they'd found in one underground shelter, covered in sores and parasites, delirious with hunger. They'd kissed their robot benefactors' hands and feet, then vomited up the nutrient drink which should have healed their ulcerated stomach linings and passed straight into their bloodstreams. Inoshiro had taken that kind of thing badly, but in the last weeks of the evacuation ve'd become almost placid, perhaps because ve'd realized that the horror was coming to an end.

Yatima said, "Gabriel tells me there are plans in Carter-Zimmerman to follow the gleisners." The gleisners had launched their first inhabited fleet of interstellar craft fifteen years before, sixty-three ships heading out to twenty-one different star systems.

Inoshiro looked bewildered. "Follow them? Why? What's the point of making the same journey twice?"

Yatima wasn't sure if this was a joke, or a genuine misunderstanding. "They're not going to visit the same stars. They'll launch a second wave of exploration, with different targets. And they're not going to mess about with fusion drives like the gleisners. They're going in style. They plan to build wormholes."

Inoshiro's face formed the gestalt for "impressed" with such uncharacteristic purity and emphasis that any inflection hinting at sarcasm would have been redundant.

"The technology might take several centuries to develop," Yatima admitted. "But it will give them the edge in speed, in the long run. Quite apart from being a thousand times more elegant."

Inoshiro shrugged, as if it was all of no consequence, and turned to contemplate the view.

Yatima was confused; ve'd expected Inoshiro to embrace the plan so enthusiastically that vis own cautious approval would seem positively apathetic. But if ve had to argue the case, so be it. "Something like Lac G-1 might not happen so close to Earth again for billions of years, but until we know why it happened, we're only guessing. We can't even be sure that other neutron star binaries will behave in the same way; we can't assume that every other pair will fall together once they cross the same threshold. Lac G-1 might have been some kind of freakish accident that will never be repeated—or it might have been the best possible case, and every other binary might fall much sooner. We just don't know." The old meson jet hypothesis had proved short-lived; no sign of the jets blasting their way through the interstellar medium had ever shown up, and detailed simulations had finally established that color-polarized cores, although strictly possible, were extremely unlikely.

Inoshiro regarded the dying Earth calmly. "What harm could another Lacerta do, now? And what could anyone do to prevent it?"

"Then forget Lacerta, forget gamma-ray bursts! Twenty years ago, we thought the greatest risk to the Earth was an asteroid strike! We can't be complacent just because we survived this, and the fleshers didn't; Lacerta proves that we don't know how the universe works—and it's the things we don't know that will kill us. Or do you think we're safe in the polises forever?"