Diaspora

Yatima reached out to the scape and crumpled the satellite into a twisted ball of metal floating between them, leaving nothing but the Earth and the stars. Then ve reached out again and grabbed the sky, inverting it and compressing it into a luminous sphere sitting in vis hand.

"You can still leave Konishi." Yatima made the sphere emit the address of the portal to Carter-Zimmerman, and held it out to Inoshiro. "Whatever you've done, you still have that choice."

Inoshiro said gently, "It's not for me, Orphan. I wish you well, but I've seen enough."

Ve vanished.

Yatima floated in the darkness for a long time, mourning Lacerta's last victim.

Then ve sent the handful of stars speeding away across the emptiness of space, and followed them.

The conceptory observed the orphan moving through the portal, leaving Konishi polis behind. With access to public data, it knew of the orphan's recent experiences; it also knew that another Konishi citizen had shared them, and had not made the same choice. The conceptory wasn't interested in scattering Konishi shapers far and wide, like replicating genes; its goal was the efficient use of polis resources for the enrichment of the polis itself.

There was no way to prove causality, no way to he certain that any of the orphan's mutant shapers really were to blame. But the conceptory was programmed to err on the side of caution. It marked the old, unmutated values for the orphan's altered fields as the only valid codes, discarding all alternatives as dangerous and wasteful, never to be tried again.

PART THREE

Paolo said decisively, "What comes next is the Forge. You helped design it, didn't you?"

"I wouldn't go that far. I played a minor role."

Paolo grinned. "Success has a thousand parents, but failure is an orphan."

Yatima rolled vis eyes. "The Forge was not a failure. But the Transmuters won't want to hear about my towering contribution to analytic methods in relativistic electron plasma modeling."

"No? Well, I was never an insider at all, so whatever we tell them will have to come from you."

Yatima thought it over. "I knew the two people who really mattered." Ve smiled. "You could say it's a love story."

"Blanca and Gabriel?"

"Maybe I should have said 'triangle.'"

Paolo was baffled. "Who else was involved?"

"I never met her myself. But I think you can guess who I mean."

7

KOZUCH'S LEGACY

Carter-Zimmerman polis, Earth

24 667 274 153 236 CST

10 December 3015, 3:49:10.390 UT

Gabriel asked the Carter-Zimmerman library to show him every scheme on record for building a traversable wormhole. The problem had been studied long before the necessary technology was remotely within reach, both as an exercise in theoretical physics and as an attempt to map out the possibilities for future civilizations. It had seemed like an act of ingratitude, as well as a waste of resources, to discard the fruits of all this ancient labor and start again from scratch, so Gabriel had volunteered to sort through all the methods and machines advocated in the past and select the ten most promising candidates for detailed feasibility studies.

The library promptly constructed an indexscape with 3,017 different blueprints, laid out in a conceptual evolutionary tree which stretched across the scape's imaginary vacuum for hundreds of kilodelta. Gabriel was taken aback for a moment; he'd been aware of the numbers, but the visible history of the subject was still an intimidating sight. People had been contemplating wormhole travel for almost a millennium; longer, counting the early designs based on classical General Relativity, but it was with the advent of Kozuch Theory that the field had truly flourished.

In Kozuch Theory, wormholes were everything. Even the vacuum was a froth of short-lived wormholes when examined at the Planck-Wheeler length of ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five meters. As early as 1955, John Wheeler had suggested that the apparently smooth space-time of General Relativity would turn out to be a tangled maze of quantum wormholes at this scale, but it was another idea of Wheeler's—finally made to work, with spectacular success, by Renata Kozuch a hundred years later—that had transformed these wormholes from arcane curiosities far beyond the limits of detection into the most important structures in physics. The elementary particles themselves were the mouths of wormholes. Electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, W-Z bosons, gravitons, and gluons were all just the mouths of longer-lived versions of the fleeting wormholes of the vacuum.