Diaspora

Blanca stroked his hack. "I'm deeply touched. But don't you think you owe your colleagues—"

He disengaged from ver angrily. "All right. Have it your way. We'll join the crowd."

He jumped. Blanca followed. As they re-entered the scape in public mode it seemed to expand dramatically; half of Carter-Zimmerman was hovering in the space above the observation chamber, and the image had been re-scaled to fit them all in.

People recognized Gabriel at once, and flocked around to congratulate him. Blanca moved aside and listened to the excited well-wishers.

"This is it! Can you imagine the gleisners' reaction, when they arrive at the next star and find that we've beaten them to it?" The citizen's icon was an ape-shaped cage full of tiny yellow birds in constant flight.

Gabriel replied diplomatically, "We'll be avoiding their targets. That was always the plan."

"I don't mean we should explore the system in competition with them. Just leave an unmistakable sign." Blanca considered interjecting that the first few thousand wormholes they widened would be most unlikely to include any of the gleisners' immediate destinations, but then thought better of it.

On jumping to the scape, they'd synched by default to the average rate of its inhabitants, a rush of about a hundred thousand. It was fluctuating, though; some people were growing impatient, while others were trying to prolong the suspense. Blanca let verself drift with the average, enjoying the sense of being jostled through time by the whims of the crowd. Ve wandered through the scape, exchanging pleasantries with strangers, finding it hard to take the vast machinery of the observation chamber seriously so soon after experiencing it all on a scale where there'd barely been room to spread vis arms. Ve spotted Yatima in the distance, deep in conversation with other members of the Forge group, and felt an amusing surge of quasi-parental pride—even if most of the skills ve'd taught the orphan would have been more use to a Konishi Miner than a C-Z physicist.

As the moment approached, people started chanting a countdown. Blanca searched for Gabriel; he was surrounded by demonstrative strangers, but when he saw ver approaching he broke away.

"Five!"

Gabriel took vis hand. "I'm sorry."

"Four!"

He said, "I didn't want to be with the others. I didn't want to be with anyone but you."

"Three!"

Fear flashed in his eyes. "My outlook's programmed to cushion me, but I don't know how I'll take this."

"Two!"

"One traversable wormhole, and then the rest is mass-production. I've made this my whole life. I've made this my whole purpose."

"ONE!"

"I cap, find another goal, choose another goal, but then who will I be?"

Blanca reached up and touched his cheek, not knowing what to say. Vis own outlook was much less focused; ve'd never faced a sharp transition like this.

"ZERO!"

The crowd fell silent. Blanca waited for the uproar, the cheers, the screams of triumph. Nothing. Gabriel looked down, then Blanca did too. The femtomouth was scattering the lasers' ultraviolet, as ever, but no gamma rays were emerging.

Blanca said, "The other mouth must have drifted out of the focus."

Gabriel laughed nervously. "But it didn't. We were there, and the instruments said nothing." People around them were whispering their own theories discreetly, but their gestalt seemed more tolerantly amused than derisive. After eight centuries of setbacks, it would have been too good to be true if the Forge had delivered the definitive proof of its success at the first opportunity.

"Then there must be a calibration error. If the mouth drifted, but the instruments thought it was still at the focus, then the whole system needs to be recalibrated."

"Yes." Gabriel ran his hands through the fur of his face, then laughed. "Here I am expecting to fall off the edge of the world, and one more thing goes wrong to save me.”

"One final screw-up to smooth the transition. What more could you ask for?"

"Yeah."

"And then what?"

He shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by the whole question. "You said it yourself: linking the Forge is only the start. We haven't wrapped the universe in wormholes yet. And at this rate, there'll he screw-ups to smooth the transition for another eight hundred years."

Blanca spent half a gigatau exploring vis new imaginary world, fine-tuning the parameters and starting again a thousand times, but never intervening and sculpting the landscape directly. That was wicked—it made it less artful, and more mock-physical—but no one had to know. When ve opened it up to the public, people would marvel at its perfect blend of consistency and spontaneity.