Diaspora

"So, what's new? What have I missed?" Blanca showed verself on the Hull no more than once or twice a year, letting the Osvalds assume that ve was spending the rest of the time frozen. Since ve'd chosen to wake at all only on this, the shortest of the journeys, such a watered-down approach to the Diaspora Experience must have struck vis fellow passengers as consistent, if not exactly laudable.

Merak rose up on her hind legs, frowning amiably, the veins in her throat beneath her violet hide still pulsing visibly after her sprint. "You really can't tell! Procyon's shifted almost a sixth of a degree since you were last here! And Alpha Centauri more than twice as much!" She closed her eyes, for a moment too blissed-out to continue. "Don't you feel it, Blanca? You must! That exquisite sense of parallax, of moving through the stars in three dimensions…"

Blanca had privately dubbed the citizens who used this outlook—most, but not all of them Star Puppies—"The Osvalds," after the character in Ibsen's Ghosts who ends the play repeating senselessly, "The sun. The sun." The stars. The stars. When they weren't speechless with joy over parallax shifts, they were mesmerized by the fluctuations of variable stars, or the slow orbits of a few easily resolved binaries. The polis was too small to be equipped with serious astronomical facilities, and in any case the Star Puppies stuck slavishly to their limited, mock-biological vision. But they basked in the starlight, and reveled in the sheer distance and time scales of the journey, because they'd reshaped their minds to render every detail of the experience endlessly pleasurable, endlessly fascinating, and endlessly significant.

Blanca stayed for a few kilotau, allowing Enif, Alnath, and Merak to lead ver all the way around the imaginary ship, pointing out hundreds of tiny changes in the sky and explaining what they meant, stopping now and then to show ver off to their friends. When ve finally hinted that vis time was almost up, they took ver to the nose and gazed reverently at their destination. In a year, Fomalhaut hadn't brightened noticeably, and there were no close stars to be seen streaming away from it, so even Merak had to admit that there was nothing much to single it out.

Blanca didn't have the heart to remind them that they'd deliberately blinded themselves to the most spectacular sign of the polis's motion: at eight percent of lightspeed, the Doppler-shift starbow centered on Fomalhaut was far too subtle for them to detect. The scape itself was based on data from cameras with single-photon sensitivity and sub-Angstrom wavelength resolution, so the sight was there for the asking, but the idea of cheating their embodiment to absorb this information directly, or even just constructing a false-color sky to exaggerate the Doppler effect to the point of visibility, would have filled them with horror. They were experiencing the trip through the raw senses of plausible space faring fleshers; any embellishments could only detract from that authenticity, and risk leading them into the madness of abstractionism.

Ve bid them farewell until next time. They gamboled around ver, protesting noisily and pleading with ver to stay, but Blanca knew they wouldn't miss ver for long.

Back in vis homescape, Blanca admitted to verself that ve'd actually enjoyed the visit. A brief dose of the Puppies' relentless enthusiasm always helped shake up vis perspective on vis own obsession.

Vis current homescape was a fissured, vitreous plain beneath a deep orange sky. Mercurial silver clouds just a few delta from the ground rose in updrafts, sublimated into invisible vapor, then re-condensed abruptly and sank again. The ground suffered quakes induced by forces from the clouds that had no analogue in real-world physics; Blanca was beginning to get a feel for the patterns in the sky that presaged the big ones, but the precise rules, complex emergent properties of the lower-level deterministic laws, remained elusive. This world and its seismology were just decoration and diversion, though. The reason ve'd elected to experience time on the voyage at all zig-zagged for kilodelta across the scape—and the trail of discarded Kozuch diagrams, failed attempts to solve the Distance Problem, would soon constitute the most significant feature of the plain, out-classing the fissures produced by even the strongest quakes.