Diaspora

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to death while he slept. "The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly what the carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. What's the risk? Culture shock?"

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the impulse seemed to come with the amphibian body. "You can't be sure that they're not intelligent."

"Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million years after it was formed?"

"Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isn't Earth, though."

"True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are intelligent, do you think they'd notice the presence of robots a millionth their size? If they're unified organisms, they don't appear to react to anything in their environment—they have no predators, they don't pursue food, they just drift with the currents—so there's no reason for them to possess elaborate sense organs at all, let alone anything working on a sub-millimeter scale. And if they're colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens to collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors… what conceivable harm could that do?"

Paolo shrugged. "I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety."

Elena splashed him back. "The only way to deal with your ignorance is to vote to send down the microprobes. We have to he cautious, I agree, but there's no point being here if we don't find out what's happening in the oceans, right now. I don't want to wait for this planet to evolve something smart enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If we're not willing to take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before we learn anything."

It was a throwaway line, but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they have lost interest and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data backed up to all the far-flung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the moment or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget that they'd ever made the journey.

"We can't lie here forever; the gang's all waiting to see you."

"Where?" Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a realtime image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn't be the same.

"I'll show you."

Paolo reached over and took her hand, then followed her as she jumped. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again… nightside, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio to the multicolored shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and backscattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean's smoothly tapered thermal glow spelled three-hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as back-lighting the atmosphere's tell-tale infrared silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder. One edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir; aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line, Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange, and he recognized most of the old signposts by color. Once he had his bearings, the direction they'd taken became clear from the way the nearer stars had gained or lost brightness. The once-dazzling Sirius was the most strikingly diminished, so Paolo searched the sky around it. Five degrees away south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside him, superficially unchanged, although they'd both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this scape mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free-fall and vacuum, but it wasn't set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their bodies were now just ordinary C-Z icons, solid and tangible but devoid of elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren't embedded in the scape at all, but were running as pure Shaper in their respective exoselves.