Diaspora

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal. Ceremonial regression to the ancestral form every now and then kept his father happy and being a flesher was largely self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged from the experience he felt like he'd broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic, but the balance seemed right to Paolo; he enjoyed the sense of embodiment that came from a tactile surface and proprioceptive feedback, but only a fanatic could persist in simulating kilograms of pointless viscera, perceiving every scape through crippled sense organs, and subjugating vis mind to all the unpleasant quirks of flesher neurobiology.

Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

"Do you like our humble new meeting place?" Hermann floated by Paolo's shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense-organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. "We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It's desolate up here, I know, but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface."

Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe's close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, an expanse of barren red rock. "More desolate down there, I think." He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.

"Ignore Hermann. He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be." Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized face stippled in gold on each wing.

Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken he'd assumed that his friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobes, and only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. "What effects? The carpets—"

"Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we don't know what else is down there." As Liesl's wings fluttered, her mirror-image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. "With neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time resolution in seconds. We don't know anything about smaller lifeforms."

"And we never will, if you have your way." Karpal—an ex-gleisner, flesher-shaped as ever—had been Liesl's lover, last time Paolo was awake.

"We've only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There's still a wealth of data we could gather nonintrusively, with a little patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life—"

Elena said dryly, "Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would he fried by UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than we're already seeing in the surface water."

"Not necessarily. The carpets seem to he vulnerable, but other species might be better protected if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals."

Paolo smiled; he hadn't thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting for.

Liesl continued, "What is there to lose, by waiting a few hundred Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate patterns—and we could watch for anomalies, storms, and quakes, hoping for some revelatory glimpses."

A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo's ambivalence waned. If he'd wanted to inhabit geological time he would have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers rushed fast enough to watch Earth's mountains erode in kilotau. Orpheus hung in the sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to he understood.

He said, "But what if there are no 'revelatory glimpses'? How long do we wait? We don't know how rare life is—in time, or in space. If this planet is precious, so is the epoch it's passing through. We don't know how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets—and whatever else could die out before we'd learned the first thing about them. What a waste that would be!"

Liesl stood her ground.

"And if we damage the Orphean ecology—or culture—by rushing in? That wouldn't be a waste. It would he a tragedy."