Diaspora

Hermann had moved the satellite into a notional orbit just below one of the scout probes, and changed the scape's scale so that the probe's lower surface, an intricate landscape of detector modules and attitude-control jets, blotted out half the sky. The atmospheric-entry capsules, ceramic teardrops three centimeters wide, burst from their launch tube and hurtled past like boulders, vanishing from sight before they'd fallen so much as ten meters closer to Orpheus. It was all scrupulously accurate, although it was part real-time imagery, part extrapolation, part faux. Paolo thought: We might as well have run a pure simulation… and pretended to follow the capsules down. Elena gave him a guilty/admonishing look. Yeah—and then why bother actually launching them at all? Why not just simulate a plausible Orphean ocean full of plausible Orphean lifeforms? Why not simulate the whole Diaspora? There was no crime of heresy in C-Z; the polis charter was just a statement of the founders' values, not some doctrine to be accepted under threat of exile. At times it still felt like a tightrope walk, though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those which contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those which were merely convenient, recreational, aesthetic (acceptable)… and those which constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).

The vote on the microprobes had been close: seventy-two percent in favor, just over the required two-thirds majority, with five percent abstaining. Citizens created since the arrival at Vega were excluded… not that anyone in Carter-Zimmerman would have dreamt of stacking the ballot, perish the thought. Paolo had been surprised at the narrow margin; he was yet to hear a single plausible scenario for the microprobes doing harm. He wondered if there was another, unspoken reason which had nothing to do with fears for the Orphean ecology, or hypothetical culture. A wish to prolong the pleasure of unraveling the planet's mysteries? Paolo had some sympathy with that impulse, but the launch of the microprobes would do nothing to undermine the greater long-term pleasure of watching, and understanding, as Orphean life evolved.

Liesl said forlornly, "Coastline erosion models show that the north-western shore of Lambda is inundated by tsunami every ninety Orphean years, on average." She offered the data to them; Paolo glanced at it, and it looked convincing, but the point was academic now. "We could have waited."

Hermann waved his eye-stalks at her. "Beaches covered in fossils, are they?"

"No, but the conditions hardly—"

"No excuses!" He wound his body around a girder, kicking his legs gleefully. Hermann had been scanned in the twenty-first century, before Carter-Zimmerman even existed, but over the teratau he'd wiped most of his episodic memories and rewritten his personality a dozen times. He'd once told Paolo, "I think of myself as my own great-great-grandson. Death's not so hard, if you do it incrementally. Ditto for immortality.

Elena said, "I keep trying to imagine how it will feel if another C-Z clone stumbles on something infinitely better—like aliens with shortened wormholes—while we're back here studying rafts of algae." Her icon was more stylized than usual: sexless, hairless and smooth, the face inexpressive and androgynous.

Paolo shrugged. "If they can shorten wormholes, the might visit us. Or share the technology, so we can link up the whole Diaspora. But I know what you mean: first alien life, and it's likely to be about as sophisticated as seaweed. It breaks the jinx, though. Seaweed every twenty-seven light years. Nervous systems every fifty? Intelligence every hundred?" He fell silent, abruptly realizing what she was feeling: electing not to wake again after first life was beginning to seem like the wrong choice, a waste of the opportunities the Diaspora had created. Paolo offered her mind graft expressing empathy and support, but she declined.

She said, "I want sharp borders, right now. I want to deal with this myself."

"I understand." He let the partial model of her which he'd acquired as they'd made love fade from his mind, heaving only an ordinary, guesswork-driven Elena-symbol, much like those he possessed for everyone else he knew. Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously; his lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and he'd more or less complied the only thing he still knew about her was the fact that she'd made the request.