Diaspora

He lay swearing for a while, then memories of a dream began to surface. Liana and Paolo had been arguing with him in the house in Atlanta, both trying to convince him that Paolo was her son. Liana had even shown him images of the birth. When Orlando had tried to explain about psychogenesis, Paolo had smirked and said, "Try doing that in a test tube!" Orlando had realized then that he had no choice: he was going to have to tell them about Lacerta. And though he'd been imagining that Paolo would escape unharmed, he could see now that this was impossible. Paolo was flesh, too. The robots would find three blackened corpses in the ruins.

Orlando closed his eyes and waited for the pain to recede. He'd told Paolo that he'd be staying frozen en route, utterly inert; he hadn't admitted to anyone that he'd chosen to dream instead. A wise omission, given Fomalhaut. That slumbering clone would have formally diverged into a separate individual; random noise in the embodiment software guaranteed that, even without different sensory inputs. But Orlando didn't think of it as a death; even his waking Earth-self's suicide didn't amount to that. He'd always intended to merge with every willing clone at the end of the Diaspora, and the loss of one or two of them along the way seemed no more tragic than losing his memories of one or two days in every thousand.

He left the cabin and walked barefoot through the cool grass to the edge of the flying island. The scape was dark as any moonless night on Earth, but the ground was even and the route familiar. He had gladly rid himself of the tedious business of defecation, but he was no more willing to give up the pleasure of emptying his bladder than he was willing to give up the possibility of sex. Both acts were entirely arbitrary, now that they were divorced from any biological imperative, but that only brought them closer to other meaningless pleasures, like music. If Beethoven deserved to endure, so did urination. He manipulated the stream into Lissajous figures as it vanished into the starry blackness beneath the jutting rock.

He'd forced only a little of his own nature onto Paolo—like any good bridger, just enough to let the two of them understand each other—and he'd gladly see subsequent generations embrace all the possibilities of software existence. But redesigning himself in an attempt to do the same in person would have been nothing but self-mutilation. That was why he dreamt the old way: confused, unconvincing, uncontrollable dreams, not the lucid, detailed, wish-fulfillment fantasies or cloyingly therapeutic psychodramas of the assimilated. His faithfully mammalian dreams would never bring Liana back; nor would they drag him down some tortuous path of allegory and catharsis designed to reconcile him to her loss. They revealed nothing, meant nothing, changed nothing. But to excise or disfigure them would have been like taking a knife to his flesh.

Voltaire lay low in the sky, in the direction Orlando thought of as east. It was a dim reddish speck at this distance, about as bright as Mercury seen from Earth, an ancient K5 star only one sixth as luminous as the sun. Five terrestrial planets, and five gas giants more in Neptune's league than Jupiter's, had been observed or inferred long before the Diaspora's launch, but individual spectra for the inner planets had continued to elude both the colossal instruments back home and the extremely modest equipment carried by the polis itself.

"What are you offering? Sanctuary?" He gazed at the star. Not likely. Just a few more barren planets. A few more lessons in the fragility of life, and the indifference of the forces that created and destroyed it.

Back in the cabin, Orlando considered ignoring the call and going straight hack to sleep. It would either be bad news—another Fomalhaut, or worse, or evidence of life so subtle that it had taken a century or two of exploration to uncover. Maybe one of the moons of one of the gas giants orbiting 51 Pegasus had yielded a few fossilized microbes in some previously uncharted crevice. Evidence of a third biosphere would be hugely significant, but he was tired of poring over the details of distant worlds in the pre-dawn darkness.

Then again, maybe the Orphean squid had finally gained an inkling of the nature of their floating universes. Orlando laughed wearily. He was jealous, but he was hooked; the chance of a development in squid culture was enough to puncture his indifference.

He clapped his hands, and the cabin fit up. He sat on his bed and addressed the wall screen. "Report." Text appeared, summarizing his exoself's reasons for waking him. Orlando could not abide non-sentient software that talked back.