Diaspora

Yatima laughed humorlessly. "Lac G-1's neutron stars were in orbit, too. They weren't supposed to fall together for another seven million years. So I wouldn't stake my life on conservation of angular momentum until I found out where it all went with Lacerta."

Paolo shrugged dismissively. The burden of proof wasn't his. Even if it was being read correctly, the Transmuters' message wasn't necessarily honest; even if it was honestly intended, that didn't mean it was infallibly true. And the failure to explain Lacerta hardly meant that conservation laws could be discarded at will. If it had been a purely theoretical argument, Yatima would have happily conceded every point.

Ve glanced around the Heart, trying to gauge the mood. People were talking quietly in small groups, edgy and subdued, but far from despairing. Since the neutron data had been released, Yatima had seen as wide a spectrum of responses in Voltaire C-Z as ve'd witnessed among the fleshers when they'd heard about Lacerta. Many citizens had simply refused to accept that the core burst was a real possibility—and a few had succumbed to paranoid fantasies to rival any flesher's, declaring that the Transmuters' message had been planted in order to induce a state of panic and decay among "rival" civilizations. Others were searching for ways to survive the event. Arranging to be in the shadow of a planet could shield the polises from gamma rays, but the neutrino flux would be unavoidable, and intense enough to damage even the most robust molecular structures. The most plausible scheme Yatima had heard so far involved encoding every polis's data as a pattern of deep trenches on a planetary surface, and then building a vast army of non-sentient robots on a variety of scales, from nanoware up, so numerous that there was a chance that the relatively few survivors would he capable of reconstructing the polis.

"Suppose this burst really is on its way, and the message is a warning." Paolo settled back in his chair, and regarded Yatima amiably. "Then having gone to the trouble of creating a whole planet's worth of coded neutrons out of the goodness of their hearts, why didn't the Transmuters leave us something more than the unpalatable facts? A few survival tips might have come in handy."

"Don't give up on the rest of the data yet; it might contain all kinds of things. Preferably instructions for shortening traversable wormholes. Failing that, a reliable technique for sealing and reopening their mouths; then we could hide inside one as a stream of nanomachines until the burst is over."

Contemplating that scenario gave Yatima severe claustrophobia, but Gabriel had gone even further and suggested that the undeciphered bulk of the neutron data might be the Transmuters themselves: digital snapshots entombed in the particles in the hope that post core-burst life, once such a thing evolved, would stumble upon them and obligingly restore them to active existence. If that was the case, they'd left no obvious clues for anyone aspiring to join them in their sanctuary—and if they'd known about the burst a billion years ago, it seemed far more likely that they'd set off for another galaxy, whether by wormhole or by more conventional means.

Paolo said, "So you think they used a straightforward pixel array for the warning, but then switched to some diabolical encryption technique for all the helpful advice? Why? A little winnowing of the species, maybe?"

Yatima shook vis head and answered plainly, ignoring the sarcasm. "Everything they've done has seemed bizarre or ambiguous at first—and then obvious and transparent once we've made sense of it. I don't believe any of it's been willfully obscure. And I don't believe their minds were so different from ours that we're in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes.

"But they couldn't have avoided making a few assumptions about the way we'd think, and the kind of technology we'd be using—and some of those assumptions are bound to be wrong. I can easily imagine a space-faring civilization that wouldn't have tried the neutron phase experiment in a million years. So maybe the meaning of the rest of the data will be inaccessible to us… but if it is, that won't be out of malice, and it won't be because their whole conceptual framework was beyond our comprehension. It will just be sheer bad luck."

Paulo gave up his smirk of tolerant amusement, as if reluctantly conceding that this was an appealing vision of the Transmuters, however naive. Yatima seized the moment.

"And whatever you think about the map yourself, just remember that Orlando can't dismiss it the way you can. Everything about this drags him back to Lacerta."

"I know that." He regarded Yatima irritably. "But the fact that it brings back painful memories doesn't make him right."