Diaspora

"No." Yatima steeled verself, and pressed on. "All I'm saying is, if he asks you to take steps to make yourself safe—"

"I'm not going to humor him." Paolo laughed indignantly. "And I don't need some ex-Konishi solipsist to tell me about the traumas of carnevale."

"No?" Yatima scrutinized his face. "Maybe your mental architecture's closer to his, but you act like you have no idea what he's been through."

Paolo averted his eyes. "I know about Liana. But what could he have done? Forced her to use the Introdus? They both made the same decision. It wasn't his fault." He looked up defiantly. "And saving me from the core burst won't bring her back."

"No. It might not hurt Orlando, though."

After a while, Paolo said sullenly, "I could live with wasting a thousand years coding myself into some planet's topography, while being ridiculed by every sane person in the Diaspora. But if I start giving in to him, where does it end? If he thinks I'm migrating back to the flesh with him afterward—"

Yatima laughed. "Don't worry, he doesn't. And once he has lots of little flesher children, he'll probably disown you altogether. Write you off as an unfortunate mistake. You'll never hear from him again."

Paolo looked uncertain, then openly wounded.

Yatima said, "That was a joke."

Blanca floated in a tranquil ocean made up of distinct layers of pastel-colored fluids, each about a quarter of a delta deep, separated by sheets of opaque blue colloid. The only light seemed to come from a diffuse and all-pervasive bioluminescence. As Yatima swam across the scape toward ver, ve wondered whether ve should ask politely about this strange world's physics before pressing ver to explain the cryptic invitation.

"Hello Orphan." As Yatima's viewpoint moved from layer to layer, the intersections of the colloid sheets with Blanca's solid black absence looked like a diagram for a method of portraying a surface's critical points as a sequence of curves. One rough ellipse through vis shoulders spawned two ovals on either side on the plane below; each of these split into five smaller ovals, which vanished just before the trunk's ellipse fissioned. Unable to see the whole icon at once, Yatima found Blanca's gestalt almost unreadable. "It's been a while."

"More for you than me. How are you?" This clone had become estranged from Gabriel soon after arrival, and as far as Yatima knew, no one else had spoken to ver since vis own last visit.

Blanca ignored the question, or took it as rhetorical. "That was interesting data you sent me."

"I'm glad you had a look at it. Everyone else is stumped." Yatima had mailed ver a tag pointing to the neutron sequence, despite vis apparent lack of interest in Swift and the Transmuters; it seemed only right to let every clone of ver know that the Fomalhaut Blanca had been vindicated.

"It reminded me of Earth biochemistry."

"Really? In what way?" People had tried interpreting the data beyond the pixel array as a Swiftian genome, but Yatima doubted that even the quirkiest old SETI software would have attempted anything as absurd as a reading based on the DNA code.

"Just some rough analogies with protein folding. Both turned out to be specific examples of a much more general problem in N dimensions… but I won't bore you with that." Blanca made a series of holes in the colloid sheets in front of ver, creating a transparent void, a sphere about two delta wide. Ve thrust vis hands into this arena, and a tangled structure appeared between them, like an intricately warped chain of heads. The structure was complex, but somehow not quite organic-looking. More like a nanomachine that someone had been forced to design from a single, linear molecule, shaped by nothing but the angles of the bonds between consecutive atoms.

Blanca said, "There was nothing to decipher, nothing to decode. You've read all the messages that were there to be read. The rest of the neutron sequence isn't data at all; it's there to control the shape of the wormhole."

"The shape? What difference does the shape make?"

"It enables it to act as a kind of catalyst."

Yatima was dazed, but part of ver was thinking: How stupid of me. Of course. The neutrons served as an attention grabbing beacon from a distance, then a warning message close-up; ve should have guessed that there was an entirely separate third function buried in the remaining structure. "What does it do? Make other long neutrons? They built just one, and it replicated itself all over the planet?"

Blanca spun the wormhole, but not in any visible dimension; it flexed oddly as the view rotated into other hyperplanes. "No. Think about it, Yatima. It can't catalyze anything here. It has no shape in this universe, it's just another neutron to us."