Diaspora

Ve extended the wormhole into a Kozuch diagram and began demonstrating some interactions with ordinary, short particles. "If you hit it with a neutrino, an antineutrino, an electron, or a positron, the effect propagates all the way along its length." Yatima watched, mesmerized; with each collision, even though the wormholes didn't splice, the structure deformed in a distinctive way, like a protein switching between metastable conformations.

"Okay. We can change its shape. But what does that achieve?"

"It makes certain vacuum wormholes real. It creates a stream of particles."

"Creates them where?" The long neutron threaded its way through billions of adjacent universes, but since the wormhole didn't open up into any of them, its presence barely registered. If it couldn't catalyze anything here, it had even less chance of doing so in any universe it merely passed through.

Blanca sent gestalt instructions to the diagram, and suddenly the catalyst was threaded with dozens of tangled, translucent membranes. As each electron or neutrino struck, and the catalyst changed shape, one of these faintly sketched vacuum wormholes became two real wormhole mouths racing apart through the space in which the catalyst was embedded.

That space was the macrosphere. The long neutrons were machines for creating particles in the macrosphere.

Yatima performed an elated backflip through the layered ocean, and found verself upside down. "Let me kiss your feet. You're a genius."

Blanca laughed, a remote sound from a hidden part of vis body. "It was a trivial problem. If you weren't rushing like a flesher, you would have solved it yourself long ago.

Yatima shook vis head. "I doubt it." Ve hesitated. "So do you think the Transmuters could have—?"

"Migrated? Upward! Why not? It's a closer escape route than heading for Andromeda."

Yatima tried to imagine it: a Diaspora into the macrosphere. "Wait. If our whole universe, our whole space-time, is the standard fiber for macrosphere physics, then our entire history only corresponds to an instant of macrosphere time. Their equivalent of a Planck moment. So how could the Transmuters create a sequence of particles, spread out in time?"

Blanca gestured at a portion of the catalyst. "Look more closely at this domain. Macrosphere space-time is woven out of vacuum wormholes, just like ours. It's the same kind of Kozuch-Penrose network, only five-plus-one dimensions instead of three-plus-one." Yatima righted verself for a better view, and peered at the multi-lobed knot Blanca was pointing to; it seemed to hook into the ghostly structures of the vacuum like a grapple. "They've pinned our time to macrosphere time. What would have been a fleeting Planck moment endures as a kind of singularity. And that singularity can emit and absorb particles in macrosphere time."

Yatima's mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn't indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they'd hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure.

"Wait. You said emit… and absorb? What happens if the singularity absorbs a macrosphere particle?"

"A small proportion of the catalysts change state. Which causes a small proportion of the long neutrons here to undergo beta decay, even if they're in supposedly stable nuclei. If you monitored a ton of Swift's atmosphere, you could detect absorption events with an efficiency of about one in ten billion." Yatima had positioned vis viewpoint in the same layer as Blanca's head, and ve caught a characteristic tilt of amusement. "So it might be worth trying. The Transmuters' macrosphere clones could be blasting messages at the singularity even as we speak."

"After a billion years? I doubt it. But they might still be nearby; the originals would have fled the galaxy, but the clones would have had no special reason to travel far from the singularity. So if we went into the macrosphere ourselves, we might still have a good chance of finding them."

If they could make contact with the Transmuters, they'd have a chance to learn the reasons for both Lacerta and the core burst, helping to convince the skeptics to protect themselves. And if there was no other choice, anyone who was willing could hide in the macrosphere to escape the burst.