Diaspora

Orlando shrugged. "Then if the whole Coalition has to make a one-way trip into the macrosphere, so be it."

He spoke with defiant equanimity, but the prospect was almost unbearable. He'd always told himself that there'd be a way through: that he'd die in the flesh, with a flesher child to bury him, on a world where he could promise a thousand generations that no fire and no poison would rain from the sky. If the macrosphere was the only true sanctuary, his choice of futures came down to faking the entire fantasy in a 3-scape, or embodying himself in the alien chemistry of this universe and trying to raise a child on a world more surreal than anything in Ashton-Laval.

Paolo managed to display contrition on his altered face, visible to Orlando's altered eyes. "Forget about one-way trips. If we can talk to the Transmuters at all, they're more likely to tell us that we misread everything. There was no warning, there'll be no core burst. We simply got it wrong."

Probes were sent ahead to Poincare on fast, single-pass trajectories. Orlando watched the images accumulate, the curved stripes of instrument footprints barely scratching the star's hypersurface with medium-resolution topographic and chemical maps. Glimpses of the folded mountain ranges and igneous plains of the continents' interiors appeared strikingly organic to his old-world sensibilities; there were wind-blasted plateaus whorled like fingerprints, channels carved by lava flows more elaborate than capillary systems, plumes of frozen magma extruding spikes like riotous fungal growths. Poincare's sky was permanently dark, but the landscape itself was radiant with heat flowing up from the core, glowing at wavelengths analogous to near-infrared: on the border between the energy levels for lepton transitions and molecular vibrations. There were traces of rings and branched chains based on atom 27 in the absorption spectra of the atmosphere above much of the interior, but the most complex chemical signatures were found near the shores.

There were also tall structures clustered around the coastal regions that did not appear to be plausible products of mere erosion or tectonics, crystallization or volcanism. These towers were ideally placed to extract energy from the temperature difference between the magma oceans and the relatively cool interiors, though whether they were Poincare's equivalent of giant trees or some form of artifact was unclear.

A second wave of probes was placed in powered orbits, pushing themselves in against the outer rim of their angular momentum ridges so that engine failure would see them flung away into deep space, not crashing to the ground. Comparisons of scale with the home universe were slippery, but if the 5-bodies they'd chosen were used as measuring rods, Poincare's hypersurface could hold ten billion times as many denizens as the Earth—or conceal a few thousand industrial civilizations in the cracks between its putative forests and vast deserts. Mapping the entire star at a resolution guaranteed to reveal or rule out even a Shanghai-sized pre-Introdus city was a task akin to mapping every terrestrial planet in the Milky Way. The circular band of images collected by one probe as it completed one orbit of the hypersphere amounted to less than a pinprick, and even when the orbit was swept 360 degrees around the star, the sphere it traced out was about as significant, proportionately, as one shot of one location on an ordinary globe. As Carter-Zimmerman itself moved into a distant powered orbit, Orlando began to find the view from the Flight Deck overwhelming: too detailed and complex to take in, too distracting not to try. Every glance was like a blast of dense atonal music; the only choice was to shut it out, or to listen attentively and still tail to make sense of it. He considered further modifications to his mind; no native, no acclimatized macrospherean would respond to the sight of their world as if it were a drug-induced hallucination, less a vision than a mass-stimulation of networks signaling perceptual breakdown.

He had his exoself enhance his visual cortex further, wiring in a collection of symbols responding to various four-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional borders—all plausible primitive forms, likely to be no more exotic to macrosphereans than a mountain or a boulder was to a flesher. And the view of Poincare was tamed, parsed into this new vocabulary, though it remained a thousand times denser than any satellite view of the Earth or Swift.

But the Floating Island became unbearable, a straitjacket for his senses, a coffin with a nail-hole of sky. Every 3-scape was the same. Even with his three-dimensional vision fully restored, he couldn't back out the new symbols without also losing his memories of Poincare, and he could feel their lack of stimulation constantly, an absence as oppressive as if the world had turned a uniform white.