DIVERGENCE
Konishi polis, Earth
24 667 272 518 451 CST
10 December 3015, 3:21:55.605 UT
Yatima looked down on the Earth through the window of the observation bay. The surface wasn't entirely obscured by NOx, but most of it appeared in barely distinguishable shades of muted, rust-tinged gray. Only the clouds and the ice caps stood out, back-lighting the stratosphere impartially to reveal it as a vivid reddish-brown. Spread over the clouds, spread over the snow, it looked like decaying blood mixed with acid and excrement: tainted, corrosive, rotten. The wound left by Lacerta's one swift, violent incision had festered for almost twenty years.
Ve and Inoshiro had constructed this scape together, an orbital way station where refugees could wake to a view of the world they'd left behind as surely as if they'd physically ascended beyond its acid snow and its blinding sky; in reality, they were a hundred meters underground in the middle of a wasteland, but there was no point confronting them with that claustrophobic and irrelevant fact. Now the station was deserted; the last refugees had moved on, and there'd be no more. Famine had taken the last surviving enclaves, but even if they'd hung on for a few more years, plankton and land vegetation were dying so rapidly that the planet would soon be fatally starved of oxygen. The age of flesh was over.
There'd been talk of returning, designing a robust new biosphere from the safety of the polises and then synthesizing it, molecule by molecule, species by species. Maybe that would happen, though support for the idea was already waning. It was one thing to endure hardship in order to go on living in a familiar form, another to he reincarnated in an alien body in an alien world, for the sake of nothing but the philosophy of embodiment. The easiest way by far for the refugees to re-create the lives they'd once led was to remain in the polises and simulate their lost world, and Yatima suspected that in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.
Inoshiro arrived, looking calmer than ever. The final trips they'd made together had been grueling; Yatima could still see the emaciated fleshers they'd found in one underground shelter, covered in sores and parasites, delirious with hunger. They'd kissed their robot benefactors' hands and feet, then vomited up the nutrient drink which should have healed their ulcerated stomach linings and passed straight into their bloodstreams. Inoshiro had taken that kind of thing badly, but in the last weeks of the evacuation ve'd become almost placid, perhaps because ve'd realized that the horror was coming to an end.
Yatima said, 'Gabriel tells me there are plans in Carter-Zimmerman to follow the gleisners.' The gleisners had launched their first inhabited fleet of interstellar craft fifteen years before, sixty-three ships heading out to twenty-one different star systems.
Inoshiro looked bewildered. 'Follow them? Why? What's the point of making the same journey twice?'
Yatima wasn't sure if this was a joke, or a genuine misunderstanding. 'They're not going to visit the same stars. They'll launch a second wave of exploration, with different targets. And they're not going to mess about with fusion drives like the gleisners. They're going in style. They plan to build wormholes.'
Inoshiro's face formed the gestalt for 'impressed' with such uncharacteristic purity and emphasis that any inflection hinting at sarcasm would have been redundant.
'The technology might take several centuries to develop,' Yatima admitted. 'But it will give them the edge in speed, in the long run. Quite apart from being a thousand times more elegant.'
Inoshiro shrugged, as if it was all of no consequence, and turned to contemplate the view.
Yatima was confused; ve'd expected Inoshiro to embrace the plan so enthusiastically that vis own cautious approval would seem positively apathetic. But if ve had to argue the case, so be it. 'Something like Lac G-1 might not happen so close to Earth again for billions of years, but until we know why it happened, we're only guessing. We can't even be sure that other neutron star binaries will behave in the same way; we can't assume that every other pair will fall together once they cross the same threshold. Lac G-1 might have been some kind of freakish accident that will never be repeated—or it might have been the best possible case, and every other binary might fall much sooner. We just don't know.' The old meson jet hypothesis had proved short-lived; no sign of the jets blasting their way through the interstellar medium had ever shown up, and detailed simulations had finally established that color-polarized cores, although strictly possible, were extremely unlikely.
Inoshiro regarded the dying Earth calmly. 'What harm could another Lacerta do, now? And what could anyone do to prevent it?'
'Then forget Lacerta, forget gamma-ray bursts! Twenty years ago, we thought the greatest risk to the Earth was an asteroid strike! We can't be complacent just because we survived this, and the fleshers didn't; Lacerta proves that we don't know how the universe works—and it's the things we don't know that will kill us. Or do you think we're safe in the polises forever?'
Inoshiro laughed softly. 'No! In a few billion years, the sun will swell up and swallow the Earth. And no doubt we'll flee to another star first… but there'll always be a new threat hanging over us, known or unknown. The Big Crunch in the end, if nothing else.' Ve turned to Yatima, smiling. 'So what priceless knowledge can Carter- Zimmerman bring back from the stars? The secret to surviving a hundred billion years, instead of ten billion?'
Yatima sent a tag to the scape; the window spun away from the Earth, then the motion-blurred star trails froze abruptly into a view of the constellation Lacerta. The black hole was undetectable at any wavelength, as quiescent in the region's high vacuum as the neutron stars had been, but Yatima imagined a speck of distorted darkness midway between Hough 187 and 10 Lacertae. 'How can you not want to understand this? It's just reached across a hundred light years and left half a million people dead.'
'The gleisners already have a probe en route to the Lac G-1 remnant.'
'Which might tell us nothing. Black holes swallow their own history; we can't count on finding anything there. We have to look further afield. Maybe there's another, older species out there, who'll know what triggered the collision. Or maybe we've just discovered the reason why there are no aliens crisscrossing the galaxy: gamma-ray bursts cut them all down before they have a hope of protecting themselves. If Lacerta had happened a thousand years ago, no one on Earth would have survived. But if we really are the only civilization capable of space travel, then we should be out there warning the others, protecting the others, not cowering beneath the surface —'
Yatima trailed off. Inoshiro was listening politely, but with a slight smile that left no doubt that ve was highly amused. Ve said, 'We can't save anyone, Yatima. We can't help anyone.'
'No? What have you been doing for the last twenty years, then? Wasting your time?'
Inoshiro shook vis head, as if the question was absurd.
Yatima was bewildered. 'You're the one who kept dragging me out of the Mines, out into the world! And now Carter-Zimmerman are going out into the world to try to keep what happened to the fleshers from happening to us. If you don't care about hypothetical alien civilizations, you must still care about the Coalition!'
Inoshiro said, 'I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there's nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death.'
'Oh, will you listen to yourself? Always! Always! You sound like that phosphoric acid replicator you fried outside Atlanta!' Yatima turned away, trying to calm down. Ve knew that Inoshiro had felt the death of the fleshers more deeply than ve had. Maybe ve should have waited before raising the subject; maybe it seemed disrespectful to the dead to talk so soon about leaving the Earth behind.
It was too late now, though. Ve had to finish saying what ve'd come here to say.
'I'm migrating to Carter-Zimmerman. What they're doing makes sense, and I want to be part of it.'
Inoshiro nodded blithely. 'Then I wish you well.'
'That's it? Good luck and bon voyage?' Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast's innocence. 'What's happened to you? What have you done to yourself?'
Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent.
It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving… including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning
