showing off his finely honed Hull-skills, but Blanca wondered what the others would have done if he'd misjudged the adhesion and launched himself into space. Would they have violated the carefully simulated physics and magicked him back down? Or would they have mounted a somber rescue mission?
'You're awake! Exactly one year later!'
'That's right. I've decided to become your vernal equinox, keeping you in touch with the rhythms of the home world.' Blanca couldn't help verself; ever since ve'd discovered that the Osvalds' outlook made them lap up any old astrobabble like this as if it was dazzlingly profound, ve'd been pushing the envelope in search of whatever vestigial sense of irony might have survived their perfect accommodation to the mental rigors of interstellar travel.
Enif sighed happily, 'You'll be our dark sun rising, a nostalgic afterimage on our collective retina!' The others had caught up, and the three of them began earnestly discussing the importance of remaining in synch with the Earth's ancient cycles. The fact that they were all fifth generation C-Z homeborn who'd never been remotely affected by the seasons didn't seem to rate a mention. When Carter-Zimmerman polis was cloned a thousand times and the clones launched toward a thousand destinations, the vast majority of citizens taking part in the Diaspora had sensibly decided to keep all their snapshots frozen until they arrived, side-stepping both tedium and risk. If a snapshot file was destroyed en route without having been run since the instant of cloning, that would constitute no loss, no death, at all. Many citizens had also programmed their exoselves to restart them only at target systems that turned out to be sufficiently interesting, eliminating even the risk of disappointment.
At the other extreme, ninety-two citizens had chosen to experience every one of the thousand journeys, and though some were rushing fast enough to shrink each trip to a few megatau, the rest subscribed to the curious belief that flesher-equivalent subjective time was the only 'honest' rate at which to engage with the physical world. They were the ones who required the most heavy-handed outlooks to keep them from going insane.
'So, what's new? What have I missed?' Blanca showed verself on the Hull no more than once or twice a year, letting the Osvalds assume that ve was spending the rest of the time frozen. Since ve'd chosen to wake at all only on this, the shortest of the journeys, such a watered-down approach to the Diaspora Experience must have struck vis fellow passengers as consistent, if not exactly laudable.
Merak rose up on her hind legs, frowning amiably, the veins in her throat beneath her violet hide still pulsing visibly after her sprint. 'You really can't tell! Procyon's shifted almost a sixth of a degree since you were last here! And Alpha Centauri more than twice as much!' She closed her eyes, for a moment too blissed-out to continue. 'Don't you feel it, Blanca? You must! That exquisite sense of parallax, of moving through the stars in three dimensions…'
Blanca had privately dubbed the citizens who used this outlook—most, but not all of them Star Puppies —'The Osvalds,' after the character in Ibsen's Ghosts who ends the play repeating senselessly, 'The sun. The sun.' The stars. The stars. When they weren't speechless with joy over parallax shifts, they were mesmerized by the fluctuations of variable stars, or the slow orbits of a few easily resolved binaries. The polis was too small to be equipped with serious astronomical facilities, and in any case the Star Puppies stuck slavishly to their limited, mock-biological vision. But they basked in the starlight, and reveled in the sheer distance and time scales of the journey, because they'd reshaped their minds to render every detail of the experience endlessly pleasurable, endlessly fascinating, and endlessly significant.
Blanca stayed for a few kilotau, allowing Enif, Alnath, and Merak to lead ver all the way around the imaginary ship, pointing out hundreds of tiny changes in the sky and explaining what they meant, stopping now and then to show ver off to their friends. When ve finally hinted that vis time was almost up, they took ver to the nose and gazed reverently at their destination. In a year, Fomalhaut hadn't brightened noticeably, and there were no close stars to be seen streaming away from it, so even Merak had to admit that there was nothing much to single it out.
Blanca didn't have the heart to remind them that they'd deliberately blinded themselves to the most spectacular sign of the polis's motion: at eight percent of lightspeed, the Doppler-shift starbow centered on Fomalhaut was far too subtle for them to detect. The scape itself was based on data from cameras with single- photon sensitivity and sub-Angstrom wavelength resolution, so the sight was there for the asking, but the idea of cheating their embodiment to absorb this information directly, or even just constructing a false-color sky to exaggerate the Doppler effect to the point of visibility, would have filled them with horror. They were experiencing the trip through the raw senses of plausible space faring fleshers; any embellishments could only detract from that authenticity, and risk leading them into the madness of abstractionism.
Ve bid them farewell until next time. They gamboled around ver, protesting noisily and pleading with ver to stay, but Blanca knew they wouldn't miss ver for long.
Back in vis homescape, Blanca admitted to verself that ve'd actually enjoyed the visit. A brief dose of the Puppies' relentless enthusiasm always helped shake up vis perspective on vis own obsession.
Vis current homescape was a fissured, vitreous plain beneath a deep orange sky. Mercurial silver clouds just a few delta from the ground rose in updrafts, sublimated into invisible vapor, then re-condensed abruptly and sank again. The ground suffered quakes induced by forces from the clouds that had no analogue in real-world physics; Blanca was beginning to get a feel for the patterns in the sky that presaged the big ones, but the precise rules, complex emergent properties of the lower-level deterministic laws, remained elusive. This world and its seismology were just decoration and diversion, though. The reason ve'd elected to experience time on the voyage at all zig-zagged for kilodelta across the scape—and the trail of discarded Kozuch diagrams, failed attempts to solve the Distance Problem, would soon constitute the most significant feature of the plain, out-classing the fissures produced by even the strongest quakes.
Blanca hovered at the fresh end of the trail, taking stock of vis recent dismal efforts. Ve'd spent the last few megatau trying to patch an ugly system of 'higher-order corrections' onto Kozuch's original model, infinite regresses of wormholes-within-wormholes which ve'd hoped might sum to arbitrarily large, but finite, lengths, hundred-billion-kilometer fractals packed into a space twenty orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. Before that, ve'd tinkered with the process of vacuum creation and annihilation, trying to get the space-time in the wormhole to expand and contract on cue as the mouths were repositioned. Neither approach had worked, and in retrospect ve was glad that they hadn't; these ad hoc modifications were far too clumsy to deserve to be true.
After being used to create the antihydrogen to fuel the Diaspora, the Forge had been reclaimed by the small group of particle physicists in Earth C-Z not terminally disillusioned by the failure of its original purpose. Their experiments had now probed every known species of particle down to the Planck-Wheeler length, and so long as no traversable wormholes were produced the results remained perfectly consistent with Kozuch Theory. To Blanca, this strongly suggested that Kozuch's original identification between particle types and wormhole mouths was correct, and whatever else needed to he overhauled or thrown out, that basic idea should remain intact as the core of a revised theory.
On Earth, though, there was a growing consensus that Kozuch's whole model had to be abandoned. The six extra dimensions which allowed the wormhole mouths their diversity were already being described as 'the mathematical fiction that misled physicists for two thousand years,' and theorists were urging each other to adopt a more 'realistic' approach with all the puritanical vigor of scourge-wielding penitents.
Blanca accepted that it was possible that all of Kozuch Theory's successful predictions were due to nothing but the 'mirroring' of the logical structure of wormhole topology in another system altogether. The motion under gravity of an object dropped down a borehole passing through the center of an asteroid obeyed essentially the same mathematics as the motion of an object tied to the free end of an idealized anchored spring—but pushing either model too far as a metaphor for the other generated nonsense. The success of Kozuch's model could be due to the fact that it was just an extremely good metaphor, most of the time, for some deeper physical process which was actually as different from extra-dimensional wormholes as a spring was different from an asteroid.
The trouble was, this conclusion fitted the prevailing mood in C-Z far too well: the recriminations over the failure of wormhole travel, the backlash against the other polises' continuing retreat from the physical world, and the increasingly popular doctrine that the only way to avoid following them was to anchor C-Z culture firmly to the rock of direct ancestral experience, and dismiss everything else as metaphysical indulgence. In that climate, Kozuch's six extra dimensions could never be more than the product of a temporary misunderstanding of what was really going on.
