DIASPORA
Carter-Zimmerman polis, Earth
55 721 234 801 846 CST
31 December 3999, 23:59:59.000 UT
Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first, but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by decree, but the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude, the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.
The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotropic. As the moment of Diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. The scape was full of birds and insects, rodents and small reptiles-decorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer; anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints. Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.
Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen possible fates.
11
WANG'S CARPETS
Carter-Zimmerman polis, Orpheus orbit
65 494 173 543 415 CST
10 September 4309, 17:12:20.569 UT
An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted. One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anti-climax, certainly—but there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone who really mattered to him lived in Carter-Zimmerman, but not all of them had chosen to take part in the Diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the thousand ships were safely dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And remaining a member of the Coalition, plugged into the entire global culture in real time, would have been an attraction in itself.
Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated—but nonsentient—self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren, had seemed likely to be an enriching experience for him, with the distinct advantage that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Z's population would have fallen by more than half, and many of his closest friends would have been absent, but he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.
Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.
Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous signs of life. That was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the moment of the prelaunch cloning—a subjective instant before the chimes had sounded—no reports of even the simplest alien life had reached Earth from the gleisners. There'd been no guarantee that any part of the C-Z Diaspora would find it.
Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target stars, twenty-seven light years from Earth. Theirs was the first ship to reach its destination; the ship aimed at Fomalhaut had been struck by debris and annihilated en route. Paolo found it hard to grieve for the ninety-two citizens who'd been awake; he hadn't been close to any of them prior to the cloning, and the particular versions who'd willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar space seemed as remote as the victims of Lacerta.
He examined his new home star through the cameras of one of the scout probes—and the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with prominences. Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as hot, sixty times as luminous. Burning hydrogen fast, and already halfway through its allotted five hundred million years on the main sequence.
Vega's sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to the best interferometers in the solar system; now Paolo gazed down on its blue-green crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly warmer—a billion kilometers took the edge off Vega's heat—and almost drowning in liquid water. Paolo rushed at a thousand times flesher, allowing C-Z to orbit the planet in twenty subjective tau; daylight unshrouded a broad new swath with each pass. Two slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both poles—far more so in the north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic darkness.
The Orphean atmosphere was mostly nitrogen—six times as much as on Earth—with traces of water vapor and carbon dioxide, but not enough of either for a runaway greenhouse effect. The high atmospheric pressure meant reduced evaporation—Paolo saw not a wisp of cloud—and the large, warm oceans in turn helped lock up carbon dioxide. The gamma-ray burst from Lacerta had been even stronger here than on Earth, but with no ozone layer to destroy, and an atmosphere routinely ionized by Vega's own intense ultraviolet, any change in the chemical environment or the radiation levels at low altitudes would have been relatively minor. The whole system was young by Earth standards, still thick with primordial dust. But Vega's greater mass, and a denser protostellar cloud, would have meant swifter passage through most of the traumas of birth: nuclear ignition and early luminosity fluctuations; planetary coalescence and the age of bombardments. The library estimated that Orpheus had enjoyed a relatively stable climate, and freedom from major impacts, for at least the past hundred million years.
Long enough for primitive life to appear
A hand seized Paolo firmly by the ankle and tugged him beneath the water. He offered no resistance, and let the vision of the planet slip away. Only two other people in C-Z had free access to this scape—and his father didn't play games with his now twelve-hundred-year-old son.
Elena dragged him all the way to the bottom of the pool, before releasing his foot and hovering above him, a triumphant silhouette against the bright surface. She was flesher-shaped but obviously cheating; she spoke with perfect clarity, and no air bubbles at all.
'Late sleeper! I've been waiting five megatau for this!'
Paolo feigned indifference, but he was fast running out of breath. He had his exoself convert him into an amphibious exuberant—biologically and historically authentic, though none of his own ancestors had taken this form. Water flooded into his modified lungs, and his modified brain welcomed it.
He said, 'Why would I want to waste consciousness, sitting around waiting for the scout probes to refine their observations? I woke as soon as the data was unambiguous.' She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down, instinctively reducing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the bottom of the pool, kissing.
Elena said, 'You know we're the first C-Z to arrive, anywhere? The Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So there's only one other pair of us. Back on Earth.'
