'So?' Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if any other version of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell each of the remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. 'What ant I meant to say? You're a thousand times more precious to me, now?'

'Yes.'

'Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred times would he closer to the truth.'

'There's no poetry in five hundred.'

'Don't he so defeatist. Rewire your language centers.'

She ran her hands along the sides of his ribcage, down to his hips. They made love with their almost- traditional bodies-and brains; Paolo was amused to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into overdrive, but he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his self-consciousness and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasn't like making love in an civilized fashion—the rate of information exchange between them was minuscule, for a start—but it had the raw insistent quality of most ancestral pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay beneath the radiant sunless sky. Paolo thought: I've crossed twenty-seven light years in an instant. I'm orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And I've sacrificed nothing—left nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selves—it was hard to imagine them faring as well, without Elena, without Orpheus—but there was nothing he could do about that, now. Although there'd be time to confer with Earth before any more ships reached their destinations, he'd decided prior to the cloning not to allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by any change of heart. Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them were powerless to alter the criteria for waking. The self with the right to choose for the thousand had passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would find—or construct—their own reasons for happiness. And there was still the chance that one of them would wake to the sound of four chimes.

Elena said, 'if you'd slept much longer, you would have missed the vote.'

The vote? The scouts in low orbit had gathered what data they could about Orphean biology. To proceed any further, it would be necessary to send microprobes into the ocean itself—an escalation of contact which required the approval of two thirds of the polis. There was no compelling reason to believe that the presence of a few million tiny robots could do any harm; all they'd leave behind in the water was a few kilojoules of waste heat. Nevertheless, a faction had arisen that advocated caution. The citizens of Carter-Zimmerman, they argued, could continue to observe from a distance for another decade, or another millennium, refining their observations and hypotheses before intruding… and those who disagreed could always sleep away the time, or find other interests to pursue.

Paolo delved into his library-fresh knowledge of the 'carpets,' the sole Orphean lifeform detected so far. They were free-floating creatures living in the equatorial ocean depths—apparently destroyed by UV if they drifted too close to the surface, but sufficiently well-shielded in their normal habitat to have been completely oblivious to Lacerta. They grew to a size of hundreds of meters, then fissioned into dozens of fragments, each of which continued to grow. It was tempting to assume that they were colonies of single-celled organisms, something like giant kelp, but there was no real evidence yet to back that up. It was difficult enough for the scout probes to discern the carpets' gross appearance and behavior through a kilometer of water, even with Vega's copious neutrinos lighting the way; remote observations on a microscopic scale, let alone biochemical analyses, were out of the question. Spectroscopy revealed that the surface water was full of intriguing molecular debris, but guessing the relationship of any of it to the living carpets was like trying to reconstruct flesher biochemistry by studying their ashes.

Paolo turned to Elena. 'What do you think?'

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to death while he slept. 'The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly what the carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. What's the risk? Culture shock?'

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the impulse seemed to come with the amphibian body. 'You can't be sure that they're not intelligent.'

'Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million years after it was formed?'

'Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isn't Earth, though.'

'True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are intelligent, do you think they'd notice the presence of robots a millionth their size? If they're unified organisms, they don't appear to react to anything in their environment—they have no predators, they don't pursue food, they just drift with the currents—so there's no reason for them to possess elaborate sense organs at all, let alone anything working on a sub-millimeter scale. And if they're colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens to collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors… what conceivable harm could that do?'

Paolo shrugged. 'I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety.'

Elena splashed him back. 'The only way to deal with your ignorance is to vote to send down the microprobes. We have to he cautious, I agree, but there's no point being here if we don't find out what's happening in the oceans, right now. I don't want to wait for this planet to evolve something smart enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If we're not willing to take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before we learn anything.'

It was a throwaway line, but Paolo tried to imagine witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheans—or would they have lost interest and departed for other stars, or modified themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its data backed up to all the far-flung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the moment or they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget that they'd ever made the journey.

'We can't lie here forever; the gang's all waiting to see you.'

'Where?' Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a realtime image of the Mount Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording wouldn't be the same.

'I'll show you.'

Paolo reached over and took her hand, then followed her as she jumped. The pool, the sky, the courtyard vanished—and he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again… nightside, but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio to the multicolored shimmer of isotopic gamma rays and backscattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a glance, now. The ocean's smoothly tapered thermal glow spelled three-hundred Kelvin instantly—as well as back-lighting the atmosphere's tell-tale infrared silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder. One edge of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him from zenith to nadir; aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each absorption and emission line, Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more familiar than strange, and he recognized most of the old signposts by color. Once he had his bearings, the direction they'd taken became clear from the way the nearer stars had gained or lost brightness. The once- dazzling Sirius was the most strikingly diminished, so Paolo searched the sky around it. Five degrees away south, by parochial Earth reckoning—faint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside him, superficially unchanged, although they'd both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this scape mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free-fall and vacuum, but it wasn't set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of flesh and blood. Their bodies were now just ordinary C-Z icons, solid and tangible but devoid of elaborate microstructure—and their minds weren't embedded in the scape at all, but were running as pure Shaper in their respective exoselves.

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal. Ceremonial regression to the ancestral form every now and then kept his father happy and being a flesher was largely self-affirming, while it lasted—but every time he emerged

Вы читаете Diaspora
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату