from the experience he felt like he'd broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There were polises where the citizens would have found his present structure almost as archaic, but the balance seemed right to Paolo; he enjoyed the sense of embodiment that came from a tactile surface and proprioceptive feedback, but only a fanatic could persist in simulating kilograms of pointless viscera, perceiving every scape through crippled sense organs, and subjugating vis mind to all the unpleasant quirks of flesher neurobiology.
Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.
'Do you like our humble new meeting place?' Hermann floated by Paolo's shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense-organs, speaking through the vacuum in modulated infrared. 'We call it Satellite Pinatubo. It's desolate up here, I know, but we were afraid it might violate the spirit of caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface.'
Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probe's close-up of a typical stretch of dry land, an expanse of barren red rock. 'More desolate down there, I think.' He was tempted to touch the ground—to let the private vision become tactile—but he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a conversation was bad etiquette.
'Ignore Hermann. He wants to flood Orpheus with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be.' Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized face stippled in gold on each wing.
Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken he'd assumed that his friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobes, and only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. 'What effects? The carpets—'
'Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as they look, we don't know what else is down there.' As Liesl's wings fluttered, her mirror-image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. 'With neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time resolution in seconds. We don't know anything about smaller lifeforms.'
'And we never will, if you have your way.' Karpal—an ex-gleisner, flesher-shaped as ever—had been Liesl's lover, last time Paolo was awake.
'We've only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year! There's still a wealth of data we could gather nonintrusively, with a little patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life—'
Elena said dryly, 'Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would he fried by UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than we're already seeing in the surface water.'
'Not necessarily. The carpets seem to he vulnerable, but other species might be better protected if they live nearer to the surface. And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to dump a few cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals.'
Paolo smiled; he hadn't thought of that. A tsunami might be worth waiting for.
Liesl continued, 'What is there to lose, by waiting a few hundred Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal climate patterns—and we could watch for anomalies, storms, and quakes, hoping for some revelatory glimpses.'
A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia? Paolo's ambivalence waned. If he'd wanted to inhabit geological time he would have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers rushed fast enough to watch Earth's mountains erode in kilotau. Orpheus hung in the sky beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to he understood.
He said, 'But what if there are no 'revelatory glimpses'? How long do we wait? We don't know how rare life is—in time, or in space. If this planet is precious, so is the epoch it's passing through. We don't know how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpets—and whatever else could die out before we'd learned the first thing about them. What a waste that would be!'
Liesl stood her ground.
'And if we damage the Orphean ecology—or culture—by rushing in? That wouldn't be a waste. It would he a tragedy.'
Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his Earth-self-almost three hundred years' worth-before composing a reply. The early communications included detailed mind grafts, and it was good to share the excitement of the Diaspora's launch; to watch-very nearly firsthand-the thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of annihilation gamma rays. Then things settled down to the usual prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip, Carter-Zimmerman's ongoing research projects, the buzz of inter-polis cultural tensions, the not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the perceptual aesthetic overthrows the emotional, again… although Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have constructed a new synthesis of the two).
After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to hold things back; by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clone's demise, the messages had become pure gestalt-and-linear monologues. Paolo understood. It was only right; they'd diverged, and you didn't send mind grafts to strangers.
Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the ships, indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent a special message to the Vega-bound clone.
'The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just picked up clear signs of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate oceans waiting for you, if the models are right. So… good luck.' Vision showed the instrument's domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside; plots of the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. 'Maybe it seems strange to you, all the trouble we're taking to catch a glimpse of what you're going to see in close-up, so soon. It's hard to explain: I don't think it's jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.
'There's been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems.' Essays, pro and con, were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. 'I don't think the idea will gain much support, though—and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind.
'I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says understand and respect the universe… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all—and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to 'conquer' Earth, to steal their 'precious' physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of 'competition'… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do—knowing no better, having no choice.
'Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That's why we need to find another spacefaring civilization. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who've faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.'
Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral homescape. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong which had just fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colony—if that was what it was—might have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms. It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything that caught his interest; for the Diaspora's great discovery to remain nothing more than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.
He glanced at a schematic of the scout probes' neutrino detectors, but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to
