Swift.
But the Floating Island became unbearable, a straitjacket for his senses, a coffin with a nail-hole of sky. Every 3-scape was the same. Even with his three-dimensional vision fully restored, he couldn't back out the new symbols without also losing his memories of Poincare, and he could feel their lack of stimulation constantly, an absence as oppressive as if the world had turned a uniform white.
He could choose to alternate between sets of symbols, one for 3-scapes and one for 5-scapes, with his exoself holding the untranslatable portion of his memories in storage. In effect, he would become two people, serial clones. Would that he so had? There were already a thousand of him, scattered across the Diaspora. But he'd come here to meet the Transmuters in person, not to give birth to a macrospherean twin who'd do it on his behalf. And the Diaspora's clones would all willingly merge and return to the restored Earth—if that was possible —but what would become of a clone who'd go insane from sensory deprivation in a rain forest, who'd stand beneath a midnight desert sky and scream with frustration at the pinhole view?
Orlando stripped away the enhancements completely, and felt like an amnesiac or an amputee. He stared at Poincare from the Flight Deck, more stupefied and frustrated than ever.
Paolo asked him how he was coping. He said, 'I'm fine. Everything is fine.'
He understood what was happening: he'd come as far as he could travel, while still hoping to return. There were no stable orbits here: you either approached this world at speed, grabbed what you needed, and retreated —or you let yourself be captured, and you spiraled down to collision.
'It's a subtle effect, but everywhere I've looked the whole ecosystem is slightly skewed in their favor. It's not that they dominate in terms of numbers or resource use, but there are certain links in the food chain—all of them ultimately beneficial to this species—that seem too robust, too reliable to be natural.'
Elena was addressing most of U-star C-Z, eighty-five citizens assembled in a small meeting hall: a 3-scape for a change, and Orlando was grateful that someone else felt like a rest from macrospherean reality. The detailed mapping of Poincare had revealed no obvious signs of technological civilization, but the xenologists had identified tens of thousands of species of plant and animal life. As on Swift, it remained possible that the Transmuters were hiding somewhere in a well-concealed polis, but now Elena claimed to have found evidence of bioengineering, and the supposed beneficiaries seemed to he camouflaged by nothing more than the modest scale of their efforts.
The xenologists had pieced together tentative ecological models for all the species large enough to be visible from orbit in the ten regions they'd singled out for analysis; microbiota remained a matter for speculation. The giant 'towers,' now called Janus trees, grew along much of the coast, powered by the light shining up from the molten ocean. Each individual tree had a lateral asymmetry that looked utterly bizarre to Orlando, with leaves growing larger, more vertical and more sparsely distributed toward the inland side. The same morphological shift continued from tree to tree, between those directly exposed to the ocean light and the four or five less privileged ranks behind them. The leaves of the first rank were a vivid banana yellow on their ocean-facing hypersurface, and bright purple on the back. The second rank used the same purple to catch the waste energy of the first rank, and blue-green to radiate away its own. By the fourth and fifth rank, the leaves' pigments were all tuned to hues of 'near-infrared,' leaving them pale gray in 'visible light.' These color translations were faithful to the ordering of wavelengths, but the visible/infrared distinction was necessarily arbitrary, since it was clear that different species of Poincare life were sensitive to different portions of the spectrum.
Because most of the leaves in this 'canopy' were almost vertical, they obstructed the probes' view far less than if they'd faced the sky, and random gaps in the foliage exposed considerable two-dimensional vistas. A dazzling range of forest-dwellers had been observed, from large, carnivorous exothermic flyers and gliders—all eight-limbed, if wings were counted—to patches of something like fungus apparently feeding directly on the trees themselves. The sheer volume of forest available for observation, and the lack of both diurnal and seasonal rhythms, had allowed the xenologists to deduce many life cycles relatively quickly; very few species reproduced in synchrony, and those that did were only in lock-step over small regions, so individuals of every species at every age could be found somewhere. There were young born live and self-sufficient, while others developed in everything from pouches to egg-like sacs in nests or hanging clusters, nodules under Janus bark, dead, paralyzed, or oblivious prey, and even the corpses of their parents.
Inland, the forest blocked the ocean light, but life spilled into the shadow. Some animals migrated away from the coast to raise their young, closely followed by predators, but there were also local species, starting with plants feeding on nutrients washed out of the forest. Poincarean life employed no single, universal solvent, but half a dozen common molecules were liquid at coastal temperatures. Rain rarely fell on the forest itself, and the major rivers flowing from the barren interior to be vaporized when they hit the magma ocean contained little organic material, but enough high-altitude dew ran down the Janus trees and found its way inland, enriched with debris, to power a secondary ecosystem comprising several thousand species.
Including the Hermits.
Elena summoned up networks of estimated energy and nutrient flows for predation, grazing, parasitism and symbiotic relationships. 'The wider the analysis, the more the evidence mounts up. It's not just that they have no predators and no visible parasites; they also face no population pressure, no food shortages, no disease, Every other species is subject to chaotic population dynamics; even the Janus trees show signs of overcrowding and die-offs. But the Hermits sit in the middle of all those wild swings, untouched. It's as if the whole biosphere has been customized to shield them from anything unpleasant.'
She displayed a 5-image, and Orlando reluctantly switched his vision to view it properly. The Hermits, Elena explained, were limbless, mollusk-like creatures, living in stationary structures half excreted like shells, half dug our like burrows. They appeared to spend most of their lives inside these caves, feeding on hapless passers-by who fell into a slippery trench that led straight to the Hermits' mouthparts. No carnivore had evolved the tools required to winkle them out, and though many species were smart enough to avoid the trenches, there were always plenty of victims. And of the six million Hermits observed from orbit, none had yet been seen either to breed, or to die.
Karpal was skeptical. 'They're just a timid, sedentary species that's had good luck for the brief time we've been watching. I wouldn't be tempted to extrapolate their lifespan to six million times the observation period; we've yet to see any significant temperature fluctuations in the crust, and when they come along they must cause havoc. We should shift our resources to the deserts; if the Transmuters are on Poincare at all, they'll be as far away from the native life as possible. Why would they intervene on behalf of these creatures'
Elena replied stiffly, 'I'm not suggesting that they did. The Poincareans could have engineered the whole setup for themselves.'
'Have you caught them doing anything remotely like biotechnology?'
'No. But once they'd put themselves in an invulnerable niche, why would they need to make any more changes?'
Orlando said, 'Even if they're intelligent enough to have done that, if their idea of utopia is spending eternity sitting in a cave waiting for food to slide down their throats, what are they going to know about the Transmuters? Ten thousand blazing star ships might have flown past Poincare a billion years ago, but even if the Hermits have been around that long, they're not going to remember. They're not going to care.'
'We don't know that. Does Carter-Zimmerman on Earth look like a hive of intellectual curiosity? Can you tell what's stored in the polis library from one glance at the protective hull?'
Karpal groaned. 'Now you're taking Orpheus to heart. One biological computer on one playlet in another universe hardly proves—'
Elena retorted, 'One natural biological computer hardly proves that they're common products of evolution. But why shouldn't Poincarean life engineer them? No one objects to the notion that every technological civilization might undergo its own Introdus. If the Poincareans were skilled in biotechnology, why shouldn't they create a suitably tailored living species, instead of a machine?'
Paolo interjected cheerfully, 'I agree! The Hermits could be living polises, with the whole ecosystem as their power supply. But they need not have been built by native Poincareans. If the Transmuters arrived here and found no intelligent life, they might have tweaked the ecosystem to make a safe niche for themselves, then created the Hermits and migrated into them to while away the time in 3-scapes.'
Elena laughed uncertainly, as if she suspected she was being mocked. 'While away the time until
