what''
'Until something evolved here—a species worth talking to. Or someone arrived, like us.'
The debate dragged on, but no conclusions were reached. On the evidence, the Hermits might have been anything from random beneficiaries of natural selection to the secret masters of Poincare.
A vote was taken, and Karpal lost. The deserts were too vast to search, with no clear target. The expedition would concentrate its resources on the Hermits.
Orlando moved slowly across the luminous rock, grit registering painlessly on the sole of his single, broad, undulating foot. He felt naked and vulnerable outside his cave; twenty kilotau playing Hermit, riding this puppet on the hypersurface of Poincare, and he could empathize that much. Or perhaps he just preferred the view through the narrow tunnel because it helped cut the five-dimensional landscape down to size.
When he knew he was in sight of his neighbor, he extruded nine batons and performed gesture 17, the only sequence he hadn't tried before. It felt almost as if he was spreading his hands and waggling his fingers, executing a fragment of sign language committed to memory without knowing its meaning.
He waited, peering down the tunnel into the pearly light of the alien's multiply-reflected body heat.
Nothing.
Real Hermits left their caves almost exclusively for the purpose of building new ones; whether they outgrew the old ones, wanted a better food supply, or were moving away from some source of danger or discomfort remained obscure. Occasionally two naked Hermits crossed paths; nine megatau of ground-level observations by a swarm of atmospheric probes had yielded a grand total of seventeen such encounters. They did not appear to fight or to copulate, unless they managed to do so at a distance with secretions too subtle to detect, hut they did extrude several stalk-like organs up to twelve hypercylinders which Elena had dubbed 'batons'—and wave them at each other as they passed.
The theory was that these were acts of communication, but with such a tiny sample of encounters to analyze it was impossible to infer anything about the hypothetical Hermitian language. In desperation, the xenologists had constructed a thousand Hermit robots and had them dig and excrete caves of their own, unnaturally close to real ones, in the hope that this would provoke some kind of response. It hadn't, though there was still the possibility of a robot-Hermit encounter if one of the neighbors ever decided to leave and build a new cave.
Non-sentient software usually controlled the robots, but a few citizens had taken to riding them as Puppets, and Orlando had dutifully joined in. He was beginning to suspect that the Hermits were every bit as stupid as they seemed, which was more a relief than a disappointment; having wasted so much time on them wouldn't be half as bad as being forced to accept that an intelligent species had willingly engineered itself into this cul-de-sac.
Orlando tried to look up at the sky, but his body was unable to comply; the infrared-sensitive hypersurface of his face could not he tilted that far. The Hermits—and many other Poincareans observed their surroundings by a form of interferometry; instead of using lenses to form an image, they employed arrays of photoreceptors and analyzed the phase differences between the radiation striking different points of the array. Limited to non-invasive observations of living Hermits and microprobe autopsies of other species' corpses, no one really knew how the Hermits saw their world, but the color and spacing of the receptors supported one obvious guess: they could see by the thermal glow of the landscape itself. Heated by their bodies, their caves were slightly warmer than most surrounding rock, so they spent their lives cocooned in light. In his own cave, Orlando had adjusted the brightness he perceived until he found the ambiance vaguely comforting, but that was as far as he was prepared to go in finding Hermit experiences pleasurable. When small spiked octapods slid into his mouth, he turned and spat them out through the cave's second tunnel. However stupid these creatures were, he wasn't willing to slaughter them for the sake of empathizing with the Hermits, or to try to authenticate an act of mimicry that had probably been flawed from the start.
His exoself pasted a window of text into the scape, a weirdly disorienting intrusion. The two-dimensional object occupied a negligible portion of his field of view—in both hyperal directions it was slender as a cobweb—but the words still seized his attention as if they'd been thrust into his face in a 3-scape, blocking out everything else. When he scanned the window consciously to read the news, he felt a strong sense of deja vu, as if he'd already taken in the whole page at a glance.
Swift C-Z had lost contact with them for almost three hundred years. On the macrosphere side, the link had never fallen silent: the stream of photons created by the singularity had stuttered straight from one data packet time-stamped 4955 UT, to another from 5242. But the citizens of Swift C-Z had just emerged from a long nightmare, wondering year after year if the reciprocal beta decays would ever resume.
Orlando jumped back to the Floating Island, the cabin, his 3-body. He sat on the bed, shivering. They weren't stranded. Not yet. The room was familiar, comforting, plausible—but it was all a lie. None of it could exist outside the polis: the wooden floor, the mattress, his body, were all physically impossible. He'd traveled too far. He could not hold on to the old world, here. And he could not embrace the new.
He couldn't stop shivering. He stared up at the ceiling, waiting for it to split open and allow the reality around him to come flooding in. Waiting for the macrosphere to strike like lightning. He whispered, 'I should have died in Atlanta.'
Liana replied distinctly, 'No one should have died. And no one should die in the core burst. Why don't you stop bleating and do something useful?'
Orlando wasn't fooled or confused for a moment—it was an auditory hallucination, a product of stress—but he grabbed the words like a lifeline. Liana would have goaded him out of self-pity; that much of her survived in his head.
He forced himself to concentrate. Somehow, the singularity had slipped—which meant the Transmuters' long-neutron anchor, binding the home universe to macrosphere time, was losing its grip. Yatima, Blanca, and all the other dazzlingly brilliant experts in extended Kozuch Theory had failed to predict anything of the kind—which meant no one would know if, or when, or by how many centuries it might slip again.
But once or twice more could easily be enough to carry them right past the core burst.
The news might jolt the others into cloning the polis and searching for the Transmuters elsewhere. But even without another singularity slip they'd barely have time to visit two or three more stars. And while every instinct he possessed told him that the Hermits were dumb animals, every instinct he possessed was too far from the world that had shaped it to know gauche from droit.
Playing Hermit would never be enough to reach them. Riding a robot, reshaping his body image, crawling around on the hypersurface would never be enough. It was no use pretending that a single mind could embrace Earth and Poincare, U and U-star, three dimensions and five. Escape and crash. No one could bend that much; he had to break.
Orlando told his exoself, 'Build a copy of the cabin. Here.' He gestured at one wall and it turned to glass; behind it, like an uninverted mirror image, the room was repeated in every detail. 'Thicken it into a 5-scape.'
Nothing seemed to change, but he was seeing only the three-dimensional shadow.
He steeled himself. 'Now clone me in there, in my 5-body, with all macrospherean visual symbols.'
Suddenly he was inside the 5-scape. He laughed, hugging himself with all four arms, trying not to hyperventilate. 'No Alice jokes, Liana, please.' He had to concentrate to find the two-dimensional slice of the tesseract wall that revealed the adjoining three-dimensional cabin; it was like staring at a tiny peep-hole. His paper-doll original, the unchanged Orlando, pressed a hand against the glass in a vaguely reassuring gesture, trying not to appear too relieved. And in truth, in spite of the panic he felt, he was relieved himself not to be confined in that claustrophobic sliver of a world any more.
He caught his breath. 'Now adjoin the robot's scape.' The opposite wall became transparent, and behind it he could see the hypersurface of Poincare; the robot was still standing a few delta from the entrance to the real Hermit's cave.
'Remove the robot. Clone me in there, with the Hermit body-image and senses, and Elena's gestural language. And—' He hesitated. This was it, the spiral down. 'Tear out every symbol relating to my old body, my old senses.'
Ve was on the hypersurface. Through a floating four-dimensional window, he could see—with the xenologists' best-guess Hermitian vision—the 5-cabin and its occupant, all the colors translated into false heat tones. The whole scene was obviously physically impossible: surreal, absurd. The 3-scape of the original cabin
