Diaspora

by Greg Egan

Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory.

each successive wave enriching the pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients, establishing a hierarchy of scales.

That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin. Who is thinking this? I am.

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Hashim’s artwork had been elegant and moving – and even without the outlook running, the powerful emotions it had evoked lingered – but Yatima was unswayed from vis choice of vocation. Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drives that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth – but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.

Having successive versions of themselves so dissimilar would have made the whole experience too much like death.

It grafted the language into their minds, slipping new word sounds into all their symbols side by side with the linear versions, and binding alternative grammatical settings into their speech analysis and generation networks. Yatima felt distinctly stretched by the process – but vis symbols were still connected to each other in the same way as before. Ve was still verself.

Yatima tried to imagine an alien species with the retarded morality required for warfare and the technological prowess to manipulate neutron stars. It was a deeply unpleasant notion, but about as likely as the influenza virus inventing the H-bomb.

We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.’

Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando’s body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimise the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalised for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a grey mask over his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, compressing the brain into an ever-tighter description of itself, discarding redundancies as waste. Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystalline sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.

Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Inhabit a sixteen-dimensional slice of a thousand-dimensional frequency space?

Life – embedded in the accidental computations of Wang’s Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating to the world outside.

It was a mark of respect that they didn’t wrap their home in a protective sphere, or shift its orbit, or modify its sun. They slipped in a change at the lowest possible level, underneath the biochemistry.’

‘Wait. If our whole universe, our whole space-time, is the standard fibre for macrosphere physics, then our entire history only corresponds to an instant of macrosphere time. Their equivalent of a Planck moment. So how could the Transmuters create a sequence of particles, spread out in time?’

Taken together, the artifacts comprised a giant sculpture, spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions. The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn’t turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn’t reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they’d inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint. Yatima played with a model of the sculpture until ve found the right way to assemble it. Ve converted the scape to five dimensions, then held the figure out to Paolo. It was a four-legged, four-armed creature, with one arm stretched high above its head. No fingers; perhaps this was a stylised, post-Introdus version of the ancestral form. The tip of one foot was in the sixth macrosphere. The highest point of the Transmuter’s raised arm was in the level just beneath them, reaching up. To the infinite number of levels above. To all the worlds it would never see, never touch, never understand.