Diaspora

by Greg Egan

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.