Diaspora

by Greg Egan

the creases on a flesher’s palm.

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

a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and grays, arranged in a pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating itself.

The “color space” of gestalt could be extended indefinitely,

Euler and Gauss were legendary miners

“Exponential growth is a curse in all its forms.

There was nothing in any scape or library file, any satellite feed or drone image, more beautiful than mathematics.

Regularities and periodicities – rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence.

it was the memes they came wrapped in that made them virulent.”

In most respects, the fleshers had a far harder time than the Coalition in trying to avoid cultural and genetic stagnation while eschewing the lunacy of exponential growth.

They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.”

We’re the ones still closest to the old drives. If anyone screws up and goes exponential, it will probably be us.”

“That’s a rich question, coming from a couple of lotus-eaters.”

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.

a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators.

Ve would probably choose to have most of it removed afterward; to Yatima this sounded like dismemberment,

Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.

in reality, they were a hundred meters underground in the middle of a wasteland,

a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving … including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs’ failings.

The beauty of the physical world had nothing to do with its power to harm – that was just the dogma of the dead statics in another guise – and everything to do with the simplicity and consistency of its laws.

We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”

it’s as arbitrary as any other choice of values.

And if they didn’t want to be seen, they were unlikely to send big, clumsy, millimeter-wide drones plowing through these puddles.

“The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything.

Even if it was being read correctly, the Transmuters’ message wasn’t necessarily honest; even if it was honestly intended, that didn’t mean it was infallibly true.

then our entire history only corresponds to an instant of macrosphere time.

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.

They’re not just immune to climate change and population swings; they’re immune to mutation, new species arising – anything short of Poincaré going supernova.

Orlando recalled the time when mind grafts had been fashionable, and they’d had to formally compose little packages of emotion to pass to each other; what a nightmare that had been.

two hundred trillion clock ticks