"What?"
Ve reached down and took his hand. "Jump with me."
"Where?"
"Not to another scape. Here. Over the edge."
Gabriel regarded ver dubiously, but he rose to his feet. "Why?"
"It will make you feel better."
"I doubt it."
"Then do it for me."
He smiled ruefully. "All right."
They stood on the edge of the rock, feeling the dust swirl down around their feet. Gabriel said, surprised, "It makes me uneasy, just knowing that I'm going to give tip control of my icon. Must be something vestigial. You know even winged exuberants had a strong reaction against free fall? Diving was often a useful maneuver for them, but they retained an instinctive desire to put an end to it as soon as possible."
"Well, don't panic and fly off, or I'll never forgive you. Ready?"
"No." Gabriel craned his neck forward. "I really don't like this."
Blanca squeezed his hand and stepped forward, and the laws of the imaginary world sent them tumbling down.
9
DEGREES OF FREEDOM
Carter-Zimmerman polis, interstellar space
58 315 855 965 866 CST
21 March 4082, 8:06:03.020 UT
Blanca felt obliged to visit the Hull at least once a year. Everyone in Carter-Zimmerman knew that ve'd chosen to experience some subjective time on the trip to Fomalhaut—despite Gabriel's decision to remain frozen for the duration—and there was really only one acceptable reason for doing that.
"Blanca! You're awake!" Enif had spotted ver already, and he bounded toward ver on all fours across the micrometeorite-pitted ceramic, sure-footed as ever. Alnath and Merak followed, at a slightly more prudent velocity. Most of the Osvalds used embodiment software to simulate hypothetical vacuum-adapted fleshers, complete with airtight, thermally insulating hides, infrared communication, variably adhesive palms and soles, and simulated repair of simulated radiation damage. The design was perfectly functional, but since each space-going clone of Carter-Zimmerman polis was barely larger than one of these Star Puppies, having the real things as passengers was out of the question. The Hull was just a plausible fiction, a synthetic scape melding the real sky with an imaginary spacecraft hundreds of meters long; thousands of times heavier than the polis, it could only have been real if they'd postponed the Diaspora for a few millennia in order to manufacture enough antihydrogen to fuel it.
Enif almost collided with ver, but he swerved aside just in time, barely maintaining his grip. He was always showing off his finely honed Hull-skills, but Blanca wondered what the others would have done if he'd misjudged the adhesion and launched himself into space. Would they have violated the carefully simulated physics and magicked him back down? Or would they have mounted a somber rescue mission?
"You're awake! Exactly one year later!"
"That's right. I've decided to become your vernal equinox, keeping you in touch with the rhythms of the home world." Blanca couldn't help verself; ever since ve'd discovered that the Osvalds' outlook made them lap up any old astrobabble like this as if it was dazzlingly profound, ve'd been pushing the envelope in search of whatever vestigial sense of irony might have survived their perfect accommodation to the mental rigors of interstellar travel.
Enif sighed happily, "You'll be our dark sun rising, a nostalgic afterimage on our collective retina!" The others had caught up, and the three of them began earnestly discussing the importance of remaining in synch with the Earth's ancient cycles. The fact that they were all fifth generation C-Z homeborn who'd never been remotely affected by the seasons didn't seem to rate a mention. When Carter-Zimmerman polis was cloned a thousand times and the clones launched toward a thousand destinations, the vast majority of citizens taking part in the Diaspora had sensibly decided to keep all their snapshots frozen until they arrived, side-stepping both tedium and risk. If a snapshot file was destroyed en route without having been run since the instant of cloning, that would constitute no loss, no death, at all. Many citizens had also programmed their exoselves to restart them only at target systems that turned out to be sufficiently interesting, eliminating even the risk of disappointment.
At the other extreme, ninety-two citizens had chosen to experience every one of the thousand journeys, and though some were rushing fast enough to shrink each trip to a few megatau, the rest subscribed to the curious belief that flesher-equivalent subjective time was the only "honest" rate at which to engage with the physical world. They were the ones who required the most heavy-handed outlooks to keep them from going insane.
"So, what's new? What have I missed?" Blanca showed verself on the Hull no more than once or twice a year, letting the Osvalds assume that ve was spending the rest of the time frozen. Since ve'd chosen to wake at all only on this, the shortest of the journeys, such a watered-down approach to the Diaspora Experience must have struck vis fellow passengers as consistent, if not exactly laudable.
Merak rose up on her hind legs, frowning amiably, the veins in her throat beneath her violet hide still pulsing visibly after her sprint. "You really can't tell! Procyon's shifted almost a sixth of a degree since you were last here! And Alpha Centauri more than twice as much!" She closed her eyes, for a moment too blissed-out to continue. "Don't you feel it, Blanca? You must! That exquisite sense of parallax, of moving through the stars in three dimensions…"
Blanca had privately dubbed the citizens who used this outlook—most, but not all of them Star Puppies—"The Osvalds," after the character in Ibsen's Ghosts who ends the play repeating senselessly, "The sun. The sun." The stars. The stars. When they weren't speechless with joy over parallax shifts, they were mesmerized by the fluctuations of variable stars, or the slow orbits of a few easily resolved binaries. The polis was too small to be equipped with serious astronomical facilities, and in any case the Star Puppies stuck slavishly to their limited, mock-biological vision. But they basked in the starlight, and reveled in the sheer distance and time scales of the journey, because they'd reshaped their minds to render every detail of the experience endlessly pleasurable, endlessly fascinating, and endlessly significant.
Blanca stayed for a few kilotau, allowing Enif, Alnath, and Merak to lead ver all the way around the imaginary ship, pointing out hundreds of tiny changes in the sky and explaining what they meant, stopping now and then to show ver off to their friends. When ve finally hinted that vis time was almost up, they took ver to the nose and gazed reverently at their destination. In a year, Fomalhaut hadn't brightened noticeably, and there were no close stars to be seen streaming away from it, so even Merak had to admit that there was nothing much to single it out.
Blanca didn't have the heart to remind them that they'd deliberately blinded themselves to the most spectacular sign of the polis's motion: at eight percent of lightspeed, the Doppler-shift starbow centered on Fomalhaut was far too subtle for them to detect. The scape itself was based on data from cameras with single-photon sensitivity and sub-Angstrom wavelength resolution, so the sight was there for the asking, but the idea of cheating their embodiment to absorb this information directly, or even just constructing a false-color sky to exaggerate the Doppler effect to the point of visibility, would have filled them with horror. They were experiencing the trip through the raw senses of plausible space faring fleshers; any embellishments could only detract from that authenticity, and risk leading them into the madness of abstractionism.