"Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That's why we need to find another spacefaring civilization. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who've faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe."
Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral homescape. Twenty-four ragged oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong which had just fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colony—if that was what it was—might have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms. It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything that caught his interest; for the Diaspora's great discovery to remain nothing more than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.
He glanced at a schematic of the scout probes' neutrino detectors, but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to disrupt the balancing act. The carpets cast a shadow so faint, though, that even this near-perfect vision could barely resolve it.
Orlando Venetti said, "You're awake."
Paolo turned. His father stood an arm's length away, presenting as an ornately clad flesher of indeterminate age. Definitely older than Paolo, though; Orlando never ceased to play up his seniority—even if the age difference was only twenty-five percent now, and falling.
Paolo banished the carpets from the room to the space behind one pentagonal window, and took his father's hand. The portions of Orlando's mind which meshed with his own expressed pleasure at Paolo's emergence from hibernation, fondly dwelt on past shared experiences, and entertained hopes of continued harmony between father and son. Paolo's greeting was similar, a carefully contrived revelation of his own emotional state. It was more of a ritual than an act of communication, but then, even with Elena he set up harriers. No one was totally honest with another person-unless the two of them intended to fuse permanently.
Orlando nodded at the carpets. "I hope you appreciate how important they are."
"You know I do." He hadn't included that in his greeting, though. "First alien life." C-Z humiliates the gleisner robots, at last—that was probably how his father saw it. The robots had been first to Alpha Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planet, but first life was Apollo to their Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.
Orlando said, "This is the hook we need, to catch the citizens of the marginal polises. The ones who haven't quite imploded into solipsism. This will shake them up—don't you think?"
Paolo shrugged. Earth's citizens were free to implode into anything they liked; it didn't stop Carter-Zimmerman from exploring the physical universe. But even thrashing the gleisners wouldn't be enough for Orlando; like many carnevale refugees, he had a missionary streak. He wanted every other polis to see the error of its ways, and follow C-Z to the stars.
Paolo said, "Ashton-Laval has intelligent aliens. I wouldn't be so sure that news of giant seaweed is going to take Earth by storm."
Orlando was venomous. "Ashton-Laval intervened in its so-called 'evolutionary' simulations so many time that they might as well have built the end products in an act of creation lasting six days. They wanted talking reptiles, and mirabile dictu, they got talking reptiles. There are self-modified citizens in this polis more alien than the aliens in Ashton-Laval."
Paolo smiled. "All right. Forget Ashton-Laval. But forget the marginal polises, too. We choose to value the physical world. That's what defines us, but it's as arbitrary as any other choice of values. Why can't you accept that? It's not the One True Path which the infidels have to be bludgeoned into following." He knew he was arguing half for the sake of it, but Orlando always drove him into taking the opposite position.
Orlando made a beckoning gesture, dragging the image of the carpets halfway hack into the room. "You'll vote for the microprobes?"
"Of course."
"Everything depends on that, now. It's good to start with a tantalizing glimpse, but if we don't follow up with details soon they'll lose interest back on Earth very rapidly."
"Lose interest? It'll be fifty-four years before we know whether anyone paid the slightest attention in the first place."
Orlando regarded him with disappointment. "If you don't care about the other polises, think about C-Z. This helps us, it strengthens us. We have to make the most of that."
Paolo was bemused. "What needs to be strengthened? You make it sound like there's something at risk."
"There is. What do you think a thousand lifeless worlds would have done to us?"
"Isn't that entirely academic now? But all right, I agree with you: this strengthens C-Z. We've been lucky. I'm glad, I'm grateful. Is that what you wanted to hear?" Orlando said sourly.
"You take too much for granted."
"And you care too much what I think! I'm not your… heir." There were times when his father seemed unable to accept that the whole concept of offspring had lost its archaic significance. "You don't need me to safeguard the future of Carter-Zimmerman on your behalf. Or the future of the whole Coalition. You can do it in person."
Orlando looked wounded—a conscious choice, but it still encoded something. Paolo felt a pang of regret, but he'd said nothing he could honestly retract.
His father gathered up the sleeves of his gold and crimson robes—the only citizen of C-Z who could make Paolo uncomfortable to be naked—and repeated as he vanished from the room: "You take too much for granted."
The gang watched the launch of the microprobes together—even Liesl, though she came in mourning, as a giant dark bird. Karpal stroked her feathers nervously. Hermann appeared as a creature out of Escher, a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet—on legs with elbows—given to curling up into a disk and rolling along the girders of Satellite Pinatubo. Paolo and Elena kept saying the same thing simultaneously; they'd just made love.
Hermann had moved the satellite into a notional orbit just below one of the scout probes, and changed the scape's scale so that the probe's lower surface, an intricate landscape of detector modules and attitude-control jets, blotted out half the sky. The atmospheric-entry capsules, ceramic teardrops three centimeters wide, burst from their launch tube and hurtled past like boulders, vanishing from sight before they'd fallen so much as ten meters closer to Orpheus. It was all scrupulously accurate, although it was part real-time imagery, part extrapolation, part faux. Paolo thought: We might as well have run a pure simulation… and pretended to follow the capsules down. Elena gave him a guilty/admonishing look. Yeah—and then why bother actually launching them at all? Why not just simulate a plausible Orphean ocean full of plausible Orphean lifeforms? Why not simulate the whole Diaspora? There was no crime of heresy in C-Z; the polis charter was just a statement of the founders' values, not some doctrine to be accepted under threat of exile. At times it still felt like a tightrope walk, though, trying to classify every act of simulation into those which contributed to an understanding of the physical universe (good), those which were merely convenient, recreational, aesthetic (acceptable)… and those which constituted a denial of the primacy of real phenomena (time to think about emigration).