Karpal watched the animation with a dazed expression. Elena touched his arm. "Are you all right?"
He nodded. Paolo knew that this was what he'd joined the Diaspora to find, as much as any planet's refugee. He'd watched from the moon as Lacerta spiraled down, unable to make sense of the process, while thousands of fleshers died because no one could explain it, no one could convince them it was real.
Paolo was feeling disoriented himself. The Transmuters remained as elusive as ever, but this non-sentient tool of another civilization entirely had just casually answered the question that had driven the Diaspora across three universes.
Or half the question.
He summoned up a map of the Milky Way, every star labeled with gestalt tags indicating mass and velocity. "Can you read this?"
"Yes." The worm added candidly, "I know what you're going to ask. What's the fate of the core?"
Paolo was suddenly grateful that the thing was non-sentient. Their minds had all been read, they'd all been rendered as naked as they could be to any lover—but unless the worm was lying, it was churning through this information, blindly, to determine the answers they needed, with no more awareness than the polis library.
"So were the Transmuters right or wrong? Do you agree with their prediction?"
"Not quite. They were extrapolating a long way into the future, and a galaxy is a complex system. They couldn't be expected to get everything right."
Elena asked, "So how far out were they?"
The worm said, "As the core collapses, most of its energy will end up as extra-dimensional spin. Energy in that form can't interact with local gravitons, so the region won't seal itself off behind an event horizon as rapidly as it otherwise would. And before it does, the energy density will grow high enough to start creating new space-time."
"A mini Big Bang?" Karpal moved restlessly away from the girder, as if that could give him a head start in spreading the warning. "A center of creation, in the middle of the galaxy?"
"Yes."
Elena said, "But won't the new space-time be orthogonal to the old? A bubble perpendicular to the main universe, not intruding into it?" She sketched a rough diagram, a large sphere with a smaller one growing out of it, the two joined only at a narrow neck.
"That's correct. But that small, shared region at the galactic core will still reach extreme temperatures before it pinches off to form a black hole."
"How extreme?"
"Hot enough to break up nuclei within a radius of fifty thousand light years. Nothing in the galaxy will survive."
Elena fell silent. Paolo thought: There will he no sign of it, here. Not a pinprick of radiance, like a distant supernova, to mark the passing of a hundred billion worlds. The apocalypse would be invisible.
Paolo knew that the Contingency Handler could feel no compassion for their plight; it could only utter the formalities programmed into it long ago, translated as best it could. But the message it conveyed still managed to bridge time, and scale, and cultures.
It said, "Bring your people through. They're welcome here. There's room enough for everyone."
Part Eight
Yatima liked the way the concentric 3-spheres of color pricked out in the sky by stars of equal Doppler-shift converged on their destination; it seemed so much more emphatic than an ordinary star born of circular bands. Wrapping the image of Weyl so tightly, it seemed to promise that, this time, the Transmuters would not have slipped away.
Paolo said, "End of story, I suppose. From that point on, they'll know the territory better than we do."
"Maybe." Yatima hesitated. "They might still be curious about one thing, though."
"What?"
"You, Paolo. You had all the information you needed. You'd made the whole Diaspora worthwhile. So why did you choose to keep traveling?"
19
PURSUIT
Carter-Zimmerman polis, U**
The polis returned to the singularity in order to cut communications time lags to a minimum. There was some talk in Poincare C-Z of quarantining themselves from the "infected" second-macrosphere clone, though this made no sense to Paolo; the Contingency Handler had infiltrated the polis by physical manipulation of the hardware on a molecular level, and no mere software sent back through the singularity would be capable of any such feat. But Paolo was happy enough to let the faction reason their way out of paranoia in their own good time; he could interact with Poincare C-Z as easily as if he was there in person, so he felt no great desire to cross back.
The message itself had passed through; he wasn't needed. The moment an independent check of the Handler's infinite-dimensional Kozuch Theory (carried out in the uncorrupted Poincare polis) had confirmed its perfect fit to the Lac G-1 data and generated the same dire predictions for the core, Orlando had left by maser to spread the news in person, merging with his Swift self along the way. The entire Diaspora, gleisners included, lay within 250 light years of Swift, so unless they were very unlucky with the timing of another singularity slip, everyone would have the chance to escape. If they didn't trust the near-omnipotent Star Striders, as the Handler's creators had come to he called, they could always remain in the first macrosphere. Paolo had no doubt that between Orlando and the Swift versions of Yatima and Karpal, the case would he put forcefully enough to persuade anyone who hadn't lost touch with the physical world entirely. Even the sequence of the Orphean carpets could be brought through, and re-seeded on another world.
It was the best they could have hoped for, but Paolo felt frustrated, ashamed, superfluous. He knew he'd willfully denied the meaning of the Transmuters' map because of Lacerta—because he'd been tired of measuring everything against Orlando's suffering and Orlando's loss. Even on Poincare, it was Orlando who'd made the sacrifice that opened the way to the second macrosphere; Paolo had merely stepped through the singularity, and the truth had fallen into his hands without cost. And now he faced spending the next five hundred years waiting for Orlando to return in triumph, leading the whole Coalition to safety.
The Handler told Paolo about the galaxy's six thousand civilizations. There were organic creatures of various biochemistries and body plans, as well as software running in polises and robots, and a spectrum of unclassifiable hybrids. Some were natives of the second macrosphere, some were from as far away as the Star Striders. Twelve had been born in the Milky Way, and either read the Transmuters' message and followed their path, or reached the same conclusions and invented the same technology themselves.
So there was an abundance of possibilities to contemplate, here, as models for the Coalition's future evolution. If the right protocols were followed, most of these cultures would he open to some form of contact with the newcomers, hopelessly backward as they were.
But the Transmuters had not stayed. They'd entered this universe after the Star Striders, spoken with them briefly, then moved on.
When Paolo heard of Yatima's plan, he went straight to Elena. Her current homescape was a verdant jungle on a tide-locked moon of an imaginary gas giant. The banded planet filled a third of the sky.
She said, "Why? Why follow them? There are people with the same technology here. People with as long a history. Out of six thousand cultures, what's so special about the Transmuters?"