Diaspora

Inoshiro laughed softly. "No! In a few billion years, the sun will swell up and swallow the Earth. And no doubt we'll flee to another star first… but there'll always be a new threat hanging over us, known or unknown. The Big Crunch in the end, if nothing else." Ve turned to Yatima, smiling. "So what priceless knowledge can Carter-Zimmerman bring back from the stars? The secret to surviving a hundred billion years, instead of ten billion?"

Yatima sent a tag to the scape; the window spun away from the Earth, then the motion-blurred star trails froze abruptly into a view of the constellation Lacerta. The black hole was undetectable at any wavelength, as quiescent in the region's high vacuum as the neutron stars had been, but Yatima imagined a speck of distorted darkness midway between Hough 187 and 10 Lacertae. "How can you not want to understand this? It's just reached across a hundred light years and left half a million people dead."

"The gleisners already have a probe en route to the Lac G-1 remnant."

"Which might tell us nothing. Black holes swallow their own history; we can't count on finding anything there. We have to look further afield. Maybe there's another, older species out there, who'll know what triggered the collision. Or maybe we've just discovered the reason why there are no aliens crisscrossing the galaxy: gamma-ray bursts cut them all down before they have a hope of protecting themselves. If Lacerta had happened a thousand years ago, no one on Earth would have survived. But if we really are the only civilization capable of space travel, then we should be out there warning the others, protecting the others, not cowering beneath the surface—"

Yatima trailed off. Inoshiro was listening politely, but with a slight smile that left no doubt that ve was highly amused. Ve said, "We can't save anyone, Yatima. We can't help anyone."

"No? What have you been doing for the last twenty years, then? Wasting your time?"

Inoshiro shook vis head, as if the question was absurd.

Yatima was bewildered. "You're the one who kept dragging me out of the Mines, out into the world! And now Carter-Zimmerman are going out into the world to try to keep what happened to the fleshers from happening to us. If you don't care about hypothetical alien civilizations, you must still care about the Coalition!"

Inoshiro said, "I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there's nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death."

"Oh, will you listen to yourself? Always! Always! You sound like that phosphoric acid replicator you fried outside Atlanta!" Yatima turned away, trying to calm down. Ve knew that Inoshiro had felt the death of the fleshers more deeply than ve had. Maybe ve should have waited before raising the subject; maybe it seemed disrespectful to the dead to talk so soon about leaving the Earth behind.

It was too late now, though. Ve had to finish saying what ve'd come here to say.

"I'm migrating to Carter-Zimmerman. What they're doing makes sense, and I want to be part of it."

Inoshiro nodded blithely. "Then I wish you well."

"That's it? Good luck and bon voyage?" Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast's innocence. "What's happened to you? What have you done to yourself?"

Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent.

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed 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.

Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it. you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it. Yatima said numbly, "You were smarter than that. Stronger than that." But when Inoshiro was wounded by Lacerta, what hadn't ve done that might have made a difference? That might have spared ver the need for the kind of anesthetic that dissolved everything ve'd once been?

Inoshiro laughed. "So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?"

"What you are now—" Ve couldn't say it.

What you are now is not Inoshiro.

Yatima stood motionless beside ver, sick with grief, angry and helpless. Ve was not in the fleshers' world anymore; there was no nanoware bullet ve could fire into this imaginary body. Inoshiro had made vis choice, destroying vis old self and creating a new one to follow the ancient meme's dictates, and no one else had the right to question this, let alone the power to reverse it.