Diaspora

Herma

Herma

Paolo glanced at Elena. She shook her head. "You go."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes! Go on." Her skin had taken on a mirrored sheen; her expressionless face reflected the planet below. "I'm all right. I just want some time to think things through, on my own."

Herma

Elena was gone. Liesl made a derisive sound and flapped off into the distance, mocking the scape's airlessness. Paolo and Karpal watched as Herma

Then Herma

They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spi

The Heart was always crowded, but it was larger than Paolo had seen it, even though Herma

They found a good spot and made some furniture, a table and two chairs—Herma

Herma

"I never listen to rumors." Karpal always presented as a faithful reproduction of his old gleisner body. Leaving his people and coming into C-Z must have taken considerable courage; they'd never welcome him hack.

Paolo said, "Does it matter what they do? Where they go, how they get there? There's more than enough room for both of us. Even if they shadowed the Diaspora, even if they came to Vega—we could study the Orpheans together, couldn't we?"

Herma

"Nothing C-Z's exploitation of a few megatons of Vegan asteroid material hasn't satisfied."

Paolo tried to change the subject. "Has anyone heard from Earth, lately? I'm begi

Karpal said, "You're not missing much; all they're talking about is Orpheus: the new lunar observations, the signs of water. They seem more excited by the mere possibility of life than we are by the certainty. And they have very high hopes."

Paolo laughed. "They do. My Earth-self seems to be counting on the Diaspora to find an advanced civilization with the answers to all of the Coalition's existential problems. I don't think he'll get much cosmic guidance from kelp."

"You know there was a big rise in emigration from C-Z after the launch? Emigration, and suicides." Herma

Paolo felt a stirring of unease. Emigration and suicides? Was that why Orlando had been so gloomy? After the disaster of the Forge, and then another three hundred years of waiting, how high had expectations become?

A buzz of excitement crossed the floor, a sudden shift in the tone of the conversation. Herma

The non-sentient Heart was intelligent enough to guess its patrons' wishes. Although everyone could tap the library for results, privately, the music cut out and a giant public image of the summary data appeared, high in the chamber. Paolo had to crane his neck to view it, a novel experience.

The microprobe had mapped one of the carpets in high resolution. The image showed the expected rough oblong, some hundred meters wide—but the two- or three-meter-thick slab of the neutrino tomographs was revealed now as a delicate, convoluted surface—fine as a single layer of skin, but folded into an elaborate space filling curve. Paolo checked the full data: the topology was strictly planar, despite the pathological appearance.

No holes, no joins—just a surface which meandered wildly enough to look ten thousand times thicker from a distance than it really was.

An inset showed the microstructure, at a point which started at the rim of the carpet and then—slowly—moved toward the center. Paolo stared at the flowing molecular diagram for several seconds before he grasped what it meant.

The carpet was not a colony of single-celled creatures. Nor was it a multicellular organism. It was a single molecule, a two-dimensional polymer weighing twenty-five thousand tons. A giant sheet of folded polysaccharide, a complex mesh of interlinked pentose and hexose sugars hung with alkyl and amide side chains. A bit like a plant cell wall, except that this polymer was far stronger than cellulose, and the surface area was twenty orders of magnitude greater.

Karpal said, "I hope those entry capsules were perfectly sterile. Earth bacteria would gorge themselves on this. One big floating carbohydrate di

Herma

Paolo was still dazed. "But how does it assemble? How does it… grow?" Herma

"The edge of the carpet catalyzes its own growth. The polymer is irregular, aperiodic—there's no single component which simply repeats. But there seem to be about twenty thousand basic structural units, twenty thousand different polysaccharide building blocks." Paolo saw them: long bundles of cross-linked chains ru