Their question would be, 'Why have you come so much further? Why have you left your own people behind?' Yatima couldn't speak for vis fellow traveler, but the answer for ver lay at the opposite end of the scale, in the realm of the very simple, and the very small.ġ ORPHANOGENESIS Konishi polis, Earth 23 387 025 000 000 CST, 11:03:17.154 UT The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Of Course, the Transmitters would already be aware of the very large, very dead celestial machinery that had driven the Diaspora to Swift and beyond.

No doubt at some time in their history the Transmuters had suffered from it too. It wasn't just a question of choosing to bury yourself in a closed world of synthetic scapes the fleshers had never been immune to this myopia, nor had the most outward-looking citizens. The real world was full of larger structures, smaller structures, simpler and more complex structures than the tiny portion comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored. Neither vis own history nor the Diaspora's would fit between those imaginary lines. When the Transmuters demanded to know 'Why have you followed us? Why have you come so far?', where should ve begin? Yatima had read pre-Introdus histories told on a single level, bounded by the fictions that individuals were as indivisible as quarks, and planetary civilizations nothing less than self-contained universes. They'd brought no end of questions to ask, but the flow of information couldn't all be one-way.

Ve wondered what account they should give of themselves when they finally caught up with their quarry. Part One Yatima surveyed the Doppler-shifted stars around the polis, following the frozen, concentric waves of color across the sky from expansion to convergence.

Diaspora by greg egan