Greg Egan - Incandescence

He reached Faravani just after sunrise. Massa had no native life; its first settlers had traveled four thousand light years, from a world that belonged to the P2 panspermia. Most of the locals still wore the ancestral phenotype, a quadruped with hairless, leathery skin, their backs about as high as Rakesh's chest. They communicated with sounds well within his own range of hearing and vocalization, so he chose to comprehend and speak their language himself, greeting the quads who were emerging from their shelters for some early morning exercise. In the node he'd grown lazy and simply perceived everyone to be speaking in his own tongue, but it was far more satisfying to deal directly with these real-time hisses and clicks, hearing all of the genuine sounds and knowing exactly what they meant, instead of wrapping the whole experience in an auditory hallucination of an approximate translation.

When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.

«I see you've made yourself at home,» he teased her.

«Flesh is flesh,» she hissed through her quad mouth. «The shape makes no difference to me.»

Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored — rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence — she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.

«So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?» he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they'd spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa's planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there'd been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl's experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.

«I've told everyone in sight that I'm heading into the bulge,» she said, «but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.»

Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof's communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.

That had been three hundred millennia ago. Since then, though nothing had changed in the basic principles, the machinery that bridged the networks had been extensively refined. The bulge was now encircled by gamma ray transmitters that could hit the nodes of the Aloof's network with pinpoint accuracy, and receivers that monitored the small portion of every communications beam that overshot its target node and spilled out of the Aloof's territory into the galactic disk, making it possible to extract the piggybacked data once it reached its destination. And though Lahl had been faced with the choice of traveling unencrypted or taking the slow road, most travelers had been able to avail themselves of quantum keys, stockpiled over the millennia, ready to be used as the need arose.

The Aloof could not have failed to be aware of this blatant technological parasitism, yet they had acted neither to stamp it out, nor to facilitate the process. Rakesh couldn't help admiring the sheer consistency of their response. They had balanced their wish for privacy with a truly cosmic indifference: swatting probes and spores back into the disk without the least sign of impatience or intemperance, and placidly accepting this trickle of foreign data because it was, quite simply, harmless and irrelevant. Whatever their strange arm's-length interaction with Lahl implied, Rakesh was in no rush to mistake it for the start of some larger, more generalized thaw. If history meant anything, the Aloof would be rigidly pursuing the same dictates as ever, and it was only the extraordinarily rare contingency that the DNA-infested meteor represented that had caused them to drag a couple of citizens of the Amalgam in as bit players. That the invitation was a rarity was undeniable, but nothing more could be read into it: there was no evidence that the Aloof's isolation was an act of fanaticism that would only be compromised in the direst of emergencies, or that their contact with Lahl represented some kind of wilting of long-held cultural norms in the face of an otherwise insoluble crisis. The one pattern to the Aloof's actions, in as much as any could be discerned, was that they appeared to make carefully measured responses, designed to meet very clear goals. If recruiting the help of outsiders for the first time in one and a half million years was necessary to meet those goals, why would they hesitate? Stubbornness? Timidity? Inertia? It was comforting to imagine that only such petty and irrational reasons could have caused them to spurn their neighbors for so long, but a far more humbling possibility remained: they had simply never found the Amalgam the least bit useful or relevant before.

Rakesh said, «Are you desperate to move on? Even if there's no news to be found here, it seems a shame to jump planet after just a couple of hours.»

Parantham flicked her ears in agreement. «I've never been much of a gratuitous tourist, but after such a long journey we can surely look around.» Rakesh was relieved. Though he'd felt as if he'd steeled himself for anything as he'd departed from the node, having just escaped from Csi's manipulations he was relishing this chance to catch his breath before delivering himself into the hands of the Aloof.

The town of Faravani was a loosely spaced assembly of shelters, gardens and sculptures. Winding between them were swaths of empty land, covered by the same wild vegetation as grew in the surrounding fields. Rather than suggesting a state of decay, though, as if this unkempt space had been neglected or abandoned, it made the more obviously artificial elements of the town look as if they'd been freshly delivered, carefully laid down in a pristine field just a month or two before.

The quads trotted playfully around this maze in groups of three or four, some racing each other, some moving more sedately. Like most citizens of the Amalgam who chose to be embodied, they clearly relished their physicality, with all of the specific abilities and constraints that came with it. Having one kind of body rather than another was a supremely arbitrary choice, but the restrictions it imposed gave a shape to everything you experienced. Early in his third century, Rakesh had played around with different bodies for a while, but wandering through that vastly larger space of possibilities had made him feel like no one at all.

«Don't you get disoriented?» he asked Parantham. «Four legs one day, two the next?» He swung his gaze from shoulder to shoulder, a quad gesture that referred to his own body. « This is part of what unifies me, what makes me feel that the person who wakes up every morning is the same as the one who went to sleep.»

«I don't actually sleep, Rakesh,» she reminded him.

«Well, no, but that's not the point.»

She rolled her neck pensively. «I understand what you're talking about: inhabiting a particular kind of body has its own unique flavor. The way the joints and muscles interact, the way all their degrees of freedom are linked together, paints a beautiful shape in phase space. I enjoy exploring those constraints. But I don't need them to be the same for my entire life. They're not part of my identity.»

A trio of quads passed them at a gallop, and Parantham took off after them. Rakesh watched, smiling, knowing better than to try to catch up. He felt a fresh pang of homesickness; it would have been nice to have someone in human form to race against.