Greg Egan - Incandescence

After a few minutes Parantham circled back to him, breathing heavily, then the three locals joined them and she made introductions. Sida, Fith and Paba had been friends since childhood. They'd traveled the planet together, but they'd never left Massa. When Parantham had mentioned her plans the trio had been intrigued, and they were determined to learn more.

They found a shaded spot in a nearby garden, and the three friends listened attentively as Rakesh described the encounter with Lahl.

When he'd finished, Paba asked, «Why is it so important to you to find this new DNA world?»

«It's not,» Rakesh confessed. «Not in itself. I'm not obsessed with my molecular family tree, or with completing the map of the panspermias. If this putative world hadn't been inside the bulge, and if it hadn't been important enough to the Aloof for them to make contact with a traveler just to pass on the news, then I doubt I would have gone looking for it.»

Fith said, «So your real interest is a kind of reflection of the Aloof's?»

Rakesh shifted on the grass. «I suppose it is, partly. But I'd never been all that interested in the Aloof before, either. And I don't really hold out much hope that they're going to reveal any more to Parantham and me than they did to Lahl.» He did his best with his human body to make the quads' gesture for conceding imperfection and uncertainty. «Maybe it sounds frivolous, to travel so far and risk so much when I can't claim a lifelong passion for any single element of what we might find in there. Taken together, though, it's a different story. The sum of these parts is exactly what I've been looking for.»

«Some people need a mystery to pursue,» Sida mused. «Not everyone, though. Some people can turn a pleasurable routine into an art form: food, exercise, conversation, companionship. The same few leitmotifs repeating for decades. Add some travel every now and then to break up the pattern, and you can spin it out into a satisfying life lasting thousands of years.»

«Is that your own plan?» asked Parantham.

«No.» Sida inclined her head toward her companions. «We might have chosen to ignore the bulge staring down at us, but we're still chasing mysteries of our own.»

«I see.» Parantham left no doubt that she wanted to hear more.

Fith said, «There are plenty of Interesting Truths to be found, even now.»

Though the quad words were slightly ambiguous, Rakesh understood immediately: «Interesting Truths» referred to a kind of theorem which captured subtle unifying insights between broad classes of mathematical structures. In between strict isomorphisms — where the same structure recurred exactly in different guises — and the loosest of poetic analogies, Interesting Truths gathered together a panoply of apparently disparate systems by showing them all to be reflections of each other, albeit in a suitably warped mirror. Knowing, for example, that multiplying two positive numbers was really the same thing as adding their logarithms revealed an exact correspondence between two algebraic systems that was useful, but not very deep. Seeing how a more sophisticated version of the same linkage could be established for a vast array of more complex systems — from rotations in space to the symmetries of subatomic particles — unified great tracts of physics and mathematics, without collapsing them all into mere copies of a single example.

Paba offered them a description of the work that the three friends were pursuing. Rakesh absorbed only the first-level summary, but even that was enough to make him giddy. Starting with foundations in the solid ground of number theory and topology, a glorious edifice of generalisations and ever-broader theorems ascended, swirling into the stratosphere. High up, far beyond Rakesh's own habitual understanding, no less than five compelling new structures that the trio had identified had started to reveal intriguing echoes of each other, as if they were, secretly, variations on a single theme. The elusive common thread had yet to be delineated, but it seemed plausible to Rakesh (albeit with all the fine details glossed over) that sufficient effort would eventually reveal one dazzlingly beautiful and powerful insight that accounted for the subtle fivefold symmetries they had charted.

Parantham said, «So much for the cliché that embodiment is the antithesis of abstraction.» She sounded impressed, and Rakesh suspected that she'd looked more closely at the work-in-progress than he had.

«I've always believed the opposite,» Fith replied firmly. «You don't need to turn every mathematical space into a kind of scape, and literally inhabit it, in order to understand it. Anchored in three dimensions, obeying mundane physics, we can still reason about any system you care to describe with sufficient clarity. That's what general intelligence means, after all.»

«How long have you been searching for something like this?» Rakesh asked.

«Thirteen hundred years,» Paba replied. Rakesh glanced at her précis; that was most of her life. «Not full-time,» she added. «Over the years, for one or two days in every ten or twenty as the mood has struck us.»

Sida said, «I've known people who've given their whole lives over to the same kind of search, but if they find nothing in a century or two they usually become discouraged. The only way we could do this was by refusing to make it the be-all and end-all. The only way we could afford to try was by ensuring that we could also afford to fail.»

«That sounds like a good strategy,» Rakesh said. He had never been drawn to the same ethereal heights himself, but he wondered if travelers could benefit from a similar approach. His youthful vow to leave his home world after exactly one thousand years, as if he'd expected fate to hand him the ideal destination at that very moment, seemed increasingly foolish. He might have passed another two or three centuries happily on Shab-e-Noor, if he'd found some way to make himself receptive to the kind of serendipity that had ultimately rescued him from the limbo of the node, without subjecting himself to the same miserable feeling that every day without success was wasted.

The five of them sat talking until noon, then the quads took them to the guest shelter to eat. Rakesh's body was flexible enough to make use of almost anything — or at the very least to survive its ingestion without harm — but the quads had a garden that was equally flexible. Instructed in his tastes, within half an hour the plants were able to form fruits and leaves that even his wild ancestors would have found nourishing and delicious. Fith insisted on cooking them into a spicy stew, using tools rather than his mouth to manipulate the ingredients, no doubt having been briefed by Massa's library on certain peoples' preference for food wholly unmasticated by others.

This, Rakesh thought, was the Amalgam at its best. Even these citizens who shared no molecular ancestry with him had made him welcome on their planet, in their town, at their meal. They had shared their ideas and discoveries, and listened attentively to his own stories and opinions.

His next hosts would be very different. For one and a half million years, the Aloof had made it clear that they needed no one's company, no one's stories, and no one's opinions but their own.

Nevertheless, it seemed that they wanted something now: some contact, some flow of information. It had started with Lahl, but Rakesh had no idea where it would end, or what the transaction would finally amount to. A disinterested exchange of scientific data? An act of trade, of mutual benefit? Munificence? Misunderstanding? Deception? Enslavement?

He and Parantham stayed with their friends until the stars of the bulge filled the sky, then they prepared themselves to walk among them.