"No. It might not hurt Orlando, though."
After a while, Paolo said sullenly, "I could live with wasting a thousand years coding myself into some planet's topography, while being ridiculed by every sane person in the Diaspora. But if I start giving in to him, where does it end? If he thinks I'm migrating back to the flesh with him afterward—"
Yatima laughed. "Don't worry, he doesn't. And once he has lots of little flesher children, he'll probably disown you altogether. Write you off as an unfortunate mistake. You'll never hear from him again."
Paolo looked uncertain, then openly wounded.
Yatima said, "That was a joke."
Blanca floated in a tranquil ocean made up of distinct layers of pastel-colored fluids, each about a quarter of a delta deep, separated by sheets of opaque blue colloid. The only light seemed to come from a diffuse and all-pervasive bioluminescence. As Yatima swam across the scape toward ver, ve wondered whether ve should ask politely about this strange world's physics before pressing ver to explain the cryptic invitation.
"Hello Orphan." As Yatima's viewpoint moved from layer to layer, the intersections of the colloid sheets with Blanca's solid black absence looked like a diagram for a method of portraying a surface's critical points as a sequence of curves. One rough ellipse through vis shoulders spawned two ovals on either side on the plane below; each of these split into five smaller ovals, which vanished just before the trunk's ellipse fissioned. Unable to see the whole icon at once, Yatima found Blanca's gestalt almost unreadable. "It's been a while."
"More for you than me. How are you?" This clone had become estranged from Gabriel soon after arrival, and as far as Yatima knew, no one else had spoken to ver since vis own last visit.
Blanca ignored the question, or took it as rhetorical. "That was interesting data you sent me."
"I'm glad you had a look at it. Everyone else is stumped." Yatima had mailed ver a tag pointing to the neutron sequence, despite vis apparent lack of interest in Swift and the Transmuters; it seemed only right to let every clone of ver know that the Fomalhaut Blanca had been vindicated.
"It reminded me of Earth biochemistry."
"Really? In what way?" People had tried interpreting the data beyond the pixel array as a Swiftian genome, but Yatima doubted that even the quirkiest old SETI software would have attempted anything as absurd as a reading based on the DNA code.
"Just some rough analogies with protein folding. Both turned out to be specific examples of a much more general problem in N dimensions… but I won't bore you with that." Blanca made a series of holes in the colloid sheets in front of ver, creating a transparent void, a sphere about two delta wide. Ve thrust vis hands into this arena, and a tangled structure appeared between them, like an intricately warped chain of heads. The structure was complex, but somehow not quite organic-looking. More like a nanomachine that someone had been forced to design from a single, linear molecule, shaped by nothing but the angles of the bonds between consecutive atoms.
Blanca said, "There was nothing to decipher, nothing to decode. You've read all the messages that were there to be read. The rest of the neutron sequence isn't data at all; it's there to control the shape of the wormhole."
"The shape? What difference does the shape make?"
"It enables it to act as a kind of catalyst."
Yatima was dazed, but part of ver was thinking: How stupid of me. Of course. The neutrons served as an attention grabbing beacon from a distance, then a warning message close-up; ve should have guessed that there was an entirely separate third function buried in the remaining structure. "What does it do? Make other long neutrons? They built just one, and it replicated itself all over the planet?"
Blanca spun the wormhole, but not in any visible dimension; it flexed oddly as the view rotated into other hyperplanes. "No. Think about it, Yatima. It can't catalyze anything here. It has no shape in this universe, it's just another neutron to us."
Ve extended the wormhole into a Kozuch diagram and began demonstrating some interactions with ordinary, short particles. "If you hit it with a neutrino, an antineutrino, an electron, or a positron, the effect propagates all the way along its length." Yatima watched, mesmerized; with each collision, even though the wormholes didn't splice, the structure deformed in a distinctive way, like a protein switching between metastable conformations.
"Okay. We can change its shape. But what does that achieve?"
"It makes certain vacuum wormholes real. It creates a stream of particles."
"Creates them where?" The long neutron threaded its way through billions of adjacent universes, but since the wormhole didn't open up into any of them, its presence barely registered. If it couldn't catalyze anything here, it had even less chance of doing so in any universe it merely passed through.
Blanca sent gestalt instructions to the diagram, and suddenly the catalyst was threaded with dozens of tangled, translucent membranes. As each electron or neutrino struck, and the catalyst changed shape, one of these faintly sketched vacuum wormholes became two real wormhole mouths racing apart through the space in which the catalyst was embedded.
That space was the macrosphere. The long neutrons were machines for creating particles in the macrosphere.
Yatima performed an elated backflip through the layered ocean, and found verself upside down. "Let me kiss your feet. You're a genius."
Blanca laughed, a remote sound from a hidden part of vis body. "It was a trivial problem. If you weren't rushing like a flesher, you would have solved it yourself long ago.
Yatima shook vis head. "I doubt it." Ve hesitated. "So do you think the Transmuters could have—?"
"Migrated? Upward! Why not? It's a closer escape route than heading for Andromeda."
Yatima tried to imagine it: a Diaspora into the macrosphere. "Wait. If our whole universe, our whole space-time, is the standard fiber for macrosphere physics, then our entire history only corresponds to an instant of macrosphere time. Their equivalent of a Planck moment. So how could the Transmuters create a sequence of particles, spread out in time?"
Blanca gestured at a portion of the catalyst. "Look more closely at this domain. Macrosphere space-time is woven out of vacuum wormholes, just like ours. It's the same kind of Kozuch-Penrose network, only five-plus-one dimensions instead of three-plus-one." Yatima righted verself for a better view, and peered at the multi-lobed knot Blanca was pointing to; it seemed to hook into the ghostly structures of the vacuum like a grapple. "They've pinned our time to macrosphere time. What would have been a fleeting Planck moment endures as a kind of singularity. And that singularity can emit and absorb particles in macrosphere time."
Yatima's mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn't indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they'd hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure.
"Wait. You said emit… and absorb? What happens if the singularity absorbs a macrosphere particle?"
"A small proportion of the catalysts change state. Which causes a small proportion of the long neutrons here to undergo beta decay, even if they're in supposedly stable nuclei. If you monitored a ton of Swift's atmosphere, you could detect absorption events with an efficiency of about one in ten billion." Yatima had positioned vis viewpoint in the same layer as Blanca's head, and ve caught a characteristic tilt of amusement. "So it might be worth trying. The Transmuters' macrosphere clones could be blasting messages at the singularity even as we speak."