Diaspora

Learning was a strange business. Ve could have had vis exoself wire all this raw information straight into vis mind, in an instant—ve could have engulfed a complete copy of the Truth Mines, like an amoeba ingesting a planet—but the facts would have become barely more accessible than they already were, and it would have done nothing to increase vis understanding. The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations. Curvature means the angles of a triangle might not add up to 180 degrees. Curvature means you have to stretch or shrink a plane non-uniformly to make it wrap a surface. Curvature means no room for parallel lines—or room for far more than Euclid ever dreamt of. Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Still, the library was full of the ways past miners had fleshed out the theorems, and Yatima could have had those details grafted in alongside the raw data, granting ver the archived understanding of thousands of Konishi citizens who'd traveled this route before. The right mind grafts would have enabled ver effortlessly to catch up with all the living miners who were pushing the coal face ever deeper in their own inspired directions… at the cost of making ver, mathematically speaking, little more than a patchwork clone of them, capable only of following in their shadows.

If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca, then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn't hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve'd constructed vis own map of the Mines—idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotated like one else's—could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein of undiscovered truths lay buried.

Yatima was back in the savanna of vis homescape, playing with a torus crisscrossed with polygons, when Inoshiro sent a calling card; the tag entered the scape like a familiar scent on the wind. Yatima hesitated—ve was happy with what ve was doing, ve didn't really want to be interrupted—but then ve relented, replying with a welcoming tag and granting Inoshiro access to the scape.

"What's that ugly piece of crap?" Inoshiro gazed contemptuously at the minimalist torus. Ever since ve'd started visiting Ashton-Laval, ve seemed to have taken on the mantle of arbiter of scape aesthetics. Everything Yatima had seen in vis homescape wriggled ceaselessly, glowed across the spectrum, and had a fractal dimension of at least two point nine.

"A sketch of the proof that a torus has zero total curvature. I'm thinking of making it a permanent fixture."

Inoshiro groaned. "The establishment have really got their hooks into you. Orphan see, orphan do."

Yatima replied serenely, "I've decomposed the surface into polygons. The number of faces, minus the number of edges, plus the number of vertices—the Euler number—is zero."

"Not for long." Inoshiro scrawled a line across the object, defiantly bisecting one of the hexagons.

"You've just added one new face and one new edge. That cancels out exactly."

Inoshiro carved a square into four triangles.

"Three new faces, minus four new edges, plus one new vertex. Net change: zero."

"Mine fodder. Logic zombie." Inoshiro opened vis mouth and spewed out some random tags of propositional calculus.

Yatima laughed. "If you've got nothing better to do than insult me…" Ve began emitting the tag for imminent withdrawal of access.

"Come and see Hashim's new piece."

"Maybe later." Hashim was one of Inoshiro's Ashton-Laval artist friends. Yatima found most of their work bewildering, though whether it was the interpolis difference in mental architecture or just vis own personal taste, ve wasn't sure. Certainly, Inoshiro insisted that it was all "sublime."

"It's real time, ephemeral. Now or never."

"Not true: you could record it for me, or I could send a proxy—"

Inoshiro stretched vis pewter face into an exaggerated scowl. "Don't be such a philistine. Once the artist decides the parameters, they're sacrosanct—"

"Hashim's parameters are just incomprehensible. Look, I know I won't like it. You go."

Inoshiro hesitated, slowly letting vis features shrink back to normal size. "You could appreciate Hashim's work, if you wanted to. If you ran the right outlook."

Yatima stared at ver. "Is that what you do?"