human form to race against.
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
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
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