diaspora-expansion
The ongoing spread of the Diaspora civilization through space over centuries, marked by key waypoints like Weyl and Swift.
2 chapters across 1 book
Diaspora (1997)Greg Egan
In this brief exchange, Yatima and Paolo discuss the significance of various points in the Diaspora's journey through space, focusing on the star Weyl and the mysterious Orpheus. While Yatima views Orpheus as a minor detail unlikely to interest an ancient civilization, Paolo insists that Orpheus was pivotal, fundamentally altering their history and existence.
In this chapter, Yatima and Paolo explore successive macrospheres in search of the Transmuters, deploying nanomachines to seed new polises and investigating enigmatic markers and artifacts left behind. They encounter vast, ancient structures and a massive quartz artifact containing an incomprehensible data store, suggesting a civilization of immense scale and complexity. The narrative explores the challenges of interdimensional and inter-universal communication, the persistence of civilizations across multiple levels of reality, and the mystery of the Transmuters' origins and intentions.