Rainzi smiled. "I thought you’d say no. But it would havebeen discourteous not to ask."

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"But you’d see it as a kind of death?"

Cass scowled. "I’m embodied, not deranged! If a copy ofmy mind experiences a few minutes' consciousness, then is lost, that’snot the death of anyone. It’s just amnesia."

Rainzi looked puzzled. "Then I don’t understand. I knowyou prefer embodiment, for the sake of having honest perceptions ofyour surroundings, but we’re not talking about immersing you in somecomforting simulation of being back on Earth. Your experiment shouldlast almost six picoseconds. Running on a strong-force substrate, you’dhave a chance to watch the data coming in, in real time. Of course,you’ll receive a useful subset of the same information eventually, butit won’t be as detailed, or as immediate. It won’t be as real."

He smiled provocatively. "Suppose the ghost of Sarumpaetcame to you in your sleep, and said: I’ll grant you a dream in whichyou witness the decay of the Diamond Graph. You’ll travel back in time,shrink to the Planck scale, and see everything with your own eyes,exactly as it happened. The only catch is, you won’t remember anythingwhen you wake. You say you don’t believe that the dreamer would bedying. So wouldn’t you still want the dream?"

Cass let go of one handhold and swiveled away from thewall. There wasn’t much point objecting that he was offering her a viewbillions of times coarser than that, of a much less significant event.It wasn’t a ringside seat at the birth of the universe, but it wasstill the closest she could hope to get to an event for which she’dalready sacrificed seven hundred and forty-five years of her life.