Diaspora

Orlando was unconvinced. "If all you want to do is gather astrophysical data, there's no need to leave the solar system. I've seen plans: seeding whole worlds with self-replicating factories, filling the galaxy with Von Neuma

Liana shook her head. "If that sort of thing was ever meant seriously, it was pre-Introdus—before gleisners even existed. Anything contemporary is just propaganda: Protocols of the Elders of Machinehood stuff. We're the ones still closest to the old drives. If anyone screws up and goes exponential, it will probably be us."

Some other bridgers joined in, and the debate dragged on for hours. One agronomist argued, through an interpreter: If space travel wasn't just a fantasy for immature cultures, then where were all the aliens? Yatima glanced up at the drab sky every now and then, and imagined a gleisner spacecraft swooping down and carrying them off to the stars. Maybe some rescue beacon had started up in the gleisner bodies when they'd reactivated them… It was an absurd notion, but it was strange to ponder the fact that it wasn't literally impossible. Even in the most dazzling astronomical scape, where you could pretend to jump across the light years and see the surface of Sirius in the best high-resolution composite of simulation and telescope-based data… you could never be kidnapped by mad astronauts.

Just after midnight, Orlando asked Liana, "So who's getting up at four in the morning to escort our guests to the border?"

"You are."

"Then I'd better get some sleep."

Inoshiro was amazed. "You still have to do that? You haven't engineered it out?"

Liana made a choking sound. "That'd be like 'engineering-out' the liver! Sleep's integral to mammalian physiology; try taking it away, and you'd end up with psychotic, immune-compromised cretins."

Orlando added grumpily, "It's also very nice. You don't know what you're missing." He kissed Liana again, and left them.

The crowd in the restaurant thi

"I'm glad you came," she said. "Now we have some kind of bridge to Konishi—and through you, to the whole Coalition. Even if you can't return… talk about us, inside. Don't let us vanish from your minds completely."

Inoshiro said earnestly, "We'll come hack! And we'll bring our friends. Once they understand that you're not all savages out here, everyone will want to visit you."

Liana laughed gently. "Yeah? And the Introdus will run backward, and the dead will rise from their graves? I'll look forward to that." She reached across the table and brushed Inoshiro's cheek with her hand. "You're a strange child. I'm going to miss you."

Yatima waited for Inoshiro's outraged response: 'I am not a child.' But instead, ve put vis hand to vis face, where she'd touched ver, and said nothing.

Orlando escorted them all the way to the border. He bid them farewell, and talked about seeing them again, but Yatima suspected that he, too, didn't believe they'd ever return. When he'd vanished into the jungle, Yatima stepped over the border and summoned the drone. It alighted on the back of vis neck, and burrowed in to make contact with vis processor. The gleisner's neck, the gleisner's processor.

Inoshiro said, "You go. I'm staying."

Yatima groaned. "You don't mean that."

Inoshiro stared back at ver, forlorn but resolute. "I was born in the wrong place. This is where I belong."

"Oh, get serious! If you want to migrate, there's always Ashton-Laval! And if you want to escape your parents, you can do that anywhere!"

Inoshiro sat down in the undergrowth, vanishing up to vis waist, and spread vis arms out in the foliage. "I've started feeling things. It's not just tags anymore—not lust an abstract overlay." Ve brought vis hands together against vis chest, then thumped the chassis. "It happens to me, it happens on my skin. I must have formed some kind of map of the data… and now my self symbol's absorbed it, incorporated it." Ve laughed miserably. "Maybe it's a family weakness. My part-sibling takes an embodied lover… and now here I am, with a fucking sense of touch." Ve looked up at Yatima, eyes wide, gestalt for horror. "I can't go back now. It'd be like… tearing off my skin."

Yatima said flatly, "You know that's not true. What do you think's going to happen to you? Pain? As soon as the tags stop coming, the whole illusion will dissolve." Ve was trying to be reassuring, but ve struggled to imagine what it must be like: some kind of intrusion of the world into Inoshiro's icon? It was confusing enough when the interface adjusted vis own icon's symbol to the actual posture of vis gleisner body—but that was more like playing along with the conventions of a game; there was no deep sense of violation…

Inoshiro said, "They'll let me live with them. I don't need food, I don't need anything they value. I'll make myself useful. They'll let me stay."

Yatima stepped back over the border; the drone broke free and retreated, buzzing angrily. Ve knelt down beside Inoshiro and said gently, "Tell the truth: you'd go mad within a week. One scape, like this, forever? And once the novelty wore off, they'd treat you like a freak."

"Not Liana!"

"Yeah? What do you think she'd become? Your lover? Or yet another parent?"

Inoshiro covered vis face with vis hands. "Just crawl back to Konishi, will you? Go lose yourself in the Mines."

Yatima stayed where ve was. Birds squawked, the sky brightened. Their twenty-four hours expired. They still had one more day before their old Konishi-selves awoke in their place-but with each passing minute, now, the sense of polis life moving on and leaving them behind grew stronger.

Yatima thought of dragging Inoshiro over the line, and instructing the drone to pluck ver from vis bode. The drone wasn't smart enough to understand anything they'd done; it wouldn't realize it was violating Inoshiro's autonomy.

And that idea was disturbing enough, but there was another possibility. Yatima still had the last updated snapshot of Inoshiro's mind, transmitted in the restaurant in the early hours of the morning. Inoshiro wouldn't have sent it after ve'd made up vis mind to stay—and it Yatima woke that snapshot inside the polis, it wouldn't matter what happened to this gleisner-clone…

Yatima erased the snapshot. This wasn't quicksand. This wasn't anything they'd foreseen.

Ve knelt, and waited. The tags from vis knees reporting the texture of the ground became an irritating, monotonous stream, and the strange fixed shape forced upon vis icon grew even more a

After almost an hour, Inoshiro rose to vis feet and walked out of the enclave. Yatima followed ver, sick with relief.

The drone landed on Inoshiro's neck; ve reached up as if to slap it away, but stopped verself. Ve asked calmly, "Do you think we'll ever come back?" Yatima thought about it, long and hard. Without the unrepeatable allure which had brought them here, would this place, and these friends, ever again be worth eight hundred times more than all the rest?

"I doubt it."