Diaspora

Yatima heard branches move suddenly, off to their left. Ve called out hopefully, "Orlando?" They stopped and listened, but there was no reply.

Inoshiro said, "It was probably just an animal."

"Wait. I can see someone."

"Where?"

Yatima pointed out the small brown hand holding a branch, some twenty meters away trying to release it slowly, instead of letting it spring back into place. "I think ve's a child."

Inoshiro spoke loudly but gently in Modern Roman. "We're friends! We have news!"

Yatima adjusted the response curve of the gleisner's visual system, optimizing it for the shadows behind the branch. A single dark eye stared back through a gap between the leaves. After a few seconds, the hidden face shifted cautiously, choosing another peephole; Yatima reconstructed the blur into a jagged strip of skin joining two lemur eyes.

Ve showed the partial image to the library, then passed the verdict to inoshiro. "Ve's a dream ape."

"Shoot ver."

"What?"

"Shoot ver with the Introdus!" Inoshiro remained motionless and silent, speaking urgently in IR. "We can't leave ver to die!"

Isolated by the frame of leaves, the dream ape's eye appeared eerily expressionless. "But we can't force ver—"

"What do you want to do? Give ver a lecture in neutron star physics? Even the bridgers can't get through to dream apes! No one's going to explain the choices to ver—not now, not ever!"

Yatima insisted stubbornly, "We don't have the right to do it by force. Ve'd have no friends inside, no family—"

Inoshiro made a sound of disgust and disbelief. "We can clone ver some friends! Give ver a scape just like this, and ve'd barely know the difference."

"We're not here to kidnap people. Imagine how you'd feel, if some alien creature reached into the polis and dragged you away from everything you knew—"

Inoshiro almost screamed with frustration. "No, you imagine how this flesher will feel, when vis skin's burnt so badly that the fluid beneath starts seeping out!"

Yatima felt a wave of doubt sweep through ver. Ve could picture the whole, hidden dream ape child, standing there waiting fearfully for the strangers to pass and though ve could barely comprehend the idea of physical pain, images of bodily integrity resonated deeply. The biosphere was a disordered world, full of potential toxins and pathogens, ruled by nothing but the chance collisions of molecules. A ruptured skin would be like a wildly malfunctioning exoself that let data flood across its borders at random, overwriting and corrupting the citizen within.

Ve said hopefully, "Maybe vis family will find a cave to shelter in, once they notice the effects of the UV. That's not impossible; the canopy will protect them for a while. They could live on fungi—"

"I'll do it." Inoshiro grabbed Yatima's right arm, and swung it toward the child. "Give me control of the delivery system, and I'll do it myself."

Yatima tried to pull free. Inoshiro resisted. The struggle confused their separate copies of the interface, which was too stupid to realize it was fighting itself; they both overbalanced. As ve toppled into the undergrowth, Yatima almost felt it: the descent, the inevitable impact. Helplessness. Ve could hear the child ru

Neither of them moved. After a while, Yatima said, "The bridgers will find a way to protect them. They'll engineer some kind of shield for their skin. They could release the genes in a virus—"

"And they'll do all this in a day? Before or after they work out how to feed fifteen thousand people when their crops are wilting, the ground is frozen, and the rain's about to turn into nitric acid?"

Yatima had no reply. Inoshiro rose to vis feet, then pulled ver up. They walked on in silence.

Halfway to the edge of the jungle, they were met by three bridgers, two females and a male. All were fully grown, but young-looking, and wary. Communication proved difficult.

Inoshiro repeated patiently, "We are Yatima and Inoshiro. We came here once before, twenty-one years ago. We're friends."

The man said, "All your robot friends are on the moon; none of them are here now. Leave us in peace." The bridgers remained several meters away; they'd retreated in alarm when Yatima had approached them with an outstretched hand.

Inoshiro complained in IR, "Even if they're too young to remember… our last visit should he legendary."

"Apparently not."

Inoshiro persisted. "We're not gleisners! We're from Konishi polis; we're just riding these machines. We're friends of Orlando Venetti and Liana Zabini." The bridgers showed no sign of recognizing either name; Yatima wondered soberly if it was possible that they were both dead. "We have important news."

One of the women asked angrily, "What news? Tell us, then leave!"

Inoshiro shook vis head firmly. "We can only give our news to Orlando or Liana." Yatima agreed with this stand; a garbled account, half-understood, would do untold damage.

Inoshiro asked in IR, "What do you think they'd do if we just marched into the city?"

"They'd stop us."

"How?"

"They must have weapons of some kind. It's too risky; we've both used up most of our maintenance nanoware—and anyway, they're never going to trust us if we barge in uninvited."

Yatima tried addressing the bridgers verself. "We are friends, but we're not getting through to you. Can you find a translator?" The second woman was almost apologetic. "We have no robot translators."

"I know. But you must have translators for statics. Think of us as statics."

The bridgers exchanged bemused glances, then went into a huddle, whispering.

The second woman said, "I'll bring someone. Wait."

She left. The other two stood guard over them, refusing to be drawn into further conversation. Yatima and Inoshiro sat on the ground, facing each other rather than the fleshers, hoping to put them at ease.

By the time the translator arrived it was late afternoon. She approached and shook their hands, but regarded them with undisguised suspicion.

"I'm Francesca Canetti. You claim to be Yatima and Inoshiro, but anyone could he inhabiting these machines. Can you tell me what you saw here? What you did?"

Inoshiro recounted the details of their visit. Yatima suspected that their frosty reception was partly due to Carter-Zimmerman's well-intentioned "assault" on the fleshers' communications network, and ve felt a renewed pang of shame. Ve and Inoshiro had had twenty-one years in which to re-establish a secure gateway between the networks; even with the problems of subjective time differences, that might have led to some kind of trust by now. But they'd done nothing.

Francesca said, "So what's the news you've brought us?"

Inoshiro asked her, "Do you know what a neutron star is?"

"Of course." Francesca laughed, clearly offended. "That's a rich question, coming from a couple of lotus-eaters." Inoshiro remained silent, and after a moment Francesca elaborated, in a tone of controlled resentment. "It's a supernova remnant. The dense core left behind when a star is too massive to form a white dwarf, but not massive enough to forms a black hole. Should I go on, or is that enough to satisfy you that you're not dealing with a hunch of agrarian throwbacks who've regressed to pre-Copernican cosmology?"

Inoshiro and Yatima conferred in IR, and decided to risk it. Francesca seemed to understand them as well as Orlando and Liana; stubbornly holding out for their old friends would cause too much hostility, and waste too much time.

Inoshiro explained the situation very clearly—and Yatima resisted interjecting with provisos and technicalities—but ve could see Francesca growing ever more suspicious. It was a long, long chain of inferences from the faint waves picked up by TERAGO to the vision of a frozen, UV-blasted Earth. With an asteroid or comet, the fleshers could have used their own optical telescopes to reach their own conclusions, but they lead no gravitational wave detectors. Everything had to be taken on trust, third hand.