Diaspora

As Francesca chose the next speaker, several people in the audience stood and began making their way out. Yatima decided to treat this as a good sign: even if they weren't entirely convinced, they could set in motion precautionary steps that would save hundreds or thousands of lives.

With extensive mind grafts, and the library at vis disposal, Inoshiro fielded technical questions easily. When the amphibious exuberant asked about UV damage to plankton and pH changes in the surface waters of the oceans, there was a Carter-Zimmerman model to quote. When a bridger in the audience questioned TERAGO's reliability, Inoshiro explained why cross-talk from some other source couldn't be the cause of the neutron stars' ever quickening waves. From the subtleties of photochemistry in the stratosphere to the impossibility of Lacerta's soon-to-be-born black hole forming fast enough to swallow all the gamma rays and spare the Earth, Inoshiro countered almost every objection that might have made the case for action less compelling.

Yatima was filled with uneasy admiration. Inoshiro had pragmatically become exactly what the crisis required ver to become, grafting in all this second-hand understanding without regard for the effects on vis own personality. Ve would probably choose to have most of it removed afterward; to Yatima this sounded like dismemberment, but Inoshiro seemed to view the whole prospect as less traumatic than the business of taking on and shrugging off their gleisner bodies.

More enclave representatives began signing off; some clearly persuaded, some obviously not, some giving no signals that Yatima could decipher. And more bridgers left the hall, but others came in to take their place, and some Atlanta residents asked questions from their homes.

The three guards had sat in the audience and let the debate run its course, but now the woman who'd sliced off Yatima's arm finally lost patience and sprang to her feet. "They brought Introdus nanoware into the city! We had to cut the weapon from vis body, or they would have used it by now!" She pointed at Yatima. "Do you deny it?"

The bridgers responded to this accusation the way Yatima had expected them to greet the news of the burst: with an audible outcry, agitated body movements, and some people rising to their feet and yelling abuse at the stage.

Yatima took Inoshiro's place at the acoustic focus. "It's true that I brought in the nanoware, but I would only have used it if asked. The nearest portal is a thousand kilometers away; we only wanted to offer you the choice of migration without the risks of that long journey."

There was no coherent response, just more shouting. Yatima looked around at the hundreds of angry fleshers, and struggled to understand their hostility; they couldn't all be as paranoid as the guards. Lacerta itself was a crushing blow, a promise of decades of hardship, at best… but maybe talk of "the choice of migration" was worse. Lacerta could only drive them into the polises if it could hammer them into the ground; maybe the prospect of following the Introdus seemed less like a welcome escape hatch, a means of cheating death, than a humiliating means of allowing the fleshers to witness their own a

Yatima raised vis voice to ensure that the translators could hear ver. "We were wrong to bring in the nanoware—but we're strangers, and we acted out of ignorance, not malice. We respect your courage and tenacity, we admire your skills—and all we ask is to be allowed to stand beside you and help you fight to go on living the way you've chosen to live: in the flesh."

This seemed to split the audience; some responded with jeers of derision, some with renewed calm and even enthusiasm. Yatima felt like ve was playing a game ve barely understood, for stakes ve hardly dared contemplate. They had never been fit for this task, either of them. In Konishi, the grossest acts of foolishness could barely wound a fellow citizen's pride; here and now, a few poorly judged words could cost thousands of lives.

One bridger called out words that were translated as, "Do you swear that you have no more Introdus nanoware—and will make no more?"

This question silenced the hall. Trust the bridgers in their diversity to have someone who knew the workings of a gleisner body. The guards glared up at Yatima, as if ve'd misled them merely by failing to confess the existence of these possibilities.

"I have no more, and I will make no more." Ve spread his arms, as if to show them the i

The convocation stretched on through the night. People came and went, some splitting off into groups to coordinate preparations for the burst, some returning with new questions. In the early hours of the morning, the three guards called on the meeting to expel Yatima and Inoshiro from Atlanta immediately; upon losing the vote they walked out.

By dawn, most of the bridgers and the representatives of many of the enclaves seemed to have been won over, if only to the point where they accepted that the balance of probabilities made it well worth the risk of wasting effort on u

One of the bridgers had suggested that they find a way to get the TERAGO data onto the fleshers' communications network. Francesca took them to Atlanta's communications hub—a large room in the same building—and they worked with the engineer on duty to establish a link to the Coalition via the drones. Translating the gestalt tags into suitable audiovisual equivalents looked like it would be the hardest part, but there turned out to be a centuries-old tool in the library for doing just that.

When everything was working the engineer summoned a plot of the Lacerta gravity waves and an a

"I'm going to need a few hours' rest." Francesca had developed a fixed gaze and monotone speech; her skepticism about the burst had clearly faded long ago, but she'd shown no sign of emotion, and she'd kept the convocation ru

Neither did Yatima, but Inoshiro said, "Can you take us to Liana and Orlando's house?"

Outside, people were constructing covered walkways between buildings, wheeling sacks and barrels of food into repositories, digging trenches and laying pipes, spreading tarpaulins to make new corridors of shade. Yatima hoped the message had got through that even reflected UV would soon have the power to burn or blind; some of the bridgers working in the heat had bare limbs or torsos, and every square centimeter of skin seemed to radiate vulnerability. The sky was darker than ever, but even the heaviest clouds would make a weak and inconstant shield. The crops in the fields were as good as dead; medium-term survival would come down to the ability to design, create, plant, and harvest viable new species before existing food supplies ran out. There was also the question of energy; Atlanta was largely powered by photovoltaic plants tailored to the atmosphere's current spectral windows. Carter-Zimmerman's botanists had already offered some tentative suggestions; Inoshiro had sketched the details at the convocation, and now they were available in full, on-line. No doubt the fleshers would regard them as the work of model-bound dilettante theoreticians, but as starting points for experimentation they had to be better than nothing.