Diaspora

They reached the house. Orlando looked tired and distracted, but he greeted them warmly. Francesca left, and the three of them sat in the front room.

Orlando said, "Liana's sleeping. It's a kidney infection, a viral thing." He stared at the space between them. "RNA never sleeps. She's going to be all right, though. I told her you'd returned. She was pleased."

"Maybe Liana will design your new skin and corneas," Yatima suggested. Orlando made a polite sound of agreement.

Inoshiro said, "You should both come with us."

"Sorry?" Orlando rubbed his bloodshot eyes.

"Back into Konishi." Yatima turned to ver, appalled; ve'd told ver about the surviving nanoware, but after the reactions they'd had so far, this was madness.

Inoshiro continued calmly, "You don't have to go through any of this. The fear, the uncertainty. What if things go badly, and Liana's still sick? What if you can't travel to the portal? You owe it to her to think about that now." Orlando didn't look at ver, and didn't reply. After a moment, Yatima noticed tears ru

Inoshiro stood. "I think you should ask Liana."

Orlando raised his head slowly; he looked more astonished than angry. "She's asleep!"

"Don't you think this is important enough to wake her? Don't you think she has a right to choose?"

"She's sick, and she's asleep, and I'm not going to put her through that. All right? Can you understand that?" Orlando searched Inoshiro's face; Inoshiro gazed back at him steadily. Yatima suddenly felt more disoriented than at any time since they'd woken in the jungle.

Orlando said, "And she doesn't fucking know yet." His voice changed sharply on the last word. He bunched his fists and said angrily, "What do you want? Why are you doing this?"

He stared at Inoshiro's bland gray features, then suddenly burst out laughing. He sat there grimacing and laughing angrily, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand, trying to compose himself. Inoshiro said nothing.

Orlando rose from the chair. "Okay. Come on up. We'll ask Liana, we'll give her the choice." He started up the stairs. "Are you coining?"

Inoshiro followed him. Yatima stayed where ve was. Ve could make out three voices, but no words.

There was no shouting, but there were several long silences. After fifteen minutes, Inoshiro came down the stairs and walked straight out onto the street. Yatima waited for Orlando to appear. Ve said, "I'm sorry." Orlando raised his hands, let them drop, dismissing it all. He looked steadier, more resolved than before.

"I should go and find Inoshiro."

"Yeah." Orlando stepped forward suddenly, and Yatima recoiled, expecting violence. When had ve learned to do that? But Orlando just touched vis shoulder and said, "Wish us luck."

Yatima nodded and backed away. "I do."

Yatima caught sight of Inoshiro near the edge of the city.

"Slow down!"

Inoshiro turned to took at ver, but kept walking. "We've done what we came for. I'm going home."

Ve could have returned to Konishi from anywhere; there was no need to leave the enclave. Yatima willed vis viewpoint forward faster, and the interface switched the body's gait into a different mode. Ve caught up with Inoshiro on the road between the fields.

"What are you afraid of? Getting stranded?" When the burst hit, part of the upper atmosphere would turn to plasma, so satellite communication would be disrupted for a while. "We'll have enough warning from TERAGO to send back snapshots." And then? The more hostile bridgers might go as far as killing the messengers, once post-Lacerta realities began to strike home, but if it came to that they could always just erase their local selves before things became too unpleasant.

Inoshiro scowled. "I'm not afraid. But we've delivered the warning. We've spoken to everyone who was capable of listening. Hanging around any longer is just voyeuristic."

Yatima gave this serious thought. "That's not true. We're too clumsy to help much as laborers, but after the burst we'd be the only people here guaranteed immune to UV. Okay, they can cover themselves, protect their eyes, nothing's impossible if they do it carefully. But two robots built for unfiltered sunlight might still be useful."

Inoshiro didn't reply. Soft-edged shadows were racing across the fields from black filaments of cloud streaming low overhead. Yatima glanced back at the city; the clouds were piling up into structures like dark fists. Heavy rain might be good; cool the place down, keep people indoors, blunt the first shafts of UV. So long as it didn't hide so much that it left the bridgers complacent.

"I thought Liana would understand." Inoshiro laughed bitterly. "Maybe she did."

"Understand what?"

Inoshiro shook vis head. It was strange to see ver in this robot body again, which looked more like Yatima's enduring mental image of ver than vis current icon back in Konishi.

"Stay and help, Inoshiro. Please. You're the one who remembered the bridgers. You're the one who shamed me into coming here."

Inoshiro regarded ver obliquely. "Do you know why I gave you the Introdus nanoware? We could have swapped jobs, you could have made the drones."

Yatima shrugged. "Why?"

"Because I would have used it all by now. I would have shot every bridger I could. I would have gathered them all up and carried them away, whether they wanted it or not."

Inoshiro walked on down the smooth dirt road. Yatima stood and watched ver for a while, then headed back into the city.

Yatima wandered Atlanta's streets and parks, offering information wherever ve dared, approaching anyone who wasn't working unless they looked openly hostile. Even without official translators ve often found ve could communicate with small groups of people, with everyone pitching in to cover the gaps.

An incomprehensible "What are the boundaries of purity?" became: "Can the sky be trusted this far?"—with the speaker glancing at the clouds—which became: "If it rains today, will it burn us?"

"No. The acidity won't rise for months; the nitric oxides will take that long to diffuse down from the stratosphere."

The translated answers sometimes sounded like they'd traversed a Mobius strip and returned inverted, but Yatima clung to the hope that all sense wasn't evaporating along the way, that "up" wasn't really turning to "down."

By midday the city looked abandoned. Or besieged, with everyone in hiding. Then ve spotted some people working on a link between two buildings, and even in the forty-degree heat they were wearing long-sleeved clothing, and gloves, and welding masks. Yatima was encouraged by their caution, but ve could almost sense the dispiriting, claustrophobic weight of the protective gear. The bridgers clearly retained an evolved acceptance of the constraints of embodiment, but it seemed that half the pleasure of being flesh came from pushing the limits of biology, and the rest from minimizing all other encumbrances. Maybe the maddest of the masochistic statics would relish every obstacle and discomfort Lacerta could impose on them, waxing lyrical about "the real world of pain and ecstasy" while the ultraviolet flayed them, but for most fleshers it would do nothing but erode the kind of freedom that made the choice of flesh worthwhile.

There was a seat suspended by ropes from a frame in one of the parks; Yatima recalled seeing people sitting on it and swinging back and forth, an eternity ago. Ve managed to sit without falling, holding tight to one rope with vis remaining hand, but when ve willed the interface to set the pendulum in motion, nothing happened. The software didn't know how.