Diaspora

"Play with me!" The orphan had learned to call the fourth citizen "I" or "me" rather than "Yatima," but that was just grammar, not self-awareness.

"I want to watch the trimming, Yatima."

"No! Play with me!" The orphan weaved around ver excitedly, projecting fragments of recent memories: Blanca creating shared scape objects—spi

"Okay, okay! Here's a new game. I just hope you're a fast learner."

Blanca emitted another extra tag—the same general flavor as before, though not identical—then vanished again… only to reappear immediately, a few hundred delta away across the scape. The orphan spotted ver easily, and followed at once.

Blanca jumped again. And again. Each time, ve sent out the new flavor of tag, with a slight variation, before vanishing. Just as the orphan was starting to find the game dull, Blanca began to stay out of the scape for a fraction of a tau before reappearing—and the orphan spent the time trying to guess where ve'd materialize next, hoping to get to the chosen spot first.

There seemed to be no pattern to it, though; Blanca's solid shadow jumped around the forum at random, anywhere from the cloisters to the fountain, and the orphan's guesses all failed. It was frustrating… but Blanca's games had usually turned out to possess some kind of subtle order in the past, so the infotrope persisted, combining and recombining existing pattern detectors into new coalitions, hunting for a way to make sense of the problem. The tags! When the infotrope compared the memory of the raw gestalt data for the tags Blanca was sending with the address the i

The first time, their icons overlapped, and the orphan had to back away before it saw that Blanca really was there, confirming the success the infotrope had already brashly claimed. The second time, the orphan instinctively compensated, varying the tag address slightly to keep from colliding, as it had learned to do when pursuing Blanca by sight. The third time, the orphan beat ver to the destination.

"I win!"

"Well done, Yatima! You followed me!"

"I followed you!"

"Shall we go and see the trimming now? With Inoshiro and Gabriel?"

"Gabriel!"

"I'll take that as a yes."

Blanca jumped, the orphan followed—and the cloistered square dissolved into a billion stars.

The orphan examined the strange new scape. Between them, the stars shone in almost every frequency from kilometer-long radio waves to high-energy gamma rays. The "color space" of gestalt could be extended indefinitely, and the orphan had chanced on a few astronomical images in the library which employed a similar palette, but most terrestrial scenes and most scapes never went beyond infrared and ultraviolet. Even the satellite views of planetary surfaces seemed drab and muted in comparison; the planets were too cold to blaze across the spectrum like this. There were hints of subtle order in the riot of color series of emission and absorption lines, smooth contours of thermal radiation but the infotrope, dazzled, gave in to the overload and simply let the data flow through it; analysis would have to wait for a thousand more clues. The stars were geometrically featureless—pointlike, distant, their scape addresses impossible to compute—but the orphan had a fleeting mental image of the act of moving toward them, and imagined, for an instant, the possibility of seeing them up close.

The orphan spotted a cluster of citizens nearby, and once it shifted its attention from the backdrop of stars it began to notice dozens of small groups scattered around the scape. Some of their icons reflected the ambient radiation, but most were simply visible by decree, making no pretense of interacting with the starlight.

Inoshiro said, "Why did you have to bring that along?"

As the orphan turned toward ver, it caught sight of a star far brighter than all the rest, much smaller than the familiar sight in the Earth's sky, but unfiltered by the usual blanket of gases and dust.

"The sun?"

Gabriel said, "Yes, that's the sun." The golden-furred citizen floated beside Blanca, who was visible as sharply as ever, darker even than the cool thin background radiation between the stars.

Inoshiro whined, "Why did you bring Yatima? It's too young! It won't understand anything!"

Blanca said, "Just ignore ver, Yatima."

Yatima! Yatima! The orphan knew exactly where Yatima was, and what ve looked like, without any need to part the navigators and check. The fourth citizen's icon had stabilized as the tall flesher in the purple robe who'd adopted the lion cub, in the library.

Inoshiro addressed the orphan. "Don't worry Yatima, I'll try to explain it to you. If the gleisners didn't trim this asteroid, then in three hundred thousand years—ten thousand teratau—there'd be a chance it might hit the Earth. And the sooner they trim it, the less energy it takes. But they couldn't do it before, because the equations are chaotic, so they couldn't model the approach well enough until now."

The orphan understood none of this. "Blanca wanted me to see the trimming! But I wanted to play a new game!"

Inoshiro laughed. "So what did ve do? Kidnap you?"

"I followed ver and ve jumped and jumped… and I followed ver!" The orphan made a few short jumps around the three of them, trying to illustrate the point, though it didn't really convey the business of leaping right out of one scape into another.

Inoshiro said, "Ssh. Here it comes."

The orphan followed vis gaze to an irregular lump of rock in the distance-lit by the sun, one half in deep shadow—moving swiftly and steadily toward the loose assembly of citizens. The scape software decorated the asteroid's image with gestalt tags packed with information about its chemical composition, its mass, its spin, its orbital parameters; the orphan recognized some of these flavors from the library, but it had no real grasp yet of what they meant. "One slip of the laser, and the fleshers die in pain!" Inoshiro's pewter eyes gleamed.

Blanca said dryly, "And just three hundred mille

Inoshiro turned to the orphan and added reassuringly, "But we'd he all right. Even if it wiped out Konishi on Earth, we're backed-up all over the solar system."

The asteroid was close enough now for the orphan to compute its scape address and its size. It was still some hundred times more distant than the farthest citizen, but it was approaching rapidly. The waiting spectators were arranged in a roughly spherical shell, about ten times as large as the asteroid itself—and the orphan could see at once that if it maintained its trajectory, the asteroid would pass right through the center of that imaginary sphere.

Everyone was watching the rock intently. The orphan wondered what kind of game this was; a generic symbol had formed which encompassed all the strangers in the scape, as well as the orphan's three friends, and this symbol had inherited the fourth citizen's property of holding beliefs about objects which had proved so useful for predicting its behavior. Maybe people were waiting to see if the rock would suddenly jump at random, like Blanca had jumped? The orphan believed they were mistaken; the rock was not a citizen, it wouldn't play games with them.

The orphan wanted everyone to know about the rock's simple trajectory. It checked its extrapolation one more time, but nothing had changed; the bearing and speed were as constant as ever. The orphan lacked the words to explain this to the crowd… but maybe they could learn things by watching the fourth citizen, the way the fourth citizen had learned things from Blanca. The orphan jumped across the scape, straight into the path of the asteroid. A quarter of the sky became pocked and gray, an irregular hillock on the sunward side casting a hand of deep shadow across the approaching face. For an instant, the orphan was too startled to move—mesmerized by the scale, and the speed, and the awkward, purposeless grandeur of the thing—then it matched velocities with the rock, and led it back toward the crowd.