Diaspora

Yatima surveyed the Doppler-shifted stars around the polis, following the frozen, concentric waves of color across the sky from expansion to convergence. Ve wondered what account they should give of themselves when they finally caught up with their quarry. They’d brought no end of questions to ask, but the flow of information couldn’t all be one-way. When the Transmuters demanded to know “Why have you followed us? Why have you come so far?”, where should ve begin?

Yatima had read pre-Introdus histories told on a single level, bounded by the fictions that individuals were as indivisible as quarks, and planetary civilizations nothing less than self-contained universes. Neither vis own history nor the Diaspora’s would fit between those imaginary lines. The real world was full of larger structures, smaller structures, simpler and more complex structures than the tiny portion comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored. It wasn’t just a question of choosing to bury yourself in a closed world of synthetic scapes; the fleshers had never been immune to this myopia, nor had the most outward-looking citizens. No doubt at some time in their history the Transmuters had suffered from it too.

Of course, the Transmuters would already be aware of the very large, very dead celestial machinery that had driven the Diaspora to Swift and beyond. Their question would be, “Why have you come so much further? Why have you left your own people behind?”

Yatima couldn’t speak for vis fellow traveler, but the answer for ver lay at the opposite end of the scale, in the realm of the very simple, and the very small.

1. ORPHANOGENESIS

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 025 000 000 CST

15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT

The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty formed partly in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.

In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would he to endanger the sanity of every child.

The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers: the basic subprograms employed during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million interacting shapers could rarely he predicted in advance; in most cases, the only reliable method would have been to perform every computation that the altered seed itself would have performed… which was no different from going ahead and sowing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing. The conceptory’s accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the Konishi mind seed. The highest-level maps were elaborate, multidimensional structures, dwarfing the seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the citizens of Konishi had used to gauge the conceptory’s progress over the centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude, and the sixty-four possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could be thought of as a path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom, singling out an instruction code for every field along the way.

Where it was known that only one code could lead to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ocher against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind’s overarching design and the fine details of vital subsystems.

Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait fields offered a selection of codes, each with a known effect on the mind’s detailed structure, with variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down to minute differences in neural architecture less significant than the creases on a flesher’s palm. They appeared in shades of green as wildly contrasting or as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.

The remaining fields—where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could he made—were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as gray against white: a mountain peak protruding through a hand of clouds which concealed everything to the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could only he discovered firsthand.

Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted territory.

And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

The conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of the womb’s memory, a single strand of information suspended in a vacuum of zeroes. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well have been the last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the womb was a virtual machine designed to execute the seed’s instructions, and a dozen more layers of software led down to the polis itself, a lattice of flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive data, could do nothing, change nothing—but in the womb, the seed’s meaning fell into perfect alignment with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.

When the womb read the seed, the seed’s first shaper caused the space around it to be filled with a simple pattern of data: a single, frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate neighbors further up or down the same slope-but each crest was still identical to every other crest, each trough the same as every other trough. The womb’s memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers stored at each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.

A second wave was added—running askew to the first, modulated with a slow steady rise—carving each ridge into a series of ascending mounds. Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients, establishing a hierarchy of scales.

The fortieth wave plowed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been rendered unique—but enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to he scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.

In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds—and at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to jump forward along the hit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a different specialized region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.

The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower’s nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax, or head. Konishi’s digital version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further instructions, switching specialized subprograms on and off—subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first roughhewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.

By the eighth iteration, the womb’s memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would he required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them—but some gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudorandom stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed—where almost every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only those where a sufficient number of pulses was arriving simultaneously—choosing, out of all the countless alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-progress, too—but if they were traveled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It didn’t matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.

In many polises, new citizens weren’t grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didn’t clash.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for incoming data—one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan’s two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.

Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of data. But every psychoblast was innately biased toward finding the polis library (if not, it would have taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.

The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan’s two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to bring in streams of connected information-sequential images of recorded motion, and then more abstract chains of cross-references-understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behavior when it struck the right balance between coherence and change.

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan’s classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine details—not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines—but an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for “person,” and bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for “citizen,” and to the features they found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library’s data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognizing monomaniacs staring into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.

These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each other’s decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in their behavior (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there was time for overeager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has been recognized-and though the word “lion” has not yet been detected, the “lion” word-trap is tentatively firing… and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.

The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.

By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an elaborate network in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this network—symbols which could be triggered by each other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on its own, had merely been a template held up to the world to be declared a match or a mismatch a verdict without implications. The lion symbol could encode an unlimited web of implications—and that web could be tapped at any time, whether or not a lion was visible.

Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning.

The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet the matching navigator, needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to jostle for access to the output channels, regardless. They used their traps’ templates to parrot the sound or image which each had learned to recognize—and it didn’t matter if they uttered the linear words “lion,” “cub,” “antelope” into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the inside.

The orphan began to hear itself think.

Not the whole pandemonium; it couldn’t give voice—or even gestalt—to everything at once. Out of the myriad associations every scene from the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain control of the nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the sky, and the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in the animals’ wake—and more, much more… the symbols which won out before the whole scene vanished were:

“Lion chasing antelope.”

Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data. The linear words cycled from channel to channel, distinct against the silence; the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and again, an idealized reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.

Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached out to the library again.

The orphan’s thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly progression—rather, symbols fired in ever richer and more elaborate cascades—but positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind resonated with its own strongest ideas. The orphan had learned to single out one or two threads from the symbols’ endless thousand-strand argument. It had learned to narrate its own experience.

The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary of ten thousand words, a short-term memory, expectations stretching several tau into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it still had no idea that there was such a thing in the world as itself.

The conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration, scrupulously tracing the effects of the randomized indeterminate fields. A sentient observer of the same information might have visualized a thousand delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zerogee crystals, sending out ever-finer branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read and acted upon, and their influence diffused from network to network. The conceptory didn’t visualize anything; it just processed the data, and reached its conclusions.

So far, the mutations appeared to have caused no harm. Every individual structure in the orphan’s mind was functioning broadly as expected, and the traffic with the library, and other sampled data streams, showed no signs of incipient global pathologies.

If a psychoblast was found to be damaged, there was nothing in principle to stop the conceptory from reaching into the womb and repairing every last malformed structure, but the consequences could he as unpredictable as the consequences of growing the seed in the first place. Localized “surgery” sometimes introduced incompatibilities with the rest of the psychoblast, while alterations widespread and thorough enough to guarantee success could he self-defeating, effectively obliterating the original psychoblast and replacing it with an assembly of parts cloned from past healthy ones.

But there were risks, too, in doing nothing. Once a psychoblast became self-aware, it was granted citizenship, and intervention without consent became impossible. This was not a matter of mere custom or law; the principle was built into the deepest level of the polis. A citizen who spiraled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorize help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

So the citizens of Konishi had programmed the conceptory to err on the side of caution. It continued to observe the orphan closely, ready to terminate psychogenesis at the first sign of dysfunction.

Not long after the five-thousandth iteration, the orphan’s output navigator began to fire—and a tug-of-war began. The output navigator was wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that showed a response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining itself to the polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both navigators were wired with a drive to bring each other into alignment, to connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak in the same place—a useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphan’s chatter of speech and icons flowed straight back to the library, which completely ignored it.

Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator sent repressor signals into the change-discriminator networks, undermining the attraction of the library’s mesmerizing show, bullying the input navigator out of its rut. Dancing a weird chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping from scape to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to talk to.

They caught a thousand random glimpses of the physical world along the way: a radar image of a dust storm sweeping across the sea of dunes ringing the north polar ice cap of Mars; the faint infrared plume of a small comet disintegrating in the atmosphere of Uranus—an event that had taken place decades before, but lingered in the satellite’s discriminating memory. They even chanced upon a real-time feed from a drone weaving its way across the East African savanna toward a pride of lions, but unlike the library’s flowing images this vision seemed intractably frozen, and after a few tau they moved on.

When the orphan stumbled on the address for a Konishi forum, it saw a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and grays, arranged in a pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating itself. A fountain sprayed liquid silver toward a cloud-streaked, burnt-orange sky; as each stream broke apart into mirrored droplets halfway up its arc, the shiny globules deformed into tiny winged piglets which flew around the fountain, braiding each others’ flight paths and grunting cheerfully before diving back into the pool. Stone cloisters ringed the square, the inner side of the walkway a series of broad arches and elaborately decorated colonnades. Some of the arches had been given unusual twists—Eschered or Kleined, skewed through invisible extra dimensions.

The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and knew the linear words for most of them; the scape itself was so unremarkable that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a difference here, though it could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had seen before, or the stylized fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by physiology or physics, but only by the conventions of gestalt—the need to proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one primary meaning: I am a citizen.

The orphan addressed the forum: “People.”

The linear conversations between the citizens were public, but muted—degraded in proportion to distance in the scape—and the orphan heard only an unchanging murmur.

It tried again. “People!”

The icon of the nearest citizen—a dazzling multihued form like a stained-glass statue, about two delta high—turned to face the orphan. An innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphan’s angle of view straight toward the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphan’s own icon—now a crude, unconscious parody of the citizen’s—turn the same way.

The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face smiled, and ve said, “Hello, orphan.”

A response, at last! The output navigator’s feedback detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping down the restlessness which had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any system which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.

The orphan parroted: “Hello, orphan.”

The citizen smiled again—“Yes, hello”—then turned back to vis friends.

“People! Hello!”

Nothing happened.

“Citizens! People!”

The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked on its satisfaction rating, making the navigators restless again. Not restless enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.

The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: “People! Hello!” It moved without momentum or inertia, gravity or friction, merely tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigator’s requests for data, which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphan’s point-of-view. The matching bits from the output navigator determined where and how the orphan’s speech and icon were merged into the scape.

The navigators learned to move close enough to the citizens to be easily heard. Some responded—“Hello, orphan”—before turning away. The orphan echoed their icons hack at them: simplified or intricate, rococco or spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of luminous smoke, or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless black—but always the same biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the letter A in a hundred mad monks’ illuminated manuscripts.

Gradually, the orphan’s input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag—a quality like a distinctive odor for a flesher, though more localized, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope—a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors—began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity—every citizen’s icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag—and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn’t previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.

The citizen exclaimed angrily, “Don’t do that, idiot!”

“Hello!”

“No one will believe you if you claim to be me—least of all me. Understand? Now go away!” This citizen had metallic, pewter-gray skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.

“No!” The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. “See? I challenge you—and you can’t respond. So why bother lying?”

“Hello!”

“Go away”

The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.

“Hello, citizen!”

The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. “Don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know your own signature?”

Another citizen said calmly, “It must be the new orphan—still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it.”

This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, “Lion.” It tried mimicking the new citizen—and suddenly all three of them were laughing.

The third citizen said, “It wants to he you now, Gabriel.”

The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, “If it doesn’t know its own name, we should call it ‘idiot.’”

“Don’t be cruel. I could show you memories, little part-sibling.” The third citizen’s icon was a featureless black silhouette.

“Now it wants to be Blanca.”

The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three responded by chanting strange linear sounds which meant nothing—“Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!”—just as the orphan sent out the gestalt images and tags.

Short-term pattern recognizers seized on the connection, and the orphan joined in the linear chanting, continued it for a while, when the others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.

The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, “I’m Inoshiro.”

The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, “I’m Gabriel.”

The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it in front of vis trunk, and said, “I’m Blanca.”

The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear word they’d spoken, aping their hand gesture. Symbols had formed for all three of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear words together—even though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.

The citizen whose icon had made them all chant “Inoshiro” said, “So far so good. But how does it get a name of its own.

The one with its tag bound to “Blanca” said, “Orphans name themselves.”

The orphan echoed, “Orphans name themselves.”

The citizen bound to “Gabriel” pointed to the one bound to “Inoshiro,” and said, “Ve is—?” The citizen bound to “Blanca” said “Inoshiro.”

Then the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” pointed back at ver and said “Ve is—?” This time, the citizen bound to “Blanca” replied, “Blanca.” The orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate systems which helped make sense of the scape’s geometry, and completing the pattern easily even when no one else did.

Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and said: “Ve is?” The input navigator spun the orphan’s angle of view, trying to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the orphan, it moved its point of view backward, closer to the golden-furred citizen-momentarily breaking step with the output navigator.

Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itself—a crude amalgam of the three Citizens’ icons, all black fur and yellow metal-not just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected channels, but as a vivid scape-object beside the other three.

This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to “Gabriel” was pointing at.

The infotrope went wild. It couldn’t complete the unfinished regularity—it couldn’t answer the game’s question for this strange fourth citizen-but the hole in the pattern needed to he filled.

The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and color, out there in the scape… changes perfectly mirroring its own random fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens, sometimes simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerized the regularity detectors for a while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.

The infotrope combined and recombined all the factors at hand, and set a short-term goal: making the pewter-skinned “Inoshiro” icon change, the way the fourth citizen’s icon was changing. This triggered a faint anticipatory firing of the relevant symbols, a mental image of the desired event. But though the image of a wiggling, pulsating citizen-icon easily won control of the gestalt output channel, it wasn’t the “Inoshiro” icon that changed—just the fourth citizen’s icon, as before.

The input navigator drifted of its own accord back into the same location as the output navigator, and the fourth citizen abruptly vanished. The infotrope pushed the navigators apart again; the fourth citizen reappeared.

The “Inoshiro” citizen said, “What’s it doing?”

The “Blanca” citizen replied, “Just watch, and be patient. You might learn something.”

A new symbol was already forming, a representation of the strange fourth citizen—the only one whose icon seemed bound by a mutual attraction to the orphan’s viewpoint in the scape, and the only one whose action the orphan could anticipate and control with such ease. So were all four citizens the same kind of thing-like all lions, all antelope, all circles… or not? The connections between the symbols remained tentative.

The “Inoshiro” citizen said, “I’m bored! Let some one else baby-sit it!” Ve danced around the group-taking turns imitating the “Blanca” and “Gabriel” icons, and reverting to vis original form. “What’s my name? I don’t know! What’s my signature? I don’t have one! I’m an orphan! I’m an orphan! I don’t even know how I look!”

When the orphan perceived the “Inoshiro” citizen taking on the icons of the other two, it almost abandoned its whole classification scheme in confusion. The “Inoshiro” citizen was behaving more like the fourth citizen, now—though vis actions still didn’t coincide with the orphan’s intentions.

The orphan’s symbol for the fourth citizen kept track of that citizen’s appearance and location in the scape, but it was also beginning to distill the essence of the orphan’s own mental images and short-term “goal” creating a summary of all the aspects of the orphan’ state of mind which seemed to have some connection to the fourth citizen’s behavior. Few symbols possessed sharply defined boundaries, though; most were as permeable and promiscuous as plasmid-swapping bacteria. The symbol for the “Inoshiro” citizen copied some of the state-of-mind structures from the symbol for the fourth citizen, and began trying them out for itself.

At first, the ability to represent highly summarized “mental images” and “goals” was no help at all—because it was still linked to the orphan’s state of mind. The “Inoshiro” symbol’s blindly cloned machinery kept predicting that the “Inoshiro” citizen would behave according to the orphan’s own plans… and that never happened. In the face of this repeated failure, the links soon withered—and the tiny, crude model-of-a-mind left inside the “Inoshiro” symbol was set free to find the “Inoshiro” state-of-mind that best matched the citizen’s actual behavior.

The symbol tried out different connections, different theories, hunting for the one that made most sense… and the orphan suddenly grasped the fact that the “Inoshiro” citizen had been imitating the fourth citizen.

The infotrope seized on this revelation—and tried to make the fourth citizen mimic the “Inoshiro” citizen back.

The fourth citizen proclaimed, “I’m an orphan! I’m an orphan! I don’t even know how I look!”

The “Gabriel” citizen pointed at the fourth citizen and said, “Ve is an orphan!”

The “Inoshiro” citizen agreed wearily, “Ve is an orphan. But why does ve have to be this slow!”

Inspired—driven by the infotrope—the orphan tried playing the “Ve is-?” game again, this rime using the response “an orphan” for the fourth citizen. The other, confirmed the choice, and soon the words were bound to the symbol for the fourth citizen. When the orphan’s three friends left the scape, the fourth citizen remained. But the fourth citizen had exhausted vis ability to offer interesting surprises, so after pestering some of the other citizens to no avail, the orphan returned to the library.

The input navigator had learned the simplest indexing scheme used by the library, and when the infotrope hunted for ways to tie up the loose ends in the patterns half-formed in the scape, it succeeded in driving the input navigator to locations in the library which referred to the four citizens’ mysterious linear words: Inoshiro, Gabriel, Blanca, and Orphan. There were streams of data indexed by each of these words, though none seemed to connect to the citizens themselves. The orphan saw so many images of fleshers, often with wings, associated with the word “Gabriel” that it built a whole symbol out of the regularities it found, but the new symbol barely overlapped with that of the golden-furred citizen.

The orphan drifted away from its infotrope-driven search many times; old addresses in the library, etched in memory, tugged at the input navigator. Once, viewing a scene of a grimy flesher child holding up an empty wooden bowl, the orphan grew bored and veered back toward more familiar territory. Halfway there, it came across a scene of an adult flesher crouching beside,, bewildered lion cub and lifting it into vis arms.

A lioness lay on the ground behind them, motionless and bloody. The flesher stroked the head of the cub. “Poor little Yatima.”

Something in the scene transfixed the orphan. It whispered to the library, “Yatima. Yatima.” It had never heard the word before, but the sound of it resonated deeply.

The lion cub mewed. The flesher crooned, “My poor little orphan.” The orphan moved between the library and the scape with the orange sky and the flying-pig fountain. Sometimes its three friends were there, or other citizens would play with it for a while; sometimes there was only the fourth citizen.

The fourth citizen rarely appeared the same from visit to visit—ve tended to resemble the most striking image the orphan had seen in the library in the preceding few kilotau—but ve was still easy to identify: ve was the one who only became visible when the two navigators moved apart. Every time the orphan arrived in the scape, it stepped back from itself and checked out the fourth citizen. Sometimes it adjusted the icon, bringing it closer to a specific memory, or fine-tuning it according to the aesthetic preferences of the input classifying networks—biases first carved out by a few dozen trait fields, then deepened or silted-up by the subsequent data stream. Sometimes the orphan mimicked the flesher it had seen picking up the lion cub: tall and slender, with deep black skin and brown eyes, dressed in a purple robe.

And once, when the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” said with mock sorrow, “Poor little orphan, you still don’t have a name,” the orphan remembered the scene, and responded, “Poor little Yatima.”

The golden-furred citizen said, “I think it does, now.

From then on, they all called the fourth citizen “Yatima.” They said it so many times, making such a fuss about it, that the orphan soon bound it to the symbol as strongly as “Orphan.”

The orphan watched the citizen bound to “Inoshiro” chanting triumphantly at the fourth citizen: “Yatima? Yatima! Ha ha ha! I’ve got five parents, and five part, siblings, and I’ll always be older than you!”

The orphan made the fourth citizen respond, “Inoshiro! Inoshiro! Ha ha ha!”

But it couldn’t think what to say next. Blanca said, “The gleisners are trimming an asteroid—right now, in real time. Do you want to come see? Inoshiro’s there, Gabriel’s there. just follow me!”

Blanca’s icon put out a strange new tag, and then abruptly vanished. The forum was almost empty; there were a few regulars near the fountain, who the orphan knew would be unresponsive, and there was the fourth citizen, as always.

Blanca reappeared. “What is it? You don’t know how to follow me, or you don’t want to come?” The orphan’s language analysis networks had begun fine-tuning the universal grammar they encoded, rapidly homing in on the conventions of linear. Words were becoming more than isolated triggers for symbols, each with a single, fixed meaning; the subtleties of order, context, and inflection were beginning to modulate the symbols’ cascades of interpretation. This was a request to know what the fourth citizen wanted.

“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—spinning numbered blocks, and brightly colored bouncing balls—and teaching the orphan how to interact with them.

“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 innate geometry networks computed when the orphan caught sight of ver a moment later, parts of the two sequences matched up, almost precisely. Again and again. The infotrope bound the two sources of information together-recognizing them as two means of learning the same thing—and the orphan began jumping across the scape without waiting to see where Blanca reappeared.

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 millennia to try again.”

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.

People began shouting excitedly, their words immune to the fictitious vacuum but degraded with distance by the scape, scrambled into a pulsating roar. The orphan turned away from the asteroid, and saw the nearest citizens waving and gesticulating.

The fourth citizen’s symbol, plugged directly into the orphan’s mind, had already concluded that the fourth citizen was tracing out the asteroid’s path in order to change what the other citizens thought. So the orphan’s model of the fourth citizen had acquired the property of having beliefs about what other citizens believed… and the symbols for Inoshiro, Blanca, Gabriel, and the crowd itself, snatched at this innovation to try it out for themselves.

As the orphan plunged into the spherical arena, it could hear people laughing and cheering. Everyone was watching the fourth citizen, though the orphan was finally beginning to suspect that no one had really needed to he shown the trajectory. As it looked back to check that the rock was still on course, a point on the hillock began to glow with intense infrared-and then erupted with light a thousand times brighter than the sunlit rock around it, and a thermal spectrum hotter than the sun itself. The orphan froze, letting the asteroid draw closer. A plume of incandescent vapor was streaming out of a crater in the hillock; the image was rich with new gestalt tags, all of them incomprehensible, but the infotrope burned a promise into the orphan’s mind: I will learn to understand them.

The orphan kept checking the scape addresses of the reference points it had been following, and it found a microscopic change in the asteroid’s direction. The flash of light—and this tiny shift in course were what everyone had been waiting to see? The fourth citizen had been wrong about what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted… and now they knew that? The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.

Before the asteroid could coincide with the fourth citizen’s icon, the orphan jumped back to its friends.

Inoshiro was furious. “What did you do that for? You ruined everything! You baby!”

Blanca asked gently, “What did you see, Yatima?”

“The rock jumped a little. But I wanted people to think… it wouldn’t.”

“Idiot! You’re always showing off!”

Gabriel said, “Yatima? Why does Inoshiro think you flew with the asteroid?”

The orphan hesitated. “I don’t know what Inoshiro thinks.”

The symbols for the four citizens shifted into a configuration they’d tried a thousand times before: the fourth citizen, Yatima, set apart from the rest, singled out as unique—this time, as the only one whose thoughts the orphan could know with certainty. And as the symbol network hunted for better ways to express this knowledge, circuitous connections began to tighten, redundant links began to dissolve.

There was no difference between the model of Yatima’s beliefs about the other citizens, buried inside the symbol for Yatima… and the models of the other citizens themselves, inside their respective symbols. The network finally recognized this, and began to discard the unnecessary intermediate stages. The model for Yatima’s beliefs became the whole, wider network of the orphan’s symbolic knowledge.

And the model of Yatima’s beliefs about Yatima’s mind became the whole model of Yatima’s mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary, just a tight bundle of connections looping back out to the thing itself.

The orphan’s stream of consciousness surged through the new connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks that I think that Yatima thinks…

Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:

I am thinking

I am thinking that I know what I’m thinking.

Yatima said, “I know what I’m thinking.”

Inoshiro replied airily, “What makes you think any one cares?”

For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan', mind against the polis’s definition of self-awareness.

Every criterion was now satisfied.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to he reprogrammed from within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizen—two unique megadigit numbers, one private, one public—and embedded them in the orphan’s cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys. It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to he counted.

Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a stream. It was now the new citizen’s exoself: its shell, its non-sentient carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from within.

Inoshiro said, “Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?”

Yatima didn’t need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon hadn’t changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the kind ve’d noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time ve’d visited the flying-pig scape.

Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a random number encoded via the public half of Yatima’s signature. Before Yatima could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to the challenge automatically: decoding Blanca’s message, re-encrypting it via Blanca’s own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag. Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, “Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima.” Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca’s challenge then muttered sullenly, “Welcome, Yatima.” Gabriel said, “And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises.”

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused, oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon… but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

2. TRUTH MINING

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 281 042 016 CST

18 May 2975, 10:10:39.170 UT

“What is it you’re having trouble with?”

Radiya’s icon was a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, the skull carved from a knotted stump. Vis homescape was a forest of oak; they always met in the same clearing. Yatima wasn’t sure if Radiya spent much time here, or whether ve immersed verself completely in abstract mathematical spaces whenever ve was working, but the forest’s complex, arbitrary messiness made a curiously harmonious backdrop for the spartan objects they conjured up to explore.

“Spatial curvature. I still don’t understand where it comes from.” Yatima created a translucent blob, floating between ver and Radiya at chest height, with half a dozen black triangles embedded in it. “If you start out with a manifold, shouldn’t you he able to impose any geometry you like on it?” A manifold was a space with nothing but dimension and topology; no angles, no distances, no parallel lines. As ve spoke, the blob stretched and bent, and the sides of the triangles swayed and undulated. “I thought curvature existed on a whole new level, a new set of rules you could write any way you liked. So you could choose zero curvature everywhere, if that’ what you wanted.” Ve straightened all the triangles into rigid, planar figures. “Now I’m not so sure. There are some simple two-dimensional manifolds, like a sphere, where I can’t see how to flatten the geometry. But I can’t prove that it’s impossible, either.”

Radiya said, “What about a torus? Can you give a torus Euclidean geometry?”

“I couldn’t at first. But then I found a way.”

“Show me.”

Yatima banished the blob and created a torus, one delta wide and a quarter of a delta high, its white surface gridded with red meridians and blue circles of latitude. Ve’d found a standard tool in the library for treating the surface of any object as a scape; it re-scaled everything appropriately, forced notional light rays to follow the surface’s geodesics, and added a slight thickness so there was no need to become two-dimensional yourself. Politely offering the address so Radiya could follow, Yatima jumped into the torus’s scape.

They arrived standing on the outer rim—the torus’s “equator”—facing “south.” With light rays clinging to the surface, the scape appeared boundless, though Yatima could clearly see the backs of both Radiya’s icon and vis own, one short revolution ahead, and ve could just make out a twice-distant Radiya through the gap between the two of them. The forest clearing was nowhere to be seen; above them was nothing but blackness.

Looking due south the perspective was very nearly linear, with the red meridians wrapping the torus appearing to converge toward a distant vanishing point. But to the east and west the blue lines of latitude—which seemed almost straight and parallel nearby—appeared to veer apart wildly as they approached a critical distance. Light rays circumnavigating the torus around the outer rim reconverged, as if focused by a magnifying lens, at the point directly opposite the place where they started out—so the vastly distended image of one tiny spot on the equator, exactly halfway around the torus, was hogging the view and pushing aside the image of everything north or south of it. Beyond the halfway mark the blue lines came together again and exhibited something like normal perspective for a while, before they came full circle and the effect was repeated. But this time the view beyond was blocked by a wide band of purple with a thin rim of black on top, stretching across the horizon: Yatima’s own icon, distorted by the curvature. A green and brown streak was also visible, partly obscuring the purple and black one, if Yatima looked directly away from Radiya.

“The geometry of this embedding is non-Euclidean, obviously.” Yatima sketched a few triangles on the surface at their feet. “The sum of the angles of a triangle depends on where you put it: more than 180 degrees here, near the outer rim, but less than 180 near the inner rim. In between, it almost balances out.”

Radiya nodded. “All right. So how do you balance it out everywhere without changing the topology?”

Yatima sent a stream of tags to the scape object, and the view around them began to he transformed. Their smeared icons on the horizon to the east and west began to shrink, and the blue lines of latitude began to straighten out. To the south, the narrow region of linear perspective was expanding rapidly. “If you bend a cylinder into a torus, the lines parallel to the cylinder’s axis get stretched into different-sized circles; that’s where the curvature really comes from. And if you tried to keep all those circles the same size, there’d be no way to keep them apart; you’d crush the cylinder flat in the process. But that’s only true in three dimensions.”

The grid lines were all straight now, the perspective perfectly linear everywhere. They appeared to he standing on a boundless plane, with only the repeated images of their icons to reveal otherwise. The triangles had straightened out, too; Yatima made two identical copies of one of them, then maneuvered the three together into a fan that showed the angles summing to 180 degrees. “Topologically, nothing’s changed; I haven’t made any cuts or joins in the surface. The only difference is…”

Ve jumped back to the forest clearing. The torus appeared to have been transformed into a short cylindrical band; the large blue circles of latitude were all of equal size now-but the smaller red circles, the meridians, looked like they’d been flattened into straight lines. “I rotated each meridian 90 degrees, into a fourth spatial dimension. They only look flat because we’re seeing them edge-on.” Yatima had rehearsed the trick with a lower-dimensional analogue: taking the band between a pair of concentric circles and twisting it 90 degrees out of the plane, standing it up on its edge; the extra dimension created room for the entire band to have a uniform radius. With a torus it was much the same; every circle of latitude could have the same radius, so long as they were given different “heights” in a fourth dimension to keep them apart. Yatima re-colored the whole torus in smoothly varying shades of green to reveal the hidden fourth coordinate. The inner and outer surfaces of the “cylinder” only matched colors at the top and bottom rims, “—here they met up in the fourth dimension; elsewhere, different hues on either side showed that they remained separated.

Radiya said, “Very nice. Now can you do the same for a sphere?”

Yatima grimaced with frustration. “I’ve tried! Intuitively, it just looks impossible… but I would have said the same thing about the torus, before I found the right trick.” Ve created a sphere as ve spoke, then deformed it into a cube. No good, though—that was just sweeping all the curvature into the singularities of the corners, it didn’t make it go away.

“Okay. Here’s a hint.” Radiya turned the cube back into a sphere, and drew three great circles on it in black: an equator, and two complete meridians 90 degrees apart.

“What have I divided the surface into?”

“Triangles. Right triangles.” Four in the northern hemisphere, four in the south.

“And whatever you do to the surface—bend it, stretch it, twist it into a thousand other dimensions—you’ll always be able to divide it up the same way, won’t you? Eight triangles, drawn between six points?”

Yatima experimented, deforming the sphere into a succession of different shapes. “I think you’re right. But how does that help?”

Radiya remained silent. Yatima made the object transparent, so ve could see all the triangles at once. They formed a kind of coarse mesh, a six-pointed net, a closed bag of string. Ve straightened all twelve lines, which certainly flattened the triangles-but it transformed the sphere into an octahedral diamond, which was just as bad as a cube. Each face of the diamond was perfectly Euclidean, but the six sharp points were like infinitely concentrated repositories of curvature.

Ve tried smoothing and flattening the six points. That was easy—but it made the eight triangles as bowed and non-Euclidean as they’d been on the original sphere. It seemed “obvious” that the points and the triangles could never be made flat simultaneously… but Yatima still couldn’t pin down the reason why the two goals were irreconcilable. Ve measured the angles where four triangles met, around what had once been a point of the diamond: 90, 90, 90, 90. That much made perfect sense: to lie flat, and meet nicely without any gaps, they had to add up to 360 degrees. Ve reverted to the unblunted diamond, and measured the same angles again: 60, 60, 60, 60. A total of 240 was too small to lie flat; anything less than a full circle forced the surface to roll up like the point of a cone…

That was it! That was the heart of the contradiction! Every vertex needed angles totaling 360 degrees around it, in order to lie flat… while every flat, Euclidean triangle supplied just 180 degrees. Half as much. So if there’d been exactly twice as many triangles as vertices, everything would have added up perfectly-but with six vertices and only eight triangles, there wasn’t enough flatness to go round.

Yatima grinned triumphantly, and recounted vis chain of reasoning. Radiya said calmly, “Good. You’ve just discovered the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, linking the Euler number and total curvature.”

“Really?” Yatima felt a surge of pride; Euler and Gauss were legendary miners—long-dead fleshers, but their skills had rarely been equaled.

“Not quite.” Radiya smiled slightly. “You should look up the precise statement of it, though; I think you’re ready for a formal treatment of Riemannian spaces. But if it all starts to seem too abstract, don’t be afraid to back off and play around with some more examples.”

“Okay.” Yatima didn’t need to be told that the lesson was over. Ve raised a hand in a gesture of thanks, then withdrew vis icon and viewpoint from the clearing.

For a moment Yatima was scapeless, input channels isolated, alone with vis thoughts. Ve knew ve still didn’t understand curvature fully—there were dozens of other ways to think about it—but at least ve’d grasped one more fragment of the whole picture.

Then ve jumped to the Truth Mines.

Ve arrived in a cavernous space with walls of dark rock, aggregates of gray igneous minerals, drab brown clays, streaks of rust red. Embedded in the floor of the cavern was a strange, luminous object: dozens of floating sparks of light, enclosed in an elaborate set of ethereal membranes. The membranes formed nested, concentric families, Daliesque onion layers—each series culminating in a bubble around a single spark, or occasionally a group of two or three. As the sparks drifted, the membranes flowed to accommodate them, in such a way that no spark ever escaped a single level of enclosure.

In one sense, the Truth Mines were just another indexscape. Hundreds of thousands of specialized selections of the library’s contents were accessible in similar ways—and Yatima had climbed the Evolutionary Tree, hopscotched the Periodic Table, walked the avenue-like Timelines for the histories of fleshers, gleisners, and citizens. Half a megatau before, ve’d swum through the Eukaryotic Cell; every protein, every nucleotide, even carbohydrate drifting through the cytoplasm had broadcast gestalt tags with references to everything the library had to say about the molecule in question.

In the Truth Mines, though, the tags weren’t just references; they included complete statements of the particular definitions, axioms, or theorems the objects represented. The Mines were self-contained: every mathematical result that fleshers and their descendants had ever proven was on display in its entirety. The library’s exegesis was helpful—but the truths themselves were all here.

The luminous object buried in the cavern floor broadcast the definition of a topological space: a set of points (the sparks), grouped into “open subsets” (the contents of one or more of the membranes) which specified how the points were connected to each other—without appealing to notions like “distance” or “dimension.” Short of a raw set with no structure at all, this was about as basic as you could get: the common ancestor of virtually every entity worthy of the name “space,” however exotic. A single tunnel led into the cavern, providing a link to the necessary prior concepts, and half a dozen tunnels led out, slanting gently “down” into the bedrock, pursuing various implications of the definition. Suppose T is a topological space… then what follows? These routes were paved with small gemstones, each one broadcasting an intermediate result on the way to a theorem. Every tunnel in the Mines was built from the steps of a watertight proof; every theorem, however deeply buried, could be traced back to every one of its assumptions. And to pin down exactly what was meant by a “proof,” every field of mathematics used its own collection of formal systems: sets of axioms, definitions, and rules of deduction, along with the specialized vocabulary needed to state theorems and conjectures precisely.

When ve’d first met Radiya in the Mines, Yatima had asked ver why some non-sentient program couldn’t just take each formal system used by the miners and crank out all its theorems automatically sparing citizens the effort.

Radiya had replied, “Two is prime. Three is prime. Five is prime. Seven is prime. Eleven is prime. Thirteen is prime. Seventeen is-”

“Stop!”

“If I didn’t get bored, I could go on like that until the Big Crunch, and discover nothing else.”

“But we could run a few billion programs at once, all mining in different directions. It wouldn’t matter if some of them never found anything interesting.”

“Which ’different directions’ would you choose?”

“I don’t know. All of them?”

“A few billion blind moles won’t let you do that. Suppose you have just one axiom, taken as given, and ten valid logical steps you can use to generate new statements. After one step, you have ten truths to explore.” Radiya had demonstrated, building a miniature, branching mine in the space in front of Yatima. “After ten steps, you have ten billion, ten to the tenth power.” The fan of tunnels in the toy mine was already an unresolvable smear-but Radiya filled them with ten billion luminous moles, making the coal face glow strongly. “After twenty steps, you have ten to the twentieth. Too many to explore at once, by a factor of ten billion. How are you going to choose the right ones? Or would you time-share the moles between all of these paths—slowing them down to the point of uselessness?” The moles spread their light out proportionately-and the glow of activity became invisibly feeble. “Exponential growth is a curse in all its forms. You know it almost wiped out the fleshers? If we were insane enough, we could try turning the whole planet—or the whole galaxy—into some kind of machine able to exert the necessary brute computational force… but even then, I doubt we’d reach Fermat’s Last Theorem before the end of the universe.”

Yatima had persisted. “You could make the programs more sophisticated. More discriminating. Let them generalize from examples, form conjectures… aim for proofs.”

Radiya had conceded, “Perhaps it could be done. Some fleshers tried that approach before the Introdus—and if you’re short-lived, slow, and easily distracted, it almost makes sense to let unthinking software find the lodes you’d never hit before you died. For us, though… Why should we sacrifice the opportunity for pleasure?”

Now that ve’d experienced Truth Mining for verself, Yatima could only agree. There was nothing in any scape or library file, any satellite feed or drone image, more beautiful than mathematics. Ve sent the scape a query tag, and it lit the way to the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem with an azure glow for vis viewpoint only. Ve floated off slowly down one of the tunnels, reading all the tags from the jeweled path.

Learning was a strange business. Ve could have had vis exoself wire all this raw information straight into vis mind, in an instant—ve could have engulfed a complete copy of the Truth Mines, like an amoeba ingesting a planet—but the facts would have become barely more accessible than they already were, and it would have done nothing to increase vis understanding. The only way to grasp a mathematical concept was to see it in a multitude of different contexts, think through dozens of specific examples, and find at least two or three metaphors to power intuitive speculations. Curvature means the angles of a triangle might not add up to 180 degrees. Curvature means you have to stretch or shrink a plane non-uniformly to make it wrap a surface. Curvature means no room for parallel lines—or room for far more than Euclid ever dreamt of. Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Still, the library was full of the ways past miners had fleshed out the theorems, and Yatima could have had those details grafted in alongside the raw data, granting ver the archived understanding of thousands of Konishi citizens who’d traveled this route before. The right mind grafts would have enabled ver effortlessly to catch up with all the living miners who were pushing the coal face ever deeper in their own inspired directions… at the cost of making ver, mathematically speaking, little more than a patchwork clone of them, capable only of following in their shadows.

If ve ever wanted to be a miner in vis own right making and testing vis own conjectures at the coal face, like Gauss and Euler, Riemann and Levi-Civita, deRham and Cartan, Radiya and Blanca, then Yatima knew there were no shortcuts, no alternatives to exploring the Mines firsthand. Ve couldn’t hope to strike out in a fresh direction, a route no one had ever chosen before, without a new take on the old results. Only once ve’d constructed vis own map of the Mines—idiosyncratically crumpled and stained, adorned and annotated like one else’s—could ve begin to guess where the next rich vein of undiscovered truths lay buried.

Yatima was back in the savanna of vis homescape, playing with a torus crisscrossed with polygons, when Inoshiro sent a calling card; the tag entered the scape like a familiar scent on the wind. Yatima hesitated—ve was happy with what ve was doing, ve didn’t really want to be interrupted—but then ve relented, replying with a welcoming tag and granting Inoshiro access to the scape.

“What’s that ugly piece of crap?” Inoshiro gazed contemptuously at the minimalist torus. Ever since ve’d started visiting Ashton-Laval, ve seemed to have taken on the mantle of arbiter of scape aesthetics. Everything Yatima had seen in vis homescape wriggled ceaselessly, glowed across the spectrum, and had a fractal dimension of at least two point nine.

“A sketch of the proof that a torus has zero total curvature. I’m thinking of making it a permanent fixture.”

Inoshiro groaned. “The establishment have really got their hooks into you. Orphan see, orphan do.”

Yatima replied serenely, “I’ve decomposed the surface into polygons. The number of faces, minus the number of edges, plus the number of vertices—the Euler number—is zero.”

“Not for long.” Inoshiro scrawled a line across the object, defiantly bisecting one of the hexagons.

“You’ve just added one new face and one new edge. That cancels out exactly.”

Inoshiro carved a square into four triangles.

“Three new faces, minus four new edges, plus one new vertex. Net change: zero.”

“Mine fodder. Logic zombie.” Inoshiro opened vis mouth and spewed out some random tags of propositional calculus.

Yatima laughed. “If you’ve got nothing better to do than insult me…” Ve began emitting the tag for imminent withdrawal of access.

“Come and see Hashim’s new piece.”

“Maybe later.” Hashim was one of Inoshiro’s Ashton-Laval artist friends. Yatima found most of their work bewildering, though whether it was the interpolis difference in mental architecture or just vis own personal taste, ve wasn’t sure. Certainly, Inoshiro insisted that it was all “sublime.”

“It’s real time, ephemeral. Now or never.”

“Not true: you could record it for me, or I could send a proxy—”

Inoshiro stretched vis pewter face into an exaggerated scowl. “Don’t be such a philistine. Once the artist decides the parameters, they’re sacrosanct—”

“Hashim’s parameters are just incomprehensible. Look, I know I won’t like it. You go.”

Inoshiro hesitated, slowly letting vis features shrink back to normal size. “You could appreciate Hashim’s work, if you wanted to. If you ran the right outlook.”

Yatima stared at ver. “Is that what you do?”

“Yes.” Inoshiro stretched out vis hand, and a flower sprouted from the palm, a green-and-violet orchid which emitted an Ashton-Laval library address. “I didn’t call you before, because you might have told Blanca… and then it would have got back to one of my parents. And you know what they’re like.”

Yatima shrugged. “You’re a citizen, it’s none of their business.”

Inoshiro rolled vis eyes and gave ver vis best martyred look. Yatima doubted that ve’d ever understand families: there was nothing any of Inoshiro’s relatives could do to punish ver for using the outlook, let alone actually stop ver. All reproving messages could he filtered out; all family gatherings that turned into haranguing sessions could he instantly deserted. Yet Blanca’s parents—three of them Inoshiro’s—had badgered ver into breaking up with Gabriel (if only temporarily); the prospect of exogamy with Carter-Zimmerman was apparently beyond the pale. Now that they were together again, Blanca (for some reason) had to avoid Inoshiro as well as the rest of the family—and presumably Inoshiro no longer feared that vis part-sibling would blab.

Yatima was a little wounded. “I wouldn’t have told Blanca, if you’d asked me not to.”

“Yeah, yeah. Do you think I don’t remember? Ve practically adopted you.”

“Only when I was in the womb!” Yatima still liked Blanca very much, but they didn’t even see each other all that often, now.

Inoshiro sighed. “Okay: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Now are you going to come see the piece?”

Yatima sniffed the flower again, warily. The Ashton-Laval address smelt distinctly foreign… but that was just unfamiliarity. Ve had vis exoself take a copy of the outlook and scrutinize it carefully. Yatima knew that Radiya, and most other miners, used outlooks to keep themselves focused on their work, gigatau after gigatau. Any citizen with a mind broadly modeled on a flesher’s was vulnerable to drift: the decay over time of even the most cherished goals and values. Flexibility was an essential part of the flesher legacy, but after a dozen computational equivalents of the pre-Introdus lifespan, even the most robust personality was liable to unwind into an entropic mess. None of the polises’ founders had chosen to build predetermined stabilizing mechanisms into their basic designs, though, lest the entire species ossify into tribes of self-perpetuating monomaniacs, parasitized by a handful of memes. It was judged far safer for each citizen to he free to choose from a wide variety of outlooks: software that could run inside your exoself and reinforce the qualities you valued most, if and when you felt the need for such an anchor. The possibilities for short-term cross-cultural experimentation were almost incidental.

Each outlook offered a slightly different package of values and aesthetics, often built up from the ancestral reasons-to-be-cheerful that still lingered to some degree in most citizens’ minds: Regularities and periodicities—rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence. There was a continuum which stretched all the way from trivial aesthetic preferences to emotional associations to the cornerstones of morality and identity.

Yatima had vis exoself’s analysis of the outlook appear in the scape in front of ver as a pair of before-and-after maps of vis own most affected neural structures.

The maps were like nets, with spheres at every junction to represent symbols; proportionate changes in the symbols’ size showed how the outlook would tweak them.

“'Death’ gets a tenfold boost? Spare me.”

“Only because it’s so underdeveloped initially.”

Yatima shot ver a poisonous look, then rendered the snaps private, and stood examining them with an air of intense concentration.

“Make up your mind; it’s starting soon.”

“You mean make my mind Hashim’s?”

“Hashim doesn’t use an outlook.”

“So it’s all down to raw artistic talent? Isn’t that what they all say?”

“Just… make a decision.”

Vis exoself’s verdict on the potential for parasitism was fairly sanguine, though there could be no guarantees. If ve ran the outlook for a few kilotau, ve ought to be able to stop.

Yatima made a matching flower grow from vis own palm. “Why do you keep talking me into these crazy stunts?”

Inoshiro’s face formed the pure gestalt sign for unappreciated benefactor. “If I don’t save you from the Mines, who will?”

Yatima ran the outlook. At once, certain features of the scape seized vis attention: a thin streak of cloud in the blue sky, a cluster of distant trees, the wind rippling through the grass nearby. It was like switching from one gestalt color map to another, and seeing some objects leap out because they’d changed more than the rest. After a moment the effect died down, but Yatima still felt distinctly modified; the equilibrium had shifted in the tug-of-war between all the symbols in vis mind, and the ordinary buzz of consciousness had a slightly different tone to it.

“Are you okay?” Inoshiro actually looked concerned, and Yatima felt a rare, raw surge of affection for ver. Inoshiro always wanted to show ver what ve’d found in vis endless fossicking through the Coalition’s possibilities—because ve really did want ver to know what the choices were.

“I’m still myself. I think.”

“Pity.” Inoshiro sent the address, and they jumped into Hashim’s artwork together.

Their icons vanished; they were pure observers. Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, re-organized. It looked like a flesher embryo—though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted light; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp.

There were two bodies, now. Twins? One was larger, though—sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.

One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibers. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink-and-gray muscles working side-by-side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher’s womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen’s mind embedded in the same woman’s brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of gray dust. Two flesher children walked side-by-side, hand-in-hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner… Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The two figures strode calmly along a city’s main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.

The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima’s viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses—and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger onto vis shoulders then the passenger’s height flowing down to the hearer like an hourglass’s sand.

They were parent and child, siblings, friends, lovers, species, and Yatima exulted in their companionship. Hashim’s piece was a distillation of the idea of friendship, within and across all borders. And whether it was all down to the outlook or not, Yatima was glad to he witnessing it, taking some part of it inside verself before every image dissolved into nothing but a flicker of entropy in Ashton-Laval’s coolant flow.

The scape began moving Yatima’s viewpoint away from the pair. For a few tau ve went along with this, but the whole city had decayed into a flat, fissured desert, so apart from the retreating figures there was nothing to be seen. Ve jumped hack to them-only to find that ve had to keep advancing vis coordinates just to stay in place. It was a strange experience: Yatima possessed no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception—the Konishi design eschewed such delusions of corporeality-but the scape’s attempt to “push” ver away, and the need to accelerate against it, seemed so close to a physical struggle that ve could almost believe ve’d been embodied.

The figure facing Yatima aged suddenly, cheeks hollowing, eyes filming over. Yatima moved around to try to see the other’s face—and the scape sent ver flying across the desert, this time in the opposite direction, Ve fought vis way back to the… mother and daughter, then decaying robot and gleaming new one… and though the two remained locked together, hand-in-hand, Yatima could all but feel the force trying to tear them apart.

Ve watched flesh hand gripping skin-and-hones, metal gripping flesh, ceramic gripping metal. All of them slowly slipping. Yatima looked into the eyes of each figure; while everything else flowed and changed, their gazes remained locked together.

The scape split in two, the ground opened up, the sky divided. The figures were parted. Yatima was flung away from them, back into the desert with a force, now, that ve could not oppose. Ve saw them in the distance—twins again, of uncertain species, reaching out desperately across the empty space growing between them. Arms outstretched, fingertips almost brushing.

Then the halves of the world rushed apart. Someone bellowed with rage and grief.

The scape decayed into blackness before Yatima understood that the cry had been vis own.

The forum with the flying-pig fountain had been abandoned long ago, but Yatima had planted a copy from the archives in vis homescape, the cloistered square marooned in the middle of a vast expanse of parched scrubland. Empty, it looked at once too large and too small. A few hundred delta away, a copy (not to scale) of the asteroid ve’d watched being trimmed was buried in the ground. At one point Yatima had envisioned a vast trail of similar mementos stretching across the savanna, a map ve could fly over whenever ve wanted to review the turning points in vis life… but then the whole idea had begun to seem childish. If the things ve’d seen had changed ver, they’d changed ver; there was no need to re-create them as monuments. Ve’d kept the forum because ve genuinely liked to visit it—and the asteroid out of the sheer perverse pleasure of resisting the urge to tidy it away.

Yatima stood by the fountain for a while, watching its silver liquid effortlessly mock the physics it half-obeyed. Then ve re-created the octahedral diamond, the six-pointed net from vis lesson with Radiya, beside it. That physics meant nothing in the polises had always been clear to ver, as it was to most citizens; Gabriel disagreed, of course, but that was just Carter-Zimmerman doctrine talking. The fountain could ignore the laws of fluid dynamics just as easily as it could conform to them. Everything it did was simply arbitrary; even the perfect gravitational parabola of the start of each stream, before the piglets were formed, was nothing but an aesthetic choice and the aesthetic itself was nothing but the vestigial influence of flesher ancestry.

The diamond net was different, though. Yatima played with the object, deforming it wildly, stretching and twisting it beyond recognition. It was infinitely malleable… and yet a few tiny constraints on the changes ve could make to it rendered it, in a sense, unchangeable. However much ve distorted its shape, however many extra dimensions ve invoked, this net would never lie flat. Ve could replace it with something else entirely such as a net which wrapped a torus and then lay that new net flat… but that would have been as meaningless as creating a non-sentient, Inoshiro-shaped object, dragging it into the Truth Mines, and then claiming that ve’d succeeded in persuading vis real friend to come along.

Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. However malleable their minds, in a sense they obeyed the same kind of deep constraints as the diamond net—short of suicide and de novo reinvention, short of obliterating themselves and constructing someone new. That meant that they had to possess their own immutable mathematical signatures—like the Euler number, only orders of magnitude more complex. Buried in the confusion of details of every mind, there had to be something untouched by time, unswayed by the shifting weight of memory and experience, unmodified by self-directed change.

Hashim’s artwork had been elegant and moving—and even without the outlook running, the powerful emotions it had evoked lingered—but Yatima was unswayed from vis choice of vocation. Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drive, that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth—but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.

Only in the Mines could ve begin to understand exactly who ve was.

3. BRIDGERS

Atlanta, Earth

23 387 545 324 947 CST

21 May 2975, 11:35:22.101 UT

Yatima’s clone started up in the gleisner body and spent a moment reflecting on vis situation. The experience of “awakening” felt no different from arriving in a new scape; there was nothing to betray the fact that vis whole mind had just been created anew. Between subjective instants, ve’d been cross-translated from Konishi’s dialect of Shaper, which ran on the virtual machine of a womb or an exoself, into the gleisner version which this robot’s highly un-polis-like hardware implemented directly. In a sense, ve had no past of vis own, just forged memories and a secondhand personality… but it still felt as if ve’d merely jumped from savanna to jungle, one and the same person before and after. All invariants intact.

The original Yatima had been suspended by vis exoself prior to translation, and if everything went according to plan that frozen snapshot would never need to be re-started. The Yatima-clone in the gleisner would be re-cloned back into Konishi polis (and re-translated back into Konishi Shaper), then both the Konishi original and the gleisner-bound clone would he erased. Philosophically, it wasn’t all that different from being shifted within the polis from one section of physical memory to another—an undetectable act which the operating system performed on every citizen from time to time, to reclaim fragmented memory space. And subjectively, the whole excursion would probably be much the same as if they’d puppeted the gleisners remotely, instead of literally inhabiting them.

If everything went according to plan.

Yatima looked around for Inoshiro. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, let alone penetrated the canopy, but the gleisner’s visual system still managed to deliver a crisp, high-contrast image. Thigh-high shrubs with huge, droopy, dark green lenticular leaves covered the forest floor nearby, between massive trunks of soaring hardwood. The interface software they’d cobbled together seemed to be working; the gleisner’s head and eyes tracked the angle-of-view bits of Yatima’s requests for data without any perceptible delay. Running eight hundred times slower than usual was apparently enough to let the machinery keep up—so long as ve remembered not to attempt any kind of discontinuous motion.

The other abandoned gleisner was sitting in the undergrowth beside ver, torso slumped forward, arms hanging limp. Its polymer skin was all but hidden, encrusted with dew-wet lichen and a thin layer of trapped soil. The mosquito-sized drone they’d used to port themselves into the gleisners’ processors which had stumbled on the disused robots in the first place—was still perched on the back of the thing’s head, repairing the tiny incision it had made to gain access to a fiber trunkline.

“Inoshiro?” The linear word came hack at Yatima through the interface software, imprinted with all the strange resonances of the gleisner chassis, muffled at odd frequencies by the jungle’s clutter and humidity. No scape’s echo had ever been quite so… undesigned. So guileless. “Are you in there?”

The drone buzzed, and rose up from the sealed wound. The gleisner turned to face Yatima, dislodging wet sand and fragments of decaying leaves. Several large red ants, suddenly exposed, weaved confused figure-eights across the gleisner’s shoulder but managed to stay on.

“Yes, I’m here, don’t panic.” Yatima began receiving the familiar signature, via an infrared link; ve instinctively challenged and confirmed it. Inoshiro flexed vis facial actuators experimentally, shearing off mulch and grime. Yatima played with vis own expression; the interface software kept sending back tags saying ve was attempting impossible deformations.

“If you want to stand up, I’ll brush some of that crap off you.” Inoshiro rose smoothly to vis feet; Yatima willed vis viewpoint higher, and the interface made vis own robot body follow suit.

Ve let Inoshiro pummel and scrape ver, paying scant attention to the detailed stream of tags ve received describing the pressure changes on “vis” polymer skin. They’d arranged for the interface to feed the gleisners’ posture, as reported by the hardware, into their own internal symbols for their icons—and to make the robots, in turn, obey changes to the icons (so long as they weren’t physically impossible, and wouldn’t send there sprawling to the ground)—but they’d decided against the kind of extensive re-design that would have given them deeply integrated flesher-style sensory feedback and motor instincts. Even Inoshiro had balked at the idea of their gleisner-clones gaining such vivid new senses and skills, only to slough them off upon returning to Konishi, where they would have been about as useless as Yatima’s object-sculpting talents were in this unobliging jungle. Having successive versions of themselves so dissimilar would have made the whole experience too much like death.

They swapped roles, Yatima doing vis best to brush Inoshiro clean. Ve understood all the relevant physical principles, and ve could cause the gleisner’s arms to do pretty much what ve liked by willing vis icon to make the right movements… but even with the interface to veto any actions which would have disrupted the elaborate balancing act of bipedal motion, it was blindingly obvious that the compromise they’d chosen left them clumsy beyond belief. Yatima recalled scenes from the library of fleshers involved in simple tasks: repairing machinery, preparing food, braiding each other’s hair. Gleisners were even more dextrous, when the right software was in charge. Konishi citizens retained the ancestral neural wiring for fine control of their icons’ hands—linked to the language centers, for gestural purposes—but all the highly evolved systems for manipulating physical objects had been ditched as superfluous. Scape objects did as they were told, and even Yatima’s mathematical toys obeyed specialized constraints with only the faintest resemblance to the rules of the external world.

“What now?” Inoshiro just stood there for a moment, grinning diabolically. Vis robot body wasn’t all that different from vis usual pewter-skinned icon; the polymer beneath all the stains and lingering biota was a dull metallic gray, and the gleisner’s facial structure was flexible enough to manage a recognizable caricature of the real thing. Yatima still felt verself sending out the same lithe, purple-robed flesher icon as always; ve was almost glad ve couldn’t part vis navigators and clearly observe vis own drab physical appearance.

Inoshiro chanted, “Thirty-two kilotau. Thirty-three kilotau. Thirty-four kilotau.”

“Shut up.” Their exoselves back in Konishi had been instructed to explain to any callers precisely what they’d done no one would be left thinking that they’d simply turned catatonic—but Yatima still felt a painful surge of doubt. What would Blanca and Gabriel be thinking? And Radiya, and Inoshiro’s parents?

“You’re not backing out on me, are you?” Inoshiro eyed ver suspiciously.

“No!” Yatima laughed, exasperated; whatever vis misgivings, ve was committed to the whole crazy stunt. Inoshiro had argued that this was vis last chance to do anything “remotely exciting” before ve started using a miner’s outlook and “lost interest in everything else”—but that simply wasn’t true; the outlook was more like a spine than a straitjacket, a strengthened internal framework, not a constrictive cage. And ve’d kept on saying no until ve finally realized that Inoshiro was too stubborn to abandon vis plans, even when it turned out that not one of vis daring, radical Ashton-Laval friends was willing to accompany ver. Yatima had been secretly tempted all along by the idea of stepping right out of Konishi time and encountering the alien fleshers, though ve would have been just as happy to leave it all in the realms of plausible fantasy. In the end, it had come down to one question: If Inoshiro went ahead and did this alone, would it turn them into strangers? Yatima had found, to vis surprise, that this wasn’t a risk ve was willing to take.

Ve suggested hesitantly, “We might not want to stay for the full twenty-four hours, though.” Eight-six megatau. “What if the whole place is empty, and there’s nothing to see?”

“It’s a flesher enclave. It won’t be empty.”

“The last known contact was centuries ago. They could have died out, moved away… anything.” Under an eight-hundred-year-old treaty, drones and satellites were not permitted to invade the privacy of the fleshers; the few dozen scattered urban enclaves where their own laws permitted them to clear away the wildlife completely and build concentrated settlements were supposed to be treated as inviolable. They had their own global communications network, but no gateways linked it to the Coalition; abuses on both sides dating back to the Introdus had forced the separation. Inoshiro had insisted that merely puppeting the gleisner bodies via satellite from Konishi would have been morally equivalent to sending in a drone—and certainly the satellites, programmed to obey the treaty, would not have permitted it—but inhabiting two autonomous robots who wandered in from the jungle for a visit was a different matter entirely.

Yatima looked around at the dense undergrowth, and resisted the futile urge to try to make vis viewpoint jump forward by a few hundred meters, or rise up into the towering forest for a better view of the terrain ahead. Fifty kilotau. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren’t reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

“We’d better start moving.”

“After You, Livingstone.”

“Wrong continent, Inoshiro.”

“Geronimo? Huckleberry? Dorothy?”

“Spare me.”

They set off north, the drone buzzing behind them: their one link to the polis, offering the chance of a rapid escape if anything went wrong. It followed them for the first kilometer-and-a-half, all the way to the edge of the enclave. There was nothing to mark the border—just the same thick jungle on either side—but the drone refused to cross the imaginary line. Even if they’d built their own transceiver to take its place, it would have done them no good; the satellite footprints were shaped with precision to exclude the region. They could have rigged up a base station to re-broadcast from outside… but it was too late for that now.

Inoshiro said, “So what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

Yatima replied without hesitation. “Quicksand. We both fall into quicksand, so we can’t even communicate with each other. We just float beneath the surface until our power runs out.” Ve checked vis gleisner’s energy store, a sliver of magnetically suspended anticobalt. “In six thousand and thirty-seven years.”

“Or five thousand nine-hundred and twenty.” Shafts of sunlight had begun to penetrate the forest; a flock of pink-and-gray birds were making rasping sounds in the branches above them.

“But our exoselves would restart our Konishi versions after two days—so we might as well commit suicide as soon as we’re sure we wouldn’t make it back by then.”

Inoshiro regarded ver curiously. “Would you do that? I feel different from the Konishi version already. I’d want to go on living. And maybe someone would come along and pull us out in a couple of centuries.”

Yatima thought it over. “I’d want to go on living—but not alone. Not without a single person to talk to.”

Inoshiro was silent for a while, then ve held up vis right hand. Their polymer skins were dotted with IR transceivers all over, but the greatest density was on the palms. Yatima received a gestalt tag, a request for data. Inoshiro was asking for a snapshot of vis mind. The gleisner hardware was multiply redundant, with plenty of room for two.

Entrusting a version of verself to another citizen would have been unthinkable, back in Konishi. Yatima placed vis palm against Inoshiro’s, and they exchanged snapshots.

They crossed into the Atlanta enclave. Inoshiro said, “Update every hour?”

“Okay.”

The interface software wasn’t too bad at walking. It kept them upright and steadily advancing, detecting obstacles in the ground cover and shifts in the terrain via the gleisners’ tactile and balance senses, and whatever vision was available—without actually commandeering the head and eyes. After stumbling a few times, Yatima started glancing down every now and then, but it was soon clear how useful it would have been if the interface had been smart enough to plant an urge to do so in vis mind at appropriate times, like the original flesher instinct.

The jungle was visibly populated with small birds and snakes, but if there was any other animal life it was hiding or fleeing at the sound of them. Compared to walking through an indexscape for a comparable ecosystem, it was a rather dilute experience—and the thrill of interacting with real mud and real vegetation was beginning to wear thin.

Yatima heard something skid across the ground in front of ver; ve’d inadvertently kicked a small piece of corroded metal out from under a shrub. Ve kept walking, but Inoshiro paused to examine it, then cried out in alarm.

“What?”

“Replicator!”

Yatima turned back and angled for a better view; the interface made vis body crouch, “It’s just an empty canister.” It was almost crushed flat, but there was still paint clinging to the metal in places, the colors faded to barely distinguishable grays. Yatima could make out a portion of a narrow, roughly longitudinal band of varying width, slightly paler than its background; it looked to ver like a two-dimensional representation of a twisted ribbon. There was also part of a circle-though if it was a biohazard warning, it didn’t look much like the ones ve recalled from vis limited browsing on the subject.

Inoshiro spoke in a hushed, sickened voice. “PreIntrodus, this was pandemic. Distorted whole nations’ economies. It had hooks into everything: sexuality, tribalism, half a dozen artforms and subcultures… it parasitized the fleshers so thoroughly you had to he some kind of desert monk to escape it.”

Yatima regarded the pathetic object dubiously, but they had no access to the library now, and vis knowledge of the era was patchy. “Even if there are traces left inside… I’m sure they’re all immune to it by now. And it could hardly infect us—”

Inoshiro cut ver off impatiently. “We’re not talking nucleotide viruses, here. The molecules themselves were just a random assortment of junk—mostly phosphoric acid; it was the memes they came wrapped in that made them virulent.” Ve bent down lower, and cupped vis hands over the battered container. “And who knows how small a fragment it can bootstrap from? I’m not taking any chances.” The gleisners’ IR transceivers could be made to operate at high power; smoke and steam from singed vegetation rose up through Inoshiro’s fingers.

A voice came from behind them—a meaningless stream of phonemes, but the interface followed it with translation into linear: “Don’t tell me: you’re starting a fire to attract attention. You didn’t want to creep up on us unannounced.”

They both turned as rapidly as their bodies permitted. The flesher stood a dozen meters away, dressed in a dark green robe shot through with threads of gold. Broadcasting no signature tag—of course, but Yatima still had to make a conscious effort to dismiss the instinctive conclusion that this was not a real person. Ve had black hair and eyes, copper-brown skin, and a thick black heard which in a flesher almost certainly meant gendered, male: ’ve’ was a he. No obvious modification: no wings, no gills, no photosynthetic cowl. Yatima resisted jumping to conclusions; none of this surface conservatism actually proved he was a static.

The flesher said, “I don’t think I’ll offer to shake hands.” Inoshiro’s palms were still glowing dull red. “And we can’t exchange signatures. I’m at a loss for protocol. But that’s good. Ritual corrupts.” He took a few steps forward; the undergrowth deferentially flattened itself to smooth his path. “I’m Orlando Venetti. Welcome to Atlanta.”

They introduced themselves. The interface—pre-loaded with the most likely base languages, and enough flexibility to cope with drift had identified the flesher’s speech as a dialect of Modern Roman. It grafted the language into their minds, slipping new word sounds into all their symbols side-by-side with the linear versions, and binding alternative grammatical settings into their speech analysis and generation networks. Yatima felt distinctly stretched by the process—but vis symbols were still connected to each other in the same way as before. Ve was still verself.

“Konishi polis: Where is that, exactly?”

Yatima began to reply, “One hundred and— Inoshiro cut ver off with a burst of warning tags.

Orlando Was unperturbed. “Just idle curiosity; I wasn’t requesting coordinates for a missile strike. But what does it matter where you’ve come from, now that you’re here in the flesh? Or the gallium indium phosphide. I trust those bodies were empty when you found them?”

Inoshiro was scandalized. “Of course!”

“Good. The thought of real gleisners still prowling around on Earth is too horrible to contemplate. They should have come out of the factories with 'Born for Vacuum’ inscribed across their chests.”

Yatima asked, “Were you born in Atlanta?”

Orlando nodded. “One hundred and sixty-three years ago. Atlanta fell empty in the 2600s-there was a community of statics here before, but disease wiped them out, and none of the other statics wanted to risk being infected. The new founders came from Turin, my grandparents among them.” Ve frowned slightly. “So do you want to see the city? Or shall we stand here all day?”

With Orlando leading the way, obstacles vanished. However the plants were sensing his presence, they responded to it swiftly: leaves curling up, spines withdrawing like snails’ stalks, sprawling shrubs contracting into tight cores, and whole protruding branches suddenly hanging limp. Yatima suspected that he was deliberately prolonging the effects to include them, and ve had no doubt that Orlando could have left any unwelcome pursuer far behind—or at least, anyone who lacked the same molecular keys.

Yatima asked, half jokingly, “Any quicksand around here?”

“Not if you stick close.”

The forest ended without warning; if anything, the edge was more densely wooded than most of the interior, helping to conceal the transition. They emerged onto a vast, bright open plain, mostly taken up with fields of crops and photovoltaics. The city lay ahead in the distance: a broad cluster of low buildings, all vividly colored, with sweeping, geometrically precise curved walls and roofs intersecting and overlapping wildly.

Orlando said, “There are twelve thousand and ninety-three of us, now. But we’re still tweaking the crops, and our digestive symbionts; within ten years, we should be able to support four thousand more with the same resources,” Yatima decided it would be impolite to inquire about their mortality rate. In most respects, the fleshers had a far harder time than the Coalition in trying to avoid cultural and genetic stagnation while eschewing the lunacy of exponential growth. Only true statics, and a few of the more conservative exuberants, retained the ancestral genes for programmed death and asking for a figure on accidental losses might have seemed insensitive.

Orlando laughed suddenly. “Ten years? What would that seem like to you? A century?”

Yatima replied, “About eight millennia.”

“Fuck.”

Inoshiro added hastily. “You can’t really convert, though. We might do a few simple things eight hundred times faster, but we change much more slowly than that.”

“Empires don’t rise and fall in a year? New species don’t evolve in a century?”

Yatima reassured him, “Empires are impossible. And evolution requires vast amounts of mutation and death. We prefer to make small changes, rarely, and wait to see how they turn out.”

“So do we.” Orlando shook his head. “Still. Over eight thousand years, I have a feeling we won’t be keeping such a tight grip on things.”

They continued on toward the city, following a broad path which looked like it was made of nothing more than reddish-brown clay, but probably teemed with organisms designed to keep it from eroding into dust or mud. The gleisner’s feet described the surface as soft but resilient, and they left no visible indentations. Birds were busy in the fields, eating weeds and insects—Yatima was only guessing, but if they were feeding on the crop itself the next harvest would be extremely sparse.

Orlando stopped to pick up a small leafy branch from the path, which must have blown in from the forest, then began sweeping it back and forth across the ground ahead of them. “So how do they greet dignitaries in the polises? Are you accustomed to having sixty thousand non-sentient slaves strewing rose petals at your feet?”

Yatima laughed, but Inoshiro was deeply offended. “We’re not dignitaries! We’re delinquents!”

As they drew nearer, Yatima could see people walking along the broad avenues between the rainbow-colored buildings—or loitering in groups, looking almost like citizens gathered in some forum, even if their appearance was much less diverse. Some had vis own icon’s dark skin, and there were other equally minor variations, but all of these exuberants could have passed for statics. Yatima wondered just what changes they were exploring; Orlando had mentioned digestive symbionts, but that hardly counted—it didn’t even involve their own DNA.

Orlando said, “When we noticed you coming, it was hard to decide who to send. We don’t get much news from the polises—we had no idea what you’d be like.” He turned back to face them. “I do make sense to you, don’t I? I’m not just imagining that communication is taking place?”

“Not unless we’re imagining it, too.” Yatima was puzzled. “What do you mean, though: who to send? Do some of you speak Coalition languages?”

“No.” They’d reached the outskirts of the city; people were turning to watch them with undisguised curiosity. “I’ll explain soon. Or a friend of mine will.”

The avenues were carpeted with thick, short grass. Yatima could see no vehicles or pack animals, just fleshers, mostly barefoot. Between the buildings there were flowerbeds, ponds and streams, statues still and moving, sundials and telescopes. Everything was space and light, open to the sky. There were parks, large enough for kite flying and ball games, and people sitting talking in the shade of small trees. The gleisner’s skin was sending tags describing the warmth of the sunlight and the texture of the grass; Yatima was almost beginning to regret not modifying verself enough to absorb the information instinctively.

Inoshiro asked, “What happened to pre-Introdus Atlanta? The skyscrapers? The factories? The apartment blocks?”

“Some of it’s still standing. Buried in the jungle, further north. I could take you there later, if you like.”

Yatima got in quickly before Inoshiro could answer. “Thank you, but we won’t have time.”

Orlando nodded at dozens of people, greeted some by name, and introduced Yatima and Inoshiro to a few. Yatima attempted to shake their offered hands, which turned out to be an extraordinarily complex dynamical problem. No one seemed hostile to their presence—hut Yatima found their gestalt gestures confusing, and no one uttered more than a few polite phrases before walking on.

“This is my home.”

The building was pale blue, with an S-shaped facade and a smaller, elliptical second story. “Is this… some kind of stone?” Yatima stroked the wall and paid attention to the tags; the surface was smooth down to the sub-millimeter scale, but it was as soft and cool as the hark ve’d touched in the forest.

“No, it’s alive. Barely. It was sprouting twigs and leaves all over when it was growing, but now it’s only metabolizing enough for repairs, and a little active air conditioning.” A strip-curtain covering the doorway parted for Orlando, and they followed him in. There were cushions and chairs, still pictures on the walls, dust-filled shafts of sunlight everywhere.

“Take a seat.” They stared at him. “No? Fine. Could you wait here a second?” He strode up a staircase.

Inoshiro said numbly, “We’re really here. We did it.” Ve surveyed the sunny room. “And this is how they live. It doesn’t look so bad.”

“Except for the time scale.”

Ve shrugged. “What are we racing, in the polises? We speed ourselves up as much as we can—then struggle not to let it change us.”

Yatima was annoyed. “What’s wrong with that? There’s not much point to longevity if all you’re going to do with your time is change into someone else entirely. Or decay into no one at all.”

Orlando returned, accompanied by a female flesher. “This is Liana Zabini. Inoshiro, and Yatima, of Konishi polis.” Liana had brown hair and green eyes. They shook hands; Yatima was beginning to get the hang of doing it without either offering too much resistance, or merely letting vis arm hang limp. “Liana is our best neuroembryologist. Without her, the bridgers wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Inoshiro said, “Who are the bridgers?”

Liana glanced at Orlando. He said, “You’d better start at the beginning.” Orlando persuaded everyone to sit; Yatima finally realized that this was more comfortable for the fleshers.

Liana said, “We call ourselves bridgers. When the founders came here from Turin, three centuries ago, they had a very specific plan. You know there’ve been thousands of artificial genetic changes in different flesher populations, since the Introdus?” She gestured at a large picture behind her, and the portrait faded, to be replaced by a complex upside-down tree diagram. “Different exuberants have made modifications to all kinds of characteristics. Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptations for new diets or habitats: digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular-skeletal.” Images flashed up from different points on the tree: amphibious, winged, and photosynthetic exuberants, close-ups of modified teeth, diagrams of altered metabolic pathways. Orlando rose from his seat and started drawing curtains; the contrast of the images improved.

“Often, habitat changes have also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts; no one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes.” A slick-skinned amphibious flesher rose slowly through emerald water, a faint stream of bubbles emerging from flaps behind vis ears; a transected, color-coded view showed dissolved gas concentrations in vis tissues and bloodstream, and an inset graph illustrated the safe range of staged ascents.

“Some neural changes have gone far beyond new instincts, though.” The tree thinned-out considerably-but there were still thirty or forty current branches left. “There are species of exuberants who’ve changed aspects of language, perception, and cognition.”

Inoshiro said, “Like the dream apes?”

Liana nodded. “At one extreme. Their ancestors stripped back the language centers to the level of the higher primates. They still have stronger general intelligence than any other primate, but their material culture has been reduced dramatically—and they can no longer modify themselves, even if they want to. I doubt that they even understand their own origins anymore.

“The dream apes are the exception, though—a deliberate renunciation of possibilities. Most exuberant, have tried more constructive changes: developing new ways of mapping the physical world into their minds, and adding specialized neural structures to handle the new categories. There are exuberants who can manipulate the most sophisticated, abstract concepts in genetics, meteorology, biochemistry, or ecology as intuitively as any static can think about a rock or a plant or an animal with the 'common sense’ about those things which comes from a few million years of evolution. And there are others who’ve simply modified ancestral neural structures to find out how that changes their thinking—who’ve headed out in search of new possibilities, with no specific goals in mind.”

Yatima felt an eerie resonance with vis own situation… though from all the evidence so far, vis own mutations hadn’t exactly set him adrift in uncharted waters. As Inoshiro put it: “With you, they’ve finally stumbled on the trait fields for the ultimate in willing mine fodder. Parents will be asking for those nice compliant 'Yatima’ settings for the next ten gigatau.”

Liana spread her arms in a gesture of frustration. “The only trouble with all this exploration is… some species of exuberants have changed so much that they can’t communicate with anyone else, anymore. Different groups have rushed off in their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds and now they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries. It’s not just a question of language—or at least, not the simple question that language was for the statics, when everyone had basically identical brains. Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense. We’re fragmenting. We’re losing each other.” She laughed, as if to deflate her own seriousness, but Yatima could see that she was passionate about the subject. “We’ve all chosen to stay on Earth, we’ve all chosen to remain organic… but we’re still drifting apart probably faster than any of you in the polises!”

Orlando, standing behind her chair, placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. She reached up and clasped her hand over his. Yatima found this mesmerizing, but tried not to stare. Ve said, “So how do the bridgers fit in?”

Orlando said, “We’re trying to plug the gaps.”

Liana gestured at the tree diagram, and a second set of branches began to grow behind and between the first. The new tree was much more finely differentiated, with more branches, more closely spaced.

“Taking the ancestral neural structures as a starting point, we’ve been introducing small changes with every generation. But instead of modifying everyone in the same direction, our children are not only different from their parents, they’re increasingly different from each other. Each generation is more diverse than the one before.”

Inoshiro said, “But… isn’t that the very thing you were lamenting? People drifting apart?”

“Not quite. Instead of whole populations jumping en masse to opposite ends of the spectrum for some neural trait giving rise to two distinct groups with no common ground—we’re always scattered evenly across the whole range. That way, no one is cut off, no one is alienated, because any given person’s 'circle'—the group of people with whom they can easily communicate—always overlaps with someone else’s, someone outside the first circle… whose own circle also overlaps with that of someone else again… until one way or another, everyone is covered.

“You could easily find two people here who can barely understand each other—because they’re as different as exuberants from two wildly divergent lines—but here, there’ll always be a chain of living relatives who can bridge the gap. With a few intermediaries—right now, four at the most—any bridger can communicate with any other.”

Orlando added, “And once there are people among us who can interact with all of the scattered exuberant communities, on their own terms…”

“Then every flesher on the planet will be connected, in the same way.”

Inoshiro asked eagerly, “So you could set up a chain of people who’d let us talk to someone at the edge of the process? Someone heading toward the most remote group of exuberants?”

Orlando and Liana exchanged glances, then Orlando said, “If you can wait a few days, that might be possible. It takes a certain amount of diplomacy; it’s not a party trick we can turn on at a moment’s notice.”

“We’re going back tomorrow morning.” Yatima didn’t dare look at Inoshiro; there’d be no end of excuses to extend their stay, but they’d agreed hours.

After a moment’s awkward silence, Inoshiro said calmly, “That’s right. Maybe next time.”

Orlando showed them around the gene foundry where he worked, assembling DNA sequences and testing their effects. As well as their main goal, the bridgers were working on a number of non-neural enhancements involving disease resistance and improved tissue-repair mechanisms, which could be tried out with relative ease on brainless vegetative assemblies of mammalian organs which Orlando jokingly referred to as “offal trees.” “You really can’t smell them? You don’t know how lucky you are.”

The bridgers, he explained, had tailored themselves to the point where any individual could rewrite parts of vis own genome by injecting the new sequence into the bloodstream, bracketed by suitable primers for substitution enzymes, wrapped in a lipid capsule with surface proteins keyed to the appropriate cell types. If the precursors of gametes were targeted, the modification was made heritable. Female bridgers no longer generated all their ova while still fetuses, like statics did, but grew each one as required, and sperm and ova production—let alone the preparation of the womb for implantation of a fertilized egg—only occurred if the right hormones, available from specially-tailored plants, were ingested. About two-thirds of the bridgers were single-gendered; the rest were hermaphroditic or parthenogenetic—asexual, in the manner of certain species of exuberants.

After a tour of the facilities, Orlando declared that it was lunchtime, and they sat in a courtyard watching him eat. The other foundry workers gathered round; a few spoke to them directly, while the rest used intermediaries to translate. Their questions often came out sounding odd, even after some lengthy exchanges between translator and questioner—“How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?” “Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?” “Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?” and from the laughter their answers produced it was clear that the inverse process was just as imperfect. A certain amount of genuine communication did take place—but it depended heavily on trial and error, and a great deal of patience.

Orlando had promised to show them factories and silos, galleries and archives… but other people started dropping by to talk to them—or just to stare—and as the afternoon wore on, their original plans receded into fantasy. Perhaps they could have forced the pace, reminding their hosts how precious their time was, but after a few hours it began to seem absurd to have imagined that they could have done anything more, in a day. Nothing could be rushed, here; a whirlwind tour would have seemed like an act of violence. As the megatau evaporated, Yatima struggled not to think about the progress ve could have been making, back in the Truth Mines. Ve wasn’t racing anyone—and the Mines would still be there when ve returned.

Eventually the courtyard behind the foundry became so crowded that Orlando dragged everyone off to an outdoor restaurant. By dusk, when Liana joined them, the questions were finally beginning to dry up, and most of the crowd had split off into smaller groups who were busily discussing the visitors among themselves.

So the four of them sat and talked beneath the stars—which were dulled and heavily filtered by the narrow spectral window of the atmosphere. “Of course we’ve seen them from space,” Inoshiro boasted. “In the polises, the orbital probes are just another address.”

Orlando said, “I keep wanting to insist: 'Ah, but you haven’t seen them with your own eyes!’ Except… you have. In exactly the same way that you’ve seen anything at all.”

Liana leaned on his shoulder and added teasingly, “Which is the same way anyone sees anything. Just because our own minds are being run a few centimeters away from our own cameras, that doesn’t make our experiences magically superior.”

Orlando conceded, “No. This does, though.”

They kissed. Yatima wondered if Blanca and Gabriel ever did that if Blanca had modified verself to make it possible, and pleasant. No wonder Blanca’s parents disapproved. Gabriel being gendered wasn’t such a big deal, as an abstract question of self-definition—but almost everyone in Carter-Zimmerman also pretended to have a tangible body. In Konishi, the whole idea of solidity, of atavistic delusions of corporeality, was generally equated with obstruction and coercion. Once your icon could so much as block another’s path in a public scape, autonomy was violated. Re-connecting the pleasures of love to concepts like force and friction was simply barbaric.

Liana asked, “What are the gleisners up to? Do you know? Last we heard, they were doing something in the asteroid belt—but that was almost a hundred years ago. Have any of them left the solar system?”

Inoshiro said, “Not in person. They’ve sent probes to a few nearby stars, but nothing sentient yet—and when they do, it will be them-in-their-whole-bodies, all the way.” Ve laughed. “They’re obsessed with not becoming polis citizens. They think if they dare take their heads off their shoulders to save a bit of mass, next thing they’ll he abandoning reality entirely.”

Orlando said contemptuously, “Give them another thousand years, and they’ll he pissing up and down the Milky Way, marking their territory like dogs.”

Yatima protested, “That’s not fair! They might have bizarre priorities… but they’re still civilized. More or less.”

Liana said, “Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They’d probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they’ve just surveyed it from orbit. They’re not vandals. They’re not colonists.”

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 Neumann machines—”

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 thinned out slowly—and then most of the bridgers who remained fell asleep in their chairs—but Liana sat with them in the growing silence.

“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 annoying—perhaps because they both mirrored vis frustration so well. Was this how it had started, for Inoshiro? If ve stayed here much longer, would ve begin to identify with vis own map of vis own gleisner body?

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.”