"Diaspora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Иган Грег)3. BridgersAtlanta, 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: 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 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 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 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: 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 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: 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." |
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