Diaspora

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."