Diaspora

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."