Diaspora

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."