Diaspora

Inoshiro used vis own gleisner's nanoware to build a pair of relay drones to keep them in touch with Konishi: no one had yet been able to trick the satellites into reshaping their footprints to include the enclaves. Yatima watched the glistening insectile machines forming in a translucent cyst on Inoshiro's forearm, then burrow out and disappear into the canopy. They'd based the design on existing drones, but these bootleg versions were entirely unfettered by prior instructions and treaty obligations, and would shamelessly fool the satellites into accepting a signal re-routed from within the forbidden region.

They stepped across the border. To test their link to the Coalition, Yatima glanced at a C-Z scape based on a feed from TERAGO. Two dark spheres limned by gravitationally-lensed starlight moved through a faintly sketched spiral tube, the tight record of past orbits widening out into the uncertainty of extrapolation; the hypothetical meson jets were omitted altogether. The neutron stars broadcast gestalt tags with their current orbital parameters, while points on the spiral at regular intervals offered past and future versions.

The orbit had shrunk by a "mere" 20 percent so far—100,000 kilometers—but the process was highly non-linear, and the same distance would be crossed again in roughly seventeen hours, then five, then one, then under three minutes. These predictions were all subject to error, and the exact moment of the burst remained uncertain by at least an hour, but the most likely swath of possibilities all placed Lacerta well above the horizon at Atlanta. For a hemisphere stretching from the Amazon to the Yangtse, the ozone layer would be blasted away in an instant. In Atlanta, it would happen beneath the blazing afternoon sun.

The path Orlando had taken when escorting them out of the enclave was still stored in the gleisners' navigation systems. They pushed through the undergrowth as fast as they could, hoping to trigger alarms and attract attention.

Yatima heard branches move suddenly, off to their left. Ve called out hopefully, "Orlando?" They stopped and listened, but there was no reply.

Inoshiro said, "It was probably just an animal."

"Wait. I can see someone."

"Where?"

Yatima pointed out the small brown hand holding a branch, some twenty meters away trying to release it slowly, instead of letting it spring back into place. "I think ve's a child."

Inoshiro spoke loudly but gently in Modern Roman. "We're friends! We have news!"

Yatima adjusted the response curve of the gleisner's visual system, optimizing it for the shadows behind the branch. A single dark eye stared back through a gap between the leaves. After a few seconds, the hidden face shifted cautiously, choosing another peephole; Yatima reconstructed the blur into a jagged strip of skin joining two lemur eyes.

Ve showed the partial image to the library, then passed the verdict to inoshiro. "Ve's a dream ape."

"Shoot ver."

"What?"

"Shoot ver with the Introdus!" Inoshiro remained motionless and silent, speaking urgently in IR. "We can't leave ver to die!"

Isolated by the frame of leaves, the dream ape's eye appeared eerily expressionless. "But we can't force ver—"

"What do you want to do? Give ver a lecture in neutron star physics? Even the bridgers can't get through to dream apes! No one's going to explain the choices to ver—not now, not ever!"

Yatima insisted stubbornly, "We don't have the right to do it by force. Ve'd have no friends inside, no family—"

Inoshiro made a sound of disgust and disbelief. "We can clone ver some friends! Give ver a scape just like this, and ve'd barely know the difference."

"We're not here to kidnap people. Imagine how you'd feel, if some alien creature reached into the polis and dragged you away from everything you knew—"

Inoshiro almost screamed with frustration. "No, you imagine how this flesher will feel, when vis skin's burnt so badly that the fluid beneath starts seeping out!"

Yatima felt a wave of doubt sweep through ver. Ve could picture the whole, hidden dream ape child, standing there waiting fearfully for the strangers to pass and though ve could barely comprehend the idea of physical pain, images of bodily integrity resonated deeply. The biosphere was a disordered world, full of potential toxins and pathogens, ruled by nothing but the chance collisions of molecules. A ruptured skin would be like a wildly malfunctioning exoself that let data flood across its borders at random, overwriting and corrupting the citizen within.

Ve said hopefully, "Maybe vis family will find a cave to shelter in, once they notice the effects of the UV. That's not impossible; the canopy will protect them for a while. They could live on fungi—"

"I'll do it." Inoshiro grabbed Yatima's right arm, and swung it toward the child. "Give me control of the delivery system, and I'll do it myself."