Diaspora

Yatima tried to pull free. Inoshiro resisted. The struggle confused their separate copies of the interface, which was too stupid to realize it was fighting itself; they both overbalanced. As ve toppled into the undergrowth, Yatima almost felt it: the descent, the inevitable impact. Helplessness. Ve could hear the child running away.

Neither of them moved. After a while, Yatima said, "The bridgers will find a way to protect them. They'll engineer some kind of shield for their skin. They could release the genes in a virus—"

"And they'll do all this in a day? Before or after they work out how to feed fifteen thousand people when their crops are wilting, the ground is frozen, and the rain's about to turn into nitric acid?"

Yatima had no reply. Inoshiro rose to vis feet, then pulled ver up. They walked on in silence.

Halfway to the edge of the jungle, they were met by three bridgers, two females and a male. All were fully grown, but young-looking, and wary. Communication proved difficult.

Inoshiro repeated patiently, "We are Yatima and Inoshiro. We came here once before, twenty-one years ago. We're friends."

The man said, "All your robot friends are on the moon; none of them are here now. Leave us in peace." The bridgers remained several meters away; they'd retreated in alarm when Yatima had approached them with an outstretched hand.

Inoshiro complained in IR, "Even if they're too young to remember… our last visit should he legendary."

"Apparently not."

Inoshiro persisted. "We're not gleisners! We're from Konishi polis; we're just riding these machines. We're friends of Orlando Venetti and Liana Zabini." The bridgers showed no sign of recognizing either name; Yatima wondered soberly if it was possible that they were both dead. "We have important news."

One of the women asked angrily, "What news? Tell us, then leave!"

Inoshiro shook vis head firmly. "We can only give our news to Orlando or Liana." Yatima agreed with this stand; a garbled account, half-understood, would do untold damage.

Inoshiro asked in IR, "What do you think they'd do if we just marched into the city?"

"They'd stop us."

"How?"

"They must have weapons of some kind. It's too risky; we've both used up most of our maintenance nanoware—and anyway, they're never going to trust us if we barge in uninvited."

Yatima tried addressing the bridgers verself. "We are friends, but we're not getting through to you. Can you find a translator?" The second woman was almost apologetic. "We have no robot translators."

"I know. But you must have translators for statics. Think of us as statics."

The bridgers exchanged bemused glances, then went into a huddle, whispering.

The second woman said, "I'll bring someone. Wait."

She left. The other two stood guard over them, refusing to be drawn into further conversation. Yatima and Inoshiro sat on the ground, facing each other rather than the fleshers, hoping to put them at ease.

By the time the translator arrived it was late afternoon. She approached and shook their hands, but regarded them with undisguised suspicion.

"I'm Francesca Canetti. You claim to be Yatima and Inoshiro, but anyone could he inhabiting these machines. Can you tell me what you saw here? What you did?"

Inoshiro recounted the details of their visit. Yatima suspected that their frosty reception was partly due to Carter-Zimmerman's well-intentioned "assault" on the fleshers' communications network, and ve felt a renewed pang of shame. Ve and Inoshiro had had twenty-one years in which to re-establish a secure gateway between the networks; even with the problems of subjective time differences, that might have led to some kind of trust by now. But they'd done nothing.

Francesca said, "So what's the news you've brought us?"

Inoshiro asked her, "Do you know what a neutron star is?"

"Of course." Francesca laughed, clearly offended. "That's a rich question, coming from a couple of lotus-eaters." Inoshiro remained silent, and after a moment Francesca elaborated, in a tone of controlled resentment. "It's a supernova remnant. The dense core left behind when a star is too massive to form a white dwarf, but not massive enough to forms a black hole. Should I go on, or is that enough to satisfy you that you're not dealing with a hunch of agrarian throwbacks who've regressed to pre-Copernican cosmology?"

Inoshiro and Yatima conferred in IR, and decided to risk it. Francesca seemed to understand them as well as Orlando and Liana; stubbornly holding out for their old friends would cause too much hostility, and waste too much time.