Diaspora

Yatima raised vis right hand, displaying his index finger. "No, it's true. We've brought enough Introdus nanoware—"

Inoshiro was sending warning tags even before the expression on the man's face changed. He leant forward and grabbed Yatima's hand by the wrist, then slammed it down on the table. He screamed, "Someone get a torch! Get a cutting tool!" One of the guards left the room; the other approached warily.

Inoshiro said calmly, "We would never have used it on anyone without permission. We just wanted to be prepared to offer you migration, if things went badly."

The man raised his free hand toward ver in a fist. "You keep back!" Sweat was dripping from his face; Yatima was doing nothing to resist, but the gleisner's skin reported that the man was straining hard against it, as if he was wrestling with some monstrous opponent.

He spoke to Yatima, without taking his eyes off Inoshiro. "What's really going to happen? Tell me! Will the gleisners set off their bombs in space, so you can herd the last of us into your machines?"

"The gleisners have no bombs. And they respect you much more highly than they respect us; the last thing they'd want to do is force fleshers into the polises." They'd faced some strange misconceptions before, but nothing like this level of paranoia.

The woman returned, carrying a small machine with a metal rod shaped into a semi-circle protruding from one end. She touched a control and an arc of blue plasma appeared, joining the tips of the rod. Yatima instructed the Introdus nanoware to begin crawling up the repair system ducts in vis arm, back toward his torso. The man leaned down harder than ever, then the woman approached and began slicing through the limb, high above the elbow.

Yatima didn't waste the nanoware's energy by pestering it with a stream of queries; ve just waited for the strange experience to be over. The interface didn't know what to make of the damage reports from the gleisner's hardware—and it declined to reach into Yatima's self-symbol and perform matching surgery. When the plasma arc broke through to the other side and the man pulled the robot's severed arm away, the corresponding part of Yatima's icon was left mentally protruding from the stump-a kind of phantom presence, only half-free of the feedback loop of embodiment.

When ve dared to check, fifteen doses of the Introdus nanoware had made it to safety. The rest were lost, or heat-damaged beyond repair.

Yatima met the man's eyes and said angrily, "We came here in peace; we would never have violated your autonomy. But now you've limited the choices for others." Without a word, the man placed the plasma saw on the edge of the table and began feeding the gleisner's hand back and forth through the arc, reducing the delicate machinery to slag and smoke. When Francesca returned, she seemed equally outraged by the guards' revelation that nanoware had been brought into the enclave, and the less-than-diplomatic ad hoc remedy they'd employed to deal with it.

Under the Treaty of 2190, Yatima and Inoshiro should have been expelled from Atlanta immediately, but Francesca was prepared to bend the rules to allow them to address the convocation—and to Yatima's surprise, the guards agreed. Apparently they believed that a public interrogation by the assembled fleshers would be the best way to expose the gleisner-Konishi conspiracy.

As they walked down the corridor toward the Convocation Hall, Inoshiro said in IR, "They can't all be like this. Remember Orlando and Liana."

"I remember Orlando ranting about the evil gleisners and their wicked plans."

"And I remember Liana setting him straight."

The Convocation Hall was a large cylindrical space, roughly the same shape as the building itself. Concentric rows of seats converged on a circular stage—and there were about a thousand bridgers filling them. Behind and above the seats, on the cylinder's wall, giant screens displayed the images of representatives from other enclaves. Yatima could easily distinguish the avian and amphibian exuberants, but ve had no doubt that the unmodified appearance of the others hid a greater range of variation.

The dream apes were not represented.

The guards stayed behind as Francesca led them up onto the stage. It was divided into three tiers; nine bridgers stood on the outermost tier, facing the audience, and three stood on the second.

"These are your translators," Francesca explained. "Pause after every sentence, and wait for all of them to finish." She pointed out a slight indentation on the stage, at the very center. "Stand here to be heard; anywhere else, you'll be inaudible." Yatima had already noticed the unusual acoustics—they'd walked through excesses and absences of background noise, and the intensity of Francesca's voice had fluctuated strangely. There were complex acoustic mirrors and baffles hanging from the ceiling, and the gleisner's skin had reported sudden air pressure gradients which were probably due to some form of barrier or lens.