Diaspora

This seemed to split the audience; some responded with jeers of derision, some with renewed calm and even enthusiasm. Yatima felt like ve was playing a game ve barely understood, for stakes ve hardly dared contemplate. They had never been fit for this task, either of them. In Konishi, the grossest acts of foolishness could barely wound a fellow citizen's pride; here and now, a few poorly judged words could cost thousands of lives.

One bridger called out words that were translated as, "Do you swear that you have no more Introdus nanoware—and will make no more?"

This question silenced the hall. Trust the bridgers in their diversity to have someone who knew the workings of a gleisner body. The guards glared up at Yatima, as if ve'd misled them merely by failing to confess the existence of these possibilities.

"I have no more, and I will make no more." Ve spread his arms, as if to show them the innocent phantom protruding from the stump, incapable of touching their world.

* * *

The convocation stretched on through the night. People came and went, some splitting off into groups to coordinate preparations for the burst, some returning with new questions. In the early hours of the morning, the three guards called on the meeting to expel Yatima and Inoshiro from Atlanta immediately; upon losing the vote they walked out.

By dawn, most of the bridgers and the representatives of many of the enclaves seemed to have been won over, if only to the point where they accepted that the balance of probabilities made it well worth the risk of wasting effort on unnecessary precautions. At seven o'clock, Francesca told the second shift of translators to get some sleep; the hall wasn't quite empty, but the few people remaining were absorbed in their own urgent discussions, and the wallscreens were blank.

One of the bridgers had suggested that they find a way to get the TERAGO data onto the fleshers' communications network. Francesca took them to Atlanta's communications hub—a large room in the same building—and they worked with the engineer on duty to establish a link to the Coalition via the drones. Translating the gestalt tags into suitable audiovisual equivalents looked like it would be the hardest part, but there turned out to be a centuries-old tool in the library for doing just that.

When everything was working the engineer summoned a plot of the Lacerta gravity waves and an annotated image of the neutron stars' orbit onto two large screens above her console: stripped-down versions of the rich polis scapes playing as flat, framed pictures. Compared to the historical baseline, the waves had doubled in frequency and their power had risen more than tenfold. G-1a and G-1b were still a little more than 300,000 kilometers apart, but the higher-derivative trends continued to imply a sudden, sharp fall around 20:00 UT—two p.m. local tune—and any flesher on the planet with minimal computing resources could now take the raw data and confirm that. Of course, the data itself could have been fabricated, but Yatima suspected it would still be more convincing than vis word, or Inoshiro's, alone.

"I'm going to need a few hours' rest." Francesca had developed a fixed gaze and monotone speech; her skepticism about the burst had clearly faded long ago, but she'd shown no sign of emotion, and she'd kept the convocation running to the end. Yatima wished ve could offer her some kind of comfort, but the only thing within vis gift was poisonous, unmentionable "I don't know what your plans are now."

Neither did Yatima, but Inoshiro said, "Can you take us to Liana and Orlando's house?"

Outside, people were constructing covered walkways between buildings, wheeling sacks and barrels of food into repositories, digging trenches and laying pipes, spreading tarpaulins to make new corridors of shade. Yatima hoped the message had got through that even reflected UV would soon have the power to burn or blind; some of the bridgers working in the heat had bare limbs or torsos, and every square centimeter of skin seemed to radiate vulnerability. The sky was darker than ever, but even the heaviest clouds would make a weak and inconstant shield. The crops in the fields were as good as dead; medium-term survival would come down to the ability to design, create, plant, and harvest viable new species before existing food supplies ran out. There was also the question of energy; Atlanta was largely powered by photovoltaic plants tailored to the atmosphere's current spectral windows. Carter-Zimmerman's botanists had already offered some tentative suggestions; Inoshiro had sketched the details at the convocation, and now they were available in full, on-line. No doubt the fleshers would regard them as the work of model-bound dilettante theoreticians, but as starting points for experimentation they had to be better than nothing.

They reached the house. Orlando looked tired and distracted, but he greeted them warmly. Francesca left, and the three of them sat in the front room.