Diaspora

The street became a sequence of dazzling staccato images bathed in blue and white, shadows jumping wildly with each new jagged arc of light. Buildings began exploding one after another, a relentless cascade of sudden orange flashes spraying sparks and fist-sized lumps of burning wood. People appeared, ducking and screaming, panicked out of their vulnerable shelters. Yatima watched, helpless but transfixed. The dying stratospheric plasma had found a way to reach down to Earth, its radio frequency pulses pumping vast quantities of ions through the lower atmosphere, inducing a massive voltage difference between the stormclouds and the ground. But now the voltage had crossed the breakdown threshold of the dust-filled air below, and the whole system was short-circuiting, rapidly and violently. Atlanta just happened to be in the way. Local damage, insignificant on a global scale.

Yatima moved slowly through the actinic blaze, half hoping for a lightning strike and the mercy of amnesia, but unable to abandon the bridgers now by choice. Driven from their homes, people were cowering beneath the onslaught, many of them burnt, torn, bloodied. A woman strode past with her arms stretched wide and her face to the sky, shouting defiantly: "So what? So what?"

A child, a half-grown girl, sat in the middle of the street, the side of her face and one exposed arm a raw pink, weeping lymphatic fluid. Yatima approached her. She was shivering.

"You can leave all this behind. Come into the polises. Is that what you want?" She stared back, uncomprehending. One of her ears was bleeding; the thunder might have deafened her. Yatima delved into the instructions for the gleisner's maintenance nanoware, and had it rebuild the lost delivery system in vis left forefinger. Then ve commanded the surviving Introdus doses to move into place.

Ve raised vis arm and aimed the delivery system at the girl, shouting "Introdus? Is that what you want?" She cried out and covered her face. Did that mean no, or was she just bracing herself for the shock?

The child began sobbing. Yatima backed away, defeated. Ve could save fifteen lives, ve could drag fifteen people out of this senseless inferno, but who could ve be sure even understood what ve was offering?

Francesca. Orlando. Liana.

Orlando and Liana's house wasn't far. Yatima steeled verself and pushed on through the chaos, past the shattered buildings and the terrified fleshers. The lightning was finally dying away—and the fireproof buildings had only burnt when directly hit—but the city had been transformed into a scene from the age of barbarism, when bombs had rained from the sky.

The house was partly standing, but unrecognizable; Yatima only knew ve'd found the right place because of the gleisner's navigation system. The top story was gutted, and there were holes in the ceiling and walls of the ground floor.

Someone was kneeling in the shadows, picking away debris at the edge of a vast heap where the ashes of most of the top story seemed to have landed. "Liana?" Yatima broke into a run. The figure turned toward ver.

It was Inoshiro.

Inoshiro had half-exposed a corpse, all black dessicated flesh and white bone. Yatima looked down at it, then recoiled, disoriented. This charred skull was not a symbol in some jaded work of polis art; it was proof of the involuntary erasure of a living mind. The physical world could do that. The death of a cosmic mayfly could do that.

Inoshiro said, "It's Liana."

Yatima tried to absorb this, but ve felt nothing, the idea meant nothing.

"Have you found-?"

"Not yet." Inoshiro's voice was expressionless.

Yatima left ver, and began scanning the rubble in IR, wondering how long a corpse would remain warmer than its surroundings. Then ve heard a faint sound from the front of the house.

Orlando was buried beneath pieces of the ruptured ceiling. Yatima called Inoshiro, and they quickly uncovered him. He was badly injured; both his legs and one arm had been crushed, and a gash in his thigh was spurting blood. Yatima checked the link to Konishi—ve couldn't even guess how to treat such wounds—but either the stratosphere was still ionized, or one of the drones had been lost in the storm.

Orlando stared up at them, ashen but conscious, eyes pleading for something. Inoshiro said flatly, "She's dead." Orlando's face contorted silently.

Yatima looked away and spoke to Inoshiro in IR. "What do we do? Carry him to a place where they can treat him? Fetch someone? I don't know how this works."

"There are thousands of injured people. No one's going to treat him; he's not going to live that long."

Yatima was outraged. "They can't leave him to die!"

Inoshiro shrugged. "You want to try finding a communications link and calling for a doctor?" Ve peered out through the broken wall. "Or do you want to try carrying him to the hospital, and see if he survives the trip?"

Yatima knelt beside Orlando. "What do we do? There are a lot of people hurt, I don't know how long it will take to get help."