Diaspora

Orlando bellowed with pain. A weak shaft of sunlight had appeared, coming through a hole in the ceiling and illuminating the skin of his broken right arm. Yatima glanced up; the storm was over, the clouds were beginning to thin and drift away.

Ve moved to block the light, while Inoshiro crouched behind Orlando, half-lifted him under the arms, and dragged him over the rubble into the shade. The wound in his thigh left a thick trail of blood.

Yatima knelt beside him again. "I still have the Introdus nanoware. I can use it, if that's what you want."

Orlando said clearly, "I want to talk to Liana. Take me to Liana."

"Liana's dead."

"I don't believe you. Take me to her." He was struggling for breath, but he forced the words out defiantly.

Yatima stepped back beneath the hole in the ceiling. In ordinary light the sun appeared as a meek orange disk through the stratosphere's brown haze, but in UV it shone fiercely amidst a blaze of scattered radiation.

Ve left the room, and returned carrying Liana's body one-handed by the collarbone. Orlando covered his face with his unbroken arm and wept loudly.

Inoshiro took the corpse away. Yatima knelt by Orlando a third time, and put vis hand on his shoulder clumsily. "I'm sorry she's dead. I'm sorry that hurt you." Ve could feel Orlando's body shaking with each sob. "What do you want? Do you want to die?"

Inoshiro spoke in IR. "You should have left when you had the chance."

"Yeah? So why did you come hack?"

Inoshiro didn't reply. Yatima swung around to face ver. "You knew about the storm, didn't you? You knew how bad it would be!"

"Yes." Inoshiro made a gesture of helplessness. "But if I'd said anything when we arrived, we might not have had a chance to speak to the other fleshers. And after the convocation, it was too late. It would have just caused panic."

The front wall creaked and lurched forward, breaking loose from the ceiling in a shower of black dust. Yatima sprang to vis feet and backed away, then fired the Introdus into Orlando.

Ve froze. The wall had struck an obstacle; it was tilted precariously, but holding. Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando's body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimize the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalized for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a gray mask over his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, compressing the brain into an ever-tighter description of itself, discarding redundancies as waste.

Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystalline sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.

"What now? How many do you have left?"

Yatima stared at the snapshot, dazed. Ve had violated Orlando's autonomy. Like a lightning bolt, like a blast of ultraviolet, ve had ruptured someone else's skin.

"How many?"

Yatima replied, "Fourteen."

"Then we'd better go use them while we can."

Inoshiro led ver out of the ruins. Yatima shot everyone they came across who looked close to death, and had no one to care for them—reading the snapshots immediately, piping the data in IR into vis gleisner's memory. They'd taken twelve more bridgers when a mob led by the border guards found them.

They started cutting up Yatima first. Ve passed the snapshot data to Inoshiro, then followed.

Before they'd finished destroying vis old body, the link to Konishi returned. The drones had survived the storm.

6

DIVERGENCE

Konishi polis, Earth

24 667 272 518 451 CST

10 December 3015, 3:21:55.605 UT

Yatima looked down on the Earth through the window of the observation bay. The surface wasn't entirely obscured by NOx, but most of it appeared in barely distinguishable shades of muted, rust-tinged gray. Only the clouds and the ice caps stood out, back-lighting the stratosphere impartially to reveal it as a vivid reddish-brown. Spread over the clouds, spread over the snow, it looked like decaying blood mixed with acid and excrement: tainted, corrosive, rotten. The wound left by Lacerta's one swift, violent incision had festered for almost twenty years.