Diaspora

The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and knew the linear words for most of them; the scape itself was so unremarkable that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a difference here, though it could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had seen before, or the stylized fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by physiology or physics, but only by the conventions of gestalt—the need to proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one primary meaning: I am a citizen.

The orphan addressed the forum: "People."

The linear conversations between the citizens were public, but muted—degraded in proportion to distance in the scape—and the orphan heard only an unchanging murmur.

It tried again. "People!"

The icon of the nearest citizen—a dazzling multihued form like a stained-glass statue, about two delta high—turned to face the orphan. An innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphan's angle of view straight toward the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphan's own icon—now a crude, unconscious parody of the citizen's—turn the same way.

The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face smiled, and ve said, "Hello, orphan."

A response, at last! The output navigator's feedback detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping down the restlessness which had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any system which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.

The orphan parroted: "Hello, orphan."

The citizen smiled again—"Yes, hello"—then turned back to vis friends.

"People! Hello!"

Nothing happened.

"Citizens! People!"

The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked on its satisfaction rating, making the navigators restless again. Not restless enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.

The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: "People! Hello!" It moved without momentum or inertia, gravity or friction, merely tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigator's requests for data, which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphan's point-of-view. The matching bits from the output navigator determined where and how the orphan's speech and icon were merged into the scape.

The navigators learned to move close enough to the citizens to be easily heard. Some responded—"Hello, orphan"—before turning away. The orphan echoed their icons hack at them: simplified or intricate, rococco or spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of luminous smoke, or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless black—but always the same biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the letter A in a hundred mad monks' illuminated manuscripts.

Gradually, the orphan's input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag—a quality like a distinctive odor for a flesher, though more localized, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope—a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors—began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity—every citizen's icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag—and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn't previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.

The citizen exclaimed angrily, "Don't do that, idiot!"

"Hello!"

"No one will believe you if you claim to be me—least of all me. Understand? Now go away!" This citizen had metallic, pewter-gray skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.

"No!" The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. "See? I challenge you—and you can't respond. So why bother lying?"

"Hello!"

"Go away"

The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.

"Hello, citizen!"

The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. "Don't you know who you are? Don't you know your own signature?"

Another citizen said calmly, "It must be the new orphan—still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it."

This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, "Lion." It tried mimicking the new citizen—and suddenly all three of them were laughing.