Diaspora

The fourth citizen rarely appeared the same from visit to visit—ve tended to resemble the most striking image the orphan had seen in the library in the preceding few kilotau—but ve was still easy to identify: ve was the one who only became visible when the two navigators moved apart. Every time the orphan arrived in the scape, it stepped back from itself and checked out the fourth citizen. Sometimes it adjusted the icon, bringing it closer to a specific memory, or fine-tuning it according to the aesthetic preferences of the input classifying networks—biases first carved out by a few dozen trait fields, then deepened or silted-up by the subsequent data stream. Sometimes the orphan mimicked the flesher it had seen picking up the lion cub: tall and slender, with deep black skin and brown eyes, dressed in a purple robe.

And once, when the citizen bound to "Inoshiro" said with mock sorrow, "Poor little orphan, you still don't have a name," the orphan remembered the scene, and responded, "Poor little Yatima."

The golden-furred citizen said, "I think it does, now.

From then on, they all called the fourth citizen "Yatima." They said it so many times, making such a fuss about it, that the orphan soon bound it to the symbol as strongly as "Orphan."

The orphan watched the citizen bound to "Inoshiro" chanting triumphantly at the fourth citizen: "Yatima? Yatima! Ha ha ha! I've got five parents, and five part, siblings, and I'll always be older than you!"

The orphan made the fourth citizen respond, "Inoshiro! Inoshiro! Ha ha ha!"

But it couldn't think what to say next. Blanca said, "The gleisners are trimming an asteroid—right now, in real time. Do you want to come see? Inoshiro's there, Gabriel's there. just follow me!"

Blanca's icon put out a strange new tag, and then abruptly vanished. The forum was almost empty; there were a few regulars near the fountain, who the orphan knew would be unresponsive, and there was the fourth citizen, as always.

Blanca reappeared. "What is it? You don't know how to follow me, or you don't want to come?" The orphan's language analysis networks had begun fine-tuning the universal grammar they encoded, rapidly homing in on the conventions of linear. Words were becoming more than isolated triggers for symbols, each with a single, fixed meaning; the subtleties of order, context, and inflection were beginning to modulate the symbols' cascades of interpretation. This was a request to know what the fourth citizen wanted.

"Play with me!" The orphan had learned to call the fourth citizen "I" or "me" rather than "Yatima," but that was just grammar, not self-awareness.

"I want to watch the trimming, Yatima."

"No! Play with me!" The orphan weaved around ver excitedly, projecting fragments of recent memories: Blanca creating shared scape objects—spinning numbered blocks, and brightly colored bouncing balls—and teaching the orphan how to interact with them.

"Okay, okay! Here's a new game. I just hope you're a fast learner."

Blanca emitted another extra tag—the same general flavor as before, though not identical—then vanished again… only to reappear immediately, a few hundred delta away across the scape. The orphan spotted ver easily, and followed at once.

Blanca jumped again. And again. Each time, ve sent out the new flavor of tag, with a slight variation, before vanishing. Just as the orphan was starting to find the game dull, Blanca began to stay out of the scape for a fraction of a tau before reappearing—and the orphan spent the time trying to guess where ve'd materialize next, hoping to get to the chosen spot first.

There seemed to be no pattern to it, though; Blanca's solid shadow jumped around the forum at random, anywhere from the cloisters to the fountain, and the orphan's guesses all failed. It was frustrating… but Blanca's games had usually turned out to possess some kind of subtle order in the past, so the infotrope persisted, combining and recombining existing pattern detectors into new coalitions, hunting for a way to make sense of the problem. The tags! When the infotrope compared the memory of the raw gestalt data for the tags Blanca was sending with the address the innate geometry networks computed when the orphan caught sight of ver a moment later, parts of the two sequences matched up, almost precisely. Again and again. The infotrope bound the two sources of information together-recognizing them as two means of learning the same thing—and the orphan began jumping across the scape without waiting to see where Blanca reappeared.

The first time, their icons overlapped, and the orphan had to back away before it saw that Blanca really was there, confirming the success the infotrope had already brashly claimed. The second time, the orphan instinctively compensated, varying the tag address slightly to keep from colliding, as it had learned to do when pursuing Blanca by sight. The third time, the orphan beat ver to the destination.

"I win!"

"Well done, Yatima! You followed me!"

"I followed you!"