rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence. There was a continuum which stretched all the way from trivial aesthetic preferences to emotional associations to the cornerstones of morality and identity.
Yatima had vis exoself's analysis of the outlook appear in the scape in front of ver as a pair of before-and- after maps of vis own most affected neural structures.
The maps were like nets, with spheres at every junction to represent symbols; proportionate changes in the symbols' size showed how the outlook would tweak them.
''Death' gets a tenfold boost? Spare me.'
'Only because it's so underdeveloped initially.'
Yatima shot ver a poisonous look, then rendered the snaps private, and stood examining them with an air of intense concentration.
'Make up your mind; it's starting soon.'
'You mean make my mind Hashim's?'
'Hashim doesn't use an outlook.'
'So it's all down to raw artistic talent? Isn't that what they all say?'
'Just… make a decision.'
Vis exoself's verdict on the potential for parasitism was fairly sanguine, though there could be no guarantees. If ve ran the outlook for a few kilotau, ve ought to be able to stop.
Yatima made a matching flower grow from vis own palm. 'Why do you keep talking me into these crazy stunts?'
Inoshiro's face formed the pure gestalt sign for unappreciated benefactor. 'If I don't save you from the Mines, who will?'
Yatima ran the outlook. At once, certain features of the scape seized vis attention: a thin streak of cloud in the blue sky, a cluster of distant trees, the wind rippling through the grass nearby. It was like switching from one gestalt color map to another, and seeing some objects leap out because they'd changed more than the rest. After a moment the effect died down, but Yatima still felt distinctly modified; the equilibrium had shifted in the tug-of- war between all the symbols in vis mind, and the ordinary buzz of consciousness had a slightly different tone to it.
'Are you okay?' Inoshiro actually looked concerned, and Yatima felt a rare, raw surge of affection for ver. Inoshiro always wanted to show ver what ve'd found in vis endless fossicking through the Coalition's possibilities —because ve really did want ver to know what the choices were.
'I'm still myself. I think.'
'Pity.' Inoshiro sent the address, and they jumped into Hashim's artwork together.
Their icons vanished; they were pure observers. Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, re-organized. It looked like a flesher embryo—though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted light; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio- frequency MRI chirp.
There were two bodies, now. Twins? One was larger, though—sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum.
One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibers. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink-and-gray muscles working side-by-side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of gray dust. Two flesher children walked side-by-side, hand-in-hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner… Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The two figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated.
The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses—and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger onto vis shoulders then the passenger's height flowing down to the hearer like an hourglass's sand.
They were parent and child, siblings, friends, lovers, species, and Yatima exulted in their companionship. Hashim's piece was a distillation of the idea of friendship, within and across all borders. And whether it was all down to the outlook or not, Yatima was glad to he witnessing it, taking some part of it inside verself before every image dissolved into nothing but a flicker of entropy in Ashton-Laval's coolant flow.
The scape began moving Yatima's viewpoint away from the pair. For a few tau ve went along with this, but the whole city had decayed into a flat, fissured desert, so apart from the retreating figures there was nothing to be seen. Ve jumped hack to them-only to find that ve had to keep advancing vis coordinates just to stay in place. It was a strange experience: Yatima possessed no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception—the Konishi design eschewed such delusions of corporeality-but the scape's attempt to 'push' ver away, and the need to accelerate against it, seemed so close to a physical struggle that ve could almost believe ve'd been embodied.
The figure facing Yatima aged suddenly, cheeks hollowing, eyes filming over. Yatima moved around to try to see the other's face—and the scape sent ver flying across the desert, this time in the opposite direction, Ve fought vis way back to the… mother and daughter, then decaying robot and gleaming new one… and though the two remained locked together, hand-in-hand, Yatima could all but feel the force trying to tear them apart.
Ve watched flesh hand gripping skin-and-hones, metal gripping flesh, ceramic gripping metal. All of them slowly slipping. Yatima looked into the eyes of each figure; while everything else flowed and changed, their gazes remained locked together.
The scape split in two, the ground opened up, the sky divided. The figures were parted. Yatima was flung away from them, back into the desert with a force, now, that ve could not oppose. Ve saw them in the distance— twins again, of uncertain species, reaching out desperately across the empty space growing between them. Arms outstretched, fingertips almost brushing.
Then the halves of the world rushed apart. Someone bellowed with rage and grief.
The scape decayed into blackness before Yatima understood that the cry had been vis own.
The forum with the flying-pig fountain had been abandoned long ago, but Yatima had planted a copy from the archives in vis homescape, the cloistered square marooned in the middle of a vast expanse of parched scrubland. Empty, it looked at once too large and too small. A few hundred delta away, a copy (not to scale) of the asteroid ve'd watched being trimmed was buried in the ground. At one point Yatima had envisioned a vast trail of similar mementos stretching across the savanna, a map ve could fly over whenever ve wanted to review the turning points in vis life… but then the whole idea had begun to seem childish. If the things ve'd seen had changed ver, they'd changed ver; there was no need to re-create them as monuments. Ve'd kept the forum because ve genuinely liked to visit it—and the asteroid out of the sheer perverse pleasure of resisting the urge to tidy it away.
Yatima stood by the fountain for a while, watching its silver liquid effortlessly mock the physics it half- obeyed. Then ve re-created the octahedral diamond, the six-pointed net from vis lesson with Radiya, beside it. That physics meant nothing in the polises had always been clear to ver, as it was to most citizens; Gabriel disagreed, of course, but that was just Carter-Zimmerman doctrine talking. The fountain could ignore the laws of fluid dynamics just as easily as it could conform to them. Everything it did was simply arbitrary; even the perfect gravitational parabola of the start of each stream, before the piglets were formed, was nothing but an aesthetic choice and the aesthetic itself was nothing but the vestigial influence of flesher ancestry.
The diamond net was different, though. Yatima played with the object, deforming it wildly, stretching and
