Diaspora

'You're not backing out on me, are you?' Inoshiro eyed ver suspiciously.

'No!' Yatima laughed, exasperated; whatever vis misgivings, ve was committed to the whole crazy stunt. Inoshiro had argued that this was vis last chance to do anything 'remotely exciting' before ve started using a miner's outlook and 'lost interest in everything else'—but that simply wasn't true; the outlook was more like a spine than a straitjacket, a strengthened internal framework, not a constrictive cage. And ve'd kept on saying no until ve finally realized that Inoshiro was too stubborn to abandon vis plans, even when it turned out that not one of vis daring, radical Ashton-Laval friends was willing to accompany ver. Yatima had been secretly tempted all along by the idea of stepping right out of Konishi time and encountering the alien fleshers, though ve would have been just as happy to leave it all in the realms of plausible fantasy. In the end, it had come down to one question: If Inoshiro went ahead and did this alone, would it turn them into strangers? Yatima had found, to vis surprise, that this wasn't a risk ve was willing to take.

Ve suggested hesitantly, 'We might not want to stay for the full twenty-four hours, though.' Eight-six megatau. 'What if the whole place is empty, and there's nothing to see?'

'It's a flesher enclave. It won't be empty.'

'The last known contact was centuries ago. They could have died out, moved away… anything.' Under an eight-hundred-year-old treaty, drones and satellites were not permitted to invade the privacy of the fleshers; the few dozen scattered urban enclaves where their own laws permitted them to clear away the wildlife completely and build concentrated settlements were supposed to be treated as inviolable. They had their own global communications network, but no gateways linked it to the Coalition; abuses on both sides dating back to the Introdus had forced the separation. Inoshiro had insisted that merely puppeting the gleisner bodies via satellite from Konishi would have been morally equivalent to sending in a drone—and certainly the satellites, programmed to obey the treaty, would not have permitted it—but inhabiting two autonomous robots who wandered in from the jungle for a visit was a different matter entirely.

Yatima looked around at the dense undergrowth, and resisted the futile urge to try to make vis viewpoint jump forward by a few hundred meters, or rise up into the towering forest for a better view of the terrain ahead. Fifty kilotau. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

'We'd better start moving.'

'After You, Livingstone.'

'Wrong continent, Inoshiro.'

'Geronimo? Huckleberry? Dorothy?'

'Spare me.'

They set off north, the drone buzzing behind them: their one link to the polis, offering the chance of a rapid escape if anything went wrong. It followed them for the first kilometer-and-a-half, all the way to the edge of the enclave. There was nothing to mark the border—just the same thick jungle on either side—but the drone refused to cross the imaginary line. Even if they'd built their own transceiver to take its place, it would have done them no good; the satellite footprints were shaped with precision to exclude the region. They could have rigged up a base station to re-broadcast from outside… but it was too late for that now.

Inoshiro said, 'So what's the worst thing that could happen?'

Yatima replied without hesitation. 'Quicksand. We both fall into quicksand, so we can't even communicate with each other. We just float beneath the surface until our power runs out.' Ve checked vis gleisner's energy store, a sliver of magnetically suspended anticobalt. 'In six thousand and thirty-seven years.'

'Or five thousand nine-hundred and twenty.' Shafts of sunlight had begun to penetrate the forest; a flock of pink-and-gray birds were making rasping sounds in the branches above them.

'But our exoselves would restart our Konishi versions after two days—so we might as well commit suicide as soon as we're sure we wouldn't make it back by then.'

Inoshiro regarded ver curiously. 'Would you do that? I feel different from the Konishi version already. I'd want to go on living. And maybe someone would come along and pull us out in a couple of centuries.'

Yatima thought it over. 'I'd want to go on living—but not alone. Not without a single person to talk to.'

Inoshiro was silent for a while, then ve held up vis right hand. Their polymer skins were dotted with IR transceivers all over, but the greatest density was on the palms. Yatima received a gestalt tag, a request for data. Inoshiro was asking for a snapshot of vis mind. The gleisner hardware was multiply redundant, with plenty of room for two.

Entrusting a version of verself to another citizen would have been unthinkable, back in Konishi. Yatima placed vis palm against Inoshiro's, and they exchanged snapshots.

They crossed into the Atlanta enclave. Inoshiro said, 'Update every hour?'

'Okay.'

The interface software wasn't too bad at walking. It kept them upright and steadily advancing, detecting obstacles in the ground cover and shifts in the terrain via the gleisners' tactile and balance senses, and whatever vision was available—without actually commandeering the head and eyes. After stumbling a few times, Yatima started glancing down every now and then, but it was soon clear how useful it would have been if the interface had been smart enough to plant an urge to do so in vis mind at appropriate times, like the original flesher instinct.

The jungle was visibly populated with small birds and snakes, but if there was any other animal life it was hiding or fleeing at the sound of them. Compared to walking through an indexscape for a comparable ecosystem, it was a rather dilute experience—and the thrill of interacting with real mud and real vegetation was beginning to wear thin.

Yatima heard something skid across the ground in front of ver; ve'd inadvertently kicked a small piece of corroded metal out from under a shrub. Ve kept walking, but Inoshiro paused to examine it, then cried out in alarm.

'What?'

'Replicator!'

Yatima turned back and angled for a better view; the interface made vis body crouch, 'It's just an empty canister.' It was almost crushed flat, but there was still paint clinging to the metal in places, the colors faded to barely distinguishable grays. Yatima could make out a portion of a narrow, roughly longitudinal band of varying width, slightly paler than its background; it looked to ver like a two-dimensional representation of a twisted ribbon. There was also part of a circle-though if it was a biohazard warning, it didn't look much like the ones ve recalled from vis limited browsing on the subject.

Inoshiro spoke in a hushed, sickened voice. 'PreIntrodus, this was pandemic. Distorted whole nations' economies. It had hooks into everything: sexuality, tribalism, half a dozen artforms and subcultures… it parasitized the fleshers so thoroughly you had to he some kind of desert monk to escape it.'

Yatima regarded the pathetic object dubiously, but they had no access to the library now, and vis knowledge of the era was patchy. 'Even if there are traces left inside… I'm sure they're all immune to it by now. And it could hardly infect us—'

Inoshiro cut ver off impatiently. 'We're not talking nucleotide viruses, here. The molecules themselves were just a random assortment of junk—mostly phosphoric acid; it was the memes they came wrapped in that made them virulent.' Ve bent down lower, and cupped vis hands over the battered container. 'And who knows how small a fragment it can bootstrap from? I'm not taking any chances.' The gleisners' IR transceivers could be made to operate at high power; smoke and steam from singed vegetation rose up through Inoshiro's fingers.

A voice came from behind them—a meaningless stream of phonemes, but the interface followed it with translation into linear: 'Don't tell me: you're starting a fire to attract attention. You didn't want to creep up on us unannounced.'

They both turned as rapidly as their bodies permitted. The flesher stood a dozen meters away, dressed in a dark green robe shot through with threads of gold. Broadcasting no signature tag—of course, but Yatima still had to make a conscious effort to dismiss the instinctive conclusion that this was not a real person. Ve had black hair and eyes, copper-brown skin, and a thick black heard which in a flesher almost certainly meant gendered, male: 've' was a he. No obvious modification: no wings, no gills, no photosynthetic cowl. Yatima resisted jumping to