Diaspora

conclusions; none of this surface conservatism actually proved he was a static.

The flesher said, 'I don't think I'll offer to shake hands.' Inoshiro's palms were still glowing dull red. 'And we can't exchange signatures. I'm at a loss for protocol. But that's good. Ritual corrupts.' He took a few steps forward; the undergrowth deferentially flattened itself to smooth his path. 'I'm Orlando Venetti. Welcome to Atlanta.'

They introduced themselves. The interface—pre-loaded with the most likely base languages, and enough flexibility to cope with drift had identified the flesher's speech as a dialect of Modern Roman. It grafted the language into their minds, slipping new word sounds into all their symbols side-by-side with the linear versions, and binding alternative grammatical settings into their speech analysis and generation networks. Yatima felt distinctly stretched by the process—but vis symbols were still connected to each other in the same way as before. Ve was still verself.

'Konishi polis: Where is that, exactly?'

Yatima began to reply, 'One hundred and— Inoshiro cut ver off with a burst of warning tags.

Orlando Was unperturbed. 'Just idle curiosity; I wasn't requesting coordinates for a missile strike. But what does it matter where you've come from, now that you're here in the flesh? Or the gallium indium phosphide. I trust those bodies were empty when you found them?'

Inoshiro was scandalized. 'Of course!'

'Good. The thought of real gleisners still prowling around on Earth is too horrible to contemplate. They should have come out of the factories with 'Born for Vacuum' inscribed across their chests.'

Yatima asked, 'Were you born in Atlanta?'

Orlando nodded. 'One hundred and sixty-three years ago. Atlanta fell empty in the 2600s-there was a community of statics here before, but disease wiped them out, and none of the other statics wanted to risk being infected. The new founders came from Turin, my grandparents among them.' Ve frowned slightly. 'So do you want to see the city? Or shall we stand here all day?'

With Orlando leading the way, obstacles vanished. However the plants were sensing his presence, they responded to it swiftly: leaves curling up, spines withdrawing like snails' stalks, sprawling shrubs contracting into tight cores, and whole protruding branches suddenly hanging limp. Yatima suspected that he was deliberately prolonging the effects to include them, and ve had no doubt that Orlando could have left any unwelcome pursuer far behind—or at least, anyone who lacked the same molecular keys.

Yatima asked, half jokingly, 'Any quicksand around here?'

'Not if you stick close.'

The forest ended without warning; if anything, the edge was more densely wooded than most of the interior, helping to conceal the transition. They emerged onto a vast, bright open plain, mostly taken up with fields of crops and photovoltaics. The city lay ahead in the distance: a broad cluster of low buildings, all vividly colored, with sweeping, geometrically precise curved walls and roofs intersecting and overlapping wildly.

Orlando said, 'There are twelve thousand and ninety-three of us, now. But we're still tweaking the crops, and our digestive symbionts; within ten years, we should be able to support four thousand more with the same resources,' Yatima decided it would be impolite to inquire about their mortality rate. In most respects, the fleshers had a far harder time than the Coalition in trying to avoid cultural and genetic stagnation while eschewing the lunacy of exponential growth. Only true statics, and a few of the more conservative exuberants, retained the ancestral genes for programmed death and asking for a figure on accidental losses might have seemed insensitive.

Orlando laughed suddenly. 'Ten years? What would that seem like to you? A century?'

Yatima replied, 'About eight millennia.'

'Fuck.'

Inoshiro added hastily. 'You can't really convert, though. We might do a few simple things eight hundred times faster, but we change much more slowly than that.'

'Empires don't rise and fall in a year? New species don't evolve in a century?'

Yatima reassured him, 'Empires are impossible. And evolution requires vast amounts of mutation and death. We prefer to make small changes, rarely, and wait to see how they turn out.'

'So do we.' Orlando shook his head. 'Still. Over eight thousand years, I have a feeling we won't be keeping such a tight grip on things.'

They continued on toward the city, following a broad path which looked like it was made of nothing more than reddish-brown clay, but probably teemed with organisms designed to keep it from eroding into dust or mud. The gleisner's feet described the surface as soft but resilient, and they left no visible indentations. Birds were busy in the fields, eating weeds and insects—Yatima was only guessing, but if they were feeding on the crop itself the next harvest would be extremely sparse.

Orlando stopped to pick up a small leafy branch from the path, which must have blown in from the forest, then began sweeping it back and forth across the ground ahead of them. 'So how do they greet dignitaries in the polises? Are you accustomed to having sixty thousand non-sentient slaves strewing rose petals at your feet?'

Yatima laughed, but Inoshiro was deeply offended. 'We're not dignitaries! We're delinquents!'

As they drew nearer, Yatima could see people walking along the broad avenues between the rainbow- colored buildings—or loitering in groups, looking almost like citizens gathered in some forum, even if their appearance was much less diverse. Some had vis own icon's dark skin, and there were other equally minor variations, but all of these exuberants could have passed for statics. Yatima wondered just what changes they were exploring; Orlando had mentioned digestive symbionts, but that hardly counted—it didn't even involve their own DNA.

Orlando said, 'When we noticed you coming, it was hard to decide who to send. We don't get much news from the polises—we had no idea what you'd be like.' He turned back to face them. 'I do make sense to you, don't I? I'm not just imagining that communication is taking place?'

'Not unless we're imagining it, too.' Yatima was puzzled. 'What do you mean, though: who to send? Do some of you speak Coalition languages?'

'No.' They'd reached the outskirts of the city; people were turning to watch them with undisguised curiosity. 'I'll explain soon. Or a friend of mine will.'

The avenues were carpeted with thick, short grass. Yatima could see no vehicles or pack animals, just fleshers, mostly barefoot. Between the buildings there were flowerbeds, ponds and streams, statues still and moving, sundials and telescopes. Everything was space and light, open to the sky. There were parks, large enough for kite flying and ball games, and people sitting talking in the shade of small trees. The gleisner's skin was sending tags describing the warmth of the sunlight and the texture of the grass; Yatima was almost beginning to regret not modifying verself enough to absorb the information instinctively.

Inoshiro asked, 'What happened to pre-Introdus Atlanta? The skyscrapers? The factories? The apartment blocks?'

'Some of it's still standing. Buried in the jungle, further north. I could take you there later, if you like.'

Yatima got in quickly before Inoshiro could answer. 'Thank you, but we won't have time.'

Orlando nodded at dozens of people, greeted some by name, and introduced Yatima and Inoshiro to a few. Yatima attempted to shake their offered hands, which turned out to be an extraordinarily complex dynamical problem. No one seemed hostile to their presence—hut Yatima found their gestalt gestures confusing, and no one uttered more than a few polite phrases before walking on.

'This is my home.'

The building was pale blue, with an S-shaped facade and a smaller, elliptical second story. 'Is this… some kind of stone?' Yatima stroked the wall and paid attention to the tags; the surface was smooth down to the sub- millimeter scale, but it was as soft and cool as the hark ve'd touched in the forest.

'No, it's alive. Barely. It was sprouting twigs and leaves all over when it was growing, but now it's only metabolizing enough for repairs, and a little active air conditioning.' A strip-curtain covering the doorway parted for Orlando, and they followed him in. There were cushions and chairs, still pictures on the walls, dust-filled shafts of sunlight everywhere.

'Take a seat.' They stared at him. 'No? Fine. Could you wait here a second?' He strode up a staircase.

Inoshiro said numbly, 'We're really here. We did it.' Ve surveyed the sunny room. 'And this is how they live. It doesn't look so bad.'