'Except for the time scale.'
Ve shrugged. 'What are we racing, in the polises? We speed ourselves up as much as we can—then struggle not to let it change us.'
Yatima was annoyed. 'What's wrong with that? There's not much point to longevity if all you're going to do with your time is change into someone else entirely. Or decay into no one at all.'
Orlando returned, accompanied by a female flesher. 'This is Liana Zabini. Inoshiro, and Yatima, of Konishi polis.' Liana had brown hair and green eyes. They shook hands; Yatima was beginning to get the hang of doing it without either offering too much resistance, or merely letting vis arm hang limp. 'Liana is our best neuroembryologist. Without her, the bridgers wouldn't stand a chance.'
Inoshiro said, 'Who are the bridgers?'
Liana glanced at Orlando. He said, 'You'd better start at the beginning.' Orlando persuaded everyone to sit; Yatima finally realized that this was more comfortable for the fleshers.
Liana said, 'We call ourselves bridgers. When the founders came here from Turin, three centuries ago, they had a very specific plan. You know there've been thousands of artificial genetic changes in different flesher populations, since the Introdus?' She gestured at a large picture behind her, and the portrait faded, to be replaced by a complex upside-down tree diagram. 'Different exuberants have made modifications to all kinds of characteristics. Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptations for new diets or habitats: digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular-skeletal.' Images flashed up from different points on the tree: amphibious, winged, and photosynthetic exuberants, close-ups of modified teeth, diagrams of altered metabolic pathways. Orlando rose from his seat and started drawing curtains; the contrast of the images improved.
'Often, habitat changes have also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts; no one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes.' A slick-skinned amphibious flesher rose slowly through emerald water, a faint stream of bubbles emerging from flaps behind vis ears; a transected, color-coded view showed dissolved gas concentrations in vis tissues and bloodstream, and an inset graph illustrated the safe range of staged ascents.
'Some neural changes have gone far beyond new instincts, though.' The tree thinned-out considerably-but there were still thirty or forty current branches left. 'There are species of exuberants who've changed aspects of language, perception, and cognition.'
Inoshiro said, 'Like the dream apes?'
Liana nodded. 'At one extreme. Their ancestors stripped back the language centers to the level of the higher primates. They still have stronger general intelligence than any other primate, but their material culture has been reduced dramatically—and they can no longer modify themselves, even if they want to. I doubt that they even understand their own origins anymore.
'The dream apes are the exception, though—a deliberate renunciation of possibilities. Most exuberant, have tried more constructive changes: developing new ways of mapping the physical world into their minds, and adding specialized neural structures to handle the new categories. There are exuberants who can manipulate the most sophisticated, abstract concepts in genetics, meteorology, biochemistry, or ecology as intuitively as any static can think about a rock or a plant or an animal with the 'common sense' about those things which comes from a few million years of evolution. And there are others who've simply modified ancestral neural structures to find out how that changes their thinking—who've headed out in search of new possibilities, with no specific goals in mind.'
Yatima felt an eerie resonance with vis own situation… though from all the evidence so far, vis own mutations hadn't exactly set him adrift in uncharted waters. As Inoshiro put it: 'With you, they've finally stumbled on the trait fields for the ultimate in willing mine fodder. Parents will be asking for those nice compliant 'Yatima' settings for the next ten gigatau.'
Liana spread her arms in a gesture of frustration. 'The only trouble with all this exploration is… some species of exuberants have changed so much that they can't communicate with anyone else, anymore. Different groups have rushed off in their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds and now they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries. It's not just a question of language—or at least, not the simple question that language was for the statics, when everyone had basically identical brains. Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense. We're fragmenting. We're losing each other.' She laughed, as if to deflate her own seriousness, but Yatima could see that she was passionate about the subject. 'We've all chosen to stay on Earth, we've all chosen to remain organic… but we're still drifting apart probably faster than any of you in the polises!'
Orlando, standing behind her chair, placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. She reached up and clasped her hand over his. Yatima found this mesmerizing, but tried not to stare. Ve said, 'So how do the bridgers fit in?'
Orlando said, 'We're trying to plug the gaps.'
Liana gestured at the tree diagram, and a second set of branches began to grow behind and between the first. The new tree was much more finely differentiated, with more branches, more closely spaced.
'Taking the ancestral neural structures as a starting point, we've been introducing small changes with every generation. But instead of modifying everyone in the same direction, our children are not only different from their parents, they're increasingly different from each other. Each generation is more diverse than the one before.'
Inoshiro said, 'But… isn't that the very thing you were lamenting? People drifting apart?'
'Not quite. Instead of whole populations jumping en masse to opposite ends of the spectrum for some neural trait giving rise to two distinct groups with no common ground—we're always scattered evenly across the whole range. That way, no one is cut off, no one is alienated, because any given person's 'circle'—the group of people with whom they can easily communicate—always overlaps with someone else's, someone outside the first circle… whose own circle also overlaps with that of someone else again… until one way or another, everyone is covered.
'You could easily find two people here who can barely understand each other—because they're as different as exuberants from two wildly divergent lines—but here, there'll always be a chain of living relatives who can bridge the gap. With a few intermediaries—right now, four at the most—any bridger can communicate with any other.'
Orlando added, 'And once there are people among us who can interact with all of the scattered exuberant communities, on their own terms…'
'Then every flesher on the planet will be connected, in the same way.'
Inoshiro asked eagerly, 'So you could set up a chain of people who'd let us talk to someone at the edge of the process? Someone heading toward the most remote group of exuberants?'
Orlando and Liana exchanged glances, then Orlando said, 'If you can wait a few days, that might be possible. It takes a certain amount of diplomacy; it's not a party trick we can turn on at a moment's notice.'
'We're going back tomorrow morning.' Yatima didn't dare look at Inoshiro; there'd be no end of excuses to extend their stay, but they'd agreed hours.
After a moment's awkward silence, Inoshiro said calmly, 'That's right. Maybe next time.'
Orlando showed them around the gene foundry where he worked, assembling DNA sequences and testing their effects. As well as their main goal, the bridgers were working on a number of non-neural enhancements involving disease resistance and improved tissue-repair mechanisms, which could be tried out with relative ease on brainless vegetative assemblies of mammalian organs which Orlando jokingly referred to as 'offal trees.' 'You really can't smell them? You don't know how lucky you are.'
The bridgers, he explained, had tailored themselves to the point where any individual could rewrite parts of vis own genome by injecting the new sequence into the bloodstream, bracketed by suitable primers for substitution enzymes, wrapped in a lipid capsule with surface proteins keyed to the appropriate cell types. If the precursors of gametes were targeted, the modification was made heritable. Female bridgers no longer generated all their ova while still fetuses, like statics did, but grew each one as required, and sperm and ova production—let alone the preparation of the womb for implantation of a fertilized egg—only occurred if the right hormones, available from specially-tailored plants, were ingested. About two-thirds of the bridgers were single-gendered; the rest were hermaphroditic or parthenogenetic—asexual, in the manner of certain species of exuberants.
After a tour of the facilities, Orlando declared that it was lunchtime, and they sat in a courtyard watching him eat. The other foundry workers gathered round; a few spoke to them directly, while the rest used
