intermediaries to translate. Their questions often came out sounding odd, even after some lengthy exchanges between translator and questioner—'How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?' and from the laughter their answers produced it was clear that the inverse process was just as imperfect. A certain amount of genuine communication did take place—but it depended heavily on trial and error, and a great deal of patience.
Orlando had promised to show them factories and silos, galleries and archives… but other people started dropping by to talk to them—or just to stare—and as the afternoon wore on, their original plans receded into fantasy. Perhaps they could have forced the pace, reminding their hosts how precious their time was, but after a few hours it began to seem absurd to have imagined that they could have done anything more, in a day. Nothing could be rushed, here; a whirlwind tour would have seemed like an act of violence. As the megatau evaporated, Yatima struggled not to think about the progress ve could have been making, back in the Truth Mines. Ve wasn't racing anyone—and the Mines would still be there when ve returned.
Eventually the courtyard behind the foundry became so crowded that Orlando dragged everyone off to an outdoor restaurant. By dusk, when Liana joined them, the questions were finally beginning to dry up, and most of the crowd had split off into smaller groups who were busily discussing the visitors among themselves.
So the four of them sat and talked beneath the stars—which were dulled and heavily filtered by the narrow spectral window of the atmosphere. 'Of course we've seen them from space,' Inoshiro boasted. 'In the polises, the orbital probes are just another address.'
Orlando said, 'I keep wanting to insist: 'Ah, but you haven't seen them with your own eyes!' Except… you have. In exactly the same way that you've seen anything at all.'
Liana leaned on his shoulder and added teasingly, 'Which is the same way anyone sees anything. Just because our own minds are being run a few centimeters away from our own cameras, that doesn't make our experiences magically superior.'
Orlando conceded, 'No. This does, though.'
They kissed. Yatima wondered if Blanca and Gabriel ever did that if Blanca had modified verself to make it possible, and pleasant. No wonder Blanca's parents disapproved. Gabriel being gendered wasn't such a big deal, as an abstract question of self-definition—but almost everyone in Carter-Zimmerman also pretended to have a tangible body. In Konishi, the whole idea of solidity, of atavistic delusions of corporeality, was generally equated with obstruction and coercion. Once your icon could so much as block another's path in a public scape, autonomy was violated. Re-connecting the pleasures of love to concepts like force and friction was simply barbaric.
Liana asked, 'What are the gleisners up to? Do you know? Last we heard, they were doing something in the asteroid belt—but that was almost a hundred years ago. Have any of them left the solar system?'
Inoshiro said, 'Not in person. They've sent probes to a few nearby stars, but nothing sentient yet—and when they do, it will be them-in-their-whole-bodies, all the way.' Ve laughed. 'They're obsessed with not becoming polis citizens. They think if they dare take their heads off their shoulders to save a bit of mass, next thing they'll he abandoning reality entirely.'
Orlando said contemptuously, 'Give them another thousand years, and they'll he pissing up and down the Milky Way, marking their territory like dogs.'
Yatima protested, 'That's not fair! They might have bizarre priorities… but they're still civilized. More or less.'
Liana said, 'Better gleisners out there than fleshers. Can you imagine statics in space? They'd probably have terraformed Mars by now. The gleisners have barely touched the planet; mostly they've just surveyed it from orbit. They're not vandals. They're not colonists.'
Orlando was unconvinced. 'If all you want to do is gather astrophysical data, there's no need to leave the solar system. I've seen plans: seeding whole worlds with self-replicating factories, filling the galaxy with Von Neumann machines—'
Liana shook her head. 'If that sort of thing was ever meant seriously, it was pre-Introdus—before gleisners even existed. Anything contemporary is just propaganda: Protocols of the Elders of Machinehood stuff. We're the ones still closest to the old drives. If anyone screws up and goes exponential, it will probably be us.'
Some other bridgers joined in, and the debate dragged on for hours. One agronomist argued, through an interpreter: If space travel wasn't just a fantasy for immature cultures, then where were all the aliens? Yatima glanced up at the drab sky every now and then, and imagined a gleisner spacecraft swooping down and carrying them off to the stars. Maybe some rescue beacon had started up in the gleisner bodies when they'd reactivated them… It was an absurd notion, but it was strange to ponder the fact that it wasn't literally impossible. Even in the most dazzling astronomical scape, where you could pretend to jump across the light years and see the surface of Sirius in the best high-resolution composite of simulation and telescope-based data… you could never be kidnapped by mad astronauts.
Just after midnight, Orlando asked Liana, 'So who's getting up at four in the morning to escort our guests to the border?'
'You are.'
'Then I'd better get some sleep.'
Inoshiro was amazed. 'You still have to do that? You haven't engineered it out?'
Liana made a choking sound. 'That'd be like 'engineering-out' the liver! Sleep's integral to mammalian physiology; try taking it away, and you'd end up with psychotic, immune-compromised cretins.'
Orlando added grumpily, 'It's also very nice. You don't know what you're missing.' He kissed Liana again, and left them.
The crowd in the restaurant thinned out slowly—and then most of the bridgers who remained fell asleep in their chairs—but Liana sat with them in the growing silence.
'I'm glad you came,' she said. 'Now we have some kind of bridge to Konishi—and through you, to the whole Coalition. Even if you can't return… talk about us, inside. Don't let us vanish from your minds completely.'
Inoshiro said earnestly, 'We'll come hack! And we'll bring our friends. Once they understand that you're not all savages out here, everyone will want to visit you.'
Liana laughed gently. 'Yeah? And the Introdus will run backward, and the dead will rise from their graves? I'll look forward to that.' She reached across the table and brushed Inoshiro's cheek with her hand. 'You're a strange child. I'm going to miss you.'
Yatima waited for Inoshiro's outraged response: 'I am not a child.' But instead, ve put vis hand to vis face, where she'd touched ver, and said nothing.
Orlando escorted them all the way to the border. He bid them farewell, and talked about seeing them again, but Yatima suspected that he, too, didn't believe they'd ever return. When he'd vanished into the jungle, Yatima stepped over the border and summoned the drone. It alighted on the back of vis neck, and burrowed in to make contact with vis processor. The gleisner's neck, the gleisner's processor.
Inoshiro said, 'You go. I'm staying.'
Yatima groaned. 'You don't mean that.'
Inoshiro stared back at ver, forlorn but resolute. 'I was born in the wrong place. This is where I belong.'
'Oh, get serious! If you want to migrate, there's always Ashton-Laval! And if you want to escape your parents, you can do that anywhere!'
Inoshiro sat down in the undergrowth, vanishing up to vis waist, and spread vis arms out in the foliage. 'I've started feeling things. It's not just tags anymore—not lust an abstract overlay.' Ve brought vis hands together against vis chest, then thumped the chassis. 'It happens to me, it happens on my skin. I must have formed some kind of map of the data… and now my self symbol's absorbed it, incorporated it.' Ve laughed miserably. 'Maybe it's a family weakness. My part-sibling takes an embodied lover… and now here I am, with a fucking sense of touch.' Ve looked up at Yatima, eyes wide, gestalt for horror. 'I can't go back now. It'd be like… tearing off my skin.'
Yatima said flatly, 'You know that's not true. What do you think's going to happen to you? Pain? As soon as the tags stop coming, the whole illusion will dissolve.' Ve was trying to be reassuring, but ve struggled to imagine what it must be like: some kind of intrusion of the world into Inoshiro's icon? It was confusing enough when the
