interface adjusted vis own icon's symbol to the actual posture of vis gleisner body—but that was more like playing along with the conventions of a game; there was no deep sense of violation…
Inoshiro said, 'They'll let me live with them. I don't need food, I don't need anything they value. I'll make myself useful. They'll let me stay.'
Yatima stepped back over the border; the drone broke free and retreated, buzzing angrily. Ve knelt down beside Inoshiro and said gently, 'Tell the truth: you'd go mad within a week. One scape, like this, forever? And once the novelty wore off, they'd treat you like a freak.'
'Not Liana!'
'Yeah? What do you think she'd become? Your lover? Or yet another parent?'
Inoshiro covered vis face with vis hands. 'Just crawl back to Konishi, will you? Go lose yourself in the Mines.'
Yatima stayed where ve was. Birds squawked, the sky brightened. Their twenty-four hours expired. They still had one more day before their old Konishi-selves awoke in their place-but with each passing minute, now, the sense of polis life moving on and leaving them behind grew stronger.
Yatima thought of dragging Inoshiro over the line, and instructing the drone to pluck ver from vis bode. The drone wasn't smart enough to understand anything they'd done; it wouldn't realize it was violating Inoshiro's autonomy.
And that idea was disturbing enough, but there was another possibility. Yatima still had the last updated snapshot of Inoshiro's mind, transmitted in the restaurant in the early hours of the morning. Inoshiro wouldn't have sent it after ve'd made up vis mind to stay—and it Yatima woke that snapshot inside the polis, it wouldn't matter what happened to this gleisner-clone…
Yatima erased the snapshot. This wasn't quicksand. This wasn't anything they'd foreseen.
Ve knelt, and waited. The tags from vis knees reporting the texture of the ground became an irritating, monotonous stream, and the strange fixed shape forced upon vis icon grew even more annoying—perhaps because they both mirrored vis frustration so well. Was this how it had started, for Inoshiro? If ve stayed here much longer, would ve begin to identify with vis own map of vis own gleisner body?
After almost an hour, Inoshiro rose to vis feet and walked out of the enclave. Yatima followed ver, sick with relief.
The drone landed on Inoshiro's neck; ve reached up as if to slap it away, but stopped verself. Ve asked calmly, 'Do you think we'll ever come back?' Yatima thought about it, long and hard. Without the unrepeatable allure which had brought them here, would this place, and these friends, ever again be worth eight hundred times more than all the rest?
'I doubt it.'
When Paolo woke and joined ver in the scape, Yatima said, 'I'm trying to decide what we should tell them. When they ask why we came after them.'
Paolo laughed grimly. 'Tell them about Lacerta.'
'They'll know about Lacerta.'
'As a blip on a map. They won't know what it did. They won't know what it meant.'
'No.' Yatima gazed at Weyl, at the center of the blue shift. Ve didn't want to antagonize Paolo with questions about Atlanta, but ve didn't want to shut him out either. 'You know Karpal, don't you?'
'Yes.' Paolo accepted the present tense with a faint smile.
'And wasn't he on the moon, running TERAGO '
Paolo said coldly, 'He did everything he could. It wasn't his fault the whole planet was sleepwalking.'
'I agree. I don't blame him for anything.' Yatima spread vis arms, conciliatory. 'I just wondered if he'd ever talked about it. If he ever told you his side of things.'
Paolo nodded grudgingly. 'He talked about it. Once.'
4
LIZARD HEART
Bullialdus observatory, Moon
24 046 104 526 757 CST
2 April 2996, 16:42:03.911 UT
Karpal lay on his back on the regolith for a full lunar month, staring up into the crystalline stillness of the universe and daring it to show him something new. He'd done this five times before, but nothing had ever changed within reach of his unaided vision. The planets moved along their predictable orbits, and sometimes a bright asteroid or comet was visible, but they were like spacecraft wandering by: obstacles in the foreground, not part of the view. Once you'd seen Jupiter close-up, firsthand, you began to think of it more as a source of light pollution and electromagnetic noise than as an object of serious astronomical interest. Karpal wanted a supernova to blossom out of the darkness unforeseen, a distant apocalypse to set the neutrino detectors screaming—not some placid conjunction of the solar system's clockwork, as noteworthy and exciting as a supply shuttle arriving on time.
When the Earth was new again, a dim reddish disk beside the blazing sun, Karpal rose to his feet and swung his arms cautiously, checking that none of his actuators had been weakened by thermal stress. If they had, it wouldn't take long for his nanoware to smooth away the microfractures, but each joint still needed to be tested by use in order to notice the problem and call for repairs.
He was fine. He walked slowly hack to the instrumentation shack at the edge of Bullialdus crater; the structure was open to the vacuum, but it sheltered the equipment to some degree from temperature extremes, hard radiation and micrometeorites. Looming behind it was the crater wall, seventy kilometers wide; Karpal could just make out the laser station on top of the wall, directly above the shack. The beams themselves were invisible from any vantage, since there was nothing to scatter the light, but Karpal couldn't picture Bullialdus from above without mentally inscribing a blue L, a right-angle linking three points on the rim.
Bullialdus was a gravitational wave detector, part of a solar-system-wide observatory known as TERAGO. A single laser beam was split, sent along perpendicular journeys, then recombined; as the space around the crater was stretched and squeezed by as little as one part in ten-to-the-twenty-fourth, the crests and troughs of the two streams of light were shifted in and out of alignment, causing fluctuations in their combined intensity which tracked the subtle changes of geometry. One detector, alone, could no more pinpoint the source of the distortions it measured than a thermometer lying on the regolith could gauge the exact position of the sun, but by combining the timing of events at Bullialdus with data from the nineteen other TERAGO sites, it was possible to reconstruct each wavefront's passage through the solar system, revealing its direction with enough precision, usually, to match it to a known object in the sky, or at least make an educated guess.
Karpal entered the shack, his home for the last nine years. Nothing had changed in his absence, and little had changed since his arrival; the racks of optical computers and signal processors lining the walls looked as gleamingly pristine as ever, and his emergency spares kit and macro repair tools had barely been moved from where he'd first placed them. He wasn't quite alone on the moon—there were a dozen gleisners doing paleoselenology up at the north pole—but he was yet to receive a visitor.
