do that? But Orlando just touched vis shoulder and said, 'Wish us luck.'
Yatima nodded and backed away. 'I do.'
Yatima caught sight of Inoshiro near the edge of the city.
'Slow down!'
Inoshiro turned to took at ver, but kept walking. 'We've done what we came for. I'm going home.'
Ve could have returned to Konishi from anywhere; there was no need to leave the enclave. Yatima willed vis viewpoint forward faster, and the interface switched the body's gait into a different mode. Ve caught up with Inoshiro on the road between the fields.
'What are you afraid of? Getting stranded?' When the burst hit, part of the upper atmosphere would turn to plasma, so satellite communication would be disrupted for a while. 'We'll have enough warning from TERAGO to send back snapshots.' And then? The more hostile bridgers might go as far as killing the messengers, once post- Lacerta realities began to strike home, but if it came to that they could always just erase their local selves before things became too unpleasant.
Inoshiro scowled. 'I'm not afraid. But we've delivered the warning. We've spoken to everyone who was capable of listening. Hanging around any longer is just voyeuristic.'
Yatima gave this serious thought. 'That's not true. We're too clumsy to help much as laborers, but after the burst we'd be the only people here guaranteed immune to UV. Okay, they can cover themselves, protect their eyes, nothing's impossible if they do it carefully. But two robots built for unfiltered sunlight might still be useful.'
Inoshiro didn't reply. Soft-edged shadows were racing across the fields from black filaments of cloud streaming low overhead. Yatima glanced back at the city; the clouds were piling up into structures like dark fists. Heavy rain might be good; cool the place down, keep people indoors, blunt the first shafts of UV. So long as it didn't hide so much that it left the bridgers complacent.
'I thought Liana would understand.' Inoshiro laughed bitterly. 'Maybe she did.'
'Understand what?'
Inoshiro shook vis head. It was strange to see ver in this robot body again, which looked more like Yatima's enduring mental image of ver than vis current icon back in Konishi.
'Stay and help, Inoshiro. Please. You're the one who remembered the bridgers. You're the one who shamed me into coming here.'
Inoshiro regarded ver obliquely. 'Do you know why I gave you the Introdus nanoware? We could have swapped jobs, you could have made the drones.'
Yatima shrugged. 'Why?'
'Because I would have used it all by now. I would have shot every bridger I could. I would have gathered them all up and carried them away, whether they wanted it or not.'
Inoshiro walked on down the smooth dirt road. Yatima stood and watched ver for a while, then headed back into the city.
Yatima wandered Atlanta's streets and parks, offering information wherever ve dared, approaching anyone who wasn't working unless they looked openly hostile. Even without official translators ve often found ve could communicate with small groups of people, with everyone pitching in to cover the gaps.
An incomprehensible 'What are the boundaries of purity?' became: 'Can the sky be trusted this far?'—with the speaker glancing at the clouds—which became: 'If it rains today, will it burn us?'
'No. The acidity won't rise for months; the nitric oxides will take that long to diffuse down from the stratosphere.'
The translated answers sometimes sounded like they'd traversed a Mobius strip and returned inverted, but Yatima clung to the hope that all sense wasn't evaporating along the way, that 'up' wasn't really turning to 'down.'
By midday the city looked abandoned. Or besieged, with everyone in hiding. Then ve spotted some people working on a link between two buildings, and even in the forty-degree heat they were wearing long-sleeved clothing, and gloves, and welding masks. Yatima was encouraged by their caution, but ve could almost sense the dispiriting, claustrophobic weight of the protective gear. The bridgers clearly retained an evolved acceptance of the constraints of embodiment, but it seemed that half the pleasure of being flesh came from pushing the limits of biology, and the rest from minimizing all other encumbrances. Maybe the maddest of the masochistic statics would relish every obstacle and discomfort Lacerta could impose on them, waxing lyrical about 'the real world of pain and ecstasy' while the ultraviolet flayed them, but for most fleshers it would do nothing but erode the kind of freedom that made the choice of flesh worthwhile.
There was a seat suspended by ropes from a frame in one of the parks; Yatima recalled seeing people sitting on it and swinging back and forth, an eternity ago. Ve managed to sit without falling, holding tight to one rope with vis remaining hand, but when ve willed the interface to set the pendulum in motion, nothing happened. The software didn't know how.
By one o'clock, the Lacerta waves had strengthened to a hundred times their old power level. There was no point any more in waiting for data to arrive from two or three of TERAGO's scattered detectors in order to eliminate interference from other sources; the feed now came straight from Bullialdus in real time, and Lac G-1's racing pulse was loud enough to drown out everything else in the sky. The waves were visibly 'chirping,' each one clearly narrower than its predecessor; the latest two peaks were just 15 minutes apart, which meant the neutron stars had crossed the 200,000 kilometer mark. In an hour that separation would be halved, then in a few more minutes it would vanish. Yatima had been clinging to a faint hope of a shift in the dynamics, but the gleisners' ever-steeper extrapolation had kept on proving itself right.
The seat wobbled. A half-naked child was tugging on the side, trying to get vis attention. Yatima stared at ver, speechless, wanting to wrap vis invulnerable polymer body around the child's exposed skin. Ve looked about the deserted playground for an adult; there was no one in sight.
Yatima stood. The child abruptly started crying and screaming. Ve sat, stood, tried to sweep the child up in vis single arm, failed. The child banged its fist on the vacated seat. Yatima obeyed.
The child clambered onto vis lap. Yatima glanced nervously at the TERAGO scape. The child stretched vis arms out and held the ropes, then leaned back slightly. Yatima imitated the motion, and the seat responded. The child leaned forward, Yatima followed.
They swung together, ever higher, the child screaming with delight, Yatima torn between terror and joy. A few sparse drops of rain descended, and then the clouds around the sun thinned, and parted.
The sudden clarity of the light was shocking. Looking across the sunlit playground—with a viewpoint gliding smoothly through this world, at last—Yatima felt an overpowering sense of hope. It was as if the Konishi mind seed still encoded the instinctive knowledge that, in time, the darkest stormclouds would always clear, the longest night would always yield to dawn, the harshest winter would always be tempered by spring. Every hardship the Earth forced upon its inhabitants was bounded, cyclic, survivable. Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.
No longer. Sunlight breaking through the clouds was a lie, now. Every instinct that proclaimed that the future could be no worse than the worst of the past was obsolete. And Yatima had long understood that, outside the polises, the universe was capricious and unjust. But it had never mattered, before. It had never touched ver.
Ve didn't trust verself to halt the swing safely, so ve froze and let the motion die away, ignoring the child's complaints. Then ve carried ver shrieking to the nearest building, where someone seemed to know where ve belonged, and snatched ver away angrily.
The stormclouds had closed in again. Yatima returned to the playground and stood motionless, watching the sky, waiting to learn the new limits of darkness.
The neutron stars made their last full orbit in under five minutes, 100,000 kilometers apart and spiraling in steeply. Yatima knew ve was witnessing the final moments of a process that had taken five billion years, but on a cosmic scale was about as rare and significant as the death of a mayfly. Gamma-ray observatories picked up the signature of identical events in other galaxies, five times a day.
