forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag—a quality like a distinctive odor for a flesher, though more localized, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope—a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors—began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity—every citizen's icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag—and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn't previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.
The citizen exclaimed angrily, 'Don't do that, idiot!'
'Hello!'
'No one will believe you if you claim to be me—least of all me. Understand? Now go away!' This citizen had metallic, pewter-gray skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.
'No!' The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. 'See? I challenge you—and you can't respond. So why bother lying?'
'Hello!'
'Go away'
The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.
'Hello, citizen!'
The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. 'Don't you know who you are? Don't you know your own signature?'
Another citizen said calmly, 'It must be the new orphan—still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it.'
This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, 'Lion.' It tried mimicking the new citizen—and suddenly all three of them were laughing.
The third citizen said, 'It wants to he you now, Gabriel.'
The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, 'If it doesn't know its own name, we should call it 'idiot.''
'Don't be cruel. I could show you memories, little part-sibling.' The third citizen's icon was a featureless black silhouette.
'Now it wants to be Blanca.'
The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three responded by chanting strange linear sounds which meant nothing—'Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!'—just as the orphan sent out the gestalt images and tags.
Short-term pattern recognizers seized on the connection, and the orphan joined in the linear chanting, continued it for a while, when the others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.
The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, 'I'm Inoshiro.'
The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, 'I'm Gabriel.'
The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it in front of vis trunk, and said, 'I'm Blanca.'
The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear word they'd spoken, aping their hand gesture. Symbols had formed for all three of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear words together —even though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.
The citizen whose icon had made them all chant 'Inoshiro' said, 'So far so good. But how does it get a name of its own.
The one with its tag bound to 'Blanca' said, 'Orphans name themselves.'
The orphan echoed, 'Orphans name themselves.'
The citizen bound to 'Gabriel' pointed to the one bound to 'Inoshiro,' and said, 'Ve is—?' The citizen bound to 'Blanca' said 'Inoshiro.'
Then the citizen bound to 'Inoshiro' pointed back at ver and said 'Ve is ?' This time, the citizen bound to 'Blanca' replied, 'Blanca.' The orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate systems which helped make sense of the scape's geometry, and completing the pattern easily even when no one else did.
Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and said: 'Ve is?' The input navigator spun the orphan's angle of view, trying to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the orphan, it moved its point of view backward, closer to the golden-furred citizen-momentarily breaking step with the output navigator.
Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itself-a crude amalgam of the three Citizens' icons, all black fur and yellow metal-not just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected channels, but as a vivid scape-object beside the other three.
This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to 'Gabriel' was pointing at.
The infotrope went wild. It couldn't complete the unfinished regularity—it couldn't answer the game's question for this strange fourth citizen-but the hole in the pattern needed to he filled.
The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and color, out there in the scape… changes perfectly mirroring its own random fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens, sometimes simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerized the regularity detectors for a while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.
The infotrope combined and recombined all the factors at hand, and set a short-term goal: making the pewter-skinned 'Inoshiro' icon change, the way the fourth citizen's icon was changing. This triggered a faint anticipatory firing of the relevant symbols, a mental image of the desired event. But though the image of a wiggling, pulsating citizen-icon easily won control of the gestalt output channel, it wasn't the 'Inoshiro' icon that changed—just the fourth citizen's icon, as before.
The input navigator drifted of its own accord back into the same location as the output navigator, and the fourth citizen abruptly vanished. The infotrope pushed the navigators apart again; the fourth citizen reappeared.
The 'Inoshiro' citizen said, 'What's it doing?'
The 'Blanca' citizen replied, 'Just watch, and be patient. You might learn something.'
A new symbol was already forming, a representation of the strange fourth citizen—the only one whose icon seemed bound by a mutual attraction to the orphan's viewpoint in the scape, and the only one whose action the orphan could anticipate and control with such ease. So were all four citizens the same kind of thing-like all lions, all antelope, all circles… or not? The connections between the symbols remained tentative.
The 'Inoshiro' citizen said, 'I'm bored! Let some one else baby-sit it!' Ve danced around the group-taking turns imitating the 'Blanca' and 'Gabriel' icons, and reverting to vis original form. 'What's my name? I don't know! What's my signature? I don't have one! I'm an orphan! I'm an orphan! I don't even know how I look!'
When the orphan perceived the 'Inoshiro' citizen taking on the icons of the other two, it almost abandoned its whole classification scheme in confusion. The 'Inoshiro' citizen was behaving more like the fourth citizen, now—though vis actions still didn't coincide with the orphan's intentions.
The orphan's symbol for the fourth citizen kept track of that citizen's appearance and location in the scape, but it was also beginning to distill the essence of the orphan's own mental images and short-term 'goal' creating a summary of all the aspects of the orphan' state of mind which seemed to have some connection to the fourth citizen's behavior. Few symbols possessed sharply defined boundaries, though; most were as permeable and promiscuous as plasmid-swapping bacteria. The symbol for the 'Inoshiro' citizen copied some of the state-of-mind structures from the symbol for the fourth citizen, and began trying them out for itself.
At first, the ability to represent highly summarized 'mental images' and 'goals' was no help at all—because it was still linked to the orphan's state of mind. The 'Inoshiro' symbol's blindly cloned machinery kept predicting that the 'Inoshiro' citizen would behave according to the orphan's own plans… and that never happened. In the face of this repeated failure, the links soon withered—and the tiny, crude model-of-a-mind left inside the 'Inoshiro' symbol was set free to find the 'Inoshiro' state-of-mind that best matched the citizen's actual behavior.
The symbol tried out different connections, different theories, hunting for the one that made most sense… and the orphan suddenly grasped the fact that the 'Inoshiro' citizen had been imitating the fourth citizen.
The infotrope seized on this revelation—and tried to make the fourth citizen mimic the 'Inoshiro' citizen
