radiation, but most were simply visible by decree, making no pretense of interacting with the starlight.
Inoshiro said, 'Why did you have to bring that along?'
As the orphan turned toward ver, it caught sight of a star far brighter than all the rest, much smaller than the familiar sight in the Earth's sky, but unfiltered by the usual blanket of gases and dust.
'The sun?'
Gabriel said, 'Yes, that's the sun.' The golden-furred citizen floated beside Blanca, who was visible as sharply as ever, darker even than the cool thin background radiation between the stars.
Inoshiro whined, 'Why did you bring Yatima? It's too young! It won't understand anything!'
Blanca said, 'Just ignore ver, Yatima.'
Yatima! Yatima! The orphan knew exactly where Yatima was, and what ve looked like, without any need to part the navigators and check. The fourth citizen's icon had stabilized as the tall flesher in the purple robe who'd adopted the lion cub, in the library.
Inoshiro addressed the orphan. 'Don't worry Yatima, I'll try to explain it to you. If the gleisners didn't trim this asteroid, then in three hundred thousand years—ten thousand teratau—there'd be a chance it might hit the Earth. And the sooner they trim it, the less energy it takes. But they couldn't do it before, because the equations are chaotic, so they couldn't model the approach well enough until now.'
The orphan understood none of this. 'Blanca wanted me to see the trimming! But I wanted to play a new game!'
Inoshiro laughed. 'So what did ve do? Kidnap you?'
'I followed ver and ve jumped and jumped… and I followed ver!' The orphan made a few short jumps around the three of them, trying to illustrate the point, though it didn't really convey the business of leaping right out of one scape into another.
Inoshiro said, 'Ssh. Here it comes.'
The orphan followed vis gaze to an irregular lump of rock in the distance-lit by the sun, one half in deep shadow—moving swiftly and steadily toward the loose assembly of citizens. The scape software decorated the asteroid's image with gestalt tags packed with information about its chemical composition, its mass, its spin, its orbital parameters; the orphan recognized some of these flavors from the library, but it had no real grasp yet of what they meant. 'One slip of the laser, and the fleshers die in pain!' Inoshiro's pewter eyes gleamed.
Blanca said dryly, 'And just three hundred millennia to try again.'
Inoshiro turned to the orphan and added reassuringly, 'But we'd he all right. Even if it wiped out Konishi on Earth, we're backed-up all over the solar system.'
The asteroid was close enough now for the orphan to compute its scape address and its size. It was still some hundred times more distant than the farthest citizen, but it was approaching rapidly. The waiting spectators were arranged in a roughly spherical shell, about ten times as large as the asteroid itself—and the orphan could see at once that if it maintained its trajectory, the asteroid would pass right through the center of that imaginary sphere.
Everyone was watching the rock intently. The orphan wondered what kind of game this was; a generic symbol had formed which encompassed all the strangers in the scape, as well as the orphan's three friends, and this symbol had inherited the fourth citizen's property of holding beliefs about objects which had proved so useful for predicting its behavior. Maybe people were waiting to see if the rock would suddenly jump at random, like Blanca had jumped? The orphan believed they were mistaken; the rock was not a citizen, it wouldn't play games with them.
The orphan wanted everyone to know about the rock's simple trajectory. It checked its extrapolation one more time, but nothing had changed; the bearing and speed were as constant as ever. The orphan lacked the words to explain this to the crowd… but maybe they could learn things by watching the fourth citizen, the way the fourth citizen had learned things from Blanca. The orphan jumped across the scape, straight into the path of the asteroid. A quarter of the sky became pocked and gray, an irregular hillock on the sunward side casting a hand of deep shadow across the approaching face. For an instant, the orphan was too startled to move—mesmerized by the scale, and the speed, and the awkward, purposeless grandeur of the thing—then it matched velocities with the rock, and led it back toward the crowd.
People began shouting excitedly, their words immune to the fictitious vacuum but degraded with distance by the scape, scrambled into a pulsating roar. The orphan turned away from the asteroid, and saw the nearest citizens waving and gesticulating.
The fourth citizen's symbol, plugged directly into the orphan's mind, had already concluded that the fourth citizen was tracing out the asteroid's path in order to change what the other citizens thought. So the orphan's model of the fourth citizen had acquired the property of having beliefs about what other citizens believed… and the symbols for Inoshiro, Blanca, Gabriel, and the crowd itself, snatched at this innovation to try it out for themselves.
As the orphan plunged into the spherical arena, it could hear people laughing and cheering. Everyone was watching the fourth citizen, though the orphan was finally beginning to suspect that no one had really needed to he shown the trajectory. As it looked back to check that the rock was still on course, a point on the hillock began to glow with intense infrared-and then erupted with light a thousand times brighter than the sunlit rock around it, and a thermal spectrum hotter than the sun itself. The orphan froze, letting the asteroid draw closer. A plume of incandescent vapor was streaming out of a crater in the hillock; the image was rich with new gestalt tags, all of them incomprehensible, but the infotrope burned a promise into the orphan's mind: I will learn to understand them.
The orphan kept checking the scape addresses of the reference points it had been following, and it found a microscopic change in the asteroid's direction. The flash of light—and this tiny shift in course were what everyone had been waiting to see? The fourth citizen had been wrong about what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted… and now they knew that? The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.
Before the asteroid could coincide with the fourth citizen's icon, the orphan jumped back to its friends.
Inoshiro was furious. 'What did you do that for? You ruined everything! You baby!'
Blanca asked gently, 'What did you see, Yatima?'
'The rock jumped a little. But I wanted people to think… it wouldn't.'
'Idiot! You're always showing off!'
Gabriel said, 'Yatima? Why does Inoshiro think you flew with the asteroid?'
The orphan hesitated. 'I don't know what Inoshiro thinks.'
The symbols for the four citizens shifted into a configuration they'd tried a thousand times before: the fourth citizen, Yatima, set apart from the rest, singled out as unique—this time, as the only one whose thoughts the orphan could know with certainty. And as the symbol network hunted for better ways to express this knowledge, circuitous connections began to tighten, redundant links began to dissolve.
There was no difference between the model of Yatima's beliefs about the other citizens, buried inside the symbol for Yatima… and the models of the other citizens themselves, inside their respective symbols. The network finally recognized this, and began to discard the unnecessary intermediate stages. The model for Yatima's beliefs became the whole, wider network of the orphan's symbolic knowledge.
And the model of Yatima's beliefs about Yatima's mind became the whole model of Yatima's mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary, just a tight bundle of connections looping back out to the thing itself.
The orphan's stream of consciousness surged through the new connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks that I think that Yatima thinks…
Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies, cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple, stable resonance:
I am thinking
I am thinking that I know what I'm thinking.
Yatima said, 'I know what I'm thinking.'
Inoshiro replied airily, 'What makes you think any one cares?'
For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory checked the architecture of the orphan', mind against the polis's definition of self-awareness.
Every criterion was now satisfied.
