Diaspora

Ve watched flesh hand gripping skin-and-hones, metal gripping flesh, ceramic gripping metal. All of them slowly slipping. Yatima looked into the eyes of each figure; while everything else flowed and changed, their gazes remained locked together.

The scape split in two, the ground opened up, the sky divided. The figures were parted. Yatima was flung away from them, back into the desert with a force, now, that ve could not oppose. Ve saw them in the distance—twins again, of uncertain species, reaching out desperately across the empty space growing between them. Arms outstretched, fingertips almost brushing.

Then the halves of the world rushed apart. Someone bellowed with rage and grief.

The scape decayed into blackness before Yatima understood that the cry had been vis own.

The forum with the flying-pig fountain had been abandoned long ago, but Yatima had planted a copy from the archives in vis homescape, the cloistered square marooned in the middle of a vast expanse of parched scrubland. Empty, it looked at once too large and too small. A few hundred delta away, a copy (not to scale) of the asteroid ve'd watched being trimmed was buried in the ground. At one point Yatima had envisioned a vast trail of similar mementos stretching across the savanna, a map ve could fly over whenever ve wanted to review the turning points in vis life… but then the whole idea had begun to seem childish. If the things ve'd seen had changed ver, they'd changed ver; there was no need to re-create them as monuments. Ve'd kept the forum because ve genuinely liked to visit it—and the asteroid out of the sheer perverse pleasure of resisting the urge to tidy it away.

Yatima stood by the fountain for a while, watching its silver liquid effortlessly mock the physics it half-obeyed. Then ve re-created the octahedral diamond, the six-pointed net from vis lesson with Radiya, beside it. That physics meant nothing in the polises had always been clear to ver, as it was to most citizens; Gabriel disagreed, of course, but that was just Carter-Zimmerman doctrine talking. The fountain could ignore the laws of fluid dynamics just as easily as it could conform to them. Everything it did was simply arbitrary; even the perfect gravitational parabola of the start of each stream, before the piglets were formed, was nothing but an aesthetic choice and the aesthetic itself was nothing but the vestigial influence of flesher ancestry.

The diamond net was different, though. Yatima played with the object, deforming it wildly, stretching and twisting it beyond recognition. It was infinitely malleable… and yet a few tiny constraints on the changes ve could make to it rendered it, in a sense, unchangeable. However much ve distorted its shape, however many extra dimensions ve invoked, this net would never lie flat. Ve could replace it with something else entirely such as a net which wrapped a torus and then lay that new net flat… but that would have been as meaningless as creating a non-sentient, Inoshiro-shaped object, dragging it into the Truth Mines, and then claiming that ve'd succeeded in persuading vis real friend to come along.

Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. However malleable their minds, in a sense they obeyed the same kind of deep constraints as the diamond net—short of suicide and de novo reinvention, short of obliterating themselves and constructing someone new. That meant that they had to possess their own immutable mathematical signatures—like the Euler number, only orders of magnitude more complex. Buried in the confusion of details of every mind, there had to be something untouched by time, unswayed by the shifting weight of memory and experience, unmodified by self-directed change.

Hashim's artwork had been elegant and moving—and even without the outlook running, the powerful emotions it had evoked lingered—but Yatima was unswayed from vis choice of vocation. Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drive, that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth—but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.

Only in the Mines could ve begin to understand exactly who ve was.

3

BRIDGERS

Atlanta, Earth

23 387 545 324 947 CST

21 May 2975, 11:35:22.101 UT