Diaspora

They swapped roles, Yatima doing vis best to brush Inoshiro clean. Ve understood all the relevant physical principles, and ve could cause the gleisner's arms to do pretty much what ve liked by willing vis icon to make the right movements… but even with the interface to veto any actions which would have disrupted the elaborate balancing act of bipedal motion, it was blindingly obvious that the compromise they'd chosen left them clumsy beyond belief. Yatima recalled scenes from the library of fleshers involved in simple tasks: repairing machinery, preparing food, braiding each other's hair. Gleisners were even more dextrous, when the right software was in charge. Konishi citizens retained the ancestral neural wiring for fine control of their icons' hands—linked to the language centers, for gestural purposes—but all the highly evolved systems for manipulating physical objects had been ditched as superfluous. Scape objects did as they were told, and even Yatima's mathematical toys obeyed specialized constraints with only the faintest resemblance to the rules of the external world.

"What now?" Inoshiro just stood there for a moment, grinning diabolically. Vis robot body wasn't all that different from vis usual pewter-skinned icon; the polymer beneath all the stains and lingering biota was a dull metallic gray, and the gleisner's facial structure was flexible enough to manage a recognizable caricature of the real thing. Yatima still felt verself sending out the same lithe, purple-robed flesher icon as always; ve was almost glad ve couldn't part vis navigators and clearly observe vis own drab physical appearance.

Inoshiro chanted, "Thirty-two kilotau. Thirty-three kilotau. Thirty-four kilotau."

"Shut up." Their exoselves back in Konishi had been instructed to explain to any callers precisely what they'd done no one would be left thinking that they'd simply turned catatonic—but Yatima still felt a painful surge of doubt. What would Blanca and Gabriel be thinking? And Radiya, and Inoshiro's parents?

"You're not backing out on me, are you?" Inoshiro eyed ver suspiciously.

"No!" Yatima laughed, exasperated; whatever vis misgivings, ve was committed to the whole crazy stunt. Inoshiro had argued that this was vis last chance to do anything "remotely exciting" before ve started using a miner's outlook and "lost interest in everything else"—but that simply wasn't true; the outlook was more like a spine than a straitjacket, a strengthened internal framework, not a constrictive cage. And ve'd kept on saying no until ve finally realized that Inoshiro was too stubborn to abandon vis plans, even when it turned out that not one of vis daring, radical Ashton-Laval friends was willing to accompany ver. Yatima had been secretly tempted all along by the idea of stepping right out of Konishi time and encountering the alien fleshers, though ve would have been just as happy to leave it all in the realms of plausible fantasy. In the end, it had come down to one question: If Inoshiro went ahead and did this alone, would it turn them into strangers? Yatima had found, to vis surprise, that this wasn't a risk ve was willing to take.

Ve suggested hesitantly, "We might not want to stay for the full twenty-four hours, though." Eight-six megatau. "What if the whole place is empty, and there's nothing to see?"

"It's a flesher enclave. It won't be empty."

"The last known contact was centuries ago. They could have died out, moved away… anything." Under an eight-hundred-year-old treaty, drones and satellites were not permitted to invade the privacy of the fleshers; the few dozen scattered urban enclaves where their own laws permitted them to clear away the wildlife completely and build concentrated settlements were supposed to be treated as inviolable. They had their own global communications network, but no gateways linked it to the Coalition; abuses on both sides dating back to the Introdus had forced the separation. Inoshiro had insisted that merely puppeting the gleisner bodies via satellite from Konishi would have been morally equivalent to sending in a drone—and certainly the satellites, programmed to obey the treaty, would not have permitted it—but inhabiting two autonomous robots who wandered in from the jungle for a visit was a different matter entirely.

Yatima looked around at the dense undergrowth, and resisted the futile urge to try to make vis viewpoint jump forward by a few hundred meters, or rise up into the towering forest for a better view of the terrain ahead. Fifty kilotau. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.

"We'd better start moving."

"After You, Livingstone."

"Wrong continent, Inoshiro."

"Geronimo? Huckleberry? Dorothy?"

"Spare me."