Diaspora

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!"