Diaspora

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 back.

The fourth citizen proclaimed, "I'm an orphan! I'm an orphan! I don't even know how I look!"

The "Gabriel" citizen pointed at the fourth citizen and said, "Ve is an orphan!"

The "Inoshiro" citizen agreed wearily, "Ve is an orphan. But why does ve have to be this slow!"

Inspired—driven by the infotrope—the orphan tried playing the "Ve is-?" game again, this rime using the response "an orphan" for the fourth citizen. The other, confirmed the choice, and soon the words were bound to the symbol for the fourth citizen. When the orphan's three friends left the scape, the fourth citizen remained. But the fourth citizen had exhausted vis ability to offer interesting surprises, so after pestering some of the other citizens to no avail, the orphan returned to the library.

The input navigator had learned the simplest indexing scheme used by the library, and when the infotrope hunted for ways to tie up the loose ends in the patterns half-formed in the scape, it succeeded in driving the input navigator to locations in the library which referred to the four citizens' mysterious linear words: Inoshiro, Gabriel, Blanca, and Orphan. There were streams of data indexed by each of these words, though none seemed to connect to the citizens themselves. The orphan saw so many images of fleshers, often with wings, associated with the word "Gabriel" that it built a whole symbol out of the regularities it found, but the new symbol barely overlapped with that of the golden-furred citizen.

The orphan drifted away from its infotrope-driven search many times; old addresses in the library, etched in memory, tugged at the input navigator. Once, viewing a scene of a grimy flesher child holding up an empty wooden bowl, the orphan grew bored and veered back toward more familiar territory. Halfway there, it came across a scene of an adult flesher crouching beside,, bewildered lion cub and lifting it into vis arms.

A lioness lay on the ground behind them, motionless and bloody. The flesher stroked the head of the cub. "Poor little Yatima."

Something in the scene transfixed the orphan. It whispered to the library, "Yatima. Yatima." It had never heard the word before, but the sound of it resonated deeply.

The lion cub mewed. The flesher crooned, "My poor little orphan." The orphan moved between the library and the scape with the orange sky and the flying-pig fountain. Sometimes its three friends were there, or other citizens would play with it for a while; sometimes there was only the fourth citizen.