Incandescence

He left the tent and looked around for Parantham, but there was no one in sight. He was in the middle of a grassy field, and the only sound he could hear was a nearby stream. He found it easily in the starlight, splashed his face and took a few mouthfuls of sweet, icy water. He had lived embodied for his first thousand years, and the time he'd spent in the scapes of the node had been less than a tenth of that, but the return to the flesh was still disorienting. This body, like the one he'd been born with, was efficient and flexible, with very modest material needs, so being subject to the laws of physics would not amount to much of an inconvenience. Nevertheless, it felt odd to be on such intimate terms with the physical world again, without a single layer of simulation, mediation, or obfuscation. It was like being naked for the first time in a century.

Rakesh called out to Parantham, and she responded with her location: she was in a small town called Faravani, fifteen kilometers away. Rakesh had never traveled the Amalgam's network with a companion before, and it hadn't occurred to him that their transmissions might end up being routed to different locations upon landfall. It was lucky that the planet, Massa, had been able to fulfill their individual requests for congenial environments without putting them on opposite sides of the globe. He could have asked the local transport facility to take him apart and reassemble him in the town, but he was in no hurry. He pocketed the tent, then closed his eyes, pictured his location on a map of the area, and set out on foot.

Tramping across the dew-soaked fields, Rakesh felt a strange pang of homesickness. It wasn't that the smells and sounds of this unfamiliar world evoked any sharp resonance with particular memories, but the simple act of walking a few kilometers through such prosaic terrain in the predawn light was redolent of embodied life. He had walked for pleasure in the scapes of the node, but his surroundings — whether they were spectacular, soothing, or deliberately difficult to traverse — had always been contrived, chosen with a purpose in mind. Taking this mundane, slightly muddy trek just to get from A to B was a quintessentially corporeal experience.

He reached Faravani just after sunrise. Massa had no native life; its first settlers had traveled four thousand light years, from a world that belonged to the P2 panspermia. Most of the locals still wore the ancestral phenotype, a quadruped with hairless, leathery skin, their backs about as high as Rakesh's chest. They communicated with sounds well within his own range of hearing and vocalization, so he chose to comprehend and speak their language himself, greeting the quads who were emerging from their shelters for some early morning exercise. In the node he'd grown lazy and simply perceived everyone to be speaking in his own tongue, but it was far more satisfying to deal directly with these real-time hisses and clicks, hearing all of the genuine sounds and knowing exactly what they meant, instead of wrapping the whole experience in an auditory hallucination of an approximate translation.

When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.

«I see you've made yourself at home,» he teased her.

«Flesh is flesh,» she hissed through her quad mouth. «The shape makes no difference to me.»

Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored — rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence — she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.

«So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?» he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they'd spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa's planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there'd been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl's experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.

«I've told everyone in sight that I'm heading into the bulge,» she said, «but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.»

Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof's communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.