Diaspora

by Greg Egan

  “The gleisners have no bombs. And they respect you much more highly than they respect us; the last thing they’d want to do is force fleshers into the polises.” They’d faced some strange misconceptions before, but nothing like this level of paranoia.

  The woman returned, carrying a small machine with a metal rod shaped into a semi-circle protruding from one end. She touched a control and an arc of blue plasma appeared, joining the tips of the rod. Yatima instructed the Introdus nanoware to begin crawling up the repair system ducts in vis arm, back toward his torso. The man leaned down harder than ever, then the woman approached and began slicing through the limb, high above the elbow.

  Yatima didn’t waste the nanoware’s energy by pestering it with a stream of queries; ve just waited for the strange experience to be over. The interface didn’t know what to make of the damage reports from the gleisner’s hardware — and it declined to reach into Yatima’s self-symbol and perform matching surgery. When the plasma arc broke through to the other side and the man pulled the robot’s severed arm away, the corresponding part of Yatima’s icon was left mentally protruding from the stump — a kind of phantom presence, only half-free of the feedback loop of embodiment.

  When ve dared to check, fifteen doses of the Introdus nanoware had made it to safety. The rest were lost, or heat-damaged beyond repair.

  Yatima met the man’s eyes and said angrily, “We came here in peace; we would never have violated your autonomy. But now you’ve limited the choices for others.”

  Without a word, the man placed the plasma saw on the edge of the table and began feeding the gleisner’s hand back and forth through the arc, reducing the delicate machinery to slag and smoke.

  When Francesca returned, she seemed equally outraged by the guards’ revelation that nanoware had been brought into the enclave, and the less-than-diplomatic ad hoc remedy they’d employed to deal with it.

  Under the Treaty of 2190, Yatima and Inoshiro should have been expelled from Atlanta immediately, but Francesca was prepared to bend the rules to allow them to address the convocation — and to Yatima’s surprise, the guards agreed. Apparently they believed that a public interrogation by the assembled fleshers would be the best way to expose the gleisner-Konishi conspiracy.

  As they walked down the corridor toward the Convocation Hall, Inoshiro said in IR, “They can’t all be like this. Remember Orlando and Liana.”

  “I remember Orlando ranting about the evil gleisners and their wicked plans.”

  “And I remember Liana setting him straight.”

  The Convocation Hall was a large cylindrical space, roughly the same shape as the building itself. Concentric rows of seats converged on a circular stage — and there were about a thousand bridgers filling them. Behind and above the seats, on the cylinder’s wall, giant screens displayed the images of representatives from other enclaves. Yatima could easily distinguish the avian and amphibian exuberants, but ve had no doubt that the unmodified appearance of the others hid a greater range of variation.

  The dream apes were not represented.

  The guards stayed behind as Francesca led them up onto the stage. It was divided into three tiers; nine bridgers stood on the outermost tier, facing the audience, and three stood on the second.

  “These are your translators,” Francesca explained. “Pause after every sentence, and wait for all of them to finish.” She pointed out a slight indentation on the stage, at the very center. “Stand here to be heard; anywhere else, you’ll be inaudible.” Yatima had already noticed the unusual acoustics — they’d walked through excesses and absences of background noise, and the intensity of Francesca’s voice had fluctuated strangely. There were complex acoustic mirrors and baffles hanging from the ceiling, and the gleisner’s skin had reported sudden air pressure gradients which were probably due to some form of barrier or lens.

  Francesca took center stage and addressed the convocation. “I am Francesca Canetti of Atlanta. I believe I am presenting to you Yatima and Inoshiro of Konishi polis. They claim to bring serious news, and if it’s true it concerns us all. I ask you to listen to them carefully, and question them closely.”

  She stepped aside. Inoshiro muttered in IR, “Nice of her to inspire such confidence in us.”

  Inoshiro repeated the account of Lacerta G-1 that ve’d given to Francesca in the jungle, pausing for the translators and clarifying some terms in response to their queries. The inner tier of three translators spoke first, then the outer nine offered their versions; even with the acoustics arranged to allow some of them to speak simultaneously, it was painfully slow. Yatima could understand that automating the process would have gone against the bridgers’ whole culture, but they still should have had some more streamlined way to communicate in an emergency. Or maybe they did, but only for a predetermined set of natural disasters.

  As Inoshiro began describing the predicted effects on the Earth, Yatima tried to judge the mood of the audience. Flesher gestalt, limited by anatomy, was much more subdued than the polis versions, but ve thought ve could detect a growing number of faces expressing consternation. There was no dramatic change sweeping through the hall, but ve decided to interpret this optimistically: anything was better than panic.

  Francesca moderated the responses. The first came from the representative of an enclave of statics; he spoke a dialect of English, so the interface slipped the language into Yatima’s mind.

  “You are shameless. We expect no honor from the simulacra of the shadows of departed cowards, but will you never give up trying to wipe the last trace of vitality from the face of the Earth?” The static laughed humorlessly. “Did you honestly believe that you could frighten us with this risible fairy-tale of ‘quarks’ and ‘gamma rays’ raining from the sky, and then we’d all file meekly into your insipid virtual paradise? Did you imagine that a few cheap, shocking words would send us fleeing from the real world of pain and ecstasy into your nightmare of perfectibility?” He gazed down at them with a kind of fascinated loathing. “Why can’t you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we’ll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.”

  Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators.

  Ve whispered to Francesca, dismayed, “I thought religion was long gone, even among the statics.”

  “God is dead, but the platitudes linger.” Yatima couldn’t bring verself to ask whether torture and slavery also lingered, but Francesca seemed to read vis face, and added, “Including a lot of confused rhetoric about free will. Most statics aren’t violent, but they view the possibility of atrocities as essential for virtue — what philosophers call ‘the Clockwork Orange fallacy.’ So in their eyes, autonomy makes the polises a kind of amoral Hell, masquerading as Eden.”

  Inoshiro was struggling to respond, in English. “We don’t ask you to come into the polises if you don’t wish to. And we aren’t lying in order to frighten you; we only want you to be prepared.”

  The static smiled serenely. “We are always prepared. This is our world, not yours; we understand its perils.”

  Inoshiro began to speak earnestly about shelter, fresh water, and the options for a viable food supply. The static interrupted ver, laughing loudly. “The final insult was choosing the millennium. A superstition for addled children.”

  Inoshiro was bewildered. “But that’s gigatau away!”

  “Close enough to make your contempt transparent.” The static bowed mockingly, and his image vanished.

  Yatima gazed at the blank screen, unwilling to accept what it seemed to imply. Ve asked Francesca, “Will others in his enclave have hea
rd Inoshiro speak?”

  “A few, almost certainly.”

  “And they could choose to go on listening?”

  “Of course. No one censors the net.”

  There was still hope, then. The statics weren’t entirely beyond reach, like the dream apes.

  The next response came from an unmodified-looking exuberant woman, speaking a language unfamiliar to the library. When the translation came, she turned out to be asking for more details of the process that was assumed to be robbing the neutron stars of their angular momentum.

  Inoshiro had grafted extensive knowledge of Kozuch Theory into vis mind, and ve had no trouble answering; Yatima, wanting to stay fresh for the Mines, understood slightly less. But ve did know that the computations linking Kozuch’s Equation to the neutron stars’ dynamics were intractably difficult, and it was mainly just a process of elimination that had left polarization as the most plausible theory.

  The exuberant listened calmly; Yatima couldn’t tell if this was mere courtesy, or a sign that someone was taking them seriously at last. When the outer-tier translator was finished, the exuberant made a further comment.

  “With such low tidal forces it would take many times longer than the lifetime of the universe for the runaway polarization state to tunnel through the energy barrier and dominate the confinement state. Polarization cannot be the cause.” Yatima was astonished. Was this confident assertion misplaced — or a mistranslation — or did the exuberant have a solid mathematical reason for it? “However, I accept that the observations are unambiguous. The neutron stars will collide, the gamma-ray flash will occur. We will make preparations.”

  Yatima wished she could have said more, but with twelve translators involved a prolonged discussion on the subject would have taken days. And they’d finally had one small victory, so ve savored it; a post mortem of the neutron stars’ physics could wait.

  As Francesca chose the next speaker, several people in the audience stood and began making their way out. Yatima decided to treat this as a good sign: even if they weren’t entirely convinced, they could set in motion precautionary steps that would save hundreds or thousands of lives.

  With extensive mind grafts, and the library at vis disposal, Inoshiro fielded technical questions easily. When the amphibious exuberant asked about UV damage to plankton and pH changes in the surface waters of the oceans, there was a Carter-Zimmerman model to quote. When a bridger in the audience questioned TERAGO’s reliability, Inoshiro explained why cross-talk from some other source couldn’t be the cause of the neutron stars’ ever quickening waves. From the subtleties of photochemistry in the stratosphere to the impossibility of Lacerta’s soon-to-be-born black hole forming fast enough to swallow all the gamma rays and spare the Earth, Inoshiro countered almost every objection that might have made the case for action less compelling.

  Yatima was filled with uneasy admiration. Inoshiro had pragmatically become exactly what the crisis required ver to become, grafting in all this second-hand understanding without regard for the effects on vis own personality. Ve would probably choose to have most of it removed afterward; to Yatima this sounded like dismemberment, but Inoshiro seemed to view the whole prospect as less traumatic than the business of taking on and shrugging off their gleisner bodies.

  More enclave representatives began signing off; some clearly persuaded, some obviously not, some giving no signals that Yatima could decipher. And more bridgers left the hall, but others came in to take their place, and some Atlanta residents asked questions from their homes.

  The three guards had sat in the audience and let the debate run its course, but now the woman who’d sliced off Yatima’s arm finally lost patience and sprang to her feet. “They brought Introdus nanoware into the city! We had to cut the weapon from vis body, or they would have used it by now!” She pointed at Yatima. “Do you deny it?”

  The bridgers responded to this accusation the way Yatima had expected them to greet the news of the burst: with an audible outcry, agitated body movements, and some people rising to their feet and yelling abuse at the stage.

  Yatima took Inoshiro’s place at the acoustic focus. “It’s true that I brought in the nanoware, but I would only have used it if asked. The nearest portal is a thousand kilometers away; we only wanted to offer you the choice of migration without the risks of that long journey.”

  There was no coherent response, just more shouting. Yatima looked around at the hundreds of angry fleshers, and struggled to understand their hostility; they couldn’t all be as paranoid as the guards. Lacerta itself was a crushing blow, a promise of decades of hardship, at best ... but maybe talk of “the choice of migration” was worse. Lacerta could only drive them into the polises if it could hammer them into the ground; maybe the prospect of following the Introdus seemed less like a welcome escape hatch, a means of cheating death, than a humiliating means of allowing the fleshers to witness their own annihilation.

  Yatima raised vis voice to ensure that the translators could hear ver. “We were wrong to bring in the nanoware — but we’re strangers, and we acted out of ignorance, not malice. We respect your courage and tenacity, we admire your skills — and all we ask is to be allowed to stand beside you and help you fight to go on living the way you’ve chosen to live: in the flesh.”

  This seemed to split the audience; some responded with jeers of derision, some with renewed calm and even enthusiasm. Yatima felt like ve was playing a game ve barely understood, for stakes ve hardly dared contemplate. They had never been fit for this task, either of them. In Konishi, the grossest acts of foolishness could barely wound a fellow citizen’s pride; here and now, a few poorly judged words could cost thousands of lives.

  One bridger called out words that were translated as, “Do you swear that you have no more Introdus nanoware — and will make no more?”

  This question silenced the hall. Trust the bridgers in their diversity to have someone who knew the workings of a gleisner body. The guards glared up at Yatima, as if ve’d misled them merely by failing to confess the existence of these possibilities.

  “I have no more, and I will make no more.” Ve spread his arms, as if to show them the innocent phantom protruding from the stump, incapable of touching their world.

  The convocation stretched on through the night. People came and went, some splitting off into groups to coordinate preparations for the burst, some returning with new questions. In the early hours of the morning, the three guards called on the meeting to expel Yatima and Inoshiro from Atlanta immediately; upon losing the vote they walked out.

  By dawn, most of the bridgers and the representatives of many of the enclaves seemed to have been won over, if only to the point where they accepted that the balance of probabilities made it well worth the risk of wasting effort on unnecessary precautions. At seven o’clock, Francesca told the second shift of translators to get some sleep; the hall wasn’t quite empty, but the few people remaining were absorbed in their own urgent discussions, and the wallscreens were blank.

  One of the bridgers had suggested that they find a way to get the TERAGO data onto the fleshers’ communications network. Francesca took them to Atlanta’s communications hub — a large room in the same building — and they worked with the engineer on duty to establish a link to the Coalition via the drones. Translating the gestalt tags into suitable audiovisual equivalents looked like it would be the hardest part, but there turned out to be a centuries-old tool in the library for doing just that.

  When everything was working the engineer summoned a plot of the Lacerta gravity waves and an annotated image of the neutron stars’ orbit onto two large screens above her console: stripped-down versions of the rich polis scapes playing as flat, framed pictures. Compared to the historical baseline, the waves had doubled in frequency and their power had risen more than tenfold. G-1a and G-1b were still a little more than 300,000 kilometers apart, but the higher-derivative trends continued to imply a sudden, sharp fall around 20:00 UT — two p.m. local time —
and any flesher on the planet with minimal computing resources could now take the raw data and confirm that. Of course, the data itself could have been fabricated, but Yatima suspected it would still be more convincing than vis word, or Inoshiro’s, alone.

  “I’m going to need a few hours’ rest.” Francesca had developed a fixed gaze and monotone speech; her skepticism about the burst had clearly faded long ago, but she’d shown no sign of emotion, and she’d kept the convocation running to the end. Yatima wished ve could offer her some kind of comfort, but the only thing within vis gift was poisonous, unmentionable. “I don’t know what your plans are now.”

  Neither did Yatima, but Inoshiro said, “Can you take us to Liana and Orlando’s house?”

  Outside, people were constructing covered walkways between buildings, wheeling sacks and barrels of food into repositories, digging trenches and laying pipes, spreading tarpaulins to make new corridors of shade. Yatima hoped the message had got through that even reflected UV would soon have the power to burn or blind; some of the bridgers working in the heat had bare limbs or torsos, and every square centimeter of skin seemed to radiate vulnerability. The sky was darker than ever, but even the heaviest clouds would make a weak and inconstant shield.

  The crops in the fields were as good as dead; medium-term survival would come down to the ability to design, create, plant, and harvest viable new species before existing food supplies ran out. There was also the question of energy; Atlanta was largely powered by photovoltaic plants tailored to the atmosphere’s current spectral windows. Carter-Zimmerman’s botanists had already offered some tentative suggestions; Inoshiro had sketched the details at the convocation, and now they were available in full, on-line. No doubt the fleshers would regard them as the work of model-bound dilettante theoreticians, but as starting points for experimentation they had to be better than nothing.

  They reached the house. Orlando looked tired and distracted, but he greeted them warmly. Francesca left, and the three of them sat in the front room.