Diaspora

by Greg Egan

  Orlando said, “Liana’s sleeping. It’s a kidney infection, a viral thing.” He stared at the space between them. “RNA never sleeps. She’s going to be all right, though. I told her you’d returned. She was pleased.”

  “Maybe Liana will design your new skin and corneas,” Yatima suggested. Orlando made a polite sound of agreement.

  Inoshiro said, “You should both come with us.”

  “Sorry?” Orlando rubbed his bloodshot eyes.

  “Back into Konishi.” Yatima turned to ver, appalled; ve’d told ver about the surviving nanoware, but after the reactions they’d had so far, this was madness.

  Inoshiro continued calmly, “You don’t have to go through any of this. The fear, the uncertainty. What if things go badly, and Liana’s still sick? What if you can’t travel to the portal? You owe it to her to think about that now.”

  Orlando didn’t look at ver, and didn’t reply. After a moment, Yatima noticed tears running into his beard, barely visible against the sheen of sweat. He cradled his head in his hands, then said, “We’ll manage.”

  Inoshiro stood. “I think you should ask Liana.”

  Orlando raised his head slowly; he looked more astonished than angry. “She’s asleep!”

  “Don’t you think this is important enough to wake her? Don’t you think she has a right to choose?”

  “She’s sick, and she’s asleep, and I’m not going to put her through that. All right? Can you understand that?” Orlando searched Inoshiro’s face; Inoshiro gazed back at him steadily. Yatima suddenly felt more disoriented than at any time since they’d woken in the jungle.

  Orlando said, “And she doesn’t fucking know yet.” His voice changed sharply on the last word. He bunched his fists and said angrily, “What do you want? Why are you doing this?”

  He stared at Inoshiro’s bland gray features, then suddenly burst out laughing. He sat there grimacing and laughing angrily, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand, trying to compose himself. Inoshiro said nothing.

  Orlando rose from the chair. “Okay. Come on up. We’ll ask Liana, we’ll give her the choice.” He started up the stairs. “Are you coming?”

  Inoshiro followed him. Yatima stayed where ve was.

  Ve could make out three voices, but no words. There was no shouting, but there were several long silences. After fifteen minutes, Inoshiro came down the stairs and walked straight out onto the street.

  Yatima waited for Orlando to appear.

  Ve said, “I’m sorry.”

  Orlando raised his hands, let them drop, dismissing it all. He looked steadier, more resolved than before. “I should go and find Inoshiro.”

  “Yeah.” Orlando stepped forward suddenly, and Yatima recoiled, expecting violence. When had ve learned to do that? But Orlando just touched vis shoulder and said, “Wish us luck.”

  Yatima nodded and backed away. “I do.”

  Yatima caught sight of Inoshiro near the edge of the city. “Slow down!”

  Inoshiro turned to look at ver, but kept walking. “We’ve done what we came for. I’m going home.”

  Ve could have returned to Konishi from anywhere; there was no need to leave the enclave. Yatima willed vis viewpoint forward faster, and the interface switched the body’s gait into a different mode. Ve caught up with Inoshiro on the road between the fields.

  “What are you afraid of? Getting stranded?” When the burst hit, part of the upper atmosphere would turn to plasma, so satellite communication would be disrupted for a while. “We’ll have enough warning from TERAGO to send back snapshots.” And then? The more hostile bridgers might go as far as killing the messengers, once post-Lacerta realities began to strike home, but if it came to that they could always just erase their local selves before things became too unpleasant.

  Inoshiro scowled. “I’m not afraid. But we’ve delivered the warning. We’ve spoken to everyone who was capable of listening. Hanging around any longer is just voyeuristic.”

  Yatima gave this serious thought.

  “That’s not true. We’re too clumsy to help much as laborers, but after the burst we’d be the only people here guaranteed immune to UV. Okay, they can cover themselves, protect their eyes, nothing’s impossible if they do it carefully. But two robots built for unfiltered sunlight might still be useful.”

  Inoshiro didn’t reply. Soft-edged shadows were racing across the fields from black filaments of cloud streaming low overhead. Yatima glanced back at the city; the clouds were piling up into structures like dark fists. Heavy rain might be good; cool the place down, keep people indoors, blunt the first shafts of UV. So long as it didn’t hide so much that it left the bridgers complacent.

  “I thought Liana would understand.” Inoshiro laughed bitterly. “Maybe she did.”

  “Understand what?”

  Inoshiro shook vis head. It was strange to see ver in this robot body again, which looked more like Yatima’s enduring mental image of ver than vis current icon back in Konishi.

  “Stay and help, Inoshiro. Please. You’re the one who remembered the bridgers. You’re the one who shamed me into coming here.”

  Inoshiro regarded ver obliquely. “Do you know why I gave you the Introdus nanoware? We could have swapped jobs, you could have made the drones.”

  Yatima shrugged. “Why?”

  “Because I would have used it all by now. I would have shot every bridger I could. I would have gathered them all up and carried them away, whether they wanted it or not.”

  Inoshiro walked on down the smooth dirt road. Yatima stood and watched ver for a while, then headed back into the city.

  Yatima wandered Atlanta’s streets and parks, offering information wherever ve dared, approaching anyone who wasn’t working unless they looked openly hostile. Even without official translators ve often found ve could communicate with small groups of people, with everyone pitching in to cover the gaps.

  An incomprehensible “What are the boundaries of purity?” became:

  “Can the sky be trusted this far?” — with the speaker glancing at the clouds — which became:

  “If it rains today, will it burn us?”

  “No. The acidity won’t rise for months; the nitric oxides will take that long to diffuse down from the stratosphere.”

  The translated answers sometimes sounded like they’d traversed a Mobius strip and returned inverted, but Yatima clung to the hope that all sense wasn’t evaporating along the way, that “up” wasn’t really turning to “down.”

  By midday the city looked abandoned. Or besieged, with everyone in hiding. Then ve spotted some people working on a link between two buildings, and even in the forty-degree heat they were wearing long-sleeved clothing, and gloves, and welding masks. Yatima was encouraged by their caution, but ve could almost sense the dispiriting, claustrophobic weight of the protective gear. The bridgers clearly retained an evolved acceptance of the constraints of embodiment, but it seemed that half the pleasure of being flesh came from pushing the limits of biology, and the rest from minimizing all other encumbrances. Maybe the maddest of the masochistic statics would relish every obstacle and discomfort Lacerta could impose on them, waxing lyrical about “the real world of pain and ecstasy” while the ultraviolet flayed them, but for most fleshers it would do nothing but erode the kind of freedom that made the choice of flesh worthwhile.

  There was a seat suspended by ropes from a frame in one of the parks; Yatima recalled seeing people sitting on it and swinging back and forth, an eternity ago. Ve managed to sit without falling, holding tight to one rope with vis remaining hand, but when ve willed the interface to set the pendulum in motion, nothing happened. The software didn’t know how.

  By one o’clock, the Lacerta waves had strengthened to a hundred times their old power level. There was no point any more in waiting for data to arrive from two or three of TERAGO’s scattered detectors in order to eliminate interference from other sources; the feed now came straight from Bullialdus in real time, and Lac G-1’s racing pulse was l
oud enough to drown out everything else in the sky. The waves were visibly “chirping,” each one clearly narrower than its predecessor; the latest two peaks were just 15 minutes apart, which meant the neutron stars had crossed the 200,000 kilometer mark. In an hour that separation would be halved, then in a few more minutes it would vanish. Yatima had been clinging to a faint hope of a shift in the dynamics, but the gleisners’ ever-steeper extrapolation had kept on proving itself right.

  The seat wobbled. A half-naked child was tugging on the side, trying to get vis attention. Yatima stared at ver, speechless, wanting to wrap vis invulnerable polymer body around the child’s exposed skin. Ve looked about the deserted playground for an adult; there was no one in sight.

  Yatima stood. The child abruptly started crying and screaming. Ve sat, stood, tried to sweep the child up in vis single arm, failed. The child banged its fist on the vacated seat. Yatima obeyed.

  The child clambered onto vis lap. Yatima glanced nervously at the TERAGO scape. The child stretched vis arms out and held the ropes, then leaned back slightly. Yatima imitated the motion, and the seat responded. The child leaned forward, Yatima followed.

  They swung together, ever higher, the child screaming with delight, Yatima torn between terror and joy. A few sparse drops of rain descended, and then the clouds around the sun thinned, and parted.

  The sudden clarity of the light was shocking. Looking across the sunlit playground — with a viewpoint gliding smoothly through this world, at last — Yatima felt an overpowering sense of hope. It was as if the Konishi mind seed still encoded the instinctive knowledge that, in time, the darkest stormclouds would always clear, the longest night would always yield to dawn, the harshest winter would always be tempered by spring. Every hardship the Earth forced upon its inhabitants was bounded, cyclic, survivable. Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this world could inflict.

  No longer. Sunlight breaking through the clouds was a lie, now. Every instinct that proclaimed that the future could be no worse than the worst of the past was obsolete. And Yatima had long understood that, outside the polises, the universe was capricious and unjust. But it had never mattered, before. It had never touched ver.

  Ve didn’t trust verself to halt the swing safely, so ve froze and let the motion die away, ignoring the child’s complaints. Then ve carried ver shrieking to the nearest building, where someone seemed to know where ve belonged, and snatched ver away angrily.

  The stormclouds had closed in again. Yatima returned to the playground and stood motionless, watching the sky, waiting to learn the new limits of darkness.

  The neutron stars made their last full orbit in under five minutes, 100,000 kilometers apart and spiraling in steeply. Yatima knew ve was witnessing the final moments of a process that had taken five billion years, but on a cosmic scale was about as rare and significant as the death of a mayfly. Gamma-ray observatories picked up the signature of identical events in other galaxies, five times a day.

  Still, Lac G-1’s great age meant that the two supernovae which had left the neutron stars behind predated the solar system. Supernovae sent shockwaves rippling through surrounding clouds of gas and dust, triggering star formation. So it was not inconceivable that G-1a or G-1b had created the sun, and the Earth, and the planets. Yatima wished ve’d thought of this when Inoshiro was talking to the statics; renaming the neutron stars “Brahma” and “Shiva” might have carried the right kind of mythic resonance to penetrate their mythic stupor. The vacuous metaphor might have saved a few lives. Other than that, whether Lacerta giver-of-life was about to show the hand that takes, or whether it was preparing to rain gamma rays on the accidental children of another dead star altogether, the scars inflicted would be equally painful, and equally meaningless.

  The signal from Bullialdus climbed, peaked at ten thousand times the old level, then dived. In the orbit scape, the two arms of the inward spiral twisted into perfect radial alignment, and the narrow cones of uncertainty flaring out from each branch of the orbit shrank and merged into a single translucent tunnel. Each neutron star made a microscopic target for the other, so a succession of near misses granting five or ten minutes’ reprieve would not have been unthinkable, but the verdict was that all sideways motion had vanished to the limits of measurement. The neutron stars would merge at the first approach.

  In twenty-one seconds.

  Yatima heard a voice wailing with anguish. Ve looked away from the scapes and swept vis robot gaze across the playground, for a moment convinced that the flesher child had escaped vis parents and returned, that search parties were out beneath the threatening sky. But the voice was distant and muffled, and there was no one in sight.

  Ten seconds.

  Five.

  Let all the models be wrong: let an event horizon swallow the blast. Let the gleisners be lying, faking the data: let the most paranoid flesher be right.

  An auroral glow filled the sky, an elaborate dazzling curtain of pink and blue electrical discharges. For a moment Yatima wondered if the clouds had been seared away, but as vis eyes desaturated and adjusted their response ve could see that the light was shining right through. The clouds made a faint grubby overlay, like smudges of dirt on a window pane, while ethereal patterns edged in luminous white and green swirled behind them, delicate wisps and vortices of ionized gas tracing the flows of billion-ampere currents.

  The sky dimmed then began to flicker, strobing at about a kilohertz. Yatima instinctively reached for the polis library, but the connection had been severed; the ionized stratosphere was radio-opaque. Why the oscillation? Was there a shell of neutrons outside the black hole, ringing like a bell as it slipped into oblivion, Doppler-shifting the last of the gamma rays back and forth?

  The flicker persisted, far too long for the burst itself to be the cause. If the remnants of Lac G-1 weren’t vibrating, what was? The gamma rays had deposited all their energy high above the ground, blasting nitrogen and oxygen molecules apart into a super-heated plasma, and the electrons and positive ions in this plasma had a billion terajoules to dispose of before they could recombine. Most of this energy would be going into chemical changes, and some was clearly reaching the ground as light, but powerful currents surging through the plasma would also be generating low frequency radio waves, which would bounce back and forth between the Earth and the now-ionized stratosphere. That was the source of the flicker. Yatima recalled the C-Z analysis stating that these waves could do real damage under certain conditions, though any effects would be highly localized, and insignificant compared to the problems of UV and global cooling.

  As the auroral light behind the clouds faded, a blue-white spike flashed across the sky. Yatima had barely registered this when a second discharge forked between the Earth and the clouds. The thunder was too loud to be heard; the gleisner’s acoustic sensors shut down in self-defense.

  The sky darkened suddenly, as if the hidden sun had been eclipsed; the plasma must have cooled enough to start forming nitric oxides. Yatima checked the tags from vis skin; the temperature had just dropped from 41 to 39, and it was still falling. Lightning struck again, close by, and in the flash ve saw a layer of dark, wind-streaked cloud moving overhead.

  Ripples appeared in the grass, at first just flattening the blades, but then Yatima saw dust rising up between them. The air came in powerful gusts, and when the pressure rose so did the temperature. Yatima raised vis hand into the hot wind, and tried to feel it flowing past vis fingers, tried to grasp what it would mean to be touched by this strange storm.

  Lightning hit a building on the far side of the playground; it exploded, showering glowing embers. Yatima hesitated, then moved quickly toward the burst shell. Patches of grass were burning nearby. Ve could see no one moving inside, but between the lightning flashes it was like a starless night, and as the embers and the grass fires sputtered out there was a moment when everything seemed blanketed, smothered by darkness. Yatima stretched
the gleisner’s vision into infrared; there were patches of body-temperature thermal radiation among the wreckage, but the shapes were ambiguous.

  People were shouting frantically, somewhere, but it didn’t seem to be coming from the building. The wind masked and distorted the sound, scrambling all cues for distance and direction, and with the streets deserted it was like being in a scape with a soundtrack of disembodied voices.

  As Yatima approached the building, buffeted by the wind, ve saw that it was empty; the body-temperature regions were just charred wood. Then vis hearing cut out again and the interface lost balance. Ve hit the ground face down, an image lingering on vis retinas: vis shadow stretched out across the grass, black and sharp against a sea of blue light. When ve scrambled to vis feet and turned around, there were three more buildings charred and smoking, walls split open, ceilings collapsed. Ve ran back across the playground.

  There were people stumbling out of the ruins, ragged and bleeding. Others were searching frantically through the debris. Yatima spotted a man half-buried in rubble, eyes open but expressionless, a black splintered length of wood lying across his body from thigh to shoulder. Ve reached down and grabbed one end of the beam, and managed to lift it and swing it away.

  As ve squatted beside the man, someone started punching and slapping the back of vis head and shoulders. Ve turned to see what was happening, and the flesher began yelling incoherently and striking vis face. Still squatting, ve backed off from the injured man awkwardly, as someone else tried to pull vis assailant away. Yatima stood and retreated. The flesher screamed after ver, “Vulture! Leave us in peace!” Confused and disheartened, Yatima fled.

  As the storm intensified, the bridgers’ hasty modifications were falling apart; crumpled tarpaulins were blowing down the street, and the ceilings of some of the walkways had come loose and crashed to the ground. Yatima looked up at the dark sky and switched to UV. Ve could just make out the disk of the sun, penetrating the stratospheric NOx easily at these wavelengths, but still veiled by the heavy clouds.