"So do we." Orlando shook his head. "Still. Over eight thousand years, I have a feeling we won't be keeping such a tight grip on things."
They continued on toward the city, following a broad path which looked like it was made of nothing more than reddish-brown clay, but probably teemed with organisms designed to keep it from eroding into dust or mud. The gleisner's feet described the surface as soft but resilient, and they left no visible indentations. Birds were busy in the fields, eating weeds and insects—Yatima was only guessing, but if they were feeding on the crop itself the next harvest would be extremely sparse.
Orlando stopped to pick up a small leafy branch from the path, which must have blown in from the forest, then began sweeping it back and forth across the ground ahead of them. "So how do they greet dignitaries in the polises? Are you accustomed to having sixty thousand non-sentient slaves strewing rose petals at your feet?"
Yatima laughed, but Inoshiro was deeply offended. "We're not dignitaries! We're delinquents!"
As they drew nearer, Yatima could see people walking along the broad avenues between the rainbow-colored buildings—or loitering in groups, looking almost like citizens gathered in some forum, even if their appearance was much less diverse. Some had vis own icon's dark skin, and there were other equally minor variations, but all of these exuberants could have passed for statics. Yatima wondered just what changes they were exploring; Orlando had mentioned digestive symbionts, but that hardly counted—it didn't even involve their own DNA.
Orlando said, "When we noticed you coming, it was hard to decide who to send. We don't get much news from the polises—we had no idea what you'd be like." He turned back to face them. "I do make sense to you, don't I? I'm not just imagining that communication is taking place?"
"Not unless we're imagining it, too." Yatima was puzzled. "What do you mean, though: who to send? Do some of you speak Coalition languages?"
"No." They'd reached the outskirts of the city; people were turning to watch them with undisguised curiosity. "I'll explain soon. Or a friend of mine will."
The avenues were carpeted with thick, short grass. Yatima could see no vehicles or pack animals, just fleshers, mostly barefoot. Between the buildings there were flowerbeds, ponds and streams, statues still and moving, sundials and telescopes. Everything was space and light, open to the sky. There were parks, large enough for kite flying and ball games, and people sitting talking in the shade of small trees. The gleisner's skin was sending tags describing the warmth of the sunlight and the texture of the grass; Yatima was almost beginning to regret not modifying verself enough to absorb the information instinctively.
Inoshiro asked, "What happened to pre-Introdus Atlanta? The skyscrapers? The factories? The apartment blocks?"
"Some of it's still standing. Buried in the jungle, further north. I could take you there later, if you like."
Yatima got in quickly before Inoshiro could answer. "Thank you, but we won't have time."
Orlando nodded at dozens of people, greeted some by name, and introduced Yatima and Inoshiro to a few. Yatima attempted to shake their offered hands, which turned out to be an extraordinarily complex dynamical problem. No one seemed hostile to their presence—hut Yatima found their gestalt gestures confusing, and no one uttered more than a few polite phrases before walking on.
"This is my home."
The building was pale blue, with an S-shaped facade and a smaller, elliptical second story. "Is this… some kind of stone?" Yatima stroked the wall and paid attention to the tags; the surface was smooth down to the sub-millimeter scale, but it was as soft and cool as the hark ve'd touched in the forest.
"No, it's alive. Barely. It was sprouting twigs and leaves all over when it was growing, but now it's only metabolizing enough for repairs, and a little active air conditioning." A strip-curtain covering the doorway parted for Orlando, and they followed him in. There were cushions and chairs, still pictures on the walls, dust-filled shafts of sunlight everywhere.
"Take a seat." They stared at him. "No? Fine. Could you wait here a second?" He strode up a staircase.
Inoshiro said numbly, "We're really here. We did it." Ve surveyed the sunny room. "And this is how they live. It doesn't look so bad."
"Except for the time scale."
Ve shrugged. "What are we racing, in the polises? We speed ourselves up as much as we can—then struggle not to let it change us."
Yatima was annoyed. "What's wrong with that? There's not much point to longevity if all you're going to do with your time is change into someone else entirely. Or decay into no one at all."
Orlando returned, accompanied by a female flesher. "This is Liana Zabini. Inoshiro, and Yatima, of Konishi polis." Liana had brown hair and green eyes. They shook hands; Yatima was beginning to get the hang of doing it without either offering too much resistance, or merely letting vis arm hang limp. "Liana is our best neuroembryologist. Without her, the bridgers wouldn't stand a chance."
Inoshiro said, "Who are the bridgers?"
Liana glanced at Orlando. He said, "You'd better start at the beginning." Orlando persuaded everyone to sit; Yatima finally realized that this was more comfortable for the fleshers.
Liana said, "We call ourselves bridgers. When the founders came here from Turin, three centuries ago, they had a very specific plan. You know there've been thousands of artificial genetic changes in different flesher populations, since the Introdus?" She gestured at a large picture behind her, and the portrait faded, to be replaced by a complex upside-down tree diagram. "Different exuberants have made modifications to all kinds of characteristics. Some have been simple, pragmatic adaptations for new diets or habitats: digestive, metabolic, respiratory, muscular-skeletal." Images flashed up from different points on the tree: amphibious, winged, and photosynthetic exuberants, close-ups of modified teeth, diagrams of altered metabolic pathways. Orlando rose from his seat and started drawing curtains; the contrast of the images improved.
"Often, habitat changes have also demanded neural modifications to provide appropriate new instincts; no one can thrive in the ocean, for example, without the right hardwired reflexes." A slick-skinned amphibious flesher rose slowly through emerald water, a faint stream of bubbles emerging from flaps behind vis ears; a transected, color-coded view showed dissolved gas concentrations in vis tissues and bloodstream, and an inset graph illustrated the safe range of staged ascents.
"Some neural changes have gone far beyond new instincts, though." The tree thinned-out considerably-but there were still thirty or forty current branches left. "There are species of exuberants who've changed aspects of language, perception, and cognition."
Inoshiro said, "Like the dream apes?"
Liana nodded. "At one extreme. Their ancestors stripped back the language centers to the level of the higher primates. They still have stronger general intelligence than any other primate, but their material culture has been reduced dramatically—and they can no longer modify themselves, even if they want to. I doubt that they even understand their own origins anymore.
"The dream apes are the exception, though—a deliberate renunciation of possibilities. Most exuberant, have tried more constructive changes: developing new ways of mapping the physical world into their minds, and adding specialized neural structures to handle the new categories. There are exuberants who can manipulate the most sophisticated, abstract concepts in genetics, meteorology, biochemistry, or ecology as intuitively as any static can think about a rock or a plant or an animal with the 'common sense' about those things which comes from a few million years of evolution. And there are others who've simply modified ancestral neural structures to find out how that changes their thinking—who've headed out in search of new possibilities, with no specific goals in mind."