They stepped across the border. To test their link to the Coalition, Yatima glanced at a C-Z scape based on a feed from TERAGO. Two dark spheres limned by gravitationally-lensed starlight moved through a faintly sketched spiral tube, the tight record of past orbits widening out into the uncertainty of extrapolation; the hypothetical meson jets were omitted altogether. The neutron stars broadcast gestalt tags with their current orbital parameters, while points on the spiral at regular intervals offered past and future versions.
The orbit had shrunk by a "mere" 20 percent so far—100,000 kilometers—but the process was highly non-linear, and the same distance would be crossed again in roughly seventeen hours, then five, then one, then under three minutes. These predictions were all subject to error, and the exact moment of the burst remained uncertain by at least an hour, but the most likely swath of possibilities all placed Lacerta well above the horizon at Atlanta. For a hemisphere stretching from the Amazon to the Yangtse, the ozone layer would be blasted away in an instant. In Atlanta, it would happen beneath the blazing afternoon sun.
The path Orlando had taken when escorting them out of the enclave was still stored in the gleisners' navigation systems. They pushed through the undergrowth as fast as they could, hoping to trigger alarms and attract attention.
Yatima heard branches move suddenly, off to their left. Ve called out hopefully, "Orlando?" They stopped and listened, but there was no reply.
Inoshiro said, "It was probably just an animal."
"Wait. I can see someone."
"Where?"
Yatima pointed out the small brown hand holding a branch, some twenty meters away trying to release it slowly, instead of letting it spring back into place. "I think ve's a child."
Inoshiro spoke loudly but gently in Modern Roman. "We're friends! We have news!"
Yatima adjusted the response curve of the gleisner's visual system, optimizing it for the shadows behind the branch. A single dark eye stared back through a gap between the leaves. After a few seconds, the hidden face shifted cautiously, choosing another peephole; Yatima reconstructed the blur into a jagged strip of skin joining two lemur eyes.
Ve showed the partial image to the library, then passed the verdict to inoshiro. "Ve's a dream ape."
"Shoot ver."
"What?"
"Shoot ver with the Introdus!" Inoshiro remained motionless and silent, speaking urgently in IR. "We can't leave ver to die!"
Isolated by the frame of leaves, the dream ape's eye appeared eerily expressionless. "But we can't force ver—"
"What do you want to do? Give ver a lecture in neutron star physics? Even the bridgers can't get through to dream apes! No one's going to explain the choices to ver—not now, not ever!"
Yatima insisted stubbornly, "We don't have the right to do it by force. Ve'd have no friends inside, no family—"
Inoshiro made a sound of disgust and disbelief. "We can clone ver some friends! Give ver a scape just like this, and ve'd barely know the difference."
"We're not here to kidnap people. Imagine how you'd feel, if some alien creature reached into the polis and dragged you away from everything you knew—"
Inoshiro almost screamed with frustration. "No, you imagine how this flesher will feel, when vis skin's burnt so badly that the fluid beneath starts seeping out!"
Yatima felt a wave of doubt sweep through ver. Ve could picture the whole, hidden dream ape child, standing there waiting fearfully for the strangers to pass and though ve could barely comprehend the idea of physical pain, images of bodily integrity resonated deeply. The biosphere was a disordered world, full of potential toxins and pathogens, ruled by nothing but the chance collisions of molecules. A ruptured skin would be like a wildly malfunctioning exoself that let data flood across its borders at random, overwriting and corrupting the citizen within.
Ve said hopefully, "Maybe vis family will find a cave to shelter in, once they notice the effects of the UV. That's not impossible; the canopy will protect them for a while. They could live on fungi—"
"I'll do it." Inoshiro grabbed Yatima's right arm, and swung it toward the child. "Give me control of the delivery system, and I'll do it myself."
Yatima tried to pull free. Inoshiro resisted. The struggle confused their separate copies of the interface, which was too stupid to realize it was fighting itself; they both overbalanced. As ve toppled into the undergrowth, Yatima almost felt it: the descent, the inevitable impact. Helplessness. Ve could hear the child running away.
Neither of them moved. After a while, Yatima said, "The bridgers will find a way to protect them. They'll engineer some kind of shield for their skin. They could release the genes in a virus—"
"And they'll do all this in a day? Before or after they work out how to feed fifteen thousand people when their crops are wilting, the ground is frozen, and the rain's about to turn into nitric acid?"
Yatima had no reply. Inoshiro rose to vis feet, then pulled ver up. They walked on in silence.
Halfway to the edge of the jungle, they were met by three bridgers, two females and a male. All were fully grown, but young-looking, and wary. Communication proved difficult.
Inoshiro repeated patiently, "We are Yatima and Inoshiro. We came here once before, twenty-one years ago. We're friends."
The man said, "All your robot friends are on the moon; none of them are here now. Leave us in peace." The bridgers remained several meters away; they'd retreated in alarm when Yatima had approached them with an outstretched hand.
Inoshiro complained in IR, "Even if they're too young to remember… our last visit should he legendary."
"Apparently not."
Inoshiro persisted. "We're not gleisners! We're from Konishi polis; we're just riding these machines. We're friends of Orlando Venetti and Liana Zabini." The bridgers showed no sign of recognizing either name; Yatima wondered soberly if it was possible that they were both dead. "We have important news."
One of the women asked angrily, "What news? Tell us, then leave!"
Inoshiro shook vis head firmly. "We can only give our news to Orlando or Liana." Yatima agreed with this stand; a garbled account, half-understood, would do untold damage.
Inoshiro asked in IR, "What do you think they'd do if we just marched into the city?"
"They'd stop us."
"How?"
"They must have weapons of some kind. It's too risky; we've both used up most of our maintenance nanoware—and anyway, they're never going to trust us if we barge in uninvited."
Yatima tried addressing the bridgers verself. "We are friends, but we're not getting through to you. Can you find a translator?" The second woman was almost apologetic. "We have no robot translators."
"I know. But you must have translators for statics. Think of us as statics."
The bridgers exchanged bemused glances, then went into a huddle, whispering.
The second woman said, "I'll bring someone. Wait."
She left. The other two stood guard over them, refusing to be drawn into further conversation. Yatima and Inoshiro sat on the ground, facing each other rather than the fleshers, hoping to put them at ease.
By the time the translator arrived it was late afternoon. She approached and shook their hands, but regarded them with undisguised suspicion.
"I'm Francesca Canetti. You claim to be Yatima and Inoshiro, but anyone could he inhabiting these machines. Can you tell me what you saw here? What you did?"
Inoshiro recounted the details of their visit. Yatima suspected that their frosty reception was partly due to Carter-Zimmerman's well-intentioned "assault" on the fleshers' communications network, and ve felt a renewed pang of shame. Ve and Inoshiro had had twenty-one years in which to re-establish a secure gateway between the networks; even with the problems of subjective time differences, that might have led to some kind of trust by now. But they'd done nothing.