by Greg Egan
“Konishi polis? Where is that, exactly?”
Yatima began to reply, “One hundred and —” Inoshiro cut ver off with a burst of warning tags.
Orlando was unperturbed. “Just idle curiosity; I wasn’t requesting coordinates for a missile strike. But what does it matter where you’ve come from, now that you’re here in the flesh? Or the gallium indium phosphide. I trust those bodies were empty when you found them?”
Inoshiro was scandalized. “Of course!”
“Good. The thought of real gleisners still prowling around on Earth is too horrible to contemplate. They should have come out of the factories with ‘Born for Vacuum’ inscribed across their chests.”
Yatima asked, “Were you born in Atlanta?”
Orlando nodded. “One hundred and sixty-three years ago. Atlanta fell empty in the 2600s — there was a community of statics here before, but disease wiped them out, and none of the other statics wanted to risk being infected. The new founders came from Turin, my grandparents among them.” Ve frowned slightly. “So do you want to see the city? Or shall we stand here all day?”
With Orlando leading the way, obstacles vanished. However the plants were sensing his presence, they responded to it swiftly: leaves curling up, spines withdrawing like snails’ stalks, sprawling shrubs contracting into tight cores, and whole protruding branches suddenly hanging limp. Yatima suspected that he was deliberately prolonging the effects to include them, and ve had no doubt that Orlando could have left any unwelcome pursuer far behind — or at least, anyone who lacked the same molecular keys.
Yatima asked, half jokingly, “Any quicksand around here?”
“Not if you stick close.”
The forest ended without warning; if anything, the edge was more densely wooded than most of the interior, helping to conceal the transition. They emerged onto a vast, bright open plain, mostly taken up with fields of crops and photovoltaics. The city lay ahead in the distance: a broad cluster of low buildings, all vividly colored, with sweeping, geometrically precise curved walls and roofs intersecting and overlapping wildly.
Orlando said, “There are twelve thousand and ninety-three of us, now. But we’re still tweaking the crops, and our digestive symbionts; within ten years, we should be able to support four thousand more with the same resources.” Yatima decided it would be impolite to inquire about their mortality rate. In most respects, the fleshers had a far harder time than the Coalition in trying to avoid cultural and genetic stagnation while eschewing the lunacy of exponential growth. Only true statics, and a few of the more conservative exuberants, retained the ancestral genes for programmed death — and asking for a figure on accidental losses might have seemed insensitive.
Orlando laughed suddenly. “Ten years? What would that seem like to you? A century?”
Yatima replied, “About eight millennia.”
“Fuck.”
Inoshiro added hastily. “You can’t really convert, though. We might do a few simple things eight hundred times faster, but we change much more slowly than that.”
“Empires don’t rise and fall in a year? New species don’t evolve in a century ?”
Yatima reassured him, “Empires are impossible. And evolution requires vast amounts of mutation and death. We prefer to make small changes, rarely, and wait to see how they turn out.”
“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 — but 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 bark 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 exuberants 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.” Yatima felt an eerie resonance with vis own situation ... though from all the evidence so far, vis own mutations hadn’t exactly set him adrift in uncharted waters. As Inoshiro put it: “With you, they’ve finally stumbled on the trait fields for the ultimate in willing mine fodder. Parents will be asking for those nice compliant ‘Yatima’ settings for the next ten gigatau.”
Liana spread her arms in a gesture of frustration. “The only trouble with all this exploration is ... some species of exuberants have changed so much that they can’t communicate with anyone else, anymore. Different groups have rushed off in their own directions, trying out new kinds of minds — and now they can barely make sense of each other, even with software intermediaries. It’s not just a question of language — or at least, not the simple question that language was for the statics, when everyone had basically identical brains. Once different communities start carving up the world into different categories, and caring about wildly different things, it becomes impossible to have a global culture in anything like the pre-Introdus sense. We’re fragmenting. We’re losing each other.” She laughed, as if to deflate her own seriousness, but Yatima could see that she was passionate about the subject. “We’ve all chosen to stay on Earth, we’ve all chosen to remain organic ... but we’re still drifting apart — probably faster than any of you in the polises!”
Orlando, standing behind her chair, placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. She reached up and clasped her hand over his. Yatima found this mesmerizing, but tried not to stare. Ve said, “So how do the bridgers fit in?”
Orlando said, “We’re trying to plug the gaps.”
Liana gestured at the tree diagram, and a second set of branches began to grow behind and between the first. The new tree was much more finely differentiated, with more branches, more closely spaced.
“Taking the ancestral neural structures as a starting point, we’ve been introducing small changes with every generation. But instead of modifying everyone in the same direction, our children are not only different from their parents, they’re increasingly different from each other. Each generation is more diverse than the one before.”
Inoshiro said, “But... isn’t that the very thing you were lamenting? People drifting apart?”
“Not quite. Instead of whole populations jumping en masse to opposite ends of the spectrum for some neural trait — giving rise to two distinct groups with no common ground — we’re always scattered evenly across the whole range. That way, no one is cut off, no one is alienated, because any given person’s ‘circle’ — the group of people with whom they can easily communicate — always overlaps with someone else’s, someone outside the first circle ... whose own circle also overlaps with that of someone else again ... until one way or another, everyone is covered.
“You could easily find two people here who can barely understand each other — because they’re as different as exuberants from two wildly divergent lines — but here, there’ll always be a chain of living relatives who can bridge the gap. With a few intermediaries — right now, four at the most — any bridger can communicate with any other.”
Orlando added, “And once there are people among us who can interact with all of the scattered exuberant communities, on their own terms ...”
“Then every flesher on the planet will be connected, in the same way.”
Inoshiro asked eagerly, “So you could set up a chain of people who’d let us talk to someone at the edge of the process? Someone heading toward the most remote group of exuberants?”
Orlando and Liana exchanged glances, then Orlando said, “If you can wait a few days, that might be possible. It takes a certain amount of diplomacy; it’s not a party trick we can turn on at a moment’s notice.”
“We’re going back tomorrow morning.” Yatima didn’t dare look at Inoshiro; there’d be no end of excuses to extend their stay, but they’d agreed on twenty-four hours.
After a moment’s awkward silence, Inoshiro said calmly, “That’s right. Maybe next time.”
Orlando showed them around the gene foundry where he worked, assembling DNA sequences and testing their effects. As well as their main goal, the bridgers were working on a number of non-neural enhancements involving disease resistance and improved tissue-repair mechanisms, which could be tried out with relative ease on brainless vegetative assemblies of mammalian organs which Orlando jokingly referred to as “offal trees.” “You really can’t smell them? You don’t know how lucky you are.”
The bridgers, he explained, had tailored themselves to the point where any individual could rewrite parts of vis own genome by injecting the new sequence into the bloodstream, bracketed by suitabl
e primers for substitution enzymes, wrapped in a lipid capsule with surface proteins keyed to the appropriate cell types. If the precursors of gametes were targeted, the modification was made heritable. Female bridgers no longer generated all their ova while still fetuses, like statics did, but grew each one as required, and sperm and ova production — let alone the preparation of the womb for implantation of a fertilized egg — only occurred if the right hormones, available from specially-tailored plants, were ingested. About two-thirds of the bridgers were single-gendered; the rest were hermaphroditic or parthenogenetic-asexual, in the manner of certain species of exuberants.
After a tour of the facilities, Orlando declared that it was lunchtime, and they sat in a courtyard watching him eat. The other foundry workers gathered round; a few spoke to them directly, while the rest used intermediaries to translate. Their questions often came out sounding odd, even after some lengthy exchanges between translator and questioner — “How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?” “Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?” “Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?” — and from the laughter their answers produced it was clear that the inverse process was just as imperfect. A certain amount of genuine communication did take place — but it depended heavily on trial and error, and a great deal of patience.
Orlando had promised to show them factories and silos, galleries and archives ... but other people started dropping by to talk to them — or just to stare — and as the afternoon wore on, their original plans receded into fantasy. Perhaps they could have forced the pace, reminding their hosts how precious their time was, but after a few hours it began to seem absurd to have imagined that they could have done anything more, in a day. Nothing could be rushed, here; a whirlwind tour would have seemed like an act of violence. As the megatau evaporated, Yatima struggled not to think about the progress ve could have been making, back in the Truth Mines. Ve wasn’t racing anyone — and the Mines would still be there when ve returned.