Inoshiro spoke in a hushed, sickened voice. "PreIntrodus, this was pandemic. Distorted whole nations' economies. It had hooks into everything: sexuality, tribalism, half a dozen artforms and subcultures… it parasitized the fleshers so thoroughly you had to he some kind of desert monk to escape it."

Yatima regarded the pathetic object dubiously, but they had no access to the library now, and vis knowledge of the era was patchy. "Even if there are traces left inside… I'm sure they're all immune to it by now. And it could hardly infect us—"

Inoshiro cut ver off impatiently. "We're not talking nucleotide viruses, here. The molecules themselves were just a random assortment of junk—mostly phosphoric acid; it was the memes they came wrapped in that made them virulent." Ve bent down lower, and cupped vis hands over the battered container. "And who knows how small a fragment it can bootstrap from? I'm not taking any chances." The gleisners' IR transceivers could be made to operate at high power; smoke and steam from singed vegetation rose up through Inoshiro's fingers.

A voice came from behind them—a meaningless stream of phonemes, but the interface followed it with translation into linear: "Don't tell me: you're starting a fire to attract attention. You didn't want to creep up on us unannounced."

They both turned as rapidly as their bodies permitted. The flesher stood a dozen meters away, dressed in a dark green robe shot through with threads of gold. Broadcasting no signature tag—of course, but Yatima still had to make a conscious effort to dismiss the instinctive conclusion that this was not a real person. Ve had black hair and eyes, copper-brown skin, and a thick black heard which in a flesher almost certainly meant gendered, male: 've' was a he. No obvious modification: no wings, no gills, no photosynthetic cowl. Yatima resisted jumping to conclusions; none of this surface conservatism actually proved he was a static.

The flesher said, "I don't think I'll offer to shake hands." Inoshiro's palms were still glowing dull red. "And we can't exchange signatures. I'm at a loss for protocol. But that's good. Ritual corrupts." He took a few steps forward; the undergrowth deferentially flattened itself to smooth his path. "I'm Orlando Venetti. Welcome to Atlanta."

They introduced themselves. The interface—pre-loaded with the most likely base languages, and enough flexibility to cope with drift had identified the flesher's speech as a dialect of Modern Roman. It grafted the language into their minds, slipping new word sounds into all their symbols side-by-side with the linear versions, and binding alternative grammatical settings into their speech analysis and generation networks. Yatima felt distinctly stretched by the process—but vis symbols were still connected to each other in the same way as before. Ve was still verself.

"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?"