Finally, Francesca admitted, "I don't understand this well enough to question you properly. Will you come into the city and address a convocation?"

Inoshiro said, "Of course."

Yatima asked, "You mean we'll talk to representatives of all the bridgers, through translators."

"No. A convocation means all the fleshers we can contact. Not just talking to Atlanta. Talking to the world."

As they made their way through the jungle, Francesca explained that she knew Liana and Orlando well, but Liana was sick, so no one had yet troubled them with the news that the Konishi emissaries had returned.

When Atlanta came into view ahead, surrounded by its vast green and golden fields, it was as if the scale of the problems the bridgers would soon be facing had been laid out for inspection in hectares of soil, megaliters of water, tons of grain. In principle, there was absolutely no reason why suitably adapted organic life couldn't flourish in the new environment Lacerta would create. Crops could employ robust pigments that made use of UV photons, their roots secreting glycols to melt the hardest tundra, their biochemistry adapted to the acidic, nitrogenous water and soil. Other species essential to the medium-term chemical stability of the biosphere could be given protective modifications, and the fleshers themselves could engineer a new integument to shield them from cell death and genetic damage even in direct sunlight.

In practice, though, any such transition would be a race against time, constrained at every step by the realities of mass and distance, entropy and inertia. The physical world couldn't simply be commanded to change; it could only be manipulated, painstakingly, step by step—more like a mathematical proof than a scape.

There were low, dark clouds rolling over the city as they approached. On the main avenue, people stopped to watch the robots arriving with their escort, but the crowds seemed strangely lethargic in the shadowless light. Yatima could see that their clothes were damp, their faces shiny with perspiration. The gleisner's skin told ver the ambient temperature and humidity: 40 degrees Celsius, 93 percent. Ve checked with the library; this was not generally considered pleasant, and there could be metabolic and behavioral consequences, depending on each exuberant's particular adaptations.

A few people greeted them, and one woman went s far as to ask why they'd returned. Yatima hesitated, and Francesca intervened. "The emissaries will address a convocation soon. Everyone will hear their news, then."

They were taken to a large, squat, cylindrical building near the center of the city, and led through the foyer and down a corridor to a room dominated by a long wooden table. Francesca left them with the three guards—it was impossible to think of them as anything else—saying she'd return in an hour or two. Yatima almost protested, but then ve recalled Orlando saying that it would take days to gather all the bridgers together. Arranging a planet-wide convocation in an hour—to discuss claims by two self-declared but possibly fraudulent Konishi citizens of an imminent threat to all life on Earth—would be a major feat of diplomacy.

They sat on one side of the long table. Their guards remained standing, and the silence seemed tense. These people had heard the whole conversation about Lacerta, but Yatima wasn't sure what they'd made of it.

After a while, the man asked nervously, "You talked about radiation from space. Is this the start of a war?"

Inoshiro said firmly, "No. It's a natural process. It's probably happened to the Earth before, hundreds of millions of years ago. Maybe many times." Yatima refrained from adding: Only never this close, never this strong.

"But the stars are falling together faster than they should be. So how do you know they're not being used as a weapon?"

"They're falling together faster than astronomers thought they would. So the astronomers were wrong, they misunderstood some of the physics. That's all."

The man seemed unconvinced. Yatima tried to imagine an alien species with the retarded morality required for warfare and the technological prowess to manipulate neutron stars. It was a deeply unpleasant notion, but about as likely as the influenza virus inventing the H-bomb. The three bridgers spoke together quietly, but the man remained visibly agitated. Yatima said reassuringly, "Whatever happens, you're always welcome in Konishi. Whoever wants to come."

The man laughed, as if he doubted it.

Yatima raised vis right hand, displaying his index finger. "No, it's true. We've brought enough Introdus nanoware—"

Inoshiro was sending warning tags even before the expression on the man's face changed. He leant forward and grabbed Yatima's hand by the wrist, then slammed it down on the table. He screamed, "Someone get a torch! Get a cutting tool!" One of the guards left the room; the other approached warily.

Inoshiro said calmly, "We would never have used it on anyone without permission. We just wanted to be prepared to offer you migration, if things went badly."

The man raised his free hand toward ver in a fist. "You keep back!" Sweat was dripping from his face; Yatima was doing nothing to resist, but the gleisner's skin reported that the man was straining hard against it, as if he was wrestling with some monstrous opponent.

He spoke to Yatima, without taking his eyes off Inoshiro. "What's really going to happen? Tell me! Will the gleisners set off their bombs in space, so you can herd the last of us into your machines?"

"The gleisners have no bombs. And they respect you much more highly than they respect us; the last thing they'd want to do is force fleshers into the polises." They'd faced some strange misconceptions before, but nothing like this level of paranoia.

The woman returned, carrying a small machine with a metal rod shaped into a semi-circle protruding from one end. She touched a control and an arc of blue plasma appeared, joining the tips of the rod. Yatima instructed the Introdus nanoware to begin crawling up the repair system ducts in vis arm, back toward his torso. The man leaned down harder than ever, then the woman approached and began slicing through the limb, high above the elbow.

Yatima didn't waste the nanoware's energy by pestering it with a stream of queries; ve just waited for the strange experience to be over. The interface didn't know what to make of the damage reports from the gleisner's hardware—and it declined to reach into Yatima's self-symbol and perform matching surgery. When the plasma arc broke through to the other side and the man pulled the robot's severed arm away, the corresponding part of Yatima's icon was left mentally protruding from the stump-a kind of phantom presence, only half-free of the feedback loop of embodiment.

When ve dared to check, fifteen doses of the Introdus nanoware had made it to safety. The rest were lost, or heat-damaged beyond repair.

Yatima met the man's eyes and said angrily, "We came here in peace; we would never have violated your autonomy. But now you've limited the choices for others." Without a word, the man placed the plasma saw on the edge of the table and began feeding the gleisner's hand back and forth through the arc, reducing the delicate machinery to slag and smoke. When Francesca returned, she seemed equally outraged by the guards' revelation that nanoware had been brought into the enclave, and the less-than-diplomatic ad hoc remedy they'd employed to deal with it.

Under the Treaty of 2190, Yatima and Inoshiro should have been expelled from Atlanta immediately, but Francesca was prepared to bend the rules to allow them to address the convocation—and to Yatima's surprise, the guards agreed. Apparently they believed that a public interrogation by the assembled fleshers would be the best way to expose the gleisner-Konishi conspiracy.