As they walked down the corridor toward the Convocation Hall, Inoshiro said in IR, "They can't all be like this. Remember Orlando and Liana."

"I remember Orlando ranting about the evil gleisners and their wicked plans."

"And I remember Liana setting him straight."

The Convocation Hall was a large cylindrical space, roughly the same shape as the building itself. Concentric rows of seats converged on a circular stage—and there were about a thousand bridgers filling them. Behind and above the seats, on the cylinder's wall, giant screens displayed the images of representatives from other enclaves. Yatima could easily distinguish the avian and amphibian exuberants, but ve had no doubt that the unmodified appearance of the others hid a greater range of variation.

The dream apes were not represented.

The guards stayed behind as Francesca led them up onto the stage. It was divided into three tiers; nine bridgers stood on the outermost tier, facing the audience, and three stood on the second.

"These are your translators," Francesca explained. "Pause after every sentence, and wait for all of them to finish." She pointed out a slight indentation on the stage, at the very center. "Stand here to be heard; anywhere else, you'll be inaudible." Yatima had already noticed the unusual acoustics—they'd walked through excesses and absences of background noise, and the intensity of Francesca's voice had fluctuated strangely. There were complex acoustic mirrors and baffles hanging from the ceiling, and the gleisner's skin had reported sudden air pressure gradients which were probably due to some form of barrier or lens.

Francesca took center stage and addressed the convocation. "I am Francesca Canetti of Atlanta. I believe I am presenting to you Yatima and Inoshiro of Konishi polis. They claim to bring serious news, and if it's true it concerns us all. I ask you to listen to them carefully, and question them closely."

She stepped aside. Inoshiro muttered in IR, "Nice of her to inspire such confidence in us."

Inoshiro repeated the account of Lacerta G-1 that ve'd given to Francesca in the jungle, pausing for the translators and clarifying some terms in response to their queries. The inner tier of three translators spoke first, then the outer nine offered their versions; even with the acoustics arranged to allow some of them to speak simultaneously, it was painfully slow. Yatima could understand that automating the process would have gone against the bridgers' whole culture, but they still should have had some more streamlined way to communicate in an emergency. Or maybe they did, but only for a predetermined set of natural disasters.

As Inoshiro began describing the predicted effects on the Earth, Yatima tried to judge the mood of the audience. Flesher gestalt, limited by anatomy, was much more subdued than the polis versions, but ve thought ve could detect a growing number of faces expressing consternation. There was no dramatic change sweeping through the hall, but ve decided to interpret this optimistically: anything was better than panic.

Francesca moderated the responses. The first came from the representative of an enclave of statics; he spoke a dialect of English, so the interface slipped the language into Yatima's mind.

"You are shameless. We expect no honor from the simulacra of the shadows of departed cowards, but will you never give up trying to wipe the last trace of vitality from the face of the Earth?" The static laughed humorlessly. "Did you honestly believe that you could frighten us with this risible fairy-tale of 'quarks' and 'gamma rays' raining from the sky, and then we'd all file meekly into your insipid virtual paradise? Did you imagine that a few cheap, shocking words would send us fleeing from the real world of pain and ecstasy into your nightmare of perfectibility?" He gazed down at them with a kind of fascinated loathing. "Why can't you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we'll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery."

Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicitors.

Ve whispered to Francesca, dismayed, "I thought religion was long gone, even among the statics."

"God is dead, but the platitudes linger." Yatima couldn't bring verself to ask whether torture and slavery also lingered, but Francesca seemed to read vis face, and added, "Including a lot of confused rhetoric about free will. Most statics aren't violent, but they view the possibility of atrocities as essential for virtue—what philosophers call `the Clockwork Orange fallacy.' So in their eyes, autonomy makes the polises a kind of amoral Hell, masquerading as Eden."

Inoshiro was struggling to respond, in English. "We don't ask you to come into the polises if you don't wish to. And we aren't lying in order to frighten you; we only want you to be prepared."

The static smiled serenely. "We are always prepared. This is our world, not yours; we understand its perils."

Inoshiro began to speak earnestly about shelter, fresh water, and the options for a viable food supply. The static interrupted ver, laughing loudly. "The final insult was choosing the millennium. A superstition for addled children."

Inoshiro was bewildered. "But that's gigatau away!"

"Close enough to make your contempt transparent." The static bowed mockingly, and his image vanished.

Yatima gazed at the blank screen, unwilling to accept what it seemed to imply. Ve asked Francesca, "Will others in his enclave have heard Inoshiro speak?"

"A few, almost certainly."

"And they could choose to go on listening?"

"Of course. No one censors the net."

There was still hope, then. The statics weren't entirely beyond reach, like the dream apes.

The next response came from an unmodified-looking exuberant woman, speaking a language unfamiliar to the library. When the translation came, she turned out to be asking for more details of the process that was assumed to be robbing the neutron stars of their angular momentum.

Inoshiro had grafted extensive knowledge of Kozuch Theory into vis mind, and ve had no trouble answering; Yatima, wanting to stay fresh for the Mines, understood slightly less. But ve did know that the computations linking Kozuch's Equation to the neutron stars' dynamics were intractably difficult, and it was mainly just a process of elimination that had left polarization as the most plausible theory.

The exuberant listened calmly; Yatima couldn't tell if this was mere courtesy, or a sign that someone was taking them seriously at last. When the outer-tier translator was finished, the exuberant made a further comment.

"With such low tidal forces it would take many times longer than the lifetime of the universe for the runaway polarization state to tunnel through the energy barrier and dominate the confinement state. Polarization cannot he the cause." Yatima was astonished. Was this confident assertion misplaced—or a mistranslation—or did the exuberant have a solid mathematical reason for it? "However, I accept that the observations are unambiguous. The neutron stars will collide, the gamma-ray flash will occur. We will make preparations."

Yatima wished she could have said more, but with twelve translators involved a prolonged discussion on the subject would have taken days. And they'd finally had one small victory, so ve savored it; a post mortem of the neutron stars' physics could wait.