Orlando stared up at them, ashen but conscious, eyes pleading for something. Inoshiro said flatly, "She's dead." Orlando's face contorted silently.

Yatima looked away and spoke to Inoshiro in IR. "What do we do? Carry him to a place where they can treat him? Fetch someone? I don't know how this works."

"There are thousands of injured people. No one's going to treat him; he's not going to live that long."

Yatima was outraged. "They can't leave him to die!"

Inoshiro shrugged. "You want to try finding a communications link and calling for a doctor?" Ve peered out through the broken wall. "Or do you want to try carrying him to the hospital, and see if he survives the trip?"

Yatima knelt beside Orlando. "What do we do? There are a lot of people hurt, I don't know how long it will take to get help."

Orlando bellowed with pain. A weak shaft of sunlight had appeared, coming through a hole in the ceiling and illuminating the skin of his broken right arm. Yatima glanced up; the storm was over, the clouds were beginning to thin and drift away.

Ve moved to block the light, while Inoshiro crouched behind Orlando, half-lifted him under the arms, and dragged him over the rubble into the shade. The wound in his thigh left a thick trail of blood.

Yatima knelt beside him again. "I still have the Introdus nanoware. I can use it, if that's what you want."

Orlando said clearly, "I want to talk to Liana. Take me to Liana."

"Liana's dead."

"I don't believe you. Take me to her." He was struggling for breath, but he forced the words out defiantly.

Yatima stepped back beneath the hole in the ceiling. In ordinary light the sun appeared as a meek orange disk through the stratosphere's brown haze, but in UV it shone fiercely amidst a blaze of scattered radiation.

Ve left the room, and returned carrying Liana's body one-handed by the collarbone. Orlando covered his face with his unbroken arm and wept loudly.

Inoshiro took the corpse away. Yatima knelt by Orlando a third time, and put vis hand on his shoulder clumsily. "I'm sorry she's dead. I'm sorry that hurt you." Ve could feel Orlando's body shaking with each sob. "What do you want? Do you want to die?"

Inoshiro spoke in IR. "You should have left when you had the chance."

"Yeah? So why did you come hack?"

Inoshiro didn't reply. Yatima swung around to face ver. "You knew about the storm, didn't you? You knew how bad it would be!"

"Yes." Inoshiro made a gesture of helplessness. "But if I'd said anything when we arrived, we might not have had a chance to speak to the other fleshers. And after the convocation, it was too late. It would have just caused panic."

The front wall creaked and lurched forward, breaking loose from the ceiling in a shower of black dust. Yatima sprang to vis feet and backed away, then fired the Introdus into Orlando.

Ve froze. The wall had struck an obstacle; it was tilted precariously, but holding. Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando's body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimize the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalized for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a gray mask over his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, compressing the brain into an ever-tighter description of itself, discarding redundancies as waste.

Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystalline sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.

"What now? How many do you have left?"

Yatima stared at the snapshot, dazed. Ve had violated Orlando's autonomy. Like a lightning bolt, like a blast of ultraviolet, ve had ruptured someone else's skin.

"How many?"

Yatima replied, "Fourteen."

"Then we'd better go use them while we can."

Inoshiro led ver out of the ruins. Yatima shot everyone they came across who looked close to death, and had no one to care for them—reading the snapshots immediately, piping the data in IR into vis gleisner's memory. They'd taken twelve more bridgers when a mob led by the border guards found them.

They started cutting up Yatima first. Ve passed the snapshot data to Inoshiro, then followed.

Before they'd finished destroying vis old body, the link to Konishi returned. The drones had survived the storm.

6

DIVERGENCE

Konishi polis, Earth

24 667 272 518 451 CST

10 December 3015, 3:21:55.605 UT

Yatima looked down on the Earth through the window of the observation bay. The surface wasn't entirely obscured by NOx, but most of it appeared in barely distinguishable shades of muted, rust-tinged gray. Only the clouds and the ice caps stood out, back-lighting the stratosphere impartially to reveal it as a vivid reddish-brown. Spread over the clouds, spread over the snow, it looked like decaying blood mixed with acid and excrement: tainted, corrosive, rotten. The wound left by Lacerta's one swift, violent incision had festered for almost twenty years.

Ve and Inoshiro had constructed this scape together, an orbital way station where refugees could wake to a view of the world they'd left behind as surely as if they'd physically ascended beyond its acid snow and its blinding sky; in reality, they were a hundred meters underground in the middle of a wasteland, but there was no point confronting them with that claustrophobic and irrelevant fact. Now the station was deserted; the last refugees had moved on, and there'd be no more. Famine had taken the last surviving enclaves, but even if they'd hung on for a few more years, plankton and land vegetation were dying so rapidly that the planet would soon be fatally starved of oxygen. The age of flesh was over.

There'd been talk of returning, designing a robust new biosphere from the safety of the polises and then synthesizing it, molecule by molecule, species by species. Maybe that would happen, though support for the idea was already waning. It was one thing to endure hardship in order to go on living in a familiar form, another to he reincarnated in an alien body in an alien world, for the sake of nothing but the philosophy of embodiment. The easiest way by far for the refugees to re-create the lives they'd once led was to remain in the polises and simulate their lost world, and Yatima suspected that in the end most would discover that they valued familiarity far more than any abstract distinction between real and virtual flesh.

Inoshiro arrived, looking calmer than ever. The final trips they'd made together had been grueling; Yatima could still see the emaciated fleshers they'd found in one underground shelter, covered in sores and parasites, delirious with hunger. They'd kissed their robot benefactors' hands and feet, then vomited up the nutrient drink which should have healed their ulcerated stomach linings and passed straight into their bloodstreams. Inoshiro had taken that kind of thing badly, but in the last weeks of the evacuation ve'd become almost placid, perhaps because ve'd realized that the horror was coming to an end.

Yatima said, "Gabriel tells me there are plans in Carter-Zimmerman to follow the gleisners." The gleisners had launched their first inhabited fleet of interstellar craft fifteen years before, sixty-three ships heading out to twenty-one different star systems.

Inoshiro looked bewildered. "Follow them? Why? What's the point of making the same journey twice?"

Yatima wasn't sure if this was a joke, or a genuine misunderstanding. "They're not going to visit the same stars. They'll launch a second wave of exploration, with different targets. And they're not going to mess about with fusion drives like the gleisners. They're going in style. They plan to build wormholes."