Inoshiro's face formed the gestalt for "impressed" with such uncharacteristic purity and emphasis that any inflection hinting at sarcasm would have been redundant.

"The technology might take several centuries to develop," Yatima admitted. "But it will give them the edge in speed, in the long run. Quite apart from being a thousand times more elegant."

Inoshiro shrugged, as if it was all of no consequence, and turned to contemplate the view.

Yatima was confused; ve'd expected Inoshiro to embrace the plan so enthusiastically that vis own cautious approval would seem positively apathetic. But if ve had to argue the case, so be it. "Something like Lac G-1 might not happen so close to Earth again for billions of years, but until we know why it happened, we're only guessing. We can't even be sure that other neutron star binaries will behave in the same way; we can't assume that every other pair will fall together once they cross the same threshold. Lac G-1 might have been some kind of freakish accident that will never be repeated—or it might have been the best possible case, and every other binary might fall much sooner. We just don't know." The old meson jet hypothesis had proved short-lived; no sign of the jets blasting their way through the interstellar medium had ever shown up, and detailed simulations had finally established that color-polarized cores, although strictly possible, were extremely unlikely.

Inoshiro regarded the dying Earth calmly. "What harm could another Lacerta do, now? And what could anyone do to prevent it?"

"Then forget Lacerta, forget gamma-ray bursts! Twenty years ago, we thought the greatest risk to the Earth was an asteroid strike! We can't be complacent just because we survived this, and the fleshers didn't; Lacerta proves that we don't know how the universe works—and it's the things we don't know that will kill us. Or do you think we're safe in the polises forever?"

Inoshiro laughed softly. "No! In a few billion years, the sun will swell up and swallow the Earth. And no doubt we'll flee to another star first… but there'll always be a new threat hanging over us, known or unknown. The Big Crunch in the end, if nothing else." Ve turned to Yatima, smiling. "So what priceless knowledge can Carter-Zimmerman bring back from the stars? The secret to surviving a hundred billion years, instead of ten billion?"

Yatima sent a tag to the scape; the window spun away from the Earth, then the motion-blurred star trails froze abruptly into a view of the constellation Lacerta. The black hole was undetectable at any wavelength, as quiescent in the region's high vacuum as the neutron stars had been, but Yatima imagined a speck of distorted darkness midway between Hough 187 and 10 Lacertae. "How can you not want to understand this? It's just reached across a hundred light years and left half a million people dead."

"The gleisners already have a probe en route to the Lac G-1 remnant."

"Which might tell us nothing. Black holes swallow their own history; we can't count on finding anything there. We have to look further afield. Maybe there's another, older species out there, who'll know what triggered the collision. Or maybe we've just discovered the reason why there are no aliens crisscrossing the galaxy: gamma-ray bursts cut them all down before they have a hope of protecting themselves. If Lacerta had happened a thousand years ago, no one on Earth would have survived. But if we really are the only civilization capable of space travel, then we should be out there warning the others, protecting the others, not cowering beneath the surface—"

Yatima trailed off. Inoshiro was listening politely, but with a slight smile that left no doubt that ve was highly amused. Ve said, "We can't save anyone, Yatima. We can't help anyone."

"No? What have you been doing for the last twenty years, then? Wasting your time?"

Inoshiro shook vis head, as if the question was absurd.

Yatima was bewildered. "You're the one who kept dragging me out of the Mines, out into the world! And now Carter-Zimmerman are going out into the world to try to keep what happened to the fleshers from happening to us. If you don't care about hypothetical alien civilizations, you must still care about the Coalition!"

Inoshiro said, "I feel great compassion for all conscious beings. But there's nothing to be done. There will always be suffering. There will always be death."

"Oh, will you listen to yourself? Always! Always! You sound like that phosphoric acid replicator you fried outside Atlanta!" Yatima turned away, trying to calm down. Ve knew that Inoshiro had felt the death of the fleshers more deeply than ve had. Maybe ve should have waited before raising the subject; maybe it seemed disrespectful to the dead to talk so soon about leaving the Earth behind.

It was too late now, though. Ve had to finish saying what ve'd come here to say.

"I'm migrating to Carter-Zimmerman. What they're doing makes sense, and I want to be part of it."

Inoshiro nodded blithely. "Then I wish you well."

"That's it? Good luck and bon voyage?" Yatima tried to read vis face, but Inoshiro just gazed back with a psychoblast's innocence. "What's happened to you? What have you done to yourself?"

Inoshiro smiled beatifically and held out vis hands. A white lotus flower blossomed from the center of each palm, both emitting identical reference tags. Yatima hesitated, then followed their scent.

It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving… including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core beliefs' failings.

Analysis with a standard tool confirmed that the outlook was universally self-affirming. Once you ran it. you could not change your mind. Once you ran it, you could not be talked out of it. Yatima said numbly, "You were smarter than that. Stronger than that." But when Inoshiro was wounded by Lacerta, what hadn't ve done that might have made a difference? That might have spared ver the need for the kind of anesthetic that dissolved everything ve'd once been?

Inoshiro laughed. "So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?"

"What you are now—" Ve couldn't say it.

What you are now is not Inoshiro.

Yatima stood motionless beside ver, sick with grief, angry and helpless. Ve was not in the fleshers' world anymore; there was no nanoware bullet ve could fire into this imaginary body. Inoshiro had made vis choice, destroying vis old self and creating a new one to follow the ancient meme's dictates, and no one else had the right to question this, let alone the power to reverse it.

Yatima reached out to the scape and crumpled the satellite into a twisted ball of metal floating between them, leaving nothing but the Earth and the stars. Then ve reached out again and grabbed the sky, inverting it and compressing it into a luminous sphere sitting in vis hand.

"You can still leave Konishi." Yatima made the sphere emit the address of the portal to Carter-Zimmerman, and held it out to Inoshiro. "Whatever you've done, you still have that choice."

Inoshiro said gently, "It's not for me, Orphan. I wish you well, but I've seen enough."

Ve vanished.

Yatima floated in the darkness for a long time, mourning Lacerta's last victim.

Then ve sent the handful of stars speeding away across the emptiness of space, and followed them.

The conceptory observed the orphan moving through the portal, leaving Konishi polis behind. With access to public data, it knew of the orphan's recent experiences; it also knew that another Konishi citizen had shared them, and had not made the same choice. The conceptory wasn't interested in scattering Konishi shapers far and wide, like replicating genes; its goal was the efficient use of polis resources for the enrichment of the polis itself.