native life; its first settlers had traveled four thousand light years, from a world that belonged to the P2 panspermia. Most of the locals still wore the ancestral phenotype, a quadruped with hairless, leathery skin, their backs about as high as Rakesh's chest. They communicated with sounds well within his own range of hearing and vocalization, so he chose to comprehend and speak their language himself, greeting the quads who were emerging from their shelters for some early morning exercise. In the node he'd grown lazy and simply perceived everyone to be speaking in his own tongue, but it was far more satisfying to deal directly with these real-time hisses and clicks, hearing all of the genuine sounds and knowing exactly what they meant, instead of wrapping the whole experience in an auditory hallucination of an approximate translation.
When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.
«I see you've made yourself at home,» he teased her.
«Flesh is flesh,» she hissed through her quad mouth. «The shape makes no difference to me.»
Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored — rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence — she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.
«So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?» he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they'd spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa's planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there'd been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl's experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.
«I've told everyone in sight that I'm heading into the bulge,» she said, «but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.»
Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof's communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.
That had been three hundred millennia ago. Since then, though nothing had changed in the basic principles, the machinery that bridged the networks had been extensively refined. The bulge was now encircled by gamma ray transmitters that could hit the nodes of the Aloof's network with pinpoint accuracy, and receivers that monitored the small portion of every communications beam that overshot its target node and spilled out of the Aloof's territory into the galactic disk, making it possible to extract the piggybacked data once it reached its destination. And though Lahl had been faced with the choice of traveling unencrypted or taking the slow road, most travelers had been able to avail themselves of quantum keys, stockpiled over the millennia, ready to be used as the need arose.
The Aloof could not have failed to be aware of this blatant technological parasitism, yet they had acted neither to stamp it out, nor to facilitate the process. Rakesh couldn't help admiring the sheer consistency of their response. They had balanced their wish for privacy with a truly cosmic indifference: swatting probes and spores back into the disk without the least sign of impatience or intemperance, and placidly accepting this trickle of foreign data because it was, quite simply, harmless and irrelevant. Whatever their strange arm's-length interaction with Lahl implied, Rakesh was in no rush to mistake it for the start of some larger, more
When he met up with Parantham outside the town's guest shelter, he found that she'd gone one step further.
«I see you've made yourself at home,» he teased her.
«Flesh is flesh,» she hissed through her quad mouth. «The shape makes no difference to me.»
Rakesh had perceived her as human-shaped back at the node, but her précis had always made it clear that she possessed no innate somatic self-perception. Born in a scape, descended from software that had ultimately been authored — rather than translated from any kind of organic intelligence — she seemed to relate to bodies the way Rakesh did to vehicles.
«So have you picked up any worthwhile gossip yet?» he asked. The whole point of pausing at Massa rather than just routing their transmissions straight into the bulge was to find out if anything had happened to the state of play between the Aloof and the Amalgam in the time they'd spent in transit. Rakesh had already asked Massa's planetary library to brief him on any developments, but there'd been nothing on the official record. That included nothing about Lahl's experience, which showed how much the official record was worth.
«I've told everyone in sight that I'm heading into the bulge,» she said, «but then all they want to talk about is Leila and Jasim.»
Rakesh emitted a quad laugh, which involved more saliva leaving his mouth than he was entirely comfortable with. Leila and Jasim were the pioneers of the bulge. After discovering that it was possible to eavesdrop on the gamma rays spilling out from the Aloof's communications network, and to inject data of their own into the system, they had made the first ever crossing, traveling from Tassef to Massa.
That had been three hundred millennia ago. Since then, though nothing had changed in the basic principles, the machinery that bridged the networks had been extensively refined. The bulge was now encircled by gamma ray transmitters that could hit the nodes of the Aloof's network with pinpoint accuracy, and receivers that monitored the small portion of every communications beam that overshot its target node and spilled out of the Aloof's territory into the galactic disk, making it possible to extract the piggybacked data once it reached its destination. And though Lahl had been faced with the choice of traveling unencrypted or taking the slow road, most travelers had been able to avail themselves of quantum keys, stockpiled over the millennia, ready to be used as the need arose.
The Aloof could not have failed to be aware of this blatant technological parasitism, yet they had acted neither to stamp it out, nor to facilitate the process. Rakesh couldn't help admiring the sheer consistency of their response. They had balanced their wish for privacy with a truly cosmic indifference: swatting probes and spores back into the disk without the least sign of impatience or intemperance, and placidly accepting this trickle of foreign data because it was, quite simply, harmless and irrelevant. Whatever their strange arm's-length interaction with Lahl implied, Rakesh was in no rush to mistake it for the start of some larger, more