The orphan addressed the forum: "People."
The linear conversations between the citizens were public, but muted—degraded in proportion to distance in the scape—and the orphan heard only an unchanging murmur.
It tried again. "People!"
The icon of the nearest citizen—a dazzling multihued form like a stained-glass statue, about two delta high—turned to face the orphan. An innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphan's angle of view straight toward the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphan's own icon—now a crude, unconscious parody of the citizen's—turn the same way.
The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face smiled, and ve said, "Hello, orphan."
A response, at last! The output navigator's feedback detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping down the restlessness which had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any system which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.
The orphan parroted: "Hello, orphan."
The citizen smiled again—"Yes, hello"—then turned back to vis friends.
"People! Hello!"
Nothing happened.
"Citizens! People!"
The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked on its satisfaction rating, making the navigators restless again. Not restless enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.
The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: "People! Hello!" It moved without momentum or inertia, gravity or friction, merely tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigator's requests for data, which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphan's point-of-view. The matching bits from the output navigator determined where and how the orphan's speech and icon were merged into the scape.
The navigators learned to move close enough to the citizens to be easily heard. Some responded—"Hello, orphan"—before turning away. The orphan echoed their icons hack at them: simplified or intricate, rococco or spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of luminous smoke, or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless black—but always the same biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the letter A in a hundred mad monks' illuminated manuscripts.
Gradually, the orphan's input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual gestalt tag—a quality like a distinctive odor for a flesher, though more localized, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope—a late-developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors—began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity—every citizen's icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag—and expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadn't previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.
The citizen exclaimed angrily, "Don't do that, idiot!"
"Hello!"
"No one will believe you if you claim to be me—least of all me. Understand? Now go away!" This citizen had metallic, pewter-gray skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.
"No!" The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. "See? I challenge you—and you can't respond. So why bother lying?"
"Hello!"
"Go away"
The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.
"Hello, citizen!"
The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. "Don't you know who you are? Don't you know your own signature?"
Another citizen said calmly, "It must be the new orphan—still in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it."
This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, "Lion." It tried mimicking the new citizen—and suddenly all three of them were laughing.
The third citizen said, "It wants to he you now, Gabriel."
The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, "If it doesn't know its own name, we should call it 'idiot.'"
"Don't be cruel. I could show you memories, little part-sibling." The third citizen's icon was a featureless black silhouette.
"Now it wants to be Blanca."
The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three responded by chanting strange linear sounds which meant nothing—"Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!"—just as the orphan sent out the gestalt images and tags.
Short-term pattern recognizers seized on the connection, and the orphan joined in the linear chanting, continued it for a while, when the others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.
The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, "I'm Inoshiro."
The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and said, "I'm Gabriel."
The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it in front of vis trunk, and said, "I'm Blanca."
The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear word they'd spoken, aping their hand gesture. Symbols had formed for all three of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear words together—even though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.
The citizen whose icon had made them all chant "Inoshiro" said, "So far so good. But how does it get a name of its own.
The one with its tag bound to "Blanca" said, "Orphans name themselves."
The orphan echoed, "Orphans name themselves.'
The citizen bound to "Gabriel" pointed to the one bound to "Inoshiro," and said, "Ve is—?" The citizen bound to "Blanca" said "Inoshiro."
Then the citizen bound to "Inoshiro" pointed back at ver and said "Ve is ?" This time, the citizen bound to "Blanca" replied, "Blanca." The orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate systems which helped make sense of the scape's geometry, and completing the pattern easily even when no one else did.
Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and said: "Ve is?" The input navigator spun the orphan's angle of view, trying to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the orphan, it moved its point of view backward, closer to the golden-furred citizen-momentarily breaking step with the output navigator.
Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itself-a crude amalgam of the three Citizens' icons, all black fur and yellow metal-not just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected channels, but as a vivid scape-object beside the other three.
This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to "Gabriel" was pointing at.
The infotrope went wild. It couldn't complete the unfinished regularity—it couldn't answer the game's question for this strange fourth citizen-but the hole in the pattern needed to he filled.
The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and color, out there in the scape… changes perfectly mirroring its own random fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens, sometimes simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerized the regularity detectors for a while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.