Permutation City (45 page)

Peer turned to Kate. She sat in an attentive pose, head up, eyes averted, as if she was listening for something. The voice of an Elysian hyperintelligence, the endpoint of a billion years of self-directed mutation, reaching out to encompass the whole TVC grid? Discovering their fate? Judging them, forgiving them, and setting them free?

Peer said, "I think you've won the bet. They're not coming back." He glanced at the control panel, and felt a stab of vertigo; more than a hundred trillion years of Standard Time had elapsed. But if the Elysians had cut all ties with them, Standard Time was meaningless. Peer reached out to halt their acceleration, but Kate grabbed him by the wrist.

She said quietly, "Why bother? Let it climb forever. It's only a number, now."

"Yes." He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

"One instruction per century. One instruction per millennium. And it makes no difference. You've finally got your way."

He cradled Kate in his arms, while Elysian aeons slipped away. He stroked her hair, and watched the control panel carefully. Only one number was rising; everything but the strange fiction of Elapsed Standard Time stayed exactly the same.

No longer tied to the growth of the Elysians, the City remained unchanged, at every level. And that meant, in turn, that the infrastructure which Carter had woven into the software for them had also ceased to expand. The simulated "computer" which ran them, composed of the City's scattered redundancies, was now a finite "machine," with a finite number of possible states.

They were mortal again.

It was a strange feeling. Peer looked around the empty walkway, looked down at the woman in his arms, feeling like he'd woken from a long dream -- but when he searched himself for some hint of a waking life to frame it, there was nothing. David Hawthorne was a dead stranger. The Copy who'd toured the Slow Clubs with Kate was as distant as the carpenter, the mathematician, the librettist.

Who am I?

Without disturbing Kate, he created a private screen covered with hundreds of identical anatomical drawings of the brain; his menu of mental parameters. He hit the icon named CLARITY.

He'd generated a thousand arbitrary reasons to live. He'd pushed his philosophy almost as far as it would go. But there was one last step to take.

He said, "We'll leave this place. Launch a universe of our own. It's what we should have done long ago."

Kate made a sound of distress. "How will I live, without the Elysians? I can't survive the way you do: rewiring myself, imposing happiness. I can't do it."

"You won't have to."

"It's been seven thousand years. I want to live among people again."

"Then you'll live among people."

She looked at him hopefully. "We'll create them? Run the ontogenesis software? Adam-and-Eve a new world of our own?"

Peer said, "No. I'll become them. A thousand, a million. Whatever you want. I'll become the Solipsist Nation."

Kate pulled away from him.
"Become?
What does that mean? You don't have to
become
a nation. You can build it with me -- then sit back and watch it grow."

Peer shook his head. "What have I become, already? An endless series of people -- all happy for their own private reasons. Linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there's one 'real' person, enduring through all those arbitrary changes?"

"You remember yourself. You believe you're one person. Why call it a pretence? It's the truth."

"But I don't believe it, anymore. Each person I create is stamped with the illusion of still being this imaginary thing called 'me' -- but that's no real part of their identity. It's a distraction, a source of confusion. There's no reason to keep on doing it -- or to make these separate people follow each other in time. Let them all live together, meet each other, keep you company."

Kate gripped him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. "You can't
become
the Solipsist Nation. That's nonsense. It's rhetoric from an old play. All it would mean is . . . dying. The people the software creates when you're gone won't be
you
in any way."

"They'll be happy, won't they? From time to time? For their own strange reasons?"

"Yes. But --"

"That's all I am, now. That's all that defines me. So when they're happy, they'll be me."

32

"Seventeen down, one to go."

Durham had rendered himself calm and efficient, to deal with the evacuation. Maria, still unmodified, watched -- sick with relief -- as he finally packed Irene Shaw, her seven hundred million offspring, and their four planets' worth of environments, into the bulging Garden-of-Eden-in-progress. A compressed snapshot of the entire civilization flowed down the data paths Durham had created to bypass the suspect hub -- following a dozen independent routes, verified and reverified at every step -- until it crossed the barrier into the region where the new Elysium was being forged.

So far, there'd been no sign that the corruption of the grid was spreading further -- but the last Town Meeting had given Durham just six hours of Standard Time to assemble and launch the new seed. Maria was astonished that they'd appointed him to do the job at all, given that it was his clandestine visit to Planet Lambert which had catalyzed the whole disaster (and they'd left -- nonconscious -- watchdog software running, to monitor his actions, and take over the task if he failed) . . . but he was still the man who'd built and launched Elysium, and apparently they trusted him above anyone else to rescue them from their disintegrating universe, just as he'd rescued the founders from their legendary deteriorating Earth.

Two of the three "hermits" among the founders -- Irene Shaw and Pedro Callas -- had responded to the emergency signals sent into their pyramids from the hub. Despite their millennia of silence, they hadn't sealed their worlds off completely from information from the rest of Elysium.

Thomas Riemann, apparently, had.

Maria checked the clock on the interface window; they had fourteen minutes left.

Durham had set a program running, hours before, to try to break into Riemann's pyramid. He'd succeeded in forging new links with the processors, but without Riemann's personal code, any instructions piped in would be ignored -- and a time-lock triggered by each incorrect attempt made scanning through all ninety-nine-digit combinations impractical. So Durham had instructed a metaprogrammer to build a TVC "machine" to isolate and dissect one of Riemann's processors, to scrutinize the contents of its memory, and to deduce the code from the heavily encrypted tests within.

As the program zeroed in on the final result, Maria said sharply, "You could have done that for my pyramid, couldn't you? And let me sleep?"

Durham shook his head, without looking at her. "Done it from where? I had no access to the border.
This
is only possible because the other founders have granted me
carte blanche."

"I think you could have burrowed through somehow, if you'd set your mind to it."

He was silent for a while, then he conceded, "Perhaps I could have. I did want you to see Planet Lambert. I honestly believed that I had no right to let you sleep through contact."

She hunted for a suitably bitter reply -- then gave up and said wearily, "You had no right to wake me -- but I'm glad I saw the Lambertians."

The code-breaking program said, "In."

There was no time left for decorum, for explaining the crisis and justifying the evacuation. Durham issued a sequence of commands, to freeze all the software running in the pyramid, analyze it, extract all the essential data, and bundle it into the new Garden-of-Eden. Riemann and his children need never know the difference.

The software had other ideas. It acknowledged the access code, but refused to halt.

Maria turned aside and retched drily.
How many people
were in there? Thousands? Millions?
There was no way of knowing. What would happen if the changes in the grid engulfed them? Would the worlds they inhabited implode and vanish, like the inanimate City?

When she could bring herself to look again, Durham had calmly changed tack. He said, "I'm trying to break the lock on communication. See if I can get in on any level, and at least talk to someone. Maybe from the inside they'll have more control; we can't halt their software and download it
en masse,
but maybe they can do that themselves."

"You have eleven minutes."

"I know." He hesitated. "If I have to, I can stick around and launch these people separately. I don't imagine they care whether or not they're in the same universe as the rest of the Elysians."

"Stick around?
You mean clone yourself, and launch one version with the rest of us -- ?"

"No. Zemansky's organized a hundred people to verify the launch from within. I don't have to be there."

Maria was horrified. "But -- why leave yourself out? Why risk it?"

He turned to her and said placidly, "I'm not splitting myself, not again. I had enough of that on twenty-four Earths. I want one life, one history. One explanation. Even if it has to come to an end."

The program he'd been running beeped triumphantly and flashed up a message. "There's a data port for granting physical interaction with one environment, and it seems to be intact."

Maria said, "Send in a few thousand robots, sweep the place for signs of life."

Durham was already trying it. He frowned. "No luck. But I wonder if . . ."

He created a doorway a few meters to his right; it seemed to lead into a lavishly decorated corridor.

Maria said queasily, "You have seven minutes. The port's not working: if a robot can't materialize . . ."

Durham stood and walked through the doorway, then broke into a run. Maria stared after him.
But there was no special danger "in there"
--
no extra risk. The software running their models was equally safe, wherever they pretended their bodies to be.

She caught up with Durham just as he reached an ornate curved staircase; they were upstairs in what seemed to be a large two-story house. He clapped her on the shoulder. "Thank you. Try downstairs, I'll keep going up here."

Maria wished she'd disabled all her human metabolic constraints -- but she was too agitated now to try to work out how to make the changes, too awash with adrenaline to do anything but run down corridors bellowing, "Is there anyone home?"

At the end of one passage, she burst through a door and found herself out in the garden.

She looked about in despair. The grounds were enormous -- and apparently deserted. She stood catching her breath, listening for signs of life. She could hear birdsong in the distance, nothing else.

Then she spotted a white shape in the grass, near a flowerbed full of tulips.

She yelled, "Down here!" and hurried toward it.

It was a young man, stark naked, stretched out on the lawn with his head cradled in his hands. She heard breaking glass behind her, and then a heavy thud on the ground; she turned to see Durham pick himself up and limp toward her.

She knelt by the stranger and tried to wake him, slapping his cheeks. Durham arrived, ashen, clearly shorn of his artificial tranquility. He said, "I think I've sprained an ankle. I could have broken my neck. Don't take any risks -- something strange is going on with our physiology; I can't override the old-world defaults."

Maria seized the man by the shoulders and shook him hard, to no effect. "This is hopeless!"

Durham pulled her away. "I'll wake him. You go back."

Maria tried to summon up a mind's-eye control panel to spirit her away. Nothing happened. "I can't connect with my exoself. I can't get through."

"Use the doorway, then.
Run!
"

She hesitated -- but she had no intention of following Durham into martyrdom. She turned and sprinted back into the house. She took the stairs two at a time, trying to keep her mind blank, then raced down the corridor. The doorway into the evacuation control room was still there -- or at least, still visible. As she ran toward it, she could see herself colliding with an invisible barrier -- but when she reached the frame, she passed straight through.

The clock on the interface window showed twenty seconds to launch.

When she'd insisted on hanging around, Durham had made her set up a program which would pack her into the new Garden-of-Eden in an instant; the icon for it -- a three-dimensional Alice stepping into a flat storybook illustration -- was clearly on display in a corner of the window.

She reached for it, then glanced toward the doorway into Riemann's world.

The corridor was moving, slowly retreating. Slipping away, like the buildings of the City.

She cried out, "Durham! You idiot! It's going to implode!" Her hand shook; her fingers brushed the Alice icon, lightly, without the force needed to signal consent.