Permutation City (46 page)

Five seconds to launch.

She could clone herself. Send one version off with the rest of Elysium, send one version in to warn him.

But she didn't know how. There wasn't time to learn how.

Two seconds. One.

She bunched her fist beside the icon, and wailed. The map of the giant cube flickered blue-white: the new lattice had begun to grow, the outermost processors were reproducing. It was still part of Elysium -- a new grid being simulated by the processors of the old one -- but she knew the watchdog software wouldn't give her a second chance. It wouldn't let her halt the launch and start again.

She looked back through the doorway. The corridor was still sliding smoothly away, a few centimeters a second.
How much further could it go, before the doorway hit a wall, stranding Durham completely?

Swearing, she stepped toward it, and reached through with one hand. The invisible boundary between the environments still let her pass. She crouched at the edge, and reached down to touch the floor; her palm made contact with the carpet as it slipped past.

Shaking with fear, she stood up and crossed the threshold. She stopped to look behind the doorway; the corridor came to a dead end, twelve or fifteen meters away in the direction the doorway was headed. She had four or five minutes, at most.

Durham was still in the garden, still trying to rouse the man. He looked up at her angrily. "What are you doing here?"

She caught her breath. "I missed the launch. And this whole thing's . . . separating. Like the City. You have to get out."

Durham turned back to the stranger. "He looks like a rejuvenated Thomas Riemann, but he could be a descendant. One of hundreds. One of millions, for all we know."

"Millions, where? It looks like he's alone here -- and there's no sign of other environments. You only discovered one communications port, didn't you?"

"We don't know what that means. The only way to be sure he's alone is to wake him and ask him.
And I can't wake him."

"What if we just . . . carried him out of here?
I
know:
there's no reason why doing that should move his model to safer territory -- but if
our
models have been affected by this place, forced to obey human physiology . . . then all the logic behind that has already been undermined."

"What if there are others? I can't abandon them!"

"There's no time!
What can you do for them, trapped in here? If this world is destroyed, nothing. If it survives somehow . . . it will still survive without you."

Durham looked sickened, but he nodded reluctantly.

She said, "Get moving. You're crippled -- I'll carry Sleeping Beauty."

She bent down and tried to lift Riemann -- Thomas or otherwise -- onto her shoulders. It looked easy when firefighters did it. Durham, who'd stopped to watch, came back and helped her. Once she was standing, walking wasn't too hard. For the first few meters.

Durham hobbled alongside her. At first, she abused him, trying insincerely to persuade him to go ahead. Then she gave up and surrendered to the absurdity of their plight. Hushed and breathless, she said, "I never thought I'd witness . . . the disintegration of a universe . . . while carrying a naked merchant banker . . ." She hesitated. "Do you think if we close our eyes and say . . . we don't believe in stairs, then maybe . . ."

She went up them almost crouching under the weight, desperate to put down her burden and rest for a while, certain that if she did they'd never make it.

When they reached the corridor, the doorway was still visible, still moving steadily away. Maria said, "Run ahead and . . . keep it open."

"How?"

"I don't know. Go and stand in the middle . . ."

Durham looked dubious, but he limped forward and reached the doorway well ahead of her. He stepped right through, then turned and stood with one foot on either side, reaching out a hand to her, ready to drag her onto the departing train. She had a vision of him, bisected, one half flopping bloodily into each world.

She said, "I hope this . . . bastard was a great . . . philanthropist. He'd better . . . have been a fucking . . . saint."

She looked to the side of the doorway. The corridor's dead end was only centimeters away. Durham must have read the expression on her face; he retreated into the control room. The doorway touched the wall, then vanished. Maria bellowed with frustration, and dropped Riemann onto the carpet.

She ran to the wall and pounded on it, then sank to her knees.
She was going to die here, inside a stranger's imploding fantasy.
She pressed her face against the cool paintwork.
There was another Maria, back in the old world
--
and whatever else happened, at least she'd saved Francesco. If this insane dream ended, it ended.

Someone put a hand on her shoulder. She twisted around in shock, pulling a muscle in her neck. It was Durham.

"This way. We have to go around.
Hurry.
"

He picked up Riemann -- he must have repaired his ankle in Elysium, and no doubt strengthened himself as well -- and led Maria a short way back down the corridor, through a vast library, and into a storage room at the end. The doorway was there, a few meters from the far wall. Durham tried to walk through, holding Riemann head first.

Riemann's head disappeared as it crossed the plane of the doorway. Durham cried out in shock and stepped back; the decapitation was reversed. Maria caught up with them as Durham turned around and tried backing through the doorway, dragging Riemann after him. Again, the portion of Riemann's body which passed through seemed to vanish -- and as his armpits, where Durham was supporting him, disappeared, the rest of him crashed to the floor. Maria ducked behind the doorway -- and saw Riemann, whole, lying across the threshold.

They couldn't save him. This world had let them come and go -- on its own terms -- but to Riemann himself, the exit they'd created was nothing, an empty frame of wood.

She went back and stepped over him, into Elysium. As the doorway retreated, Riemann's shoulders came into view again. Durham, sobbing with frustration, reached through and dragged the sleeping man along for a meter -- and then his invisible head must have struck the invisible wall, and he could be moved no further.

Durham withdrew into Elysium, just as the doorway became opaque. A second later, they saw the outside wall of the house. The implosion -- or separation -- accelerated as the doorway flew through the air above the grounds; and then the whole scene was encircled by darkness, like a model in a glass paperweight, floating off into deep space.

Maria watched the bubble of light recede, the shapes within melting and reforming into something new, too far away to decipher.
Was Riemann dead, now? Or just beyond their reach?

She said, "I don't understand -- but whatever the Lambertians are doing to us, it's not just random corruption . . . it's not just destroying the TVC rules. That world was
holding together.
As if its own logic had taken precedence over Elysium's. As if it no longer needed us."

Durham said flatly, "I don't believe that." He crouched beside the doorway, weighed down by defeat.

Maria touched his shoulder. He shrugged free. He said, "You'd better hurry up and launch yourself. The other Elysians will have been removed from the seed, but everything else -- all the infrastructure -- should still be there. Use it."

"Alone?"

"Make children, if you want to. It's easy; the utility programs are all in the central library."

"And -- what? You'll do the same?"

"No." He looked up at her and said grimly, "I've had enough.
Twenty-five lives.
I thought I'd finally discovered solid ground -- but now it's all crumbling into illusions and contradictions. I'll kill myself before the whole thing falls apart: die on my own terms, leaving nothing to be explained in another permutation."

Maria didn't know how to respond. She walked over to the interface window, to take stock of whatever was still functioning. After a while, she said, "The Autoverse spy software has stopped working -- and the entire hub has gone dead -- but there's some last-minute summary data in the copy of the central library you made for the seed." She hunted through Repetto's analysis and translation systems.

Durham came and stood beside her; he pointed out a highlighted icon, a stylized image of a swarm of Lambertians.

He said, "Activate that."

They read the analysis together. A team of Lambertians had found a set of field equations -- nothing to do with the Autoverse cellular automaton -- with thirty-two stable solutions. One for each of their atoms. And at high enough temperatures, the same equations predicted the spontaneous generation of matter -- in exactly the right proportions to explain the primordial cloud.

The dance had been judged successful. The theory was gaining ground.

Maria was torn between resentment and pride. "Very clever -- but how will they ever
explain
four humanoid robots abandoned in a meadow?"

Durham seemed bleakly amused. "They arrived in a spaceship, didn't they? Aliens must have sent them, as emissaries. There must be other stars out there -- concealed behind a suitable dust cloud."

"Why should aliens try to tell the Lambertians about the TVC cellular automaton?"

"Maybe they believed in it. Maybe they discovered the Autoverse rules . . . but since they still couldn't explain the origin of the elements, they decided to embed the whole thing in a larger system -- another cellular automaton -- complete with immortal beings to create the Autoverse, primordial cloud and all. But the Lambertians will put them straight: there's no need for such a convoluted hypothesis."

"And now the Autoverse is sloughing us off like dead skin." Maria gazed at the Lambertian field equations; they were far more complex than the Autoverse rules, but they had a strange elegance all their own. She could never have invented them herself; she was sure of that.

She said, "It's not just a matter of the Lambertians out-explaining us.
The whole idea of a creator
tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust . . . or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole . . . or not at all. There never can, and never will be,
Gods."

She displayed a map of Elysium. The dark stain marking processors which had ceased responding had spread out from the six public pyramids and swallowed most of the territories of Riemann, Callas, Shaw, Sanderson, Repetto and Tsukamoto. She zoomed in on the edge of the darkness; it was still growing.

She turned to Durham and pleaded, "Come with me!"

"No. What is there left for me to do? Descend into paranoia again? Wake up wondering if I'm really nothing but a discredited myth of Planet Lambert's humanoid alien visitors?"

Maria said angrily, "You can keep me company. Keep
me
sane. After all you've done to me, you owe me that much."

Durham was unmoved. "You don't need me for that. You'll find better ways."

She turned back to the map, her mind going blank with panic for a moment -- then she gestured at the growing void. "The TVC rules are dissolving, the Lambertians are destroying Elysium --
but what's controlling that process?
There must be deeper rules, governing the clash of theories: deciding which explanations hold fast, and which dissolve.
We can hunt for those rules.
We can try to make sense of what went on here."

Durham said sardonically, "Onward and upward? In search of higher order?"

Maria was close to despair. He was her one link to the old world; without him, her memories would lose all meaning.

"Please!
We can argue this out in the new Elysium.
But there's no time now."

He shook his head sadly. "Maria, I'm sorry -- but I can't follow you. I'm seven thousand years old. Everything I've struggled to build is in ruins. All my certainties have evaporated. Do you know how that feels?"

Maria met his eyes and tried to understand, tried to gauge the depth of his weariness.
Could she have persisted for as long as he had?
Maybe the time came, for everyone, when there was no way forward, no other choice but death. Maybe the Lambertians were right, maybe "infinity" was meaningless . . . and "immortality" was a mirage no human should aspire to.

No
human
--

Maria turned on him angrily. "Do I know how it feels?
However you want it to feel.
Isn't that what you told me? You have the power to choose exactly
who you are.
The old human shackles are gone. If you don't want the weight of your past to crush you . . .
then don't let it!
If you really want to die, I can't stop you -- but don't tell me that you
have no choice.
"

For a moment Durham looked stricken, as if all she'd done was compound his despair, but then something in her tirade seemed to break through to him.