The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (54 page)

Abelsmythe and Voltman, and – and—”

I could not remember any more of it.

“Blake was hung . . .”

“Maxwell who was very young,” Horejsi finished. “And the first ‘someone’ you mentioned was Paschalle, but now I can’t think of the second, and I’m already forgetting parts of the rhyme myself In 1388, the oldest was – someone – ”

“Dryburn,” I said. “The only one older than Tyrwhitt himself—”

“And the only one I knew in 1388,” Tyrwhitt said. “I thought he was an arrogant asshole, actually, but the only person I could really talk math with. And it’s rather sad because they were bright, talented people, and probably without the original discovery and my teaching, they’d just have been smart people who went on to obscure careers, but Peron didn’t want to take any chances. With the tools and compounds he took back in his kit, probably none of the deaths looked like a murder, either, at least not to a fourteenth-century coroner.” He sighed, swirled his hot coffee and whiskey mix, and took another sip. “Still, murder does stick in the craw, doesn’t it? Especially murdering someone for having brains and talent; even more especially, men who apparently would have been my closest friends. So I know something of a whole other life that didn’t happen for me, and I don’t know quite how to feel about that.”

“It’s your life,” I said slowly, “but it’s our world. So we’re in process of vanishing or at least transforming. I can feel some sympathy for you, but what about us?”

“Bear with me for a moment. I claim the privilege of explaining myself because you will have to understand, if you decide you want to undo what Peron has done.”

“If we decide. If?” Horejsi sounded outraged. “Our job is to—”

“Just so. My own sense of – well, ethics I suspect? – thinks you should have a chance to do your job.”

I was hopelessly confused; he sounded like he was defying us, and turning Peron and himself in, and playing some obscure game to delay us, and asking for our help – all at once. “Perhaps,” I said, “We don’t have much choice except to let you tell us in your own way.”

“Perhaps that is true. I dislike presenting a choice so bluntly. It seems rude.” He watched the coffee swirl in his cup as if it were a crystal ball, and Horejsi and I sat still as stones until he went on. “Anyway, I’ve been over the databases and through the libraries, and all of the eleven are gone wherever I look, now. The Inconsistency Principle is kicking in fast and hard, and I’ve been helping it along by sending out random e-mails, getting people to look for those names – sweepstakes contests, questions to librarians, that sort of thing. You’re probably among the last five percent or so of people who remember them.”

“Then we’re too late,” Horejsi said. “Peron has erased the whole modern world, and we’re – well, I suppose we’re already not who we were, and about to either cease to be or be someone else.” She rested her hand on my arm; I put my hand on hers.

“There’s a great deal more casopropagation still to happen,” Tyrwhitt said, “and I suppose you and your bosses can still do a great deal to undo it, if you choose to tell them what I am about to tell you. If they jump an agent back to take my place in my bed, for example, and position another one to kill Peron on arrival, it might still all be undone.

“But they would have to decide to do it right away – and I’m quite sure they won’t make that decision at once, unless you contact them almost right away, shout at them to do it now, and one way or another shake them into it. That’s your decision: to try to get through to them, or to just let things happen as they’re happening. Hear me out, and decide. After all, Mr Rastigevat, as you say, it was my decision but it is your world. You get to decide which one you will be retaining.

“So what I propose is that I will explain why Peron did it, and why I have chosen to enlist on his side in this conflict, and finally ask you not to interfere – but I will give you the chance to interfere. You will be able to walk right out of here and call FBI headquarters. I won’t stop you if you choose to do that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “You have told us several times you approve of whatever it is Peron is trying to do.” Truly, I thought it might already be too late. It’s an endless source of frustration to FBI field agents that the desk never authorizes anything soon enough to do any good. “Why would you let us walk out of here, call our superiors, and fight for a crisis mission to stop you?”

“My peculiar taste, I suppose.” He sighed, and looked from one of us to the other. “It is only that . . . well. There is an idea that interests me, the idea of consent. I suppose you might say it’s one of those things that mathematicians love, taking concepts like ‘obvious,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘complex,’ and making them precise. I am interested in the idea of having someone consent to this – actually in following up on Peron’s idea about it, which I think was right.”

“Peron got someone’s consent to end the world?” Horejsi asked. “Whose? How could he possibly – ”

“I think Peron made an astonishing and correct judgment about what needed to be done, and why. To carry out his judgment, he performed a more or less permanent kidnapping, and a variety of other crimes against me, but he ultimately depended on my consenting to cooperate; if his recordings had not persuaded me that what he was doing was right, his scheme would have unraveled.”

“Did the eleven consent to be killed?” I asked. “Did they agree never to be the brilliant, admired people they would have been?”

“They did not. And that is another part of my evidence in reasoning about all of this, you see. The whole thing is made the more confusing, of course, because I am a superb mathematician, but not necessarily any more ethical than any of the rest of you. So I’m quite sure of my reasoning, and not the least bit sure about my premises. Nonetheless, I find I admire what Peron did and how he chose to do it, and so, as far as my understanding reaches, I intend to try to do likewise.” He rose and added coffee, and liquor, to our cups, without asking. Neither Horejsi nor I objected; for myself, I can say that I probably needed all the warmth I could get. “He chose a way that required the consent of one person who would be utterly changed – me. His way of doing things required that I consent to be someone utterly different from the person I would have been. To coin a phrase, you might call me an extremely representative sample.”

“You’ve read Gödel about random numbers,” I said. “But doesn’t indexical derivability show there’s no true randomness, only chaos and complexity?”

“Imagine,” he said, “a world where the sciences had to develop without indexical derivability – one where the sciences were based on setting up repeated tests of physical, chemical, and biological processes, or observing the world. And without the eleventh and fourteenth theorems, you’d never know about the complectisons, so you wouldn’t be able to study those functions effectively. The numbers might as well have a random component for all you knew, and you’d have to use Gödelian statistics. Probably it would have developed a lot earlier. You see what a different world we are thinking of launching?”

“We’re not, you are,” Horejsi said firmly. “I have no idea what either of you have been talking about, but I gather that somehow you think the consent of two of us is the same thing as the consent of a billion people.”

“Half the people on Earth are slaves, and you know the market is always booming in ways to prevent suicide. What if I decided to obtain their consent?”

That one kind of froze me. Officially I knew slaves couldn’t consent to anything; that was basic law. But what if the change of history made a slave Free – or even Com’n, or Liejt while we’re at it? Wouldn’t he surely consent retroactively?

I could see how Tyrwhitt had been seduced into thinking about this problem. The math was fascinating. I wanted to spend hours just talking about that, but Horejsi had that strange I am about to inexplicably explode expression she often got, right when the math was really interesting, so it didn’t seem like a good idea.

“So why not two people, one Com’n and one Liejt, both intimately involved with the case already? Who could I ask otherwise? Everyone? And how would we put their answers together? I suppose we could gather their answers – here, in the Year of Grace 2014, with the forty-third Lancaster on the throne of the world, I have at hand a communication system that would allow me to call the whole almost-one-billion Christian beings on all the continents, every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve, Liejt or Com’n, slave or Free, Espano, Russky, Fransche, English, and all the minor nations as well. I could use that marvelous communication system to call every one of them and ask, ‘Would you like to vanish or be someone else utterly, because the world that would come into being would be, in ways that might or might not make any sense to you, better than the one we live in now?’ I also have no doubt, speaking as a mathematician, that I could devise some ingenious way of putting all their expressed thoughts, fears, and hopes together into one common thought, as the parliament has sometimes essayed to do, and as the Athenians and Romans are alleged to have done; perhaps something as simple as the casting of a verdict as is done with a jury. Yet somehow that revolts me; I do not think a verdict is made better by the number of hands raised to make it – that seems an idea that could easily become a snare for the half-witted. The decision of one, or a few, reasonably wise, merciful, and kind people, it seems to me, is better than that of a billion indifferent.

“So I have chosen to follow the model that Alvarez Peron has shown me. I was called to stand in for everyone of my time, and all the ones to come after, and given no choice about having the choice; he said, ‘These are my reasons, choose,’ and I chose.

“Part of what I chose is to pass a part of the choice on to you. We are in the last days or weeks of your possible consent. If you do not choose, what I have done will stand; or you may assent in full and say, let it stand; or – if you choose otherwise – you may try to stop me, and we shall contend and see who is the stronger. But I am offering you two people – and only you two people – a chance, and just a chance, to try to undo my choice, because you are concerned in it. You stand in for all the people who are about to have never existed, or to be someone else entirely; I will tell you what will be gained if you choose to vanish in those ways, and you will decide if it is worth it.”

“By deciding to die?” Horejsi asked.

“No, not to die,” I said. I could see at once that was one of those times when words just make a muddle of things, because they combine so many meanings that are logically separate, and she was a creature of words. “Once a soul has come to exist, it has no exit from existence but to die, but when souls abruptly have never existed, nothing experiences the death. So he’s offering us the chance to try to be what exists after it all damps back down; and since there is only one time, at any given moment we’ll exist or not, but we won’t cross over – that is, die – between existing and not existing.” I looked to see if she got it, and what she might be feeling about it if she did; I was the only person who could read her facial expressions, but she was really the one of us who understood all this human-feelings stuff, and it just seemed to me that if Tyrwhitt wanted us to consent (or not), it had to be a matter of how the Christian souls of the Earth ought to feel about it, or not – which was more her department than mine.

Her head was turned at an angle to get her ear, not her eyes, pointed at me; her Riemann eyes were gone, and she wore dark glasses to hide whatever functionless eyes she did have. A big dog on a harness sat beside her. I knew in a moment I would not remember the name “Riemann.”

No, of course I would – it was the name of the dog.

“I have been blind from birth, Rastigevat,” she said, “and yet, I have the dearest, sweetest memory of what your face looks like when you’re sad, or make one of your terrible jokes, or worry about me. And I try to hold on to it, recall it more strongly, and it slips away. Is that what it will be like for everyone?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Then, Magister Tyrwhitt,” she said, “how can you ask us to give all this up? And how did Peron persuade you that you should?”

Tyrwhitt sighed, and said, “This will be more difficult than I had thought, and I had not thought it would be easy.” He held his breath for a moment, unconsciously stroking the stump of his thumb, and finally went on. “The man we all know as Peron – how strange to think that the real name of a man of his gifts will be lost forever – had taken the step that Einstein, Copland, and Turing all struggled all their lives to achieve. Peron finally united matter and meaning in a single theory, and using that theory he could meaningfully measure meaningfulness itself – know how much meaning there was within our event horizon, as well as how much meaning there had been, and how much there could be. I can tell already, Mr Rastigevat, that your training in the physical sciences and logic is fading from your memory, and you will not retain the ideas you need to understand me much longer; so do not object, as it will only cost time.

“At root, things and ideas are one; meaning in the soul and causality in the universe are one. Peron cracked this impossible nut – if I remain here and live long enough, I may just barely reach the point he reached, but I doubt I shall have anyone I can teach it to. And what he found was that Christian Eu rope had made a terrible mistake; when Henry VI of England became Henry I of the World, and decreed that ‘all the world shall be under the Pope or under the ground,’ and his airships went forth in the Great Erasure, to make an empty world for the Christians of Eu rope to grow into . . . he was only doing what any other civilization of his time might have done . . . he felt no wickedness, saw no reason to think anything of it. A few thousand preserved bodies in barrels of formaldehyde, and because of Maxwell’s pleas, the largely unreadable books of such peoples as had books, was not only all that was saved but all he could have imagined wanting to save.”