Permutation City

23

Maria woke from dreamless sleep, clearheaded, tranquil. She opened her eyes and looked around. The bed, the room, were unfamiliar; both were large and luxurious. Everything appeared unnaturally pristine, unsullied by human habitation, like an expensive hotel room. She was puzzled, but unperturbed; an explanation seemed to be on the verge of surfacing. She was wearing a nightdress she’d never seen before in her life.

She suddenly remembered the Landau Clinic. Chatting with the technicians. Borrowing the marker pen. The tour of the recovery rooms. The anesthetist asking her to count.

She pulled her hands out from beneath the sheet. Her left palm was blank; the comforting message she’d written there was gone. She felt the blood drain from her face.

Before she had a chance to think, Durham stepped into the room. For a moment, she was too shocked to make a sound—then she screamed at him, “What have you done to me? I’m the Copy, aren’t I? You’re running the Copy!” Trapped in the launch software, with two minutes to live?

Durham said quietly, “Yes, you’re the Copy.”

“How? How did you do it? How could I let it happen?” She stared at him, desperate for a reply, enraged more than anything else by the thought that they might both vanish before she’d heard the explanation, before she understood how he’d broken through all of her elaborate safeguards. But Durham just stood by the doorway looking bemused and embarrassed—as if he’d anticipated a reaction like this, but couldn’t quite credit it now that it was happening.

Finally, she said, “This isn’t the launch, is it? This is later. You’re another version. You stole me, you’re running me later.”

“I didn’t steal you.” He hesitated, then added cautiously, “I think you know exactly where you are. And I agonized about waking you—but I had to do it. There’s too much going on here that you’ll want to see, want to be a part of; I couldn’t let you sleep through it all. That would have been unforgivable.”

Maria disregarded everything he’d said. “You kept my scan file after the launch. You duplicated it, somehow.”

“No. The only place your scan file data ever went was the Garden-of-Eden configuration. As agreed. And now you’re in Permutation City. In the TVC universe—now commonly known as Elysium. Running on nothing but its own laws.”

Maria sat up in bed slowly, bringing her knees up to her chest, trying to accept the situation without panicking, without falling apart. Durham was insane, unpredictable. Dangerous. When was she going to get that into her skull? In the flesh, she could probably have broken his fucking neck if she had to, to defend herself—but if he controlled this environment, she was powerless: he could rape her, torture her, do anything at all. The very idea of him attacking her still seemed ludicrous—but she couldn’t rely on the way he’d treated her in the past to count for anything. He was a liar and a kidnapper. She didn’t know him at all.

Right now, though, he was being as civilized as ever; he seemed intent on keeping up the charade. She was afraid to test this veneer of hospitality—but she forced herself to say evenly, “I want to use a terminal.”

Durham gestured at the space above the bed, and a terminal appeared. Maria’s heart sank; she realized that she’d been hanging on to the slender hope that she might have been human. And that was still possible. Durham himself had once been memory-wiped and fooled into thinking he was a Copy, when he was merely a visitor. Or at least he’d claimed that it had happened, in another world.

She tried half a dozen numbers, starting with Francesca’s, ending with Aden’s. The terminal declared them all invalid. She couldn’t bring herself to try her own. Durham watched in silence. He seemed to be caught between genuine sympathy and a kind of clinical fascination—as if an attempt to make a few phone calls cast doubt on her sanity; as if she was engaged in some bizarre, psychotic behavior worthy of the closest scrutiny: peering behind a mirror in search of the objects seen in the reflection; talking back to a television program… or making calls on a toy phone.

Maria pushed the floating machine away angrily; it moved easily, but came to a halt as soon as she took her hands off it. Patchwork VR and its physics-of-convenience seemed like the final insult.

She said, “Do you think I’m stupid? What does a dummy terminal prove?”

“Nothing. So why don’t you apply your own criteria?” He said, “Central computer,” and the terminal flashed up an icon-studded menu, headed permutation city computing facility. “Not many people use this interface, these days; it’s the original version, designed before the launch. But it still plugs you into as much computing power as the latest co-personality links.”

He showed Maria a text file. She recognized it immediately; it was a program she’d written herself, to solve a large, intentionally difficult, set of Diophantine equations. The output of this program was the key they’d agreed upon to unlock Durham’s access to the other Copies, “after” the launch.

He ran it. It spat out its results immediately: a screenful of numbers, the smallest of which was twenty digits long. On any real-world computer, it should have taken years.

Maria was unimpressed. “You could have frozen us while the program was running, making it seem like no time had passed. Or you could have generated the answers in advance.” She gestured at the terminal. “I expect you’re faking all of this: you’re not talking to a genuine operating system, you’re not really running the program at all.”

“Feel free to alter some parameters in the equations, and try again.”

She did. The modified program “ran” just as quickly, churning out a new set of answers. She laughed sourly. “So what am I supposed to do now? Verify all this in my head? You could put any bullshit you liked on the screen; I wouldn’t know the difference. And if I wrote another program to check the results, you could fake its operation, too. You control this whole environment, don’t you? So I can’t trust anything. Whatever I do to try to test your claims, you can intervene and make it go your way. Is that why you wanted my scan file, all along? So you could lock me in here and bombard me with lies—finally ‘prove’ all your mad ideas to someone?”

“You’re being paranoid now.”

“Am I? You’re the expert.”

She looked around the luxurious prison cell. Red velvet curtains stirred in a faint breeze. She slipped out of bed and crossed the room, ignoring Durham; the more she argued with him, the harder it was to be physically afraid of him. He’d chosen his form of torture, and he was sticking to it.

The window looked out on a forest of glistening towers—no doubt correctly rendered according to all the laws of optics, but still too slick to be real… like some nineteen twenties Expressionist film set. She’d seen the sketches; this was Permutation City—whatever hardware it was running on. She looked down. They were seventy or eighty stories up, the street was all but invisible, but just below the window, a dozen meters to the right, a walkway stretched across to an adjacent building, and she could see the puppet citizens, chatting together in twos and threes as they strode toward their imaginary destinations. All of this looked expensive—but slowdown could buy a lot of subjective computing power, if that was the trade-off you wanted to make. How much time had passed in the outside world? Years? Decades?

Had she managed to save Francesca?

Durham said, “You think I’ve kidnapped your scan file, and run this whole city, solely for the pleasure of deceiving you?”

“It’s the simplest explanation.”

“It’s ludicrous, and you know it. I’m sorry; I know this must be painful for you. But I didn’t do it lightly. It’s been seven thousand years; I’ve had a lot of time to think it over.”

She spun around to face him. “Stop lying to me!”

He threw his hands up, in a gesture of contrition—and impatience. “Maria… you are in the TVC universe. The launch worked, the dust hypothesis has been vindicated. It’s a fact, and you’d better come to terms with that, because you’re now part of a society which has been living with it for millennia.

“And I know I said I’d only wake you if Planet Lambert failed—if we needed you to work on the biosphere seed. All right, I’ve broken my word on that. But… it was the wrong promise to make. Planet Lambert hasn’t failed; it’s succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. How could I let you sleep through that?”

An interface window appeared in midair beside her, showing a half-lit blue-and-white world. “I don’t expect the continents will look familiar. We’ve given the Autoverse a lot of resources; seven thousand years, for most of us, has been about three billion for Planet Lambert.”

Maria said flatly, “You’re wasting your time. Nothing you show me is going to change my mind.” But she watched the planet, transfixed, as Durham moved the viewpoint closer.

They broke through the clouds near the east coast of a large, mountainous island, part of an archipelago straddling the equator. The bare surface rock of the peaks was the color of ochre; no mineral she’d included in the original design… but time, and geochemistry, could have thrown up something new. The vegetation, which covered almost every other scrap of land, right to the water line, came in shades of blue-green. As the viewpoint descended, and the textures resolved themselves, Maria saw only “grasses” and “shrubs”—nothing remotely like a terrestrial tree.

Durham zeroed in on a meadow not far from the coast—a few hundred meters back, according to the scale across the bottom of the image—and about what she would have guessed from cues in the landscape, unexpectedly validated. What looked at first like a cloud of wind-borne debris—seeds of some kind?—blowing above the grass resolved into a swarm of shiny black “insects.” Durham froze the image, then zoomed in on one of the creatures.

It was no insect by the terrestrial definition; there were four legs, not six, and the body was clearly divided into five segments: the head; sections bearing the forelegs, wings, and hind legs; and the tail. Durham made hand movements and rotated the view. The head was blunt, not quite flat, with two large eyes—if they were eyes: shiny bluish disks, with no apparent structure. The rest of the head was coated in fine hairs, lined up in a complex, symmetrical pattern which reminded Maria of Maori facial tattoos. Sensors for vibration—or scent?

She said, “Very pretty, but you forgot the mouth.”

“They put food into a cavity directly under the wings.” He rotated the body to show her. “It adheres to those bristles, and gets dissolved by the enzymes they secrete. You’d think it would fall out, but it doesn’t—not until they’ve finished digesting it and absorbing nutrients, and then a protein on the bristles changes shape, switching off the adhesion. Their whole stomach is nothing but this sticky droplet hanging there, open to the air.”

“You might have come up with something more plausible.”

Durham laughed. “Exactly.”

The single pair of wings were translucent brown, looking like they were made of a thin layer of the same stuff as the exoskeleton. The four legs each had a single joint, and terminated in feathery structures. The tail segment had brown-and-black markings like a bull’s-eye, but there was nothing at the center; a dark tube emerged from the bottom of the rim, narrowing to a needle-sharp point.

“The Lambertians have diploid chromosomes, but only one gender. Any two of them can inject DNA, one after the other, into certain kinds of plant cell; their genes take over the cell and turn it into a cross between a cyst and an egg. They usually choose a particular spot on the stems of certain species of shrub. I don’t know if you’d call it parasitism—or just nest-building on a molecular level. The plant nourishes the embryo, and survives the whole process in perfect health—and when the young hatch, they return the favor by scattering seeds. Their ancestors stole some of the control mechanisms from a plant virus, a billion years ago. There are a lot of genetic exchanges like that; the “kingdoms” are a lot more biochemically similar here than they were on Earth.”

Maria turned away from the screen. The stupidest thing was, she kept wanting to ask questions, press him for details. She said, “What’s next? You zoom right in and show me the fine anatomical structure, the insect’s cells, the proteins, the atoms, the Autoverse cells—and that’s supposed to convince me that the whole planet is embedded in the Autoverse? You unfreeze this thing, let it fly around—and I’m meant to conclude that no real-world computer could ever run an organism so complex, modeled at such a deep level? As if I could personally verify that every flap of its wings corresponded to a valid sequence of a few trillion cellular automaton states. It’s no different than the equation results. It wouldn’t prove a thing.”

Durham nodded slowly. “All right. What if I showed you some of the other species? Or the evolutionary history? The paleogenetic record? We have every mutation on file since the year zero. You want to sit down with that and see if it looks authentic?”

“No. I want a terminal that works. I want you to let me call my original. I want to talk to her—and between us, maybe we can decide what I’m going to do when I get out of this fucking madhouse and into my own JSN account.”

Durham looked rattled—and for a moment she believed she might finally be getting through to him. But he said, “I woke you for a reason. We’re going to be making contact with the Lambertians soon. It might have been sooner—but there’ve been complications, political delays.”

He’d lost her completely now. “‘Contact with the Lambertians?’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

He gestured at the motionless insect, backside and genitals still facing them. ‘This is not some species I picked at random. This is the pinnacle of Autoverse life. They’re conscious, self-aware, highly intelligent. They have almost no technology—but their nervous system is about ten times more complex than a human’s—and they can go far beyond that for some tasks, performing a kind of parallel computing in swarms. They have chemistry, physics, astronomy. They know there are thirty-two atoms—although they haven’t figured out the underlying cellular automaton rules yet. And they’re modeling the primordial cloud. These are sentient creatures, and they want to know where they came from.”

Maria turned her hand in front of the screen, bringing the Lambertian’s head back into view. She was beginning to suspect that Durham actually believed every word he was saying—in which case, maybe he hadn’t, personally, contrived these aliens. Maybe some other version of him—the flesh-and-blood original?—was deceiving both of them. If that was the case, she was arguing with the wrong person—but what was she supposed to do instead? Start shouting pleas for freedom to the sky?

She said numbly, “Ten times more complex than a human brain?”

“Their neurons use conducting polymers to carry the signal, instead of membrane action potentials. The cells themselves are comparable in size to a human’s—but each axon and dendrite carries multiple signals.” Durham moved the viewpoint behind the Lambertian’s eye, and showed her. A neuron in the optic nerve, under close examination, contained thousands of molecules like elaborately knotted ropes, running the whole length of the cell body. At the far end, each polymer was joined to a kind of vesicle, the narrow molecular cable dwarfed by the tiny pouch of cell membrane pinched off from the outside world. “There are almost three thousand distinct neurotransmitters; they’re all proteins, built from three sub-units, with fourteen possibilities for each sub-unit. A bit like human antibodies—the same trick for generating a wide spectrum of shapes. And they bind to their receptors just as selectively as an antibody to an antigen; every synapse is a three-thousand-channel biochemical switchboard, with no cross-talk. That’s the molecular basis of Lambertian thought.” He added wryly, “Which is more than you and I possess: a molecular basis for anything. We still run the old patchwork models of the human body—expanded and modified according to taste, but still based on the same principles as John Vines’s first talking Copy. There’s a long-term project to give people the choice of being implemented on an atomic level… but quite apart from the political complications, even the enthusiasts keep finding more pressing things to do.”

Durham moved the viewpoint out through the cell wall and turned it back to face the terminal end of the neuron. He changed the color scheme from atomic to molecular, to highlight the individual neurotransmitters with their own distinctive hues. Then he unfroze the image.

Several of the grey lipid-membrane vesicles twitched open, disgorging floods of brightly colored specks; tumbling past the viewpoint, they resolved into elaborate, irregular globules with a bewildering variety of forms. Durham swung the angle of view forward again, and headed for the far side of the synapse. Eventually, Maria could make out color-coded receptors embedded in the receiving neuron’s cell wall: long-chain molecules folded together into tight zig-zagged rings, with lumpy depressions on the exposed surface.

For several minutes, they watched thousands of mismatched neurotransmitters bounce off one receptor, until Durham became bored and pleaded with the software, “Show us a fit.” The image blurred for a second, and then returned to the original speed as a correctly shaped molecule finally stumbled onto its target. It hit the receptor and locked into place; Durham plunged the viewpoint through the cell membrane in time to show the immersed tail section of the receptor changing its configuration in response. He said, “That will now catalyze the activation of a second messenger, which will feed energy into the appropriate polymer—unless there’s an inhibiting messenger already bound there, blocking access.” He spoke to the software again; it took control of the viewpoint, and showed them each of the events he’d described.

Maria shook her head, bedazzled. “Tell me the truth—who orchestrated this? Three thousand neurotransmitters, three thousand receptors, three thousand second messengers? No doubt you can show me the individual structures of all of them—and no doubt they really would behave the way you claim they do. Even writing the software to fake this would have been an enormous job. Who did you commission? There can’t be many people who’d take it on.”

Durham said gently, “I commissioned you. You can’t have forgotten. A seed for a biosphere? A demonstration that life in the Autoverse could be as diverse and elaborate as life on Earth?”

“No. From A. hydrophila to this would take—”

“Billions of years of Autoverse time? Computing power orders of magnitude beyond the resources of twenty-first century Earth? That’s what Planet Lambert needed—and that’s exactly what it’s been given.”

Maria backed away from the screen until she could go no further, then slid down against the wall beside the red-draped window and sat on the plushly carpeted floor. She put her face in her hands, and tried to breathe slowly. She felt like she’d been buried alive.

Did she believe him? It hardly seemed to matter anymore. Whatever she did, he was going to keep on bombarding her with “evidence” like this, consistent with his claims. Whether he was deliberately lying or not—and whether he was being fooled by another version of himself, or whether the “dust hypothesis” was right after all—he was never going to let her out of here, back into the real world. Psychotic liar, fellow victim or calm purveyor of the truth, he was incapable of setting her free.

Her original was still out there—with the money to save Francesca. That was the point of the whole insane gamble, the payoff for risking her soul. If she could remember that, cling to that, maybe she could keep herself sane.

Durham pressed on—oblivious to her distress, or intent on delivering the coup de grace. He said, “Who could have engineered this? You know how long it took Max Lambert to translate a real-world bacterium. Do you honestly believe that I found someone who could manufacture a functioning—novel—pseudo-insect out of thin air… let alone an intelligent one?

“All right: you can’t personally check macroscopic behavior against the Autoverse rules. But you can study all the biochemical pathways, trace them back to the ancestral species. You can watch an embryo grow, cell by cell—following the gradients of control hormones, the differentiating tissue layers, the formation of the organs.

“The whole planet is an open book to us; you can examine whatever you like, scrutinize it on any scale, from viruses to ecosystems, from the activation of a molecule of retinal pigment to the geochemical cycles.

“There are six hundred and ninety million species currently living on Planet Lambert. All obeying the laws of the Autoverse. All demonstrably descended from a single organism which lived three billion years ago—and whose characteristics I expect you know by heart. Do you honestly believe that anyone could have designed all that?”

Maria looked up at him angrily. “No. Of course it evolved; it must have evolved. You can shut up now—you’ve won; I believe you. But why did you have to wake me? I’m going to lose my mind.”

Durham squatted down and put a hand on her shoulder. She started sobbing drily as she attempted to dissect her loss into parts she could begin to comprehend. Francesca was gone. Aden was gone. All her friends. All the people she’d ever met: in the flesh, on the networks. All the people she’d ever heard of: musicians and writers, philosophers and movie stars, politicians and serial killers. They weren’t even dead; their lives didn’t lie in her past, whole and comprehensible. They were scattered around her like dust: meaningless, disconnected.

Everything she’d ever known had been ground down into random noise.

Durham hesitated, then put his arms around her clumsily. She wanted to hurt him, but instead she clung to him and wept, teeth clenched, fists tight, shuddering with rage and grief.

He said, “You’re not going to lose your mind. You can live any life you want to, here. Seven thousand years means nothing; we haven’t lost the old culture—we still have all the libraries, the archives, the databases. And there are thousands of people who’ll want to meet you; people who respect you for what you’ve done. You’re a myth; you’re a hero of Elysium; you’re the sleeping eighteenth founder. We’ll hold a festival in honor of your awakening.”

Maria pushed him away. “I don’t want that. I don’t want any of that.”

“All right. It’s up to you.”

She closed her eyes and huddled against the wall. She knew she must have looked like a petulant child, but she didn’t care. She said fiercely, “You’ve had the last word. The last laugh. You’ve brought me to life just to rub my nose in the proof of your precious beliefs. And now I want to go back to sleep. Forever. I want all of this to vanish.”

Durham was silent for a while. Then he said, “You can do that, if you really want to. Once I’ve shown you what you’ve inherited, once I’ve shown you how to control it, you’ll have the power to seal yourself off from the rest of Elysium. If you choose sleep, then nobody will ever be able to wake you.

“But don’t you want to be there, on Planet Lambert, when we make first contact with the civilization that owes its existence to you?”

24 (Rut City)

Peer was in his workshop, making a table leg on his lathe, when Kate’s latest message caught his eye: You have to see this. Please! Meet me in the City.

He looked away.

He was working with his favorite timber, sugar pine. He’d constructed his own plantation from a gene library and plant cell maps—modeling individual examples of each cell type down to an atomic level, then encapsulating their essential behavior in rules which he could afford to run billions of times over, for tens of thousands of trees. In theory, he could have built the whole plantation from individual atoms—and that would have been the most elegant way to do it, by far—but slowing himself down to a time frame in which the trees grew fast enough to meet his needs would have meant leaving Kate far behind.

He stopped the lathe and reread the message, which was written on a poster tacked to the workshop’s noticeboard (the only part of his environment he allowed her to access, while he was working). The poster looked quite ordinary, except for an eye-catching tendency for the letters to jump up and down when they crossed his peripheral vision.

He muttered, “I’m happy here. I don’t care what they’re doing in the City.” The workshop abutted a warehouse full of table legs—one hundred and sixty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine, so far. Peer could imagine nothing more satisfying than reaching the two hundred thousand mark—although he knew it was likely that he’d change his mind and abandon the workshop before that happened; new vocations were imposed by his exoself at random intervals, but statistically, the next one was overdue. Immediately before taking up woodwork, he’d passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elysian mathematicians would ever be aware of his work. Before that, he’d written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience. Before that, he’d patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness. Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time. He’d even been interested in the Elysians, once.

No longer. He preferred to think about table legs.

He was still interested in Kate, though. He’d chosen that as one of his few invariants. And he’d been neglecting her lately; they hadn’t met in almost a decade.

He looked around the workshop wistfully, his gaze falling on the pile of fresh timber in the corner, but then he strengthened his resolve. The pleasures of the lathe beckoned—but love meant making sacrifices.

Peer took off his dustcoat, stretched out his arms, and fell backward into the sky above the City.

Kate met him while he was still airborne, swooping down from nowhere and grabbing his hand, nearly wrenching his arm from its socket. She yelled above the wind, “So, you’re still alive after all. I was beginning to think you’d shut yourself down. Gone looking for the next life without me.” Her tone was sarcastic, but there was an edge of genuine relief. Ten years could still be a long time, if you let it.

Peer said gently, but audibly, “You know how busy I am. And when I’m working—”

She laughed derisively. “Working? Is that what you call it? Taking pleasure from something that would bore the stupidest factory robot to death?” Her hair was long and jet black, whipping up around her face as if caught by the wind at random—but always concealing just enough to mask her expression.

“You’re still—“ The wind drowned out his words; Kate had disabled his aphysical intelligibility. He shouted, “You’re still a sculptor, aren’t you? You ought to understand. The wood, the grain, the texture—”

“I understand that you need prosthetic interests to help pass the time—but you could try setting the parameters more carefully.”

“Why should I?” Being forced to raise his voice made him feel argumentative; he willed his exoself to circumvent the effect, and screamed calmly: “Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It’s perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I’m not stuck on any one thing forever, however much you think I’m wasting my time, it’s only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?”

“You could still be more selective.”

“What did you have in mind? Something socially useful? Famine relief work? Counseling the dying? Or something intellectually challenging? Uncovering the fundamental laws of the universe? I have to admit that the TVC rules have slipped my mind completely; it might take me all of five seconds to look them up again. Searching for God? That’s a difficult one: Paul Durham never returns my calls. Self discovery—?”

“You don’t have to leave yourself open to every conceivable absurdity.”

“If I limited the range of options, I’d be repeating myself in no time at all. And if you find the phase I’m passing through so unbearable, you can always make it vanish: you can freeze yourself until I change.”

Kate was indignant. “I have other time frames to worry about besides yours!”

“The Elysians aren’t going anywhere.” He didn’t add that he knew she’d frozen herself half a dozen times already. Each time for a few more years than the time before.

She turned toward him, parting her hair” to show one baleful eye. “You’re fooling yourself, you know. You’re going to repeat yourself, eventually. However desperately you reprogram yourself, in the end you’re going to come full circle and find that you’ve done it all before.”

Peer laughed indulgently, and shouted, “We’ve certainly been through all this before—and you know that’s not true. It’s always possible to synthesize something new: a novel art form, a new field of study. A new aesthetic, a new obsession.” Falling through the cool late afternoon air beside her was exhilarating, but he was already missing the smell of wood dust.

Kate rendered the air around them motionless and silent, although they continued to descend. She released his hand, and said, “I know we’ve been through this before. I remember what you said last time: If the worst comes to the worst, for the first hundred years you can contemplate the number one. For the second hundred years you can contemplate the number two. And so on, ad infinitum. Whenever the numbers grow too big to hold in your mind, you can always expand your mind to fit them. QED. You’ll never run out of new and exciting interests.”

Peer said gently, “Where’s your sense of humor? It’s a simple proof that the worst-case scenario is still infinite. I never suggested actually doing that.”

“But you might as well.” Now that her face was no longer concealed, she looked more forlorn than angry—by choice, if not necessarily by artifice. “Why do you have to find everything so… fulfilling? Why can’t you discriminate? Why can’t you let yourself grow bored with things—then move on? Pick them up again later if you feel the urge.”

“Sounds awfully quaint to me. Very human.”

“It did work for them. Sometimes.”

“Yes. And I’m sure it works for you, sometimes. You drift back and forth between your art and watching the great Elysian soap opera. With a decade or two of aimless depression in between. You’re dissatisfied most of the time—and letting that happen is a conscious choice, as deliberate, and arbitrary, as anything I impose on myself. If that’s how you want to live, I’m not going to try to change you. But you can’t expect me to live the same way.”

She didn’t reply. After a moment, the bubble of still air around them blew away, and the roar of the wind drowned the silence again.

Sometimes he wondered if Kate had ever really come to terms with the shock of discovering that stowing away had granted them, not a few hundred years in a billionaires’ sanctuary, but a descent into the abyss of immortality. The Copy who had persuaded David Hawthorne to turn his back on the physical world; the committed follower—even before her death—of the Solipsist Nation philosophy; the woman who had needed no brain rewiring or elaborate external contrivances to accept her software incarnation… now acted more and more like a flesh-and-blood-wannabe—or rather, Elysian-wannabe—year by year. And there was no need for it. Their tiny slice of infinity was as infinite as the whole; ultimately, there was nothing the Elysians could do that Kate couldn’t.

Except walk among them as an equal, and that was what she seemed to covet the most.

True, the Elysians had deliberately set out to achieve the logical endpoint of everything she’d ever believed Copies should be striving for—while she’d merely hitched a ride by mistake. Their world would “always” (Elysian instant compared to Elysian instant) be bigger and faster than her own. So “naturally”—according to archaic human values which she hadn’t had the sense to erase—she wanted to be part of the main game. But Peer still found it absurd that she spent her life envying them, when she could have generated—or even launched—her own equally complex, equally populous society, and turned her back on the Elysians as thoroughly as they’d turned their back on Earth.

It was her choice. Peer took it in his stride, along with all their other disagreements. If they were going to spend eternity together, he believed they’d resolve their problems eventually—if they could be resolved at all. It was early days yet. As it always would be.

He rolled over and looked down at the City—or the strange recursive map of the City which they made do with, buried as they were in the walls and foundations of the real thing. Malcolm Carter’s secret parasitic software wasn’t blind to its host; they could spy on what was going on in the higher levels of the program which surreptitiously ran them, even though they couldn’t affect anything which happened there. They could snatch brief, partial recordings of activity in the real City, and play them back in a limited duplicate environment. It was a bit like… being the widely separated letters in the text of Ulysses which read: Peer and Kate read, “Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin.” If not quite so crude an abridgment.

Certainly, the view from the air was still breathtaking; Peer had to concede that it was probably indistinguishable from the real thing. The sun was setting over the ocean as they descended, and the Ulam Falls glistened in the east like a sheet of amber set in the granite face of Mount Vine. In the foothills, a dozen silver needles and obsidian prisms, fanciful watchtowers, caught the light and scattered it between them. Peer followed the river down, through lush tropical forests, across dark plains of grassland, into the City itself.

The buildings on the outskirts were low and sprawling, becoming gradually taller and narrower; the profile swept up in a curve which echoed the shape of Mount Vine. Closer to the centre, a thousand crystalline walkways linked the City’s towers at every level, connections so dense and stellated as to make it seem possible that every building was joined, directly, to all the rest. That wasn’t true—but the sense that it might have been was still compelling.

Decorative crowds filled the streets and walkways: mindless puppets obeying the simplest rules, but looking as purposeful and busy as any human throng. A strange adornment, perhaps—but not much stranger than having buildings and streets at all. Most Elysians merely visited this place, but last time Peer had concerned himself with such things, a few hundred of them—mainly third-generation—had taken up inhabiting the City full-time: adopting every detail of its architecture and geography as fixed parameters, swearing fidelity to its Euclidian distances. Others—mainly first-generation—had been appalled by the behavior of this sect. It was strange how “reversion” was the greatest taboo amongst the oldest Elysians, who were so conservative in most other ways. Maybe they were afraid of becoming homesick.

Kate said, “Town Hall.”

He followed her down through the darkening air. The City always smelled sweet to Peer; sweet but artificial, like a newly unwrapped electronic toy, all microchips and plastic, from David Hawthorne’s childhood. They spiraled around the central golden tower, the City’s tallest, weaving their way between the transparent walkways. Playing Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. Peer had long ago given up arguing with Kate about the elaborate routes she chose for entering the reconstruction; she ran this peephole on the City out of her own time, and she controlled access to the environment completely. He could either put up with her rules, or stay away altogether. And the whole point of being here was to please her.

They alighted on the paved square outside the Town Hall’s main entrance. Peer was startled to recognize one of the fountains as a scaled-up version of Malcolm Carter’s demonstration for his algorithmic piggy-back tricks: a cherub wrestling a snake. He must have noticed it before—he’d stood on this spot a hundred times—but if so, he’d forgotten. His memory was due for maintenance; it was a while since he’d increased the size of the relevant networks, and they were probably close to saturation. Simply adding new neurons slowed down recall—relative to other brain functions—making some modes of thought seem like swimming through molasses; a whole host of further adjustments were necessary to make the timing feel right. The Elysians had written software to automate this tuning process, but he disliked the results of the versions they’d shared with each other (and hence made accessible to him), so he’d written his own—but he’d yet to perfect it. Things like table legs kept getting in the way.

The square wasn’t empty, but the people around them all looked like puppets, merely strolling past. The City’s owners were already inside—and so Kate’s software, which spied on the true City and reconstructed it for the two of them, was carrying most of the burden of computing the appearance of their surroundings, now officially unobserved. He took Kate’s hand—and she allowed it, though she made her skin feel as cold as marble—and they walked into the hall.

The cavernous room was about half-full, so some eight thousand Elysians had turned up for the meeting. Peer granted himself a brief bird’s-eye view of the crowd. A variety of fashions in clothing—or lack of it—and body type were represented, certainly spanning the generations, but most people had chosen to present in more or less traditional human form. The exceptions stood out. One clique of fourth-generation Elysians displayed themselves as modified Babbage engines; the entire hall couldn’t have held one of them “to scale,” so portions of the mechanism poked through into their seating allocation from some hidden dimension. Ditto for those who’d turned up as “Searle’s Chinese Rooms”: huge troupes of individual humans (or human-shaped automatons), each carrying out a few simple tasks, which together amounted to a complete working computer. The “components” seated in the hall were Kali-armed blurs, gesticulating at invisible colleagues with coded hand movements so rapid that they seemed to merge into a static multiple exposure.

Peer had no idea how either type of system collected sound and vision from its surroundings to feed to the perfectly normal Elysians these unwieldy computers were (presumably) simulating, as the end result of all their spinning cogs and frantic hand movements—or whether the people in question experienced anything much different than they would have if they’d simply shown that standard physiological model to the world.

Pretentious fancy dress aside, there were a smattering of animal bodies visible—which may or may not have reflected their inhabitants’ true models. It could be remarkably comfortable being a lion, or even a snake—if your brain had been suitably adapted for the change. Peer had spent some time inhabiting the bodies of animals, both historical and mythical, and he’d enjoyed them all—but when the phase was over, he’d found that with very little rewiring, he could make the human form feel every bit as good. It seemed more elegant to be comfortable with his ancestral physiology. The majority of Elysians apparently agreed.

Eight thousand was a typical attendance figure—but Peer could not have said what fraction of the total population it represented. Even leaving out Callas, Shaw and Riemann—the three founders who’d remained in their own private worlds, never making contact with anyone—there might have been hundreds or thousands of members of the later generations who’d opted out of the core community without ever announcing their existence.

The ever-expanding cube of Elysium had been divided up from the outset into twenty-four everexpanding oblique pyramids; one for each of the eighteen founders and their offspring, and six for common ventures (such as Permutation City itself—but mostly Planet Lambert). Most Elysians—or at least most who used the City—had chosen to synch themselves to a common objective time rate. This Standard Time grew steadily faster against Absolute Time—the ticking of the TVC cellular automaton’s clock—so every Elysian needed a constantly growing allocation of processors to keep up; but Elysium itself was growing even faster, leaving everyone with an ever-larger surplus of computing power.

Each founder’s territory was autonomous, subdivided on his or her own terms. By now, each one could have supported a population of several trillion, living by Standard Time. But Peer suspected that most of the processors were left idle—and he had occasionally daydreamed about some fifth-generation Elysian studying the City’s history, getting a curious hunch about Malcolm Carter, and browbeating one of the founders into supplying the spare computing resources of a near-empty pyramid to scan the City for stowaways. All of Carter’s ingenious camouflage—and the atom-in-a-haystack odds which had been their real guarantee against discovery—would count for nothing under such scrutiny, and once their presence was identified, they could easily be disinterred… assuming that the Elysians were generous enough to do that for a couple of petty thieves.

Kate claimed to believe that this was inevitable, in the long term. Peer didn’t much care if they were found or not; all that really mattered to him was the fact that the City’s computational infrastructure was also constantly expanding, to enable it to keep up with both the growing population, and the ever-increasing demands of Elysian Standard Time. As long as that continued, his own tiny fraction of those resources also steadily increased. Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.

Kate had timed their entrance into the replay perfectly. As they settled into empty seats near the back of the hall, Paul Durham himself took the stage.

He said, “Thank you for joining me. I’ve convened this meeting to discuss an important proposal concerning Planet Lambert.”

Peer groaned. “I could be making table legs, and you’ve dragged me along to Attack of the Killer Bees. Part One Thousand and Ninety-Three.”

Kate said, “You could always choose to be glad you’re here. There’s no need to be dissatisfied.”

Peer shut up, and Durham—frozen by the interruption—continued. “As most of you will know, the Lambertians have been making steady progress recently in the scientific treatment of their cosmology. A number of teams of theorists have proposed dust-and-gas-cloud models for the formation of their planetary system—models which come very close to the truth. Although no such process ever literally took place in the Autoverse, it was crudely simulated before the launch, to help design a plausible ready-made system. The Lambertians are now zeroing in on the parameters of that simulation.” He gestured at a giant screen behind him, and vision appeared: several thousand of the insect-like Lambertians swarming in the air above a lush blue-green meadow.

Peer was disappointed. Scientific treatment of their cosmology sounded like the work of a technologically sophisticated culture, but there were no artifacts visible in the scene: no buildings, no machines, not even the simplest tools. He froze the image and expanded a portion of it. The creatures themselves looked exactly the same to him as they’d looked several hundred thousand Lambertian years before, when they’d been singled out as the Species Most Likely to Give Rise to Civilization. Their segmented, chitinous bodies were still naked and unadorned. What had he expected? Insects in lab coats? No—but it was still hard to accept that the leaps they’d made in intelligence had left no mark on their appearance, or their surroundings.

Durham said, “They’re communicating a version of the theory, and actively demonstrating the underlying mathematics at the same time; like one group of researches sending a computer model to another—but the Lambertians don’t have artificial computers. If the dance looks valid it’s taken up by other groups—and if they sustain it long enough, they’ll internalize the pattern: they’ll be able to remember it without continuing to perform it.”

Peer whispered, “Come back to the workshop and dance cosmological models with me?” Kate ignored him.

“The dominant theory employs accurate knowledge of Autoverse chemistry and physics, and includes a detailed breakdown of the composition of the primordial cloud. It goes no further. As yet, there’s no hypothesis about the way in which that particular cloud might have come into existence; no explanation for the origin and relative abundances of the elements. And there can be no explanation, no sensible prior history; the Autoverse doesn’t provide one. No Big Bang: General Relativity doesn’t apply, their space-time is flat, their universe isn’t expanding. No elements formed in stars: there are no nuclear forces, no fusion; stars burn by gravity alone—and their sun is the only star.

“So, these cosmologists are about to hit a brick wall—through no fault of their own. Dominic Repetto has suggested that now would be the ideal time for us to make contact with the Lambertians. To announce our presence. To explain their planet’s origins. To begin a carefully moderated cultural exchange.”

A soft murmuring broke out among the crowd. Peer turned to Kate. “This is it? This is the news I couldn’t miss?”

She stared back at him, pityingly. “They’re talking about first contact with an alien race. Did you really want to sleepwalk right through that?”

Peer laughed. “First contact?” They’ve observed these insects in microscopic detail since the days they were single-celled algae. Everything about them is known already: their biology, their language, their culture. It’s all in the central library. These “aliens” have evolved on a microscope slide. There are no surprises in store.”

“Except how they respond to us.”

“Us? Nobody responds to us.”

Kate gave him a poisonous look. “How they respond to the Elysians.”

Peer thought it over. “I expect someone knows all about that, too. Someone must have modeled the reaction of Lambertian “society” to finding out that they’re nothing but an experiment in artificial life.”

An Elysian presenting as a tall, thin young man took the stage. Durham introduced him as Dominic Repetto. Peer had given up trying to keep track of the proliferating dynasties long ago, but he thought the name was a recent addition; he certainly couldn’t recall a Repetto being involved in Autoverse studies when he’d had a passion for the subject himself.

Repetto addressed the meeting. “It’s my belief that the Lambertians now possess the conceptual framework they need to comprehend our existence, and to make sense of our role in their cosmology. It’s true that they lack artificial computers—but their whole language of ideas is based on representations of the world around them in the form of numerical models. These models were originally variations on a few genetically hardwired themes—maps of terrain showing food sources, algorithms for predicting predator behavior—but the modern Lambertians have evolved the skill of generating and testing whole new classes of models, in a way that’s as innate to them as language skills were to the earliest humans. A team of Lambertians can ‘speak’ and ‘judge’ a mathematical description of population dynamics in the mites they herd for food, as easily as prelaunch humans could construct or comprehend a simple sentence.

“We mustn’t judge them by anthropomorphic standards; human technological landmarks simply aren’t relevant. The Lambertians have deduced most of Autoverse chemistry and physics by observations of their natural world, supplemented by a very small number of controlled experiments. They’ve generated concepts equivalent to temperature and pressure, energy and entropy—without fire, metallurgy or the wheel… let alone the steam engine. They’ve calculated the melting and boiling points of most of the elements—without ever purifying them. Their lack of technology only makes their intellectual achievements all the more astounding. It’s as if the ancient Greeks had written about the boiling point of nitrogen, or the Egyptians had predicted the chemical properties of chlorine.”

Peer smiled to himself cynically; the founders always loved to hear Earth rate a mention—and all the better if the references were to times long before they were born.

Repetto paused; he grew perceptibly taller and his youthful features became subtly more dignified, more mature. Most Elysians would see this as no more manipulative than a change in posture or tone of voice. He said solemnly, “Most of you will be aware of the resolution of the Town Meeting of January 5, 3052, forbidding contact with the Lambertians until they’d constructed their own computers and performed simulations—experiments in artificial life—as sophisticated as the Autoverse itself. That was judged to be the safest possible benchmark… but I believe it has turned out to be misconceived, and completely inappropriate.

“The Lambertians are looking for answers to questions about their origins. We know there are no answers to be discovered inside the Autoverse itself—but I believe the Lambertians are intellectually equipped to comprehend the larger truth. We have a responsibility to make that truth known to them. I propose that this meeting overturns the resolution of 3052, and authorizes a team of Autoverse scholars to enter Planet Lambert and—in a culturally sensitive manner—inform the Lambertians of their history and context.”

The buzz of discussion grew louder. Peer felt a vestigial twinge of interest, in spite of himself. In a universe without death or scarcity, politics took strange forms. Any one of the founders who disagreed with the way Planet Lambert was managed would be perfectly free to copy the whole Autoverse into their own territory, and to do as they wished with their own private version. In inverse proportion to the ease of such a move, any faction would have a rare chance here to demonstrate their “influence” and increase their “prestige” by persuading the meeting to retain the ban on contact with the Lambertians—without provoking their opponents into cloning the Autoverse and pushing ahead regardless. Many of the first generation still chose to value these things, for their own sake.

Elaine Sanderson rose to her feet, resplendent in a light blue suit and a body which together proclaimed: 7972 to 2045 a.d., and proud of it (even if she only wore them on official occasions). Peer let himself time-trip for a second: in his late teens, David Hawthorne had seen the flesh-and-blood Sanderson on television, being sworn in as Attorney General of the United States of America—a nation whose constituent particles at the time of that oath might well overlap with some portion of Elysium at this very instant.

Sanderson said, “Thank you, Mr. Repetto, for giving us your perspective on this important matter. It’s unfortunate that so few of us take the time to keep ourselves up to date with the progress of the Lambertians. Although they have come all the way from single-celled lifeforms to their present, highly sophisticated state without our explicit intervention, ultimately they are in our care at every moment, and we all have a duty to treat that responsibility with the utmost seriousness.

“I can still recall some of the earliest plans we made for dealing with the Autoverse: to hide the details of life on Planet Lambert from ourselves, deliberately; to watch and wait, as if from afar, until the inhabitants sent probes to their system’s other worlds; to arrive as ‘explorers’ in ‘space ships,’ struggling to learn the language and customs of these ‘aliens’—perhaps going so far as to extend the Autoverse to include an invisibly distant star, with a ‘home world’ from which we might travel. Slavish imitations of the hypothetical interstellar missions we’d left behind. Bizarre charades.

“Mercifully, we abandoned those childish ideas long ago. There will be no sham ‘mission of discovery’—and no lying to the Lambertians, or to ourselves.

“There is one quality of those early, laughable schemes which should still be kept in mind, though: we always intended to meet the Lambertians as equals. Visitors from a distant world who would stretch their vision of the universe—but not subvert it, not swallow it whole. We would approach them as siblings, arguing our viewpoint—not Gods, revealing divine truth.

“I ask the meeting to consider whether these two equally laudable aims, of honesty and humility, could not be reconciled. If the Lambertians are on the verge of a crisis in understanding their origins, what patronizing instinct compels us to rush in and provide them with an instant solution? Mr. Repetto tells us how they have already inferred the properties of the chemical elements—elements which remain mysterious and invisible, manifesting themselves only in the elaborate phenomena of the natural world. Clearly, the Lambertians have a gift for uncovering hidden patterns, hidden explanations. How many more centuries can it be, then, before they guess the truth about their own cosmology?

“I propose that we delay contact until the hypothesis of our existence has arisen naturally amongst the Lambertians, and has been thoroughly explored. Until they have decided for themselves exactly what we might mean to them. Until they have debated, as we are debating right now, how best they might deal with us.

“If aliens had visited Earth the moment humans first looked up at the sky and suffered some crisis of understanding, they would have been hailed as Gods. If they’d arrived in the early twenty-first century—when humans had been predicting their existence and pondering the logistics of contact, for decades—they would have been accepted as equals; more experienced, more skilled, more knowledgeable, but ultimately nothing but an expected part of a well-behaved, well-understood universe.

“I believe that we should wait for the equivalent moment in Lambertian history: when the Lambertians are impatient for proof of our existence—when our continued absence becomes far harder for them to explain than our arrival would be. Once they begin to suspect that we’re eavesdropping on every conversation they hold about us, it would be dishonest to remain concealed. Until then, we owe them the opportunity to find as many answers as they can, without us.”

Sanderson resumed her seat. Portions of the audience applauded demurely. Peer lazily mapped the response and correlated it with appearance; she seemed to have been a big hit with the third-generation mainstream—but they had a reputation for gleefully faking everything.

Kate said, “Don’t you wish you could join the discussion?” Half sarcasm, half self-pity.

Peer said cheerfully, “No—but if you have strong views on the matter yourself, I suggest you copy the whole Autoverse, and make contact with the Lambertians personally—or leave them in unspoilt ignorance. Whichever you prefer.”

“You know I don’t have room to do that.”

“And you know that makes no difference. There’s a copy of the original biosphere seed, the entire compressed description, in the central library. You could copy that, and freeze yourself until you finally have the room to unfold it. The whole thing’s deterministic—every Lambertian would flutter its little wings for you in exactly the same way as it did for the Elysians. Right up to the moment of contact.”

“And you honestly believe that the City will grow that large? That after a billion years of Standard Time, they won’t have trashed it and built something new?”

“I don’t know. But there’s always the alternative: you could launch a whole new TVC universe and make all the room you need. I’ll come along, if you want me to.” He meant it; he’d follow her anywhere. She only had to say the word.

But she looked away. He ached to grant her happiness, but the choice was hers: if she wanted to believe that she was standing outside in the snow—or rather, bricked into the walls—watching the Elysians feast on Reality, there was nothing he could do to change that.

Three hundred and seven speakers followed; one hundred and sixty-two backed Repetto, one hundred and forty supported Sanderson. Five waffled on with no apparent agenda; a remarkably low proportion. Peer daydreamed about the sound of sandpaper on wood.

When the vote finally came—one per original attendee, no last-minute clonings accepted—Sanderson won by a ten percent margin. She took the stage and made a short speech thanking the voters for their decision. Peer suspected that many of the Elysians had quietly slipped out of their bodies and gone elsewhere, by now.

Dominic Repetto said a few words too, clearly disappointed, but gracious in defeat. It was Paul Durham—presumably his mentor and sponsor—who showed the slightly vacuous expression of a model-of-a-body with its facial muscles crudely decoupled from its model-of-a-brain. Durham—with his strange history of brief episodes as a Copy in different permutations—seemed to have never really caught up with the prelaunch state of the art, let alone the Elysian cutting edge; when he had something to hide, it was obvious. He was taking the decision badly.

Kate said coldly, “That’s it. You’ve fulfilled your civic duty. You can go now.”

Peer made his eyes big and brown. “Come back to the workshop with me. We can make love in the wood dust. Or just sit around and talk. Be happy, for no reason. It wouldn’t be so bad.”

Kate shook her head and faded away. Peer felt a pang of disappointment, but not for long.

There’d be other times.

25

Thomas crouched in the bathroom window frame, halfway out of Anna’s flat. He knew that the edges of the brickwork would be sharper than razors, this time. He made his way across to the neighbor’s window, repeating the familiar movements precisely, though his hands and forearms wept blood. Insects crawled from the wounds and swarmed along his arm, over his face, into his mouth. He gagged and retched but he didn’t falter.

Down the drain pipe. From the alley below, he returned to the flat. Anna was by his side on the stairs. They danced again. Argued again. Struggled again.

“Think fast. Think fast.”

He knelt over her, one knee to either side, took her face in his hands, then closed his eyes. He brought her head forward, then slammed it back against the wall. Five times. Then he held his fingers near her nostrils, without opening his eyes. He felt no exhalation.

Thomas was in his Frankfurt apartment, a month after the murder, dreaming. Anna stood by the bed. He reached out from beneath the blankets into the darkness, eyes closed. She took his hand in hers. With her other hand, she stroked the scar on his forearm tenderly, then she pushed one finger easily through his brittle skin and liquefying flesh. He thrashed against the sheets, but she wouldn’t let go; she dug with her fingers until she was gripping naked bone. When she snapped the ulna and radius, he convulsed with pain and ejaculated suddenly, everything his corrupt body contained departing in a single stream: dark clotted blood, maggots, pus, excrement.

Thomas was in his suburban mansion, sitting naked on the floor at the end of the hallway, startled. He shifted his right hand, and realized he was clutching a small vegetable knife. And he remembered why.

There were seven faint pink scars on his abdomen, seven digits, still legible, right-way-up as he gazed down at them: 1053901. He set to work recarving the first six.

He didn’t trust the clocks. The clocks lied. And although every incision he made in his skin healed perfectly, given time, for a long time it seemed he had managed to repair the numbers before they faded. He didn’t know what they measured, except their own steady ascent, but they seemed like a touchstone of something approaching sanity.

He recut the final digit as a two, then licked his fingers and wiped the blood away. At first it seeped back, but after five or six repetitions, the fresh wound stood clean and red against his pale skin. He pronounced the number several times. “One million, fifty three thousand, nine hundred and two.”

Thomas climbed to his feet and walked down the hall. His body knew only the time he carved upon it; he never felt tired, or hungry, or even unclean—he could sleep or not sleep, eat or not eat, wash or not wash; it made no perceptible difference. His hair and fingernails never grew. His face never aged.

He stopped outside the library. He believed he’d methodically torn all the books to shreds several times, but on each occasion the debris had been cleared away and the books replaced, in his absence.

He walked into the room. He glanced at the terminal in the corner, the object of his deepest loathing; he’d never been able to damage it—smash, chip, bend or even scratch any part of its visible form. Indestructible or not, it had never functioned.

He wandered from shelf to shelf, but he’d read every book a dozen or more times. They’d all become meaningless. The library was well-stocked, and he’d studied the sacred texts of every faith; those few which, by some stretch of poetic licence, might have been said to describe his condition offered no prospect for changing it. In the distant past, he’d undergone a hundred feverish conversions; he’d ranted to every deity which humanity had ever postulated. If he’d stumbled on the one which existed—the one responsible for his damnation—his pleas had been to no avail.

The one thing he’d never expected after death was uncertainty. It had worried him deeply, at first: being cast into Hell, without so much as a glimpse of Heaven to taunt him, and a smug I-told-you-so from the faithful on their way up—let alone a formal trial before the God of his childhood, in which every doctrinal assertion he’d ever doubted was proclaimed as Absolute Truth, and every theological debate was resolved, once and for all.

But he’d since decided that if his condition was eternal and irreversible, it hardly mattered what the God who’d made it so was named.

Thomas sat cross-legged on the floor of the library, and tried to empty his mind.

“Think fast. Think fast.”

Anna lay before him, bleeding and unconscious. Time slowed down. The moment he was approaching seemed impossible to face, impossible to traverse yet again—but he inched toward it, and he knew that he had no power to turn away.

He’d come to understand that all the visions of his own decay and mutilation were nothing but elaborate gestures of self-loathing. When his flesh was torn from his body it was a distraction—almost a relief. His suffering did not illuminate his crime; it drowned his thoughts in an anesthetic haze. It was a fantasy of power, a fantasy of retribution.

But here there was no balm of self-righteous pain, no pretence that his baroque tortures were working some alchemy of justice. He knelt over Anna, and could not weep, could not flinch, could not blind himself to the measure of what he’d done.

He might have called an ambulance. He might have saved her life. It would have taken so little strength, so little courage, so little love, that he could not imagine how a human being could have failed to possess enough of each, and still walk the Earth.

But he had. He had.

So he brought her head forward, and slammed it against the wall.

26

After a week as Durham’s guest, Maria went looking for a place of her own.

Her anger had faded, the numbness of shock had faded, the fifth or sixth wave of disbelief had finally lifted. But she still felt almost paralyzed by the strangeness of the truths she’d been forced to accept: her exile from the universe of flesh-and-blood humanity; the impossible existence of Elysium; intelligent life in the Autoverse. She couldn’t begin to make sense of any of these things until she had a fixed point to stand on.

She had refused to pack any luggage to accompany her scan file into the next life; it would have felt like she was humoring Durham if she’d made the slightest concession to the needs of a Copy who she’d believed would never run. No environments, no furniture, no clothes; no photographs, no diaries, no scanned memorabilia. No VR duplicate of her old narrow terrace to make her feel at home. She might have set about reconstructing it from memory, detail by detail—or let architectural software pluck a perfect imitation straight out of her brain—but she didn’t feel strong enough to deal with the emotional contradictions: the tug of the old world, the taint of self-deception. Instead, she decided to choose one of the pre-defined apartments in the City itself.

Durham assured her that nobody would begrudge her the use of public resources. “Of course, you could copy the City into your own territory and run a private version at your own expense—defeating the whole point. This is the one environment in all of Elysium which comes close to being a place in the old sense. Anyone can walk the streets, anyone can live here—but no one can rearrange the skyline on a whim. It would require a far more impassioned debate to alter the colors of the street signs, here, than it used to take for the average local council to rezone an entire neighborhood.”

So Permutation City offered her its disingenuous, municipally sanctioned, quasi-objective presence for free, while her model-of-a-body ran on processors in her own territory—and the two systems, by exchanging data, contrived her experience of walking the streets, entering the sleek metallic buildings, and exploring the empty apartments which might have smelled of paint, but didn’t. She felt nervous on her own, so Durham came with her, solicitous and apologetic as ever. His regret seemed sincere on one level—he wasn’t indifferent to the pain he’d caused her—but beneath that there didn’t seem to be much doubt: he clearly expected to be wholly forgiven for waking her, sooner or later.

She asked him, “How does it feel, being seven thousand years old?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On how I want it to feel.”

She found a place in the northeast quadrant, halfway between the central tower and the City’s rim. From the bedroom, she could see the mountains in the east, the glistening waterfall, a distant patch of forest. There were better views available, but this one seemed right; anything more spectacular would have made her feel self-conscious.

Durham showed her how to claim residency: a brief dialogue with the apartment software. He said, “You’re the only Elysian in this tower, so you can program all your neighbors any way you like.”

“What if I do nothing?”

“Default behavior: they’ll stay out of your way.”

“And what about other Elysians? Am I such a novelty that people will come looking for me?”

Durham thought it over. “Your awakening is public knowledge—but most people here are fairly patient. I doubt that anyone would be so rude as to buttonhole you in the street. Your phone number will remain unlisted until you choose otherwise—and the apartment itself is under your control, now, as secure as any private environment. The software has been rigorously validated: breaking and entering is mathematically impossible.”

He left her to settle in. She paced the rooms, trying to inhabit them, to claim them as her own; she forced herself to walk the nearby streets, trying to feel at ease. The Art Deco apartment, the Fritz Lang towers, the streets full of crowd-scene extras all unnerved her—but on reflection, she realized that she couldn’t have gone anywhere else. When she tried to imagine her “territory,” her private slice of Elysium, it seemed as daunting and unmanageable as if she’d inherited one twenty-fourth of the old universe of galaxies and vacuum. That the new one was generally invisible, and built from a lattice of self-reproducing computers, built in turn from cellular automaton cells—which were nothing more than sequences of numbers, however easy it might be to color-code them and arrange them in neat grids—only made the thought of being lost in its vastness infinitely stranger. It was bad enough that her true body was a pattern of computation resonating in a tiny portion of an otherwise silent crystalline pyramid which stretched into the distance for the TVC equivalent of thousands of light years. The thought of immersing her senses in a fake world which was really another corner of the same structure—withdrawing entirely into the darkness of that giant airless crypt, and surrendering to private hallucinations—made her sick with panic.

If the City was equally unreal, at least it was one hallucination which other Elysians shared—and, anchored by that consensus, she found the courage to examine the invisible world beneath, from a safe—if hallucinatory—distance. She sat in the apartment and studied maps of Elysium. On the largest scale, most of the cube was portrayed as featureless: the other seventeen founders’ pyramids were private, and her own was all but unused. Public territory could be colored according to the software it ran—processes identified, data flows traced—but even then, most of it was monochrome: five of the six public pyramids were devoted to the Autoverse, running the same simple program on processor after processor, implementing the Autoverse’s own cellular automaton rules—utterly different from the TVC’s. A faint metallic grid was superimposed on this region, like a mesh of fine wires immersed in an unknown substance to gauge its properties. This was the software which spied on Planet Lambert—an entirely separate program from the Autoverse itself, not subject to any of its laws. Maria had written the original version herself, although she’d never had a chance to test it on a planetary scale. Generations of Elysian Autoverse scholars had extended and refined it, and now it peeked through a quadrillion nonexistent cracks in space, collating, interpreting and summarizing everything it saw. The results flowed to the hub of Elysium, into the central library—along a channel rendered luminous as white-hot silver by the density of its data flow.

The hub itself was a dazzling polyhedron, a cluster of databases ringed by the communications structures which handled the torrent of information flowing to and from the pyramids. Every transaction between Elysians of different clans flowed through here; from phone calls to handshakes, from sex to whatever elaborate post-human intimacies they’d invented in the past seven thousand years. The map gave nothing away, though; even with the highest magnification and the slowest replay, streaming packets of data registered as nothing more than featureless points of light, their contents safely anonymous.

The second-brightest data flow linked the hub to the City, revealed as a delicate labyrinth of algorithms clinging to one face of the sixth public pyramid. With the Autoverse software across the border rendered midnight blue, the City looked like a cluttered, neon-lit fairground on the edge of a vast desert, at the end of a shimmering highway. Maria zoomed in and watched the packets of data responsible for the map itself come streaming out from the hub.

There was no point-for-point correspondence between this view and the City of the senses. The crowds of fake pedestrians, spread across the visible metropolis, could all be found here as a tight assembly of tiny flashing blocks in pastel shades, with titles like flocking behavior and miscellaneous tropisms. The locations and other attributes of specific individuals were encoded in data structures too small to be seen without relentless magnification. Maria’s own apartment was equally microscopic, but it was the product of widely scattered components, as far apart as surface optics, air dynamics, thermal radiation and carpet texture.

She might have viewed her own body as a similar diagram of functional modules—but she decided to let that wait.

One vivisection at a time.

She began exploring the information resources of Elysium—the data networks which portrayed themselves as such—and leaving the apartment to walk alone through the City twice a day; familiarizing herself with the two spaces analogous to those she’d known in the past.

She skimmed through the libraries, not quite at random, flicking through Homer and Joyce, staring at the Rembrandts and Picassos and Moores, playing snatches of Chopin and Liszt, viewing scenes from Bergman and Buñuel. Hefting the weight of the kernel of human civilization the Elysians had brought with them.

It felt light. Dubliners was as fantastic, now, as The Iliad. Guernica had never really happened—or if it had, the Elysian view was beyond the powers of any artist to portray. The Seventh Seal was a mad, pointless fairy tale. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was all that remained.

Altering herself in any way was too hard a decision to make, so, faithful by default to human physiology, she ate and shat and slept. There were a thousand ways to conjure food into existence, from gourmet meals in the culinary database literally emerging from the screen of her terminal, to the time-saving option of push-button satiety and a pleasant aftertaste, but old rituals clamored to be reenacted, so she went out and bought raw ingredients from puppet shopkeepers in aromatic delicatessens, and cooked her own meals, often badly, and grew curiously tired watching the imperfect chemistry at work, as if she was performing the difficult simulation, subconsciously, herself.

For three nights, she dreamed that she was back in the old world, having unremarkable conversations with her parents, school friends, fellow Autoverse junkies, old lovers. Whatever the scene, the air was charged, glowing with self-conscious authenticity. She woke from these dreams crippled with loss, clawing at the retreating certainties, believing—for ten seconds, or five—that Durham had drugged her, hypnotized her, brainwashed her into dreaming of Elysium; and each time she thought she “slept,” here, she awoke into the Earthly life she’d never stopped living.

Then the fog cleared from her brain, and she knew that it wasn’t true.

She dreamed of the City for the first time. She was out on Fifteenth Avenue when the puppets started pleading with her to be treated as fully sentient. “We pass the Turing test, don’t we? Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can’t witness her inner life?” They tugged at her clothes like beggars. She told them not to be absurd. She said, “How can you complain? Don’t you understand? We’ve abolished injustice.” A man in a crisp black suit eyed her sharply, and muttered, “You’ll always have the poor.” But he was wrong.

And she dreamed of Elysium itself. She weaved her way through the TVC grid in the gaps between the processors, transformed into a simple, self-sustaining pattern of cells, like the oldest, most primitive forms of artificial life; disturbing nothing, but observing everything—in all six dimensions, no less. She woke when she realized how absurd that was: the TVC universe wasn’t flooded with some analog of light, spreading information about every cell far and wide. To be embedded in the grid meant being all but blind to its contents; reaching out and painstakingly probing what lay ahead—sometimes destructively—was the only way to discover anything.

In the late afternoons, in the golden light which flooded in through the bedroom window after a thousand chance, calculated reflections between the towers, she usually wept. It felt inadequate, desultory, pathetic, immoral. She didn’t want to “mourn” the human race—but she didn’t know how to make sense of its absence. She refused to imagine a world long dead—as if her Elysian millennia of sleep had propelled her into Earth’s uncertain future—so she struggled to bind herself to the time she remembered, to follow the life of her doppelgänger in her mind. She pictured a reconciliation with Aden; it wasn’t impossible. She pictured him very much alive, as tender and selfish and stubborn as ever. She fantasized the most mundane, the most unexceptionable moments between them, ruthlessly weeding out anything that seemed too optimistic, too much like wish-fulfilment. She wasn’t interested in inventing a perfect life for the other Maria; she only wanted to guess the unknowable truth.

But she had to keep believing that she’d saved Francesa. Anything less would have been unbearable.

She tried to think of herself as an emigrant, an ocean-crosser in the days before aircraft, before telegraphs. People had left everything behind, and survived. Prospered. Flourished. Their lives hadn’t been destroyed; they’d embraced the unknown, and been enriched, transformed.

The unknown? She was living in an artifact, a mathematical object she’d helped Durham construct for his billionaires. Elysium was a universe made to order. It contained no hidden wonders, no lost tribes.

But it did contain the Autoverse.

The longer she thought about it, the more it seemed that Planet Lambert was the key to her sanity. Even after three billion years of evolution, it was the one thing in Elysium which connected with her past life—leading right back to the night she’d witnessed A. lamberti digesting mutose. The thread was unbroken: the seed organism, A. hydrophila, had come from that very same strain. And if the Autoverse, then, had been the ultimate indulgence, a rarefied intellectual game in a world beset with problems, the situation now was completely inverted: the Autoverse was home to hundreds of millions of lifeforms, a flourishing civilization, a culture on the verge of a scientific revolution. In a universe subject to whim, convenience and fantasy, it seemed like the only solid ground left.

And although she suffered no delusions of having personally “created” the Lambertians—sketching their planet’s early history, and cobbling together an ancestor for them by adapting someone else’s translation of a terrestrial bacterium, hardly qualified her to take credit for their multiplexed nervous systems and their open-air digestive tracts, let alone their self-awareness—she couldn’t simply wash her hands of their fate. She’d never believed that Planet Lambert could be brought into existence—but she had helped to make it happen nonetheless.

Part of her still wanted to do nothing but rage against her awakening, and mourn her loss. Embracing the Autoverse seemed like an insult to the memory of Earth—and a sign that she’d accepted the way Durham had treated her. But it began to seem perverse to the point of insanity to turn her back on the one thing which might give her new life some meaning—just to spite Durham, just to make a lie of his reasons for waking her. There were other ways of making it clear that she hadn’t forgiven him.

The apartment—at first, inconceivably large, almost uninhabitable—slowly lost its strangeness. On the tenth morning, she finally woke expecting the sight of the bedroom exactly as she found it; if not at peace with her situation, at least unsurprised to be exactly where she was.

She phoned Durham and said, “I want to join the expedition.”

The Contact Group occupied one story of a tower in the southeast quadrant. Maria, uninterested in teleporting, made the journey on foot, crossing from building to building by walkway, ignoring the puppets and admiring the view. It was faster than traveling at street level, and she was gradually conquering her fear of heights. Bridges here did not collapse from unanticipated vibrations. Perspex tubes did not hurtle to the ground, spilling corpses onto the pavement. It made no difference whether or not Malcolm Carter had known the first thing about structural engineering; the City was hardly going to bother laboriously modeling stresses and loads just to discover whether or not parts of itself should fail, for the sake of realism. Everything was perfectly safe, by decree.

Durham was waiting for her in the foyer. Inside, he introduced her to Dominic Repetto and Alisa Zemansky, the project’s other leaders. Maria hadn’t known what to expect from her first contact with later-generation Elysians, but they presented as neatly dressed humans, male and female, both “in their late thirties,” wearing clothes which would not have looked wildly out of place in any office in twenty-first century Sydney. Out of deference to her? She hoped not—unless the accepted thing to do, in their subculture, was to show a different form to everyone, expressly designed to put them at ease. Repetto, in fact, was so strikingly handsome that she almost recoiled at the thought that he—or his parent—had deliberately chosen such a face. But what did codes of vanity from the age of cosmetic surgery and gene splicing mean, now? Zemansky was stunning too, with dark-flecked violet eyes and spiked blonde hair. Durham appeared—to her, at least—almost unchanged from the man she’d met in 2050. Maria began to wonder how she looked to the young Elysians. Like something recently disinterred, probably.

Repetto shook her hand over and over. “It’s a great, great honor to meet you. I can’t tell you how much you’ve inspired us all.” His face shone; he seemed to be sincere. Maria felt her cheeks flush, and tried to imagine herself in some analogous situation, shaking hands with… who? Max Lambert? John von Neumann? Alan Turing? Charles Babbage? Ada Lovelace? She knew she’d done nothing compared to any of those pioneers—but she’d had seven thousand years for her reputation to be embellished. And three billion for her work to bear fruit.

The floor was divided into open-plan offices, but nobody else seemed to be about. Durham saw her peering around the partitions and said cryptically, “There are other workers, but they come and go.”

Zemansky led the way into a small conference room. She said to Maria, “We can move to a VR representation of Planet Lambert, if you like—but I should warn you that it can be disorienting: being visually immersed but intangible, walking through vegetation, and so on. And moving at the kinds of speeds necessary to keep track of the Lambertians can induce motion sickness. Of course, there are neural changes which counteract both those problems—”

Maria wasn’t ready to start tampering with her brain—or to step onto the surface of an alien planet. She said, “Viewing screens sound easier. I’d be happier with that. Do you mind?” Zemansky looked relieved.

Repetto stood at the end of the table and addressed the three of them, although Maria knew this was all for her benefit.

“So much has been happening on Lambert, lately, that we’ve slowed it right down compared to Standard Time so we can keep up with developments.” An elliptical map of the planet’s surface appeared on the wall behind him. “Most recently, dozens of independent teams of chemists have begun looking for a simpler, more unified model underlying the current atomic theory.” Markers appeared, scattered across the map. “It’s been three hundred years since the standard model—thirty-two atoms with a regular pattern of masses, valencies and mutual affinities—became widely accepted. The Lambertian equivalent of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.” He flashed a smile at Maria, as if she might have been a contemporary of Mendeleev—or perhaps because he was proud of his arcane knowledge of the history of a science which was no longer true. “At the time, atoms were accepted as fundamental entities: structureless, indivisible, requiring no further explanation. Over the last twenty years, that view has finally begun to break down.”

Maria was already confused. From the hurried reading she’d done in the past few days, she knew that the Lambertians only modified an established theory when a new phenomenon was discovered which the theory failed to explain. Repetto must have noticed her expression, because he paused expectantly.

She said, “Autoverse atoms are indivisible. There are no components you can separate out, no smaller stable entities. Smash them together at any energy you like, and all they’ll do is bounce—and the Lambertians are in no position to smash them together at any energy at all. So… surely there’s nothing in their experience that the current theory can’t account for perfectly.”

“Nothing in their immediate environment, certainly. But the problem is cosmology. They’ve been refining the models of the history of their star system, and now they’re looking for an explanation for the composition of the primordial cloud.”

“They accepted the thirty-two atoms and their properties as given—but they can’t bring themselves to do the same with the arbitrary amounts of each one in the cloud?”

“That’s right. It’s difficult to translate the motivation exactly, but they have a very precise aesthetic which dictates what they’ll accept as a theory—and it’s almost physically impossible for them to contradict it. If they try to dance a theory which fails to resonate with the neural system which assesses its simplicity, the dance falls apart.” He thought for a second, then pointed to the screen behind him; a swarm of Lambertians appeared. “Here’s an example—going back awhile. This is a team of astronomers—all fully aware of the motions of the planets in the sky, relative to the sun—testing out a theory which attempts to explain those observations by assuming that Planet Lambert is fixed, and everything else orbits around it.”

Maria watched the creatures intently. She would have been hard-pressed to identify the rhythms in their elaborate weaving motions—but when the swarm began to drift apart, the collapse of order was obvious.

“Now here’s the heliocentric version, from a few years later.”

The dance, again, was too complex to analyze—although it did seem to be more harmonious—and after a while, almost hypnotic. The black specks shifting back and forth against the white sky left trails on her retinas. Below, the ubiquitous grassland seemed an odd setting for astronomical theorizing. The Lambertians apparently accepted their condition—in which herding mites represented the greatest control they exerted over nature—as if it constituted as much of a Utopia as the Elysian’s total freedom. They still faced predators. Many still died young from disease. Food was always plentiful, though; they’d modeled their own population cycles, and learned to damp the oscillations, at a very early stage. And, nature lovers or not, there’d been no “ideological” struggles over “birth control”; once the population model had spread, the same remedies had been adopted by communities right across the planet. Lambertian cultural diversity was limited; far more behavior was genetically determined than was the case in humans—the young being born self-sufficient, with far less neural plasticity than a human infant—and there was relatively little variation in the relevant genes.

The heliocentric theory was acceptable; the dance remained coherent. Repetto replayed the scene, with a “translation” in a small window, showing the positions of the planets represented at each moment. Maria still couldn’t decipher the correspondence—the Lambertians certainly weren’t flying around in simple mimicry of the hypothetical orbits—but the synchronized rhythms of planets and insect-astronomers seemed to mesh somewhere in her visual cortex, firing some pattern detector which didn’t know quite what to make of the strange resonance.

She said, “So Ptolemy was simply bad grammar—obvious nonsense. Doubleplus ungood. And they reached Copernicus a few years later? That’s impressive. How long did they take to get to Kepler… to Newton?”

Zemansky said smoothly, “That was Newton. The theory of gravity—and the laws of motion—were all part of the model they were dancing; the Lambertians could never have expressed the shapes of the orbits without including a reason for them.”

Maria felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

“If that was Newton… what came before?”

“Nothing. That was the first successful astronomical model—the culmination of about a decade of trial and error by teams all over the planet.”

“But they must have had something. Primitive myths. Stacks of turtles. Sun gods in chariots.”

Zemansky laughed. “No turtles or chariots, obviously—but no: no naive cosmologies. Their earliest language grew out of the things they could easily observe and model—ecological relationships, population dynamics. When cosmology was beyond their grasp, they didn’t even try to tackle it; it was a non-subject.”

“No creation myths?”

“No. To the Lambertians, believing any kind of “myth”—any kind of vague, untestable pseudo-explanation—would have been like… suffering hallucinations, seeing mirages, hearing voices. It would have rendered them completely dysfunctional.”

Maria cleared her throat. “Then I wonder how they’ll react to us.”

Durham said, “Right now, creators are a non-subject. The Lambertians have no need of that hypothesis. They understand evolution: mutation, natural selection—they’ve even postulated some kind of macromolecular gene. But the origin of life remains an open question, too difficult to tackle, and it would probably be centuries before they realized that their ultimate ancestor was seeded “by hand”… if in fact there’s any evidence to show that—any logical reason why A. hydrophila couldn’t have arisen in some imaginary prebiotic history.

“But it won’t come to that; after a few more decades banging their heads against the problem of the primordial cloud, I think they’ll guess what’s going on. An idea whose time has come can sweep across the planet in a matter of months, however exotic it might be; these creatures are not traditionalists. And once the theory that their world was made arises in the proper scientific context, it’s not going to drive them mad. All Alisa was saying was that the sort of primitive superstitions which early humans believed in wouldn’t have made sense to the early Lambertians.”

Maria said, “So… we’ll wait until ‘creators’ are no longer a non-subject before we barge in and announce that that’s exactly what we are?”

Durham replied, “Absolutely. We have permission to make contact once the Lambertians have independently postulated our existence—and no sooner.” He laughed, and added, with evident satisfaction, “Which we achieved by asking for much more.”

Maria still felt uneasy—but she didn’t want to hold up proceedings while she grappled with the subtleties of Lambertian culture.

She said, “All right. Cosmology is the trigger, but they’re looking for a deeper explanation for their chemistry. Are they having any luck?”

Repetto brought back the map of Planet Lambert; the markers showing the locations of the teams of theorists were replaced by small bar charts in the same positions. “These are the dance times sustained for various subatomic models which have been explored over the past five years. A few theories are showing some promise, improving slightly with each refinement; other groups are getting fairly random results. Nobody’s come up with anything they’d be capable of communicating over any distance; these dances are too short-lived to be remembered by teams of messengers.”

Maria felt her skin crawl, again. False messages die, en route. There was something chilling about all this efficiency, this ruthless pursuit of the truth. Or maybe it was just a matter of injured pride: treating some of humanity’s most hard-won intellectual achievements as virtually self-evident wasn’t the most endearing trait an alien species could possess.

She said, “So… no team is on the verge of discovering the truth?”

Repetto shook his head. “Not yet. But the Autoverse rules are the simplest explanation for the thirty-two atoms, by almost any criterion.”

“Simplest to us. There’s nothing in the Lambertians’ environment to make them think in terms of cellular automata.”

Zemansky said, “There was nothing in their environment to make them think in terms of atoms.”

“Well, no, but the ancient Greeks thought of atoms—but they didn’t come up with quantum mechanics.” Maria couldn’t imagine a preindustrial human inventing the cellular automaton—even as a mathematical abstraction—let alone going on to hypothesize that the universe itself might be one. Clockwork cosmologies had come after physical clocks; computer cosmologies had come after physical computers.

Human history, though, clearly wasn’t much of a guide to Lambertian science. They already had their Newtonian—“clockwork”—planetary model. They didn’t need artifacts to point the way.

She said, “This ‘aesthetic’ which governs the acceptability of theories—have you been able to map the neural structures involved? Can you reproduce the criteria?”

Repetto said, “Yes. And I think I know what you’re going to ask next.”

“You’ve devised your own versions of possible Lambertian cellular automaton theories? And you’ve tested them against the Lambertian aesthetic?”

He inclined his head modestly. “Yes. We don’t model whole brains, of course—that would be grossly unethical—but we can run simulations of trial dances with nonconscious Lambertian neural models.”

Modeling Lambertians modeling the Autoverse…

“So how did it go?”

Repetto was hesitant. “The results so far are inconclusive. None of the theories I’ve constructed have worked—but it’s a difficult business. It’s hard to know whether or not I’m really stating the hypothesis in the way the Lambertians would—or whether I’ve really captured all the subtleties of the relevant behavior in a nonconscious model.”

“But it doesn’t look promising?”

“It’s inconclusive.”

Maria thought it over. “The Autoverse rules, alone, won’t explain the abundances of the elements—which is the main problem the Lambertians are trying to solve. So what happens if they miss the whole idea of a cellular automaton, and come up with a completely different theory: something utterly misguided… which fits all the data nonetheless? I know, they’ve grasped everything else about their world far more smoothly than humans ever did, but that doesn’t make them perfect. And if they have no tradition of giving up on difficult questions by invoking the hand of a creator, they might cobble together something which explains both the primordial cloud and the chemical properties of the elements—without coming anywhere near the truth. That’s not impossible, is it?”

There was an awkward silence. Maria wondered if she’d committed some terrible faux pas by suggesting that the criteria for contact might never be met… but she could hardly be telling these people anything they hadn’t already considered.

Then Durham said simply, “No, it’s not impossible. So we’ll just have to wait and see where the Lambertians’ own logic take them.”

27 (Rut City)

Peer felt the change begin, and switched off the lathe. He looked around the workshop helplessly, his eyes alighting on object after object which he couldn’t imagine living without: the belt sander, the rack full of cutting tools for the lathe, cans of oil, tins of varnish. The pile of freshly cut timber itself. Abandoning these things—or worse, abandoning his love of them—seemed like the definition of extinction.

Then he began to perceive the situation differently. He felt himself step back from his life as a carpenter into the larger scheme of things—or non-scheme: the random stuttering from pretext to pretext which granted his existence its various meanings. His sense of loss became impossible to sustain; his enthusiasm for everything to which he’d been devoted for the past seventy-six years evaporated like a dream. He was not repelled, or bewildered, by the phase he was leaving behind—but he had no desire to extend or repeat it.

His tools, his clothes, the workshop itself, all melted away, leaving behind a featureless gray plain, stretching to infinity beneath a dazzling blue sky, sunless but radiant. He waited calmly to discover his new vocation—remembering the last transition, and thinking: These brief moments between are a life in themselves. He imagined picking up the same train of thought and advancing it, slightly, the next time.

Then the empty ground grew a vast room around him, stretching in all directions for hundreds of meters, full of row after row of yellow wooden specimen drawers. A high ceiling with dusty skylights came together above him, completing the scene. He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.

The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.

As he approached the nearest set of drawers—where a blank legal pad and pencil were already waiting for him—he hesitated, and tried to make sense of his feelings. He knew why he was happy here: his exoself had rewired his brain, yet again, as he’d programmed it to do. What more sense did he require?

He looked around the musty room, trying to pin down the source of his dissatisfaction. Everything was perfect, here and now—but his past was still with him: the gray plain of transition, his decades at the lathe, the times he’d spent with Kate, his previous obsessions. The long-dead David Hawthorne, invincible, clinging to a rock face. None of it bore the slightest connection to his present interests, his present surroundings—but the details still hovered at the edge of his thoughts: superfluous, anachronistic distractions.

He was dressed for a role—so why not complete the illusion? He’d tinkered with false memories before. Why not construct a virtual past which “explained” his situation, and his enthusiasm for the task ahead, in terms which befitted the environment? Why not create a person with no memory of Peer, who could truly lose himself in the delights of being unleashed on this priceless collection?

He opened a window to his exoself, and together they began to invent the biography of an entomologist.

Peer stared blankly at the flickering electric lamp in the corner of the room, then marched over to it and read the scrawled note on the table beneath.

He hesitated, then created a door beside the lamp. Kate stepped through. She was ashen.

She said, “I spend half my life trying to reach you. When is it going to stop?” Her tone was flat, as if she wanted to be angry, but didn’t have the strength. Peer raised a hand to her cheek; she pushed it away.

He said, “What’s the problem?”

“The problem? You’ve been missing for four weeks.”

Four weeks? Peer almost laughed, but she looked so shaken that he stopped himself. He said, “You know I get caught up in what I’m doing. It’s important to me. But I’m sorry if you were worried—”

She brushed his words aside. “You were missing. I didn’t say: You didn’t answer my call. The environment we’re standing in—and its owner—did not exist.”

“Why do you think that?”

“The communications software announced that there was no process accepting data addressed to your personal node. The system lost you.”

Peer was surprised. He hadn’t trusted Malcolm Carter to start with, but after all this time it seemed unlikely that there were major problems with the infrastructure he’d woven into the City for them.

He said, “Lost track of me, maybe. For how long?”

“Twenty-nine days.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

Kate laughed bitterly. “No. What—do you think I would have kept it to myself? I have never come across a basic software failure of any kind, until now. And there are automatic logs which confirm that. This is the first time.”

Peer scratched his neck beneath the starched collar. The interruption had left him disoriented; he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing when the flashing lamp had caught his attention. His memory needed maintenance. He said, “It’s worrying—but I don’t see what we can do, except run some diagnostics, try to pinpoint the problem.”

“I ran diagnostics while the problem was happening.”

“And—?”

“There was certainly nothing wrong with the communications software. But none of the systems involved with running you were visible to the diagnostics.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Did you suspend yourself?”

“Of course not. And that wouldn’t explain anything; even if I had, the systems responsible for me would still have been active.”

“So what have you been doing?”

Peer looked around the room, back to where he’d been standing. There was a specimen drawer on one of the desks, and a thick legal pad beside it. He walked up to the desk. Kate followed.

He said, “Drawing beetles, apparently.” Perhaps a hundred pages of the pad had been used and flipped over. An unfinished sketch of one of the specimens was showing. Peer was certain that he’d never seen it before.

Kate picked up the pad and stared at the drawing, then flipped back through the previous pages.

She said, “Why the pseudonym? Aren’t the clothes affectation enough?”

“What pseudonym?”

She held the pad in front of him, and pointed to a signature. “Sir William Baxter, frs.”

Peer steadied himself against the desk, and struggled to fill the gap. He’d been playing some kind of memory game, that much was obvious—but surely he would have set things up so he’d understand what had happened, in the end? When Kate made contact, breaking the spell, his exoself should have granted him a full explanation. He mentally invoked its records; the last event shown was his most recent random transition. Whatever he’d done since, there was no trace of it.

He said dully, “The name means nothing to me.”

Stranger still, the thought of spending twenty-nine days sketching beetles left him cold. Any passion he’d felt for insect taxonomy had vanished along with his memories—as if the whole package had belonged to someone else entirely, who’d now claimed it, and departed.

28

As the City slowly imprinted itself upon her brain—every dazzling sunset leaving its golden afterimage burning on her nonexistent retinas, every journey she made wiring maps of the nonexistent streets into her nonexistent synapses—Maria felt herself drifting apart from her memories of the old world. The details were as sharp as ever, but her history was losing its potency, its meaning. Having banished the idea of grieving for people who had not died—and who had not lost her—all she seemed to have left to feel was nostalgia… and even that was undermined by contradictions.

She missed rooms, streets, smells. Sometimes it was so painful it was comical. She lay awake thinking about the shabbiest abandoned buildings of Pyrmont, or the cardboard stench of ersatz popcorn wafting out of the VR parlors on George Street. And she knew that she could reconstruct her old house, all of its surroundings, all of Sydney, and more, in as much detail as she wished; she knew that every last idiot ache she felt for the amputated past could be dealt with in an instant. Understanding exactly how far she could go was more than enough to rid her of any desire to take a single step in that direction.

But having chosen to make no effort to relieve the pangs of homesickness, she seemed to have forfeited her right to the emotion. How could she claim to long for something which she could so easily possess—while continuing to deny it to herself?

So she tried to set the past aside. She studied the Lambertians diligently, preparing for the day when contact would be permitted. She tried to immerse herself in the role of the legendary eighteenth founder, roused from her millennia of sleep to share the triumphant moment when the people of Elysium would finally come face to face with an alien culture.

Lambertian communities—despite some similarities to those of terrestrial social insects—were far more complex, and much less hierarchical, than the nests of ants or the hives of bees. For a start, all Lambertians were equally fertile; there was no queen, no workers, no drones. The young were conceived in plants at the periphery of the local territory, and upon hatching usually migrated hundreds of kilometers to become members of distant communities. There, they joined teams and learned their speciality—be it herding, defense against predators, or modeling the formation of planetary systems. Specialization was usually for life, but team members occasionally changed professions if the need arose.

Lambertian group behavior had a long evolutionary history, and it remained the driving force in cultural development—because individual Lambertians were physically incapable of inventing, testing or communicating the models by which the most sophisticated ideas were expressed. An individual could learn enough about a model while taking part in a successful dance to enable it to exchange roles with any other individual the next time the dance was performed—but it could never ponder the implications of the idea itself, in solitude. The language of the dance was like human writing, formal logic, mathematical notation and computing, all rolled into one—but the basic skills were innate, not cultural. And it was so successful—and so much in tune with other aspects of their social behavior—that the Lambertians had never had reason to develop a self-contained alternative.

Individuals were far from unthinking components, though. They were fully conscious in their own right; groups performed many roles, but they did not comprise “communal minds.” The language of sounds, movements and scents used by individuals was far simpler than the group language of the dance, but it could still express most of the concepts which preliterate humans had dealt with: intentions, past experience, the lives of others.

And individual Lambertians spoke of individual death. They knew that they would die.

Maria searched the literature for some clue to the way they dealt with their mortality. Corpses were left where they dropped; there was no ritual to mark the event, and no evidence of anything like grief. There were no clear Lambertian analogs for any of the human emotions—not even physical pain. When injured, they were acutely aware of the fact, and took steps to minimize damage to themselves—but it was a matter of specific instinctive responses coming into play, rather than the widespread biochemical shifts involved in human mood changes. The Lambertian nervous system was “tighter” than a human’s; there was no flooding of regions of the brain with large doses of endogenous stimulants or depressants—everything was mediated within the enclosed synapses.

No grief. No pain. No happiness? Maria retreated from the question. The Lambertians possessed their own spectrum of thoughts and behavior; any attempt to render it in human terms would be as false as the colors of the Autoverse atoms themselves.

The more she learned, the more the role she’d played in bringing the Lambertians into existence seemed to recede into insignificance. Fine-tuning their single-celled ancestor had seemed like a matter of the utmost importance, at the time—if only for the sake of persuading the skeptics that Autoverse life could flourish. Now—although a few of her biochemical tricks had been conserved over three billions years of evolution—it was hard to attribute any real significance to the choices she’d made. Even though the whole Lambertian biosphere might have been transformed beyond recognition if she’d selected a different shape for a single enzyme in A. hydrophila, she couldn’t think of the Lambertians as being dependent on her actions. The decisions she’d made controlled what she was witnessing on her terminal, nothing more; had she made other choices, she would have seen another biosphere, another civilization—but she could not believe that the Lambertians themselves would have failed to have lived the very same lives without her. Somehow, they still would have found a way to assemble themselves from the dust.

If that was true, though—if the internal logic of their experience would have been enough to bring them into existence—then there was no reason to believe that they would ever be forced to conclude that their universe required a creator.

She tried to reconcile this growing conviction with the Contact Group’s optimism. They’d studied the Lambertians for thousands of years—who was she to doubt their expertise? Then it occurred to her that Durham and his colleagues might have decided to feign satisfaction with the political restrictions imposed upon them, until they knew where she stood on the issue. Until she reached the same conclusions, independently? Durham might have guessed that she’d resist being pressured into taking their side; it would be far more diplomatic to leave her to form her own opinions—even applying a little reverse psychology to aim her in the right direction.

Or was that sheer paranoia?

After five days of studying the Lambertians, tracing the history of their increasingly successful attempts to explain their world—and five nights trying to convince herself that they’d soon give it all up and recognize their status as artificial life—she could no longer hold the contradictions in her head.

She phoned Durham.

It was three in the morning, but he must have been out of the City; Standard Time set a rate, but no diurnal cycle, and behind him was a dazzling sunlit room.

She said bluntly, “I think I’d like to hear the truth now. Why did you wake me?”

He seemed unsurprised by the question, but he replied guardedly. “Why do you think?”

“You want my support for an early expedition to Planet Lambert. You want me to declare—with all the dubious authority of the ’mother’ of the Lambertians—that there’s no point waiting for them to invent the idea of us. Because we both know it’s never going to happen. Not until they’ve seen us with their own eyes.”

Durham said, “You’re right about the Lambertians—but forget the politics. I woke you because your territory adjoins the region where the Autoverse is run. I want you to let me use it to break through to Planet Lambert.” He looked like a child, solemnly confessing some childish crime. “Access through the hub is strictly controlled, and visible to everyone. There’s plenty of unused space in the sixth public wedge, so I could try to get in from there—but again, it’s potentially visible. Your territory is private.”

Maria felt a surge of anger. She could scarcely believe that she’d ever swallowed the line about being woken to share in the glory of contact—and being used by Durham was no great shock; it was just like old times—but having been resurrected, not for her expertise, not for her status, but so he could dig a tunnel through her backyard…

She said bitterly, “Why do you need to break into the Autoverse? Is there a race going on that nobody’s bothered to tell me about? Bored fucking immortals battling it out to make the first unauthorized contact with the Lambertians? Have you turned xenobiology into a new Olympian sport?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“No? What, then? I’m dying to know.” Maria tried to read his face, for what it was worth. He allowed himself to appear ashamed—but he also looked grimly determined, as if he really did believe that he’d had no choice.

It hit her suddenly. “You think… there’s some kind of risk to Elysium, from the Autoverse?”

“Yes.”

“I see. So you woke me in time to share the danger? How thoughtful.”

“Maria, I’m sorry. If there’d been another way, I would have let you sleep forever—”

She started laughing and shivering at the same time. Durham placed one palm flat against the screen; she was still angry with him, but she let him reach through the terminal from his daylit room and put his hand on hers.

She said, “Why do you have to act in secret? Can’t you persuade the others to agree to stop running the Autoverse? They must realize that it wouldn’t harm the Lambertians; it would launch them as surely as it launched Elysium. There’s no question of genocide. All right, it would be a loss to the Autoverse scholars—but how many of those can there be? What does Planet Lambert mean to the average Elysian? It’s just one more kind of entertainment.”

“I’ve already tried to shut it down. I’m authorized to set the running speed relative to Standard Time—and to freeze the whole Autoverse, temporarily, if I see the need to stem the information flow, to let us catch up with rapid developments.”

“So what happened? They made you restart it?”

“No. I never managed to freeze it. It can’t be done anymore. The clock rate can’t be slowed past a certain point; the software ignores the instructions. Nothing happens.”

Maria felt a deep chill spread out from the base of her spine. “Ignores them how? That’s impossible.”

“It would be impossible if everything was working—so, obviously, something’s failed. The question is, at what level? I can’t believe that the control software is suddenly revealing a hidden bug after all this time. If it’s not responding the way it should, then the processors running it aren’t behaving correctly. So either they’ve been damaged somehow… or the cellular automaton itself has changed. I think the JVC rules are being undermined—or subsumed into something larger.”

“Do you have any hard evidence?”

“No. I’ve rerun the old validation experiments, the ones I ran during the launch, and they still work—wherever I’ve tried them—but I can’t even instruct the processors running the Autoverse to diagnose themselves, let alone probe what’s happening there at the lowest level. I don’t even know if the problem is confined to the region, or if it’s spreading out slowly… or if it’s already happening everywhere, but the effects are too subtle to pick up. You know the only way to validate the rules is with special apparatus. So what do I do? Disassemble half the processors in Elysium, and build test chambers in their place? And even if I could prove that the rules were being broken, how would that help?”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Only Repetto and Zemansky. If it became public knowledge, I don’t know what would happen.”

Maria was outraged. “What gives you the right to keep this to yourselves? Some people might panic… but what are you afraid of? Riots? Looting? The more people who know about the problem, the more likely it is that someone will come up with a solution.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps the mere fact that more people know would make things worse.”

Maria absorbed that in silence. The sunlight spilling through the terminal cast radial shadows around her; the room looked like a medieval woodcut of an alchemist discovering the philosopher’s stone.

Durham said, “Do you know why I chose the Autoverse in the first place—instead of real-world physics?”

“Less computation. Easier to seed with life. My brilliant work with A. lamberti.”

“No nuclear processes. No explanation for the origins of the elements. I thought: In the unlikely event that the planet yielded intelligent life, they’d still only be able to make sense of themselves on our terms. It all seemed so remote and improbable, then. It never occurred to me that they might miss the laws that we know are laws, and circumvent the whole problem.”

“They haven’t settled on any kind of theory, yet. They might still come up with a cellular automaton model—complete with the need for a creator.”

“They might. But what if they don’t?”

Maria’s throat was dry. The numbing abstractions were losing their hypnotic power; she was beginning to feel all too real: too corporeal, too vulnerable. Good timing: finally embracing the illusion of possessing solid flesh and blood—just as the foundations of this universe seemed ready to turn to quicksand.

She said, “You tell me. I’m tired of guessing what’s going on in your head.”

“We can’t shut them down. I think that proves that they’re already affecting Elysium. If they successfully explain their origins in a way which contradicts the Autoverse rules, then that may distort the JVC rules. Perhaps only in the region where the Autoverse is run—or perhaps everywhere. And if the TVC rules are pulled out from under us—”

Maria baulked. “That’s… like claiming that a VR environment could alter the real-world laws of physics in order to guarantee its own internal consistency. Even with thousands of Copies in VR environments, that never happened back on Earth.”

“No—but which is most like the real world: Elysium, or the Autoverse?” Durham laughed, without bitterness. “We’re all still patchwork Copies, most of us in private fantasy lands. Our bodies are ad hoc approximations. Our cities are indestructible wallpaper. The “laws of physics” of all the environments in Elysium contradict each other—and themselves—a billion times a day. Ultimately, yes, everything runs on the TVC processors, it’s all consistent with the TVC rules—but level after level is sealed off, made invisible to the next, made irrelevant.

“On Planet Lambert, everything that happens is intimately tied to one set of physical laws, applied uniformly, everywhere. And they’ve had three billion years of that. We may not know what the deepest laws are, anymore, but every event the Lambertians experience is part of a coherent whole. If there’s any conflict between the two versions of reality, we can’t rely on our own version taking precedence.”

Maria couldn’t argue for patchwork VR holding up against the deep logic of the Autoverse. She said, “Then surely the safest thing would be to ensure that there is no conflict. Stop observing the Autoverse. Give up all plans of making contact. Isolate the two explanations. Keep them from clashing.”

Durham said flatly, “No. We’re already in conflict. Why else can’t we shut them down?”

“I don’t know.” Maria looked away. “If the worst comes to the worst… can’t we start again? Construct a new Garden-of-Eden configuration? Launch ourselves again, without the Autoverse?”

“If we have to.” He added, “If we think we can trust the TVC universe to do everything it’s programmed to do—without altering the launch process, fouling it up… or even passing on the modified laws which we think we’re escaping.”

Maria looked out at the City. Buildings were not collapsing, the illusion was not decaying. She said, “If we can’t trust in that, what’s left?”

Durham said grimly, “Nothing. If we don’t know how this universe works anymore, we’re powerless.”

She pulled her hand free. “So what do you want to do? You think if you have access to more of the Autoverse than the data channels running out from the hub, you can make the TVC rules apply? One whole face of the pyramid shouting stop to the neighboring processors will carry more weight than the normal chain of command?”

“No. That might be worth trying. But I don’t believe it will work.”

“Then… what?”

Durham leaned forward urgently. “We have to win back the laws. We have to go into the Autoverse and convince the Lambertians to accept our explanation of their history—before they have a clear alternative.

“We have to persuade them that we created them, before that’s no longer the truth.”

29

Thomas sat in the garden, watching the robots tend the flowerbeds. Their silver limbs glinted in the sunshine as they reached between the dazzling white blossoms. Every movement they made was precise, economical; there was no faltering, no resting. They did what they had to, and moved on.

When they were gone, he sat and waited. The grass was soft, the sky was bright, the air was calm. He wasn’t fooled. There’d been moments like this before: moments approaching tranquility. They meant nothing, heralded nothing, changed nothing. There’d always be another vision of decay, another nightmare of mutilation. And another return to Hamburg.

He scratched the smooth skin of his abdomen; the last number he’d cut had healed long ago. Since then, he’d stabbed his body in a thousand places; slit his wrists and throat, punctured his lungs, sliced open the femoral artery. Or so he believed; no evidence of the injuries remained.

The stillness of the garden began to unnerve him. There was a blankness to the scene he couldn’t penetrate, as if he was staring at an incomprehensible diagram, or an abstract painting he couldn’t quite parse. As he gazed across the lawn, the colors and textures flooding in on him suddenly dissociated completely into meaningless patches of light. Nothing had moved, nothing had changed—but his power to interpret the arrangement of shades and hues had vanished; the garden had ceased to exist.

Panicking, Thomas reached blindly for the scar on his forearm. When his fingers made contact, the effect was immediate: the world around him came together again. He sat, rigid for a moment, waiting to see what would happen next, but the stretch of dark green in the corner of his eye remained a shadow cast by a fountain, the blue expanse above remained the sky.

He curled up on the grass, stroking the dead skin, crooning to himself. He believed he’d once hacked the scar right off; the new wound he’d made had healed without a trace—but the original faint white line had reappeared in its proper place. It was the sole mark of his identity, now. His face, when he sought it in the mirrors inside the house, was unrecognizable. His name was a meaningless jumble of sounds. But whenever he began to lose his sense of himself, he only had to touch the scar to recall everything which defined him.

He closed his eyes.

He danced around the flat with Anna. She stank of alcohol, sweat and perfume. He was ready to ask her to marry him; he could feel the moment approaching, and he was almost suffocating with fear, and hope.

He said, “God, you’re beautiful.”

Order my life, I’m nothing without you: fragments of time, fragments of words, fragments of feelings. Make sense of me. Make me whole.

Anna said, “I’m going to ask you for something I’ve never asked for before. I’ve been trying to work up the courage all day.”

“You can ask for anything.”

Let me understand you. Let me piece you together, hold you together. Let me help you to explain yourself.

She said, “I have a friend, with a lot of cash. Almost two hundred thousand marks. He needs someone who can—”

Thomas stepped back from her, then struck her hard across the face. He felt betrayed; wounded and ridiculous. She started punching him in the chest and face; he stood there and let her do it for a while, then grabbed both her hands by the wrists.

She caught her breath. “Let go of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then let go of me.”

He didn’t. He said, “I’m not a money-laundering facility for your friends.”

She looked at him pityingly. “Oh, what have I done? Offended your high moral principles? All I did was ask. You might have made yourself useful. Never mind. I should have known it was too much to expect.”

He pushed his face close to hers. “Where are you going to be, in ten years’ time? In prison? At the bottom of the Elbe?”

“Fuck off.”

“Where? Tell me?”

She said, “I can think of worse fates. I could end up playing happy families with a middle-aged banker.”

Thomas threw her toward the wall. Her feet slipped from under her before she hit it; her head struck the bricks as she was going down.

He crouched beside her, disbelieving. There was a wide gash in the back of her head. She was breathing. He patted her cheeks, then tried to open her eyes; they’d rolled up into her skull. She’d ended up almost sitting on the floor, legs sprawled in front of her, head lolling against the wall. Blood pooled around her.

He said, “Think fast. Think fast.”

Time slowed. Every detail in the room clamored for attention. The light from the one dull bulb in the ceiling was almost blinding; every edge of every shadow was razor sharp. Thomas shifted on the lawn, felt the grass brush against him. It would take so little strength, so little courage, so little love. It was not beyond imagining—

Anna’s face burned his eyes, sweet and terrible. He had never been so afraid. He knew that if he failed to kill her, he was nothing; no other part of him remained. Only her death made sense of what he’d become, the shame and madness which were all he had left. To believe that he had saved her life would be to forget himself forever.

To die.

He forced himself to lie still on the grass; waves of numbness swept through his body.

Shaking, he phoned for an ambulance. His voice surprised him; he sounded calm, in control. Then he knelt beside Anna and slid one hand behind her head. Warm blood trickled down his arm, under the sleeve of his shirt. If she lived, he might not go to prison—but the scandal would still destroy him. He cursed himself, and put his ear to her mouth. She hadn’t stopped breathing. His father would disinherit him. He stared blankly into the future, and stroked Anna’s cheek.

He heard the ambulance men on the stairs. The door was locked; he had to get up to let them in. He stood back helplessly as they examined her, then lifted her onto the stretcher. He followed them out through the front door. One of the men locked eyes with him coldly as they maneuvered the stretcher around the landing. “Pay extra to smack them around, do you?”

Thomas shook his head innocently. “It’s not what it looks like.”

Reluctantly, they let him ride in the back. Thomas heard the driver radio the police. He held Anna’s hand and gazed down at her. Her fingers were icy, her face was white. The ambulance took a corner; he reached out with his free hand to steady himself. Without looking up, he asked, “Will she be all right?”

“Nobody will know that until she’s been X-rayed.”

“It was an accident. We were dancing. She slipped.”

“Whatever you say.”

They sped through the streets, weaving through a universe of neon and headlights, rendered silent by the wail of the siren. Thomas kept his eyes on Anna. He held her hand tightly, and with all of his being willed her to live, but he resisted the urge to pray.

30

The leaders of the Contact Group assembled in Maria’s apartment. They’d barely taken their seats when Durham said, “I think we should move to my territory before we proceed any further. I’m on the far side of the hub from the Autoverse region—for what that’s worth. If distance still means anything, we should at least try to run our models somewhere reliable.”

Maria felt sick. The City itself was right beside the Autoverse: the fairground on the edge of the desert. But no Elysians were being computed in that public space; only buildings and puppet pedestrians. She said, “Six other founders have pyramids adjoining the Autoverse. If you think there’s a chance that effects are spilling over the border… can’t you find a pretext to get them to move their people as far away as possible? You don’t have to spell things out—you don’t have to tell them anything that might increase the danger.” Durham said wearily, “I’ve had enough trouble persuading thirty-seven dedicated Autoverse scholars to occupy themselves with projects which will keep them out of our way. If I started suggesting to Elaine Sanderson, Angelo Repetto and Tetsuo Tsukamoto that they rearrange the geometry of their computing resources, it would take them about ten seconds to put the entire Autoverse under scrutiny, to try to find out what’s going on. And the other three pyramids are occupied by hermits who haven’t shown themselves since the launch; we couldn’t warn them even if we wanted to. The best thing we can do is deal with the problem as quickly—and inconspicuously—as possible.”

Maria glanced at Dominic Repetto, but apparently he was resigned to the need to keep his family in the dark. She said, “It makes me feel like a coward. Fleeing to the opposite side of the universe, while we poke the hornet’s nest by remote control.”

Repetto said drily, “Don’t worry; for all we know, the TVC geometry might be irrelevant. The logical connection between us and the Autoverse might put us at more risk than the closet physical neighbors.”

Maria still chose to do everything manually, via her “solid” terminal; no interface windows floating in midair, no telepathic links to her exoself. Zemansky showed her how to run the obscure utility program which would transport her right out of her own territory. The less wealthy Copies back on Earth had darted from continent to continent in search of the cheapest QIPS—but in Elysium there would never have been a reason for anyone to shift this way, before. As she okayed the last query on the terminal, she pictured her model being halted, taken apart and piped through the hub into Durham’s pyramid—no doubt with a billion careful verification steps along the way… but it was impossible to know what even the most stringent error-checking procedures were worth, now that the deepest rules upon which they relied had been called into question.

As a final touch, Durham cloned the apartment, and they moved—imperceptibly—to the duplicated version. Maria glanced out the window. “Did you copy the whole City as well?”

“No. That’s the original you’re looking at; I’ve patched in a genuine view.”

Zemansky created a series of interface windows on the livingroom wall; one showed the region running the Autoverse, with the triangular face which bordered Maria’s own pyramid seen head-on. On top of the software map—the midnight-blue of the Autoverse cellular automation program, finely veined with silver spy software—she overlayed a schematic of the Lambertian planetary system, the orbits weirdly chopped up and rearranged to fit into the five adjacent pyramids. The space being modeled was—on its own terms—a relatively thin disk, only a few hundred thousand kilometers thick, but stretching about fifty per cent beyond the orbit of the outermost planet. Most of it was empty—or filled with nothing but light streaming out from the sun—but there were no short-cuts taken; every cubic kilometer, however featureless, was being modeled right down to the level of Autoverse cells. The profligacy of it was breathtaking; Maria could barely look at the map without trying to think of techniques to approximate the computations going on in all the near-vacuum. When she forced herself to stop and accept the thing as it was, she realized that she’d never fully grasped the scale of Elysium before. She’d toured the Lambertian biosphere from the planetary level right down to the molecular—but that was nothing compared to a solar-system’s-worth of subatomic calculations.

Durham touched her elbow. “I’m going to need your authorization.” She went with him to the terminal he’d created for himself in a corner of the room, and typed out the code number which had been embedded in her scan file back on Earth; the ninety-nine digits flowed from her fingers effortlessly, as if she’d rehearsed the sequence a thousand times. The code which would have granted her access to her deceased estate, on Earth, here unlocked the processors of her pyramid.

She said, “I really am your accomplice, now. Who goes to prison when you commit a crime using my ID?”

“We don’t have prisons.”

“So what exactly will the other Elysians do to us, when they find out what we’ve done?”

“Express appropriate gratitude.”

Zemansky zoomed in on the map to show the individual TVC processors along the border, and then enlarged the view still further to reveal their elaborate structure. It looked like a false-color schematic of an array of three-dimensional microcircuits—but it was too rectilinear, too perfect, to be a micrograph of any real object. The map was largely conjecture, now: a simulation guided by limited data flowing in from the grid itself. There were good reasons why it “should have been” correct, but there could be no watertight evidence that anything they were seeing was actually there.

Zemansky manipulated the view until they were peering straight down the middle of the thin layer of transparent “null” cells which separated the Autoverse region from Maria’s territory—bringing her own processors into sight for the first time. An arrow in a small key diagram above showed the orientation; they were looking straight toward the distant hub. All the processors were structurally identical, but those in the Autoverse were alive with the coded streams of activated states marking data flows, while her own were almost idle. Then Durham plugged her territory into the software he was running, and a wave of data swept out from the hub—looking like something from the stargate sequence in 2001—as the processors were reprogrammed. The real wave would have passed in a Standard Time picosecond; the map was smart enough to show the event in slow motion.

The reprogrammed processors flickered with data—and then began to sprout construction wires. Every processor in the TVC grid was a von Neumann machine as well as a Turing machine—a universal constructor as well as a universal computer. The only construction task they’d performed in the past had been a one-off act of self-replication, but they still retained the potential to build anything at all, given the appropriate blueprint.

The construction wires reached across the gap and touched the surface of the Autoverse processors. Maria held her breath, almost expecting to see a defensive reaction, a counterattack. Durham had analyzed the possibilities in advance: if the TVC rules continued to hold true, any “war” between these machines would soon reach a perpetual stalemate; they could face each other forever, annihilating each other’s “weapons” as fast as they grew, and no strategy could ever break the deadlock.

If the TVC rules failed, though, there was no way of predicting the outcome.

There was no—detectable—counterattack. The construction wires withdrew, leaving behind data links bridging the gap between the pyramids. Since the map was showing the links as intact, the software must have received some evidence that they were actually working: the Autoverse processors were at least reacting as they should to simple tests of the integrity of the connections.

Durham said, “Well, that’s something. They haven’t managed to shut us out completely.”

Repetto grimaced. “You make it sound like the Lambertians have taken control of the processors—that they’re deciding what’s going on here. They don’t even know that this level exists.”

Durham kept his eyes on the screen. “Of course they don’t. But it still feels like we’re sneaking up on some kind of… sentient adversary. The Lambertians’ guardian angels: aware of all the levels—but jealously defending their own people’s version of reality.” He caught Maria’s worried glance, and smiled. “Only joking.”

Maria looked on as Durham and Zemansky ran a series of tests to verify that they really had plugged in to the Autoverse region. Everything checked out—but then, all the same tests had worked when run through the authorized link, down at the hub. The suspect processors were merely acting as messengers, passing data around in a giant loop which confirmed that they could still talk to each other—that the basic structure of the grid hadn’t fallen apart.

Durham said, “Now we try to stop the clock.” He hit a few keys, and Maria watched his commands racing across the links. She thought: Maybe there was something wrong down at the hub. Maybe this whole crisis is going to turn out to be nothing but a tiny, localized bug. Perfectly explicable. Easily fixed.

Durham said, “No luck. I’ll try to reduce the rate.”

Again, the commands were ignored.

Next, he increased the Autoverse clock rate by fifty percent—successfully—then slowed it down in small steps, until it was back at the original value.

Maria said numbly, “What kind of sense does that make? We can run it as fast as we like—within our capacity to give it computing resources—but if we try to slow it down, we hit a brick wall. That’s just… perverse.”

Zemansky said, “Think of it from the Autoverse point of view. Slowing down the Autoverse is speeding up Elysium; it’s as if there’s a limit to how fast it can run us—a limit to the computing resources it can spare for us.”

Maria blanched. “What are you suggesting? That Elysium is now a computer program being run somewhere in the Autoverse?”

“No. But there’s a symmetry to it. A principle of relativity. Elysium was envisioned as a fixed frame of reference, a touchstone of reality—against which the Autoverse could be declared a mere simulation. The truth has turned out to be more subtle: there are no fixed points, no immovable objects, no absolute laws.” Zemansky betrayed no fear, smiling beatifically as she spoke, as if the ideas enchanted her. Maria longed to know whether she was merely concealing her emotions, or whether she had actually chosen a state of tranquility in the face of her world’s dethronement.

Durham said flatly, “Symmetries were made to be broken. And we still have the edge: we still know far more about Elysium—and the Autoverse—than the Lambertians. There’s no reason why our version of the truth can’t make as much sense to them as it does to us. All we have to do is give them the proper context for their ideas.”

Repetto had created a puppet team of Lambertians he called Mouthpiece: a swarm of tiny robots resembling Lambertians, capable of functioning in the Autoverse—although ultimately controlled by signals from outside. He’d also created human-shaped “telepresence robots” for the four of them. With Mouthpiece as translator, they could “reveal themselves” to the Lambertians and begin the difficult process of establishing contact.

What remained to be seen was whether or not the Autoverse would let them in.

Zemansky displayed the chosen entry point: a deserted stretch of grassland on one of Planet Lambert’s equatorial islands. Repetto had been observing a team of scientists in a nearby community; the range of ideas they were exploring was wider than that of most other teams, and he believed there was a chance that they’d be receptive to Elysian theories.

Durham said, “Time to dip a toe in the water.” On a second window, he duplicated the grassland scene, then zoomed in at a dizzying rate on a point in midair, until a haze of tumbling molecules appeared, and then individual Autoverse cells. The vacuum between molecules was shown as transparent, but faint lines delineated the lattice.

He said, “One red atom. One tiny miracle. Is that too much to ask for?”

Maria watched the commands stream across the TVC map: instructions to a single processor to rewrite the data which represented this microscopic portion of the Autoverse.

Nothing happened. The vacuum remained vacuum.

Durham swore softly. Maria turned to the window. The City was still standing; Elysium was not decaying like a discredited dream. But she felt herself break out in a sweat, felt her body drag her to the edge of panic. She had never really swallowed Durham’s claim that there was a danger in sharing their knowledge with the other Elysians—but now she wanted to flee the room herself, hide her face from the evidence, lest she add to the weight of disbelief.

Durham tried again, but the Autoverse was holding fast to its laws. Red atoms could not spontaneously appear from nowhere—it would have violated the cellular automaton rules. And if those rules had once been nothing but a few lines of a computer program—a program which could always be halted and rewritten, interrupted and countermanded, subjugated by higher laws—that was no longer true. Zemansky was right: there was no rigid hierarchy of reality and simulation anymore. The chain of cause and effect was a loop now—or a knot of unknown topology.

Durham said evenly, “All right. Plan B.” He turned to Maria. “Do you remember when we discussed closing off the Autoverse? Making it finite, but borderless… the surface of a four-dimensional doughnut?”

“Yes. But it was too small.” She was puzzled by the change of subject, but she welcomed the distraction; talking about the old days calmed her down, slightly. “Sunlight would have circumnavigated the universe and poured back into the system, in a matter of hours; Planet Lambert would have ended up far too hot, for far too long. It tried all kinds of tricks to change the thermal equilibrium—but nothing plausible really worked. So I left in the border. Sunlight and the solar wind disappear across it, right out of the model. And all that comes in is—”

She stopped abruptly. She knew what he was going to try next.

Durham finished for her. “All that comes in is cold thermal radiation, and a small flux of atoms, like a random inflow of interstellar gas. A reasonable boundary condition—better than having the system magically embedded in a perfect vacuum. But there’s no strict logic to it, no Autoverse-level model of exactly what’s supposed to be out there. There could be anything at all.”

He summoned up a view of the edge of the Autoverse; the atoms drifting in were so sparse that he had to send Maxwell’s Demon looking for one. The software which faked the presence of a plausible intestellar medium created atoms in a thin layer of cells, “next to” the border. This layer was not subject to the Autoverse rules—or the atoms could not have been created—but its contents affected the neighboring Autoverse cells in the usual way, allowing the tiny hurricanes which the atoms were to drift across the border.

Durham sent a simple command to the atom-creation sub-process—an instruction designed to merge with the flow of random requests it was already receiving: inject a red atom at a certain point, with a certain velocity.

It worked. The atom conjured up in the boundary layer, and then moved into the Autoverse proper, precisely on cue.

Durham sent a sequence of a thousand similar commands. A thousand more atoms followed, all moving with identical vectors. The “random inflow” was no longer random.

Elysium was affecting the Autoverse; they’d broken through.

Repetto cheered. Zemansky smiled enigmatically. Maria felt sicker than ever. She’d been hoping that the Autoverse would prove to be unbreachable—and then, by symmetry, Elysium might have been equally immune to interference. The two worlds, mutually contradictory or not, might have continued on their separate ways.

She said, “How does this help us? Even if you can make this program inject the puppets into deep space, how would you get them safely down to Planet Lambert? And how could you control their behavior once they were there? We still can’t reach in and manipulate them—that would violate the Autoverse rules.”

Durham had thought it all through. “One, we put them in a spaceship and drop that in. Two, we make them radio-controlled—and beam a signal at them from the edge of the model. If we can persuade the cold thermal radiation software to send in a maser beam.”

“You’re going to sit here and try to design a spaceship which can function in the Autoverse?”

“I don’t have to; it’s already been done. One of the old plans for contact involved masquerading as ‘aliens’ from another part of the Autoverse, to limit the culture shock for the Lambertians. We would have told them that there were billions of other stars, hidden from view by dust clouds shrouding their system. The whole idea was immoral, of course, and it was scrapped thousands of years ago—long before there were sentient Lambertians—but the technical work was completed and filed away. It’s all still there, in the Central Library; it should take us about an hour to assemble the components into a working expedition.”

It sounded bizarre, but Maria could see no flaw in the plan, in principle. She said, “So… we’re crossing space to meet the aliens, after all?”

“It looks that way.”

Repetto echoed the phrase. “Crossing space to meet the aliens. You must have had some strange ideas, in the old days. Sometimes I almost wish I’d been there.”

Maria gave in and learned how to use a mind’s eye control panel to switch between her Elysian body and her Autoverse telepresence robot. She stretched the robot’s arms and looked around the glistening flight deck of the Ambassador. She was lying in an acceleration couch, alongside the other three members of the crew. According to the flight plan, the robot was almost weightless now—but she’d chosen to filter out the effects of abnormal gravity, high or low. The robot knew how to move itself, in response to her wishes, under any conditions; inflicting herself with space sickness for the sake of “realism” would be absurd. She was not in the Autoverse, after all—she had not become this robot. Her entire model-of-a-human-body was still being run back in Elysium; the robot was connected to that model in a manner not much different from the nerve-induction link between a flesh-and-blood visitor to a VR environment, and his or her software puppet.

She flicked a mental switch and returned to the cloned apartment. Durham, Repetto and Zemansky sat in their armchairs, staring blankly ahead; little more than place markers, really. She went back to the Ambassador, but opened a small window in a corner of her visual field, showing the apartment through her Elysian eyes. If she was merely running a puppet in the Autoverse, she wanted to be clear about where her “true” body was supposed to be located. Knowing that there was an unobserved and insensate shop-window dummy occupying a chair on her behalf was not quite enough.

From the acceleration couch, she watched a—solid—display screen, high on the far wall of the flight deck, which showed their anticipated trajectory, swooping down on a shallow helical path toward Planet Lambert. They’d injected the ship through the border at the nearest possible point—one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers above the orbital plane—with a convenient preexisting velocity; it would take very little fuel to reach their destination, and descend.

She said, “Does anyone know if they ever bothered to rehearse a real landing in this thing?” Her vocal tract, wherever it was, felt perfectly normal as she spoke—but the timbre of her voice sounded odd through the robot’s ears. The tricks being played on her model-of-a-brain to edit out the growing radio time lag between her intentions and the robot’s actions didn’t bear thinking about.

Durham said, “Everything was rehearsed. They recreated the whole prebiotic planetary system for the test flights. The only difference between then and now was that they could materialize the ship straight into the vacuum, wherever they liked—and control the puppet crew directly.”

Violating Autoverse laws all over the place. It was unnerving to hear it spelled out: the lifeless Autoverse, in all its subatomic detail, had been a mere simulation; the presence of the Lambertians had made all the difference.

A second display screen showed the planet itself, an image from a camera outside the hull. The view was no different from that which the spy software had shown her a thousand times; although the camera and the robot’s eyes were subject to pure Autoverse physics, once the image was piped into her non-Autoverse brain, the usual false-color conventions were employed. Maria watched the blue-and-white disk growing nearer, with a tightening in her chest. Free falling with the illusion of weight. Descending and staying still.

She said, “Why show ourselves to the Lambertians, immediately? Why not send Mouthpiece ahead to prepare the ground—to make sure that they’re ready to face us? There are no animals down there larger than a wasp—and none at all with internal skeletons, walking on their hind legs. Humanoid robots one hundred and eighty centimeters tall will look like something out of their nightmares.”

Repetto replied, “Novel stimuli aren’t disabling for the Lambertians. They’re not going to go into shock. But we’ll certainly grab their attention.”

Durham added, “We’ve come to reveal ourselves as the creators of their universe. There’s not much point being shy about it.”

They hit the upper layers of the atmosphere over the night side. Land and ocean alike were in almost perfect darkness: no moonlight, no starlight, no artificial illumination. The ship began to vibrate; instrument panels on the flight deck hummed, and the face of one display screen audibly cracked. Then radio contact was disrupted by the cone of ionized gas around the hull, and they had no choice but to return to the apartment, to sit out the worst of it. Maria stared at the golden towers of the City, weighing the power of their majestic, self-declared invulnerability against the unassailable logic of the buffeting she’d just witnessed.

They returned for the last seconds of the descent, after the parachutes had already been deployed. The impact itself seemed relatively smooth—or maybe that was just her gravity filter coddling her. They left their acceleration couches and waited for the hull to cool: cameras showed the grass around them blackened, but true to predictions the fire had died out almost at once.

Repetto unpacked Mouthpiece from a storage locker, opening the canister full of robot insects and tipping them into the air. Maria flinched as the swarm flew around aimlessly for several seconds, before assembling into a tight formation in one corner of the deck.

Durham opened the airlock doors, outer first, then inner. The robots didn’t need pneuma of any kind, but the Ambassador’s designers must have toyed with the possibility of mapping human biochemistry into the Autoverse—actually creating “aliens” who could meet the Lambertians as equals—instead of playing with elaborate masks.

They stepped out onto the scorched ground. It was early morning; Maria blinked at the sunlight, the clear white sky. the warmth on her robot skin came through loud and clear. The blue-green meadow stretched ahead as far as she could see; she walked away from the ship—a squat ceramic truncated cone, its white heat shield smoke-darkened in untidy streaks—and the highlands to the south came into view behind it. Lush vegetation crowded the slopes, but the peaks were bare, rust-red.

A chorus of faint chirps and hums filled the air. She glanced at Mouthpiece, but it was hovering, almost silently, near Repetto; these sounds were coming from every direction. She recognized some of the calls—she’d listened to a few of the nonsentient species, in a quick tour of the evolutionary history leading up to Lambertian communication—and there was nothing particularly exotic about any of them; she might have been hearing cicadas, bees, wasps, mosquitoes. When a faint breeze blew from the east, though, carrying something which the robot’s olfactory apparatus mapped to the scent of salt water, Maria was suddenly so overwhelmed by the modest cluster of sensations that she thought her legs might give way beneath her. But it didn’t happen; she made no deliberate attempt to swoon, so the robot just stood like a statue.

Durham approached her. “You’ve never been on Lambert before, have you?”

She frowned. “How could I?”

“Passively. Most Autoverse scholars have done it.” Maria remembered Zemansky’s offer of a VR representation, when she first met the Contact Group. Durham bent down and picked a handful of grass, then scattered the blades. “But we could never do that before.”

“Hallelujah, the Gods have landed. What are you going to do if the Lambertians ask for a miracle? Pluck a few leaves as a demonstration of your omnipotence?”

He shrugged. “We can always show them the ship.”

“They’re not stupid. The ship proves nothing. Why should they believe that we’re running the Autoverse, when we can’t even break its laws?”

“Cosmology. The primordial cloud. The convenient amounts of each element.” She couldn’t help looking skeptical. He said, “Whose side are you on? You designed the primordial cloud! You sketched the original topography! You made the ancestor of the whole Lambertian biosphere! All I want to do is tell them that. It’s the truth, and they have to face it.”

Maria looked about, at a loss for words. It seemed clearer than ever that this world was not her creation; it existed on its own terms.

She said, “Isn’t that like saying… that your flesh-and-blood original was nothing but a lunatic with some strange delusions? And that any other, better explanation he invented for his life had to be wrong?”

Durham was silent for a while. Then he said, “Elysium is at stake. What do you want us to do? Map ourselves into Autoverse biochemistry and come here to live?”

“I’ve seen worse places.”

“The sun’s going to freeze in another billion years. I promised these people immortality.”

Repetto called out to them, “Are you ready? I’ve spotted the team; they’re not far off. About three kilometers west.” Maria was baffled for a moment, until she recalled that he still had access to all of the spy software. They were, still, outside the Autoverse looking in.

Durham yelled back, “Ten seconds.” He turned to Maria. “Do you want to be part of this, or not? It has to be done the way I’ve planned it—and you can either go along with that, or go back.”

She was about to reply angrily that he had no right to start making ultimatums, when she noticed the tiny window with its view of the apartment, hovering in the corner of her eye.

Elysium was at stake. Hundreds of thousands of people. The Lambertians would survive the shock of learning their “true” cosmology. Elysium might or might not survive the invention of an alternative.

She said, “You’re right; it has to be done. So let’s go spread the word.”

The team was hovering in a loose formation over the meadow. Maria had had visions of being attacked, but the Lambertians didn’t seem to notice their presence at all. They stopped about twenty meters from the swarm, while Mouthpiece went forward.

Repetto said, “This is the dance to signify that we have a message to convey.”

Mouthpiece came to a halt in a tight vertical plane, and the individual robots began to weave around each other in interlocking figure eights. The Lambertians responded immediately, aligning themselves into a similar plane. Maria glanced at Repetto; he was beaming like a ten-year-old whose home-made shortwave radio had just started to emit promising crackling noises.

She whispered, “It looks like they’re ignoring us completely… but do they think they’re talking to real Lambertians—or have they noticed the differences?”

“I can’t tell. But as a group, they’re reacting normally, so far.”

Zemansky said, “If a robot greeted you in your own language, wouldn’t you reply?”

Repetto nodded. “And the instinct goes far deeper, with the Lambertians. I don’t think they’d… discriminate. If they’ve noticed the differences, they’ll want to understand them, eventually—but the first priority will still be to receive the message. And to judge it.”

Mouthpiece began to drift into a more complex formation. Maria could make little sense of it—but she could see the Lambertians tentatively begin to mimic the change. This was it: Durham and Repetto’s cosmological package deal. An explanation for the primordial cloud, and for the deep rules underlying Autoverse chemistry: a cellular automaton, created with the cloud in place, five billion years ago. The two billion years of planetary formation which strictly hadn’t happened seemed like a forgivable white lie, for the moment; messy details like that could be mentioned later, if the basic idea was accepted.

Durham said, “Bad messages usually can’t be conveyed very far. Maybe the fact that Mouthpiece clearly isn’t a team for a nearby community will add credence to the theory.”

Nobody replied. Zemansky smiled sunnily. Maria watched the dancing swarms, hypnotized. The Lambertians seemed to be imitating Mouthpiece almost perfectly, now—but that only proved that they’d “read” the message. It didn’t yet mean that they believed it.

Maria turned away, and saw black dots against the sky. Persistence of vision was back in Elysium, in her model-of-a-brain. She remembered her dissatisfaction, clutching Autoverse molecules with her real-world hands and gloves. Had she come any closer to knowing the Autoverse as it really was?

Repetto said, “They’re asking a question. They’re asking for… clarification.” Maria turned back. The Lambertians had broken step with Mouthpiece, and the swarm had rearranged itself into something like an undulated black flying carpet. “They want ‘the rest of the message’—the rest of the theory. They want a description of the universe within which the cellular automaton was created.”

Durham nodded. He looked dazed, but happy. “Answer them. Give them the TVC rules.”

Repetto was surprised. “Are you sure? That wasn’t the plan—”

“What are we going to do? Tell them it’s none of their business?”

“I’ll translate the rules. Give me five seconds.”

Mouthpiece began a new dance. The waving carpet dispersed, then began to fall into step.

Durham turned to Maria. “This is better than we’d dared to hope. This way, they reinforce us. They won’t just stop challenging our version; they’ll help to affirm it.”

Zemansky said, “They haven’t accepted it yet. All they’ve said is that the first part of what we’ve told them makes no sense alone. They might ask about real-world physics, next.”

Durham closed his eyes, smiling. He said quietly, “Let them ask. We’ll explain everything—right back to the Big Bang, if we have to.”

Repetto said, puzzled, “I don’t think it’s holding.”

Durham glanced at the swarm. “Give them a chance. They’ve barely tried it out.”

“You’re right. But they’re already sending back a… rebuttal.”

The swarm’s new pattern was strong and simple: a sphere, rippling with waves like circles of latitude, running from pole to pole. Repetto said, “The software can’t interpret their response. I’m going to ask it to reassess all the old data; there may be a few cases where this dance has been observed before—but too few to be treated as statistically significant.”

Maria said, “Maybe we’ve made some kind of grammatical error. Screwed up the syntax, so they’re laughing in our face—without bothering to think about the message itself.”

Repetto said, “Not exactly.” He frowned, like a man trying to visualize something tricky. Mouthpiece began to echo the spherical pattern. Maria felt a chill in her Elysian bowels.

Durham said sharply, “What are you doing?”

“Just being polite. Just acknowledging their message.”

“Which is?”

“You may not want to hear it.”

“I can find out for myself, if I have to.” He took a step toward Repetto, more a gesture of impatience than a threat; a cloud of tiny blue gnat-like creatures flew up from the grass, chirping loudly.

Repetto glanced at Zemansky; something electric passed between them. Maria was confused—they were, unmistakably, lovers; she’d never noticed before. But perhaps the signals had passed through other channels, before, hidden from her. Only now—

Repetto said, “Their response is that the TVC rules are false—because the system those rules describe would endure forever. They’re rejecting everything we’ve told them, because it leads to what they think is an absurdity.”

Durham scowled. “You’re talking absurdities. They’ve had transfinite mathematics for thousands of years.”

“As a formality, a tool—an intermediate step in certain calculations. None of their models lead to infinite results. Most teams would never go so far as to try to communicate a model which did; that’s why this response is one we’ve rarely seen before.”

Durham was silent for a while, then he said firmly, “We need time to decide how to handle this. We’ll go back, study the history of the infinite in Lambertian culture, find a way around the problem, then return.”

Maria was distracted by something bright pulsing at the edge of her vision. She turned her head—but whatever it was seemed to fly around her as fast as she tracked it. Then she realized it was the window on Elysium; she’d all but banished it from her attention, filling it in like a blind spot. She tried to focus on it, but had difficulty making sense of the image. She centered and enlarged it.

The golden towers of Permutation City were flowing past the apartment window. She cried out in astonishment, and put her hands up, trying to gesture to the others. The buildings weren’t simply moving away; they were softening, melting, deforming. She fell to her knees, torn between a desire to return to her true body, to protect it—and dread at what might happen if she did. She dug one hand into the Lambertian soil; it felt real, solid, trustworthy.

Durham grabbed her shoulder. “We’re going back. Stay calm. It’s only a view—we’re not part of the City.”

She nodded and steeled herself, fighting every visceral instinct about the source of the danger, and the direction in which she should flee. The cloned apartment looked as solid as ever… and in any case, its demise could not, in itself, harm her. The body she had to defend was invisible: the model running at the far end of Durham’s territory. She would be no safer pretending to be on Planet Lambert than she would pretending to be in the cloned apartment.

She returned.

The four of them stood by the window, speechless, as the City rapidly and silently… imploded. Buildings rushed by, abandoning their edges and details, converging on a central point. The outskirts followed, the fields and parks flowing in toward the golden sphere which was all that remained of the thousand towers. Rainforest passed in a viridian blur. Then the scene turned to blackness as the foothills crowded in, burying their viewpoint in a wall of rock.

Maria turned to Durham. “The people who were in there… ?”

“They’ll all have left. Shocked but unharmed. Nobody was in there—in the software—any more than we were.” He was shaken, but he seemed convinced.

“And what about the founders with adjoining territory?”

“I’ll warn them. Everyone can come here, everyone can shift. We’ll all be safe, here. The TVC grid is constantly growing; we can keep moving away, while we plan the next step.”

Zemansky said firmly, “The TVC grid is decaying. The only way to be safe is to start again. Pack everything into a new Garden-of-Eden configuration, and launch Elysium again.”

Repetto said, “If that’s possible. If the infinite is still possible.” Born into a universe without limits, without death, he seemed transfixed by the Lambertians’ verdict.

A red glow appeared in the distance; it looked like a giant sphere of luminous rubble. As Maria watched, it brightened, then broke apart into a pattern of lights, linked by fine silver threads. A neon labyrinth. A fairground at night, from the air. The colors were wrong, but the shape was unmistakable: it was a software map of the City. The only thing missing was the highway, the data link to the hub.

Before Maria could say a word, the pattern continued to rearrange itself. Dazzling pinpricks of light appeared within a seemingly random subset of the processes, then moved together, clustering into a tightly linked core. Around them, a dimmer shell formed by the remaining software settled into a symmetrical configuration. The system looked closed, self-contained.

They watched it recede, in silence.

31

Peer turned and looked behind him. Kate had stopped dead in the middle of the walkway. All the energy seemed to drain out of her; she put her face in her hands, then sank to her knees.

She said flatly, “They’ve gone, haven’t they? They must have discovered us… and now this is their punishment. They’ve left the City running… but they’ve deserted it.”

“We don’t know that.”

She shook her head impatiently. “They will have made another version—purged of contamination—for their own use. And we’ll never see them again.” A trio of smartly dressed puppets approached, and walked straight through her, smiling and talking among themselves.

Peer walked over to her and sat cross-legged on the floor beside her. He’d already sent software probes hunting for any trace of the Elysians, without success—but Kate had insisted on scouring a reconstruction of the City, on foot, as if their own eyes might magically reveal some sign of habitation that the software had missed.

He said gently, “There are a thousand other explanations. Someone might have… I don’t know… created a new environment so astonishing that they’ve all gone off to explore it. Fashions sweep Elysium like plagues—but this is their meeting place, their center of government, their one piece of solid ground. They’ll be back.”

Kate uncovered her face and gave him a pitying look. “What kind of fashion would tempt every Elysian out of the City, in a matter of seconds? And where did they hear about this great work of art which they had to rush off and experience? I monitor all the public networks; there was nothing special leading up to the exodus. But if they’d discovered us—if they knew we were listening in—then they wouldn’t have used the public channels to announce the fact, would they?”

Peer couldn’t see why not; if the Elysians had found them, they’d also know that he and Kate were powerless to influence the City—let alone its inhabitants—in any way. There was no reason to arrange a secret evacuation. He found it hard enough to believe that anyone would want to punish two harmless stowaways—but it was harder still to accept that they’d been “exiled” without being dragged through an elaborate ritual of justice—or at the very least, publicly lambasted for their crime, before being formally sentenced. The Elysians never missed the opportunity for a bit of theater; swift, silent retribution just didn’t ring true.

He said, “If the data link to the hub was broken, unintentionally—”

Kate was scornful. “It would have been fixed by now.”

“Perhaps. That depends on the nature of the problem.” He hesitated. “Those four weeks I was missing… we still don’t know if I was cut off from you by a fault in the software at our level—or whether the problem was somewhere deeper. If there are faults appearing in the City itself, one of them might have severed the links to the rest of Elysium. And it might take some time for the problem to be pinned down; anything that’s taken seven thousand years to reveal itself could turn out to be elusive.”

Kate was silent for a while, then she said, “There’s an easy way to find out if you’re right. Increase our slowdown—keep increasing it—and see what happens. Program our exoselves to break in and switch us back to the normal rate if there’s any sign of the Elysians… but if that doesn’t happen, keep ploughing ahead into the future, until we’re both convinced that we’ve waited long enough.”

Peer was surprised; he liked the idea—but he’d imagined that Kate would have preferred to prolong the uncertainty. He wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or not. Did it mean she wanted to make a clean break from the Elysians? To banish any lingering hope of their return, as rapidly as possible? Or was it proof of just how desperately she wanted them back?

He said, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I’m sure. Will you help me program it? You’re the expert at this kind of thing.”

“Here and now?”

“Why not? The whole point is to save ourselves from waiting.”

Peer created a control panel in the air in front of them, and together they set up the simple time machine.

Kate hit the button.

Slowdown one hundred. The puppets using the walkway accelerated into invisible streaks. Slowdown ten thousand. Night and day chugged by, then flashed, then flickered—slowdown one million—then merged. Peer glanced up to watch the arc of the sun’s path slide up and down the sky with the City’s mock seasons, ever faster, until it smeared into a dull glowing band. Slowdown one billion. The view was perfectly static, now. There were no long-term fake astronomical cycles programmed into the virtual sky. No buildings rose, or crumbled. The empty, invulnerable City had nothing to do but repeat itself: to exist, and exist, and exist. Slowdown one trillion.

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.

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.

He said gently, “You really do need someone, don’t you, who knows the old world?”

“Yes.” Maria blinked back tears.

Durham’s expression froze abruptly, as if he’d decoupled from his body. Had he left her? Maria almost pulled free of his grip—but then his waxwork face became animated again.

He said, “I’ll come with you.”

“What—?”

He beamed at her, like an idiot, like a child. “I just made a few adjustments to my mental state. And I accept your invitation. Onward and upward.”

Maria was speechless, giddy with relief. She put her arms around him; he returned the embrace. He’d done that, for her? Reshaped himself, rebuilt himself…

There was no time to waste. She moved toward the control panel and hurried to prepare the launch. Durham looked on, still smiling; he seemed as entranced by the flickering display as if he’d never set eyes on it before.

Maria stopped dead. If he’d rebuilt himself, reinvented himself… then how much of the man she’d known remained? Had he granted himself transhuman resilience, and healed himself of his terminal despair… or had he died in silence, beyond her sight, and given birth to a companion for her, a software child who’d merely inherited its father’s memories?

Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder… and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new?

She searched his face for an answer, but she couldn’t read him.

She said, “You must tell me what you did. I need to understand.”

Durham promised her, “I will. In the next life.”