Грег Иган - Permutation City

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.