Permutation City

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.