Permutation City

"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.