Permutation City

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.