Permutation City

TALK TO ME. SOMETHING IS WRONG.

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.