Permutation City

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."