Permutation City

She cloned a small colony of the mutose-eating strain, and watched it grow steadily in a culture of pure mutose. No surprise, but it was still worth doing.

Then she did the same, with pure nutrose, and the colony, of course, died out at once. The original ring-cleaving enzyme had been lost; the original roles of nutrose and mutose as food and poison had been swapped.

Maria pondered this. A. lamberti had adapted -- but not in the way she'd expected. Why hadn't it found a means of consuming both sugars, instead of exchanging one kind of exclusive reliance for another? It would have been a far better strategy. It was what a real-world bacterium would have done.

She brooded over the question for a while -- then started laughing. Sixteen years, people had been hunting for a single, convincing example of natural selection in the Autoverse -- and here she was worrying that it wasn't the best of all possible adaptations. Evolution was a random walk across a minefield, not a preordained trajectory, onward and upward toward "perfection." A. lamberti had stumbled on a successful way to turn poison into food. It was tough luck if the corollary was: vice versa.

Maria ran a dozen more experiments. She lost all track of time; when dawn came, the software brightened the images in front of her, keeping the daylight from washing them out. It was only when her concentration faltered, and she looked around the room, that she realized how late it was.

She started again on the letter. After three drafts of the first paragraph -- all eliciting the same response from Camel's Eye: You'll hate this when you reread it later. Trust me. -- she finally admitted to herself that she was wasted. She shut down everything and crawled into bed.

She lay there awhile in a stupor, burying her face in the pillow, waiting for the ghost images of Petri dishes and enzymes to fade. Five years ago, she could have worked all night, and suffered nothing worse than a fit of yawning in the middle of the afternoon. Now, she felt like she'd been hit by a train -- and she knew she'd be a wreck for days. Thirty-one is old, old, old.

Her head throbbed, her whole body ached. She didn't care. All the time and money she'd squandered on the Autoverse was worth it, now. Every moment she'd spent there had been vindicated.

Yeah? She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. What, exactly, had changed? It was still nothing but a self-indulgent hobby, an elaborate computer game. She'd be famous with seventy-two other anal-retentive Autoverse freaks. How many bills would that pay? How many typhoons would it neutralize?

She wrapped her head in the pillow, feeling crippled, stupid, hopeless -- and defiantly happy -- until her limbs went numb, her mouth went dry, and the room seemed to rock her to sleep.

5

(Remit not paucity)

NOVEMBER 2050

Peer anchored the soles of both feet and the palm of one hand firmly against the glass, and rested for a while. He tipped his head back to take in, one more time, the silver wall of the skyscraper stretching to infinity above him. Cotton-wool clouds drifted by, higher than any part of the building -- even though the building went on forever.

He freed his right foot, reanchored it higher up the wall, then turned and looked down at the neat grid of the city below, surrounded by suburbs as orderly as ploughed fields. The foreshortened countryside beyond formed a green-brown rim to the hemispherical bowl of the Earth; a blue-hazed horizon bisected the view precisely. The features of the landscape, like the clouds, were "infinitely large," and "infinitely distant"; a finite city, however grand, would have shrunk to invisibility, like the base of the skyscraper. The distance was more than a trick of perspective, though; Peer knew he could keep on approaching the ground for as long as he liked, without ever reaching it. Hours, days, centuries.