Permutation City

He turned sideways, then reached across the outside wall, and into the frame of the bathroom window of the neighboring flat. He could hear traffic, and music somewhere, but no lights showed from within the flat, and the alley below was deserted. The two windows were scarcely a meter apart, but the second one was closed, halving its width. With one hand on each edge, he shifted his right foot to the neighbor's window. Then, gripping the intervening wall tightly between his forearms, he moved his left foot across. Finally, securing himself by pressing up with his right hand, he let go of the first frame completely.

He shuffled across the one-brick's-width ledge, fighting an impulse to mutter Ave Marias. Pray for us sinners? He realized that he'd stopped weeping. A drain pipe ran close to the far side of the window. He imagined tearing his palms open on jagged rusty metal, but the pipe was smooth; it took all his strength to hold himself in place, gripping it with hands and knees. When he touched the ground with his feet, his legs gave way. But not for long.

He hid in a public toilet for three hours, staring up at one corner of the room. The lights, the tiles, could have belonged to a prison or an asylum. He found himself disconnected, from the world, the past; his time breaking up into moments, shocks of awareness, shimmering droplets of mercury, beads of sweat.

This isn't me. This is something else that believes it's me. And it's wrong, wrong, wrong.

Nobody disturbed him. At six o'clock he walked out into the morning light, and caught a train home.

15

(Remit not paucity)

APRIL 2051

Durham's north Sydney flat was small, and very sparsely furnished; not at all what Maria had expected. The combined living room and kitchen was all she'd seen, but it was clear from the outside that there wasn't space for much more. Durham was on the sixteenth floor, but the building was hemmed in on all sides by ugly late-twenties office towers, blue and pink ersatz-marble monstrosities; no expensive harbor views here. For someone who was ripping off gullible millionaires -- or even someone who merely sold them insurance -- Durham didn't seem to have much to show for it. Maria thought it unlikely that the place had been set up entirely for her benefit, to fit the story he'd told her: to demonstrate the frugal lifestyle which supposedly enabled him to pay her out of his own pocket. He'd invited her out of the blue; she would never have had a reason to insist on seeing where he lived.

She put her notepad down on the scratched dining table, and turned it so that Durham could read the graphs. "These are the latest results for the two most promising species. A. lithophila has the higher mutation rate, per generation, but it reproduces much more slowly, and it's more vulnerable to climate change. A. hydrophila is more prolific, with a stabler genome. It's not intrinsically hardier; it's just better protected by the ocean."

Durham said, "What's your gut feeling?"

"What's yours?"

"A. litho evolves into a few promising species -- which all get wiped out by one major crisis. A. hydro slowly builds up a huge stock of survival-neutral mutations, some of which turn out to be useful on land. The first few hundred thousand species which blow out of the sea don't make it -- but it doesn't matter, there are always more. Or am I just being swayed too much by terrestrial preconceptions?"

"The people you're trying to convince will almost certainly think the same way."

Durham laughed. "It wouldn't hurt to be right, as well as persuasive. If they're not mutually exclusive ambitions."

Maria didn't reply. She stared down at the notepad; she couldn't look Durham in the eye. Talking to him by phone, with software filters, had been bearable. And the work itself had been an end in itself; immersed in the elaborate game of Autoverse biochemistry, she'd found it all too easy to carry on, as if it made no difference what it was for. But she'd done next to nothing to make Durham more likely to take her into his confidence. That was why she'd agreed to this meeting -- and why she had to take advantage of it.

The trouble was, now that she was here, she was so ill at ease that she could barely discuss the most neutral technicalities without her voice faltering. If he started spouting lies about his hopes of debating the skeptics of the artificial life mafia in some future issue of Cellular Automaton World, she'd probably start screaming. Or, more likely, throw up on the bare linoleum floor.

He said, "By the way, I signed the release on your fee this morning -- I've authorized the trust fund to pay you in full. The work's been going so well, it seemed only fair."