Permutation City

Thomas threw her toward the wall. Her feet slipped from under her before she hit it; her head struck the bricks as she was going down.

He crouched beside her, disbelieving. There was a wide gash in the back of her head. She was breathing. He patted her cheeks, then tried to open her eyes; they’d rolled up into her skull. She’d ended up almost sitting on the floor, legs sprawled in front of her, head lolling against the wall. Blood pooled around her.

He said, “Think fast. Think fast.”

He knelt over her, one knee to either side, took her face in his hands, then closed his eyes. He brought her head forward, then slammed it back against the wall. Five times. Then he held his fingers near her nostrils, without opening his eyes. He felt no exhalation.

He backed away from her, turned away and opened his eyes, then walked around the flat, wiping things he might have touched with his handkerchief. Avoiding looking at her. He was crying and shaking, but he couldn’t think why.

There was blood on his hands, his shirt, his trousers, his shoes. He found a garbage bag, put all his clothes in it, then washed the blood from his skin. There was a black spot in the center of his vision, but he worked around it. He put the garbage bag in his suitcase, and put on fresh clothes: blue jeans and a black T-shirt. He went through the flat, packing away everything that belonged to him. He almost took Anna’s address book, but when he checked he saw that he wasn’t in it. He looked for diaries, but found none.

Dozens of people had seen them together, month after month. Anna’s neighbors, Anna’s friends. Dozens of people had seen them leave the nightclub. He wasn’t sure how many of her friends knew what he did, where he was from. He’d never told any of them more than his first name, he’d always lied about the rest—but Anna might have told them everything she knew.

Having been seen with her alive was bad enough; he couldn’t risk being seen walking out the front door the night she was killed.

The flat was two flights up. The bathroom window opened onto an alley. Thomas threw the suitcase down; it landed with a soft thud. He thought of jumping—almost believing that he could land unhurt, or almost believing that he wouldn’t care—but there was a gray clarity underneath those delusions, and an engine in his skull a billion years old which only wanted to survive.

He climbed up into the window frame, into the gap left by the sliding half-pane, one foot either side of the track. There was no ledge, as such, just the double brickwork of the wall itself. He had to crouch to fit, but he found he could keep his balance by pushing his left hand up against the top of the frame, jamming himself in place.

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.”

Maria glanced up at him, startled. He looked perfectly sincere, but she couldn’t help wondering—not for the first time—if he knew that she’d been approached by Hayden, knew exactly what she’d been told. She felt her cheeks flush. She’d spent too many years using phones and filters; she couldn’t keep anything from showing on her face.

She said, “Thank you. But aren’t you afraid I might take the first plane to the Bahamas? There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

“I think I can trust you.”

There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice—but there really didn’t need to be.

He said, “Speaking of trust… I think your phone may be bugged. I’m sorry; I should have told you that sooner.”

Maria stared at him. “How did you know?”