Permutation City

“But don’t you want to be there, on Planet Lambert, when we make first contact with the civilization that owes its existence to you?”

24 (Rut City)

Peer was in his workshop, making a table leg on his lathe, when Kate’s latest message caught his eye: You have to see this. Please! Meet me in the City.

He looked away.

He was working with his favorite timber, sugar pine. He’d constructed his own plantation from a gene library and plant cell maps—modeling individual examples of each cell type down to an atomic level, then encapsulating their essential behavior in rules which he could afford to run billions of times over, for tens of thousands of trees. In theory, he could have built the whole plantation from individual atoms—and that would have been the most elegant way to do it, by far—but slowing himself down to a time frame in which the trees grew fast enough to meet his needs would have meant leaving Kate far behind.

He stopped the lathe and reread the message, which was written on a poster tacked to the workshop’s noticeboard (the only part of his environment he allowed her to access, while he was working). The poster looked quite ordinary, except for an eye-catching tendency for the letters to jump up and down when they crossed his peripheral vision.

He muttered, “I’m happy here. I don’t care what they’re doing in the City.” The workshop abutted a warehouse full of table legs—one hundred and sixty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine, so far. Peer could imagine nothing more satisfying than reaching the two hundred thousand mark—although he knew it was likely that he’d change his mind and abandon the workshop before that happened; new vocations were imposed by his exoself at random intervals, but statistically, the next one was overdue. Immediately before taking up woodwork, he’d passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory—untroubled by the fact that none of the Elysian mathematicians would ever be aware of his work. Before that, he’d written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English—and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience. Before that, he’d patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness. Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time. He’d even been interested in the Elysians, once.

No longer. He preferred to think about table legs.

He was still interested in Kate, though. He’d chosen that as one of his few invariants. And he’d been neglecting her lately; they hadn’t met in almost a decade.

He looked around the workshop wistfully, his gaze falling on the pile of fresh timber in the corner, but then he strengthened his resolve. The pleasures of the lathe beckoned—but love meant making sacrifices.

Peer took off his dustcoat, stretched out his arms, and fell backward into the sky above the City.

Kate met him while he was still airborne, swooping down from nowhere and grabbing his hand, nearly wrenching his arm from its socket. She yelled above the wind, “So, you’re still alive after all. I was beginning to think you’d shut yourself down. Gone looking for the next life without me.” Her tone was sarcastic, but there was an edge of genuine relief. Ten years could still be a long time, if you let it.

Peer said gently, but audibly, “You know how busy I am. And when I’m working—”

She laughed derisively. “Working? Is that what you call it? Taking pleasure from something that would bore the stupidest factory robot to death?” Her hair was long and jet black, whipping up around her face as if caught by the wind at random—but always concealing just enough to mask her expression.

“You’re still—“ The wind drowned out his words; Kate had disabled his aphysical intelligibility. He shouted, “You’re still a sculptor, aren’t you? You ought to understand. The wood, the grain, the texture—”

“I understand that you need prosthetic interests to help pass the time—but you could try setting the parameters more carefully.”

“Why should I?” Being forced to raise his voice made him feel argumentative; he willed his exoself to circumvent the effect, and screamed calmly: “Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It’s perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I’m not stuck on any one thing forever, however much you think I’m wasting my time, it’s only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?”

“You could still be more selective.”

“What did you have in mind? Something socially useful? Famine relief work? Counseling the dying? Or something intellectually challenging? Uncovering the fundamental laws of the universe? I have to admit that the TVC rules have slipped my mind completely; it might take me all of five seconds to look them up again. Searching for God? That’s a difficult one: Paul Durham never returns my calls. Self discovery—?”

“You don’t have to leave yourself open to every conceivable absurdity.”

“If I limited the range of options, I’d be repeating myself in no time at all. And if you find the phase I’m passing through so unbearable, you can always make it vanish: you can freeze yourself until I change.”

Kate was indignant. “I have other time frames to worry about besides yours!”

“The Elysians aren’t going anywhere.” He didn’t add that he knew she’d frozen herself half a dozen times already. Each time for a few more years than the time before.

She turned toward him, parting her hair” to show one baleful eye. “You’re fooling yourself, you know. You’re going to repeat yourself, eventually. However desperately you reprogram yourself, in the end you’re going to come full circle and find that you’ve done it all before.”

Peer laughed indulgently, and shouted, “We’ve certainly been through all this before—and you know that’s not true. It’s always possible to synthesize something new: a novel art form, a new field of study. A new aesthetic, a new obsession.” Falling through the cool late afternoon air beside her was exhilarating, but he was already missing the smell of wood dust.

Kate rendered the air around them motionless and silent, although they continued to descend. She released his hand, and said, “I know we’ve been through this before. I remember what you said last time: If the worst comes to the worst, for the first hundred years you can contemplate the number one. For the second hundred years you can contemplate the number two. And so on, ad infinitum. Whenever the numbers grow too big to hold in your mind, you can always expand your mind to fit them. QED. You’ll never run out of new and exciting interests.”

Peer said gently, “Where’s your sense of humor? It’s a simple proof that the worst-case scenario is still infinite. I never suggested actually doing that.”

“But you might as well.” Now that her face was no longer concealed, she looked more forlorn than angry—by choice, if not necessarily by artifice. “Why do you have to find everything so… fulfilling? Why can’t you discriminate? Why can’t you let yourself grow bored with things—then move on? Pick them up again later if you feel the urge.”

“Sounds awfully quaint to me. Very human.”

“It did work for them. Sometimes.”

“Yes. And I’m sure it works for you, sometimes. You drift back and forth between your art and watching the great Elysian soap opera. With a decade or two of aimless depression in between. You’re dissatisfied most of the time—and letting that happen is a conscious choice, as deliberate, and arbitrary, as anything I impose on myself. If that’s how you want to live, I’m not going to try to change you. But you can’t expect me to live the same way.”

She didn’t reply. After a moment, the bubble of still air around them blew away, and the roar of the wind drowned the silence again.

Sometimes he wondered if Kate had ever really come to terms with the shock of discovering that stowing