Permutation City

properties of the elements—without coming anywhere near the truth. That’s not impossible, is it?”

There was an awkward silence. Maria wondered if she’d committed some terrible faux pas by suggesting that the criteria for contact might never be met… but she could hardly be telling these people anything they hadn’t already considered.

Then Durham said simply, “No, it’s not impossible. So we’ll just have to wait and see where the Lambertians’ own logic take them.”

27 (Rut City)

Peer felt the change begin, and switched off the lathe. He looked around the workshop helplessly, his eyes alighting on object after object which he couldn’t imagine living without: the belt sander, the rack full of cutting tools for the lathe, cans of oil, tins of varnish. The pile of freshly cut timber itself. Abandoning these things—or worse, abandoning his love of them—seemed like the definition of extinction.

Then he began to perceive the situation differently. He felt himself step back from his life as a carpenter into the larger scheme of things—or non-scheme: the random stuttering from pretext to pretext which granted his existence its various meanings. His sense of loss became impossible to sustain; his enthusiasm for everything to which he’d been devoted for the past seventy-six years evaporated like a dream. He was not repelled, or bewildered, by the phase he was leaving behind—but he had no desire to extend or repeat it.

His tools, his clothes, the workshop itself, all melted away, leaving behind a featureless gray plain, stretching to infinity beneath a dazzling blue sky, sunless but radiant. He waited calmly to discover his new vocation— remembering the last transition, and thinking: These brief moments between are a life in themselves. He imagined picking up the same train of thought and advancing it, slightly, the next time.

Then the empty ground grew a vast room around him, stretching in all directions for hundreds of meters, full of row after row of yellow wooden specimen drawers. A high ceiling with dusty skylights came together above him, completing the scene. He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.

The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.

As he approached the nearest set of drawers—where a blank legal pad and pencil were already waiting for him—he hesitated, and tried to make sense of his feelings. He knew why he was happy here: his exoself had rewired his brain, yet again, as he’d programmed it to do. What more sense did he require?

He looked around the musty room, trying to pin down the source of his dissatisfaction. Everything was perfect, here and now—but his past was still with him: the gray plain of transition, his decades at the lathe, the times he’d spent with Kate, his previous obsessions. The long-dead David Hawthorne, invincible, clinging to a rock face. None of it bore the slightest connection to his present interests, his present surroundings—but the details still hovered at the edge of his thoughts: superfluous, anachronistic distractions.

He was dressed for a role—so why not complete the illusion? He’d tinkered with false memories before. Why not construct a virtual past which “explained” his situation, and his enthusiasm for the task ahead, in terms which befitted the environment? Why not create a person with no memory of Peer, who could truly lose himself in the delights of being unleashed on this priceless collection?

He opened a window to his exoself, and together they began to invent the biography of an entomologist.

+ + +

Peer stared blankly at the flickering electric lamp in the corner of the room, then marched over to it and read the scrawled note on the table beneath.

TALK TO ME. SOMETHING IS WRONG.

He hesitated, then created a door beside the lamp. Kate stepped through. She was ashen.

She said, “I spend half my life trying to reach you. When is it going to stop?” Her tone was flat, as if she wanted to be angry, but didn’t have the strength. Peer raised a hand to her cheek; she pushed it away.

He said, “What’s the problem?”

“The problem? You’ve been missing for four weeks.”

Four weeks? Peer almost laughed, but she looked so shaken that he stopped himself. He said, “You know I get caught up in what I’m doing. It’s important to me. But I’m sorry if you were worried—”

She brushed his words aside. “You were missing. I didn’t say: You didn’t answer my call. The environment we’re standing in—and its owner—did not exist.”

“Why do you think that?”

“The communications software announced that there was no process accepting data addressed to your personal node. The system lost you.”

Peer was surprised. He hadn’t trusted Malcolm Carter to start with, but after all this time it seemed unlikely that there were major problems with the infrastructure he’d woven into the City for them.

He said, “Lost track of me, maybe. For how long?”

“Twenty-nine days.”

“Has this ever happened before?”

Kate laughed bitterly. “No. What—do you think I would have kept it to myself? I have never come across a basic software failure of any kind, until now. And there are automatic logs which confirm that. This is the first time.”

Peer scratched his neck beneath the starched collar. The interruption had left him disoriented; he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing when the flashing lamp had caught his attention. His memory needed maintenance. He said, “It’s worrying—but I don’t see what we can do, except run some diagnostics, try to pinpoint the problem.”

“I ran diagnostics while the problem was happening.”

“And—?”

“There was certainly nothing wrong with the communications software. But none of the systems involved with running you were visible to the diagnostics.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Did you suspend yourself?”

“Of course not. And that wouldn’t explain anything; even if I had, the systems responsible for me would still have been active.”

“So what have you been doing?”

Peer looked around the room, back to where he’d been standing. There was a specimen drawer on one of the desks, and a thick legal pad beside it. He walked up to the desk. Kate followed.

He said, “Drawing beetles, apparently.” Perhaps a hundred pages of the pad had been used and flipped over. An unfinished sketch of one of the specimens was showing. Peer was certain that he’d never seen it before.

Kate picked up the pad and stared at the drawing, then flipped back through the previous pages.

She said, “Why the pseudonym? Aren’t the clothes affectation enough?”

“What pseudonym?”

She held the pad in front of him, and pointed to a signature. “Sir William Baxter, frs.”

Peer steadied himself against the desk, and struggled to fill the gap. He’d been playing some kind of memory game, that much was obvious—but surely he would have set things up so he’d understand what had happened, in the end? When Kate made contact, breaking the spell, his exoself should have granted him a full explanation. He