Permutation City

Repetto echoed the phrase. “Crossing space to meet the aliens. You must have had some strange ideas, in the old days. Sometimes I almost wish I’d been there.”

+ + +

Maria gave in and learned how to use a mind’s eye control panel to switch between her Elysian body and her Autoverse telepresence robot. She stretched the robot’s arms and looked around the glistening flight deck of the Ambassador. She was lying in an acceleration couch, alongside the other three members of the crew. According to the flight plan, the robot was almost weightless now—but she’d chosen to filter out the effects of abnormal gravity, high or low. The robot knew how to move itself, in response to her wishes, under any conditions; inflicting herself with space sickness for the sake of “realism” would be absurd. She was not in the Autoverse, after all—she had not become this robot. Her entire model-of-a-human-body was still being run back in Elysium; the robot was connected to that model in a manner not much different from the nerve-induction link between a flesh-and-blood visitor to a VR environment, and his or her software puppet.

She flicked a mental switch and returned to the cloned apartment. Durham, Repetto and Zemansky sat in their armchairs, staring blankly ahead; little more than place markers, really. She went back to the Ambassador, but opened a small window in a corner of her visual field, showing the apartment through her Elysian eyes. If she was merely running a puppet in the Autoverse, she wanted to be clear about where her “true” body was supposed to be located. Knowing that there was an unobserved and insensate shop-window dummy occupying a chair on her behalf was not quite enough.

From the acceleration couch, she watched a—solid—display screen, high on the far wall of the flight deck, which showed their anticipated trajectory, swooping down on a shallow helical path toward Planet Lambert. They’d injected the ship through the border at the nearest possible point—one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers above the orbital plane—with a convenient preexisting velocity; it would take very little fuel to reach their destination, and descend.

She said, “Does anyone know if they ever bothered to rehearse a real landing in this thing?” Her vocal tract, wherever it was, felt perfectly normal as she spoke—but the timbre of her voice sounded odd through the robot’s ears. The tricks being played on her model-of-a-brain to edit out the growing radio time lag between her intentions and the robot’s actions didn’t bear thinking about.

Durham said, “Everything was rehearsed. They recreated the whole prebiotic planetary system for the test flights. The only difference between then and now was that they could materialize the ship straight into the vacuum, wherever they liked—and control the puppet crew directly.”

Violating Autoverse laws all over the place. It was unnerving to hear it spelled out: the lifeless Autoverse, in all its subatomic detail, had been a mere simulation; the presence of the Lambertians had made all the difference.

A second display screen showed the planet itself, an image from a camera outside the hull. The view was no different from that which the spy software had shown her a thousand times; although the camera and the robot’s eyes were subject to pure Autoverse physics, once the image was piped into her non-Autoverse brain, the usual false-color conventions were employed. Maria watched the blue-and-white disk growing nearer, with a tightening in her chest. Free falling with the illusion of weight. Descending and staying still.

She said, “Why show ourselves to the Lambertians, immediately? Why not send Mouthpiece ahead to prepare the ground—to make sure that they’re ready to face us? There are no animals down there larger than a wasp—and none at all with internal skeletons, walking on their hind legs. Humanoid robots one hundred and eighty centimeters tall will look like something out of their nightmares.”

Repetto replied, “Novel stimuli aren’t disabling for the Lambertians. They’re not going to go into shock. But we’ll certainly grab their attention.”

Durham added, “We’ve come to reveal ourselves as the creators of their universe. There’s not much point being shy about it.”

They hit the upper layers of the atmosphere over the night side. Land and ocean alike were in almost perfect darkness: no moonlight, no starlight, no artificial illumination. The ship began to vibrate; instrument panels on the flight deck hummed, and the face of one display screen audibly cracked. Then radio contact was disrupted by the cone of ionized gas around the hull, and they had no choice but to return to the apartment, to sit out the worst of it. Maria stared at the golden towers of the City, weighing the power of their majestic, self-declared invulnerability against the unassailable logic of the buffeting she’d just witnessed.

They returned for the last seconds of the descent, after the parachutes had already been deployed. The impact itself seemed relatively smooth—or maybe that was just her gravity filter coddling her. They left their acceleration couches and waited for the hull to cool: cameras showed the grass around them blackened, but true to predictions the fire had died out almost at once.

Repetto unpacked Mouthpiece from a storage locker, opening the canister full of robot insects and tipping them into the air. Maria flinched as the swarm flew around aimlessly for several seconds, before assembling into a tight formation in one corner of the deck.

Durham opened the airlock doors, outer first, then inner. The robots didn’t need pneuma of any kind, but the Ambassador’s designers must have toyed with the possibility of mapping human biochemistry into the Autoverse—actually creating “aliens” who could meet the Lambertians as equals—instead of playing with elaborate masks.

They stepped out onto the scorched ground. It was early morning; Maria blinked at the sunlight, the clear white sky. the warmth on her robot skin came through loud and clear. The blue-green meadow stretched ahead as far as she could see; she walked away from the ship—a squat ceramic truncated cone, its white heat shield smoke-darkened in untidy streaks—and the highlands to the south came into view behind it. Lush vegetation crowded the slopes, but the peaks were bare, rust-red.

A chorus of faint chirps and hums filled the air. She glanced at Mouthpiece, but it was hovering, almost silently, near Repetto; these sounds were coming from every direction. She recognized some of the calls—she’d listened to a few of the nonsentient species, in a quick tour of the evolutionary history leading up to Lambertian communication—and there was nothing particularly exotic about any of them; she might have been hearing cicadas, bees, wasps, mosquitoes. When a faint breeze blew from the east, though, carrying something which the robot’s olfactory apparatus mapped to the scent of salt water, Maria was suddenly so overwhelmed by the modest cluster of sensations that she thought her legs might give way beneath her. But it didn’t happen; she made no deliberate attempt to swoon, so the robot just stood like a statue.

Durham approached her. “You’ve never been on Lambert before, have you?”

She frowned. “How could I?”

“Passively. Most Autoverse scholars have done it.” Maria remembered Zemansky’s offer of a VR representation, when she first met the Contact Group. Durham bent down and picked a handful of grass, then scattered the blades. “But we could never do that before.”

“Hallelujah, the Gods have landed. What are you going to do if the Lambertians ask for a miracle? Pluck a few leaves as a demonstration of your omnipotence?”

He shrugged. “We can always show them the ship.”

“They’re not stupid. The ship proves nothing. Why should they believe that we’re running the Autoverse, when we can’t even break its laws?”

“Cosmology. The primordial cloud. The convenient amounts of each element.” She couldn’t help looking skeptical. He said, “Whose side are you on? You designed the primordial cloud! You sketched the original topography! You made the ancestor of the whole Lambertian biosphere! All I want to do is tell them that. It’s the truth, and they have to face it.”

Maria looked about, at a loss for words. It seemed clearer than ever that this world was not her creation; it existed on its own terms.

She said, “Isn’t that like saying… that your flesh-and-blood original was nothing but a lunatic with some strange delusions? And that any other, better explanation he invented for his life had to be wrong?”

Durham was silent for a while. Then he said, “Elysium is at stake. What do you want us to do? Map ourselves into Autoverse biochemistry and come here to live?”

“I’ve seen worse places.”

“The sun’s going to freeze in another billion years. I promised these people