Permutation City

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 immortality.'

Repetto called out to them, 'Are you ready? I've spotted the team; they're not far off. About three kilometers west.' Maria was baffled for a moment, until she recalled that he still had access to all of the spy software. They were, still, outside the Autoverse looking in.

Durham yelled back, 'Ten seconds.' He turned to Maria. 'Do you want to be part of this, or not? It has to be done the way I've planned it -- and you can either go along with that, or go back.'

She was about to reply angrily that he had no right to start making ultimatums, when she noticed the tiny window with its view of the apartment, hovering in the corner of her eye.

Elysium was at stake. Hundreds of thousands of people. The Lambertians would survive the shock of learning their 'true' cosmology. Elysium might or might not survive the invention of an alternative.

She said, 'You're right; it has to be done. So let's go spread the word.'

+ + +

The team was hovering in a loose formation over the meadow. Maria had had visions of being attacked, but the Lambertians didn't seem to notice their presence at all. They stopped about twenty meters from the swarm, while Mouthpiece went forward.

Repetto said, 'This is the dance to signify that we have a message to convey.'

Mouthpiece came to a halt in a tight vertical plane, and the individual robots began to weave around each other in interlocking figure eights. The Lambertians responded immediately, aligning themselves into a similar plane. Maria glanced at Repetto; he was beaming like a ten-year-old whose home-made shortwave radio had just started to emit promising crackling noises.

She whispered, 'It looks like they're ignoring us completely . . . but do they think they're talking to real Lambertians -- or have they noticed the differences?'

'I can't tell. But as a group, they're reacting normally, so far.'

Zemansky said, 'If a robot greeted you in your own language, wouldn't you reply?'

Repetto nodded. 'And the instinct goes far deeper, with the Lambertians. I don't think they'd . . . discriminate. If they've noticed the differences, they'll want to understand them, eventually -- but the first priority will still be to receive the message. And to judge it.'

Mouthpiece began to drift into a more complex formation. Maria could make little sense of it -- but she could see the Lambertians tentatively begin to mimic the change. This was it: Durham and Repetto's cosmological package deal. An explanation for the primordial cloud, and for the deep rules underlying Autoverse chemistry: a cellular automaton, created with the cloud in place, five billion years ago. The two billion years of planetary formation which strictly hadn't happened seemed like a forgivable white lie, for the moment; messy details like that could be mentioned later, if the basic idea was accepted.

Durham said, 'Bad messages usually can't be conveyed very far. Maybe the fact that Mouthpiece clearly isn't a team for a nearby community will add credence to the theory.'

Nobody replied. Zemansky smiled sunnily. Maria watched the dancing swarms, hypnotized. The Lambertians seemed to be imitating Mouthpiece almost perfectly, now -- but that only proved that they'd 'read' the message. It didn't yet mean that they believed it.

Maria turned away, and saw black dots against the sky. Persistence of vision was back in Elysium, in her model-of-a-brain. She remembered her dissatisfaction, clutching Autoverse molecules with her real-world hands and gloves. Had she come any closer to knowing the Autoverse as it really was?

Repetto said, 'They're asking a question. They're asking for . . . clarification.' Maria turned back. The Lambertians had broken step with Mouthpiece, and the swarm had rearranged itself into something like an undulated black flying carpet. 'They want 'the rest of the message' -- the rest of the theory. They want a description of the universe within which the cellular automaton was created.'

Durham nodded. He looked dazed, but happy. 'Answer them. Give them the TVC rules.'

Repetto was surprised. 'Are you sure? That wasn't the plan --'

'What are we going to do? Tell them it's none of their business?'

'I'll translate the rules. Give me five seconds.'

Mouthpiece began a new dance. The waving carpet dispersed, then began to fall into step.

Durham turned to Maria. 'This is better than we'd dared to hope. This way, they reinforce us. They won't just stop challenging our version; they'll help to affirm it.'