Permutation City

'Yes. But --'

'That's all I am, now. That's all that defines me. So when they're happy, they'll be me.'

32

'Seventeen down, one to go.'

Durham had rendered himself calm and efficient, to deal with the evacuation. Maria, still unmodified, watched -- sick with relief -- as he finally packed Irene Shaw, her seven hundred million offspring, and their four planets' worth of environments, into the bulging Garden-of-Eden-in-progress. A compressed snapshot of the entire civilization flowed down the data paths Durham had created to bypass the suspect hub -- following a dozen independent routes, verified and reverified at every step -- until it crossed the barrier into the region where the new Elysium was being forged.

So far, there'd been no sign that the corruption of the grid was spreading further -- but the last Town Meeting had given Durham just six hours of Standard Time to assemble and launch the new seed. Maria was astonished that they'd appointed him to do the job at all, given that it was his clandestine visit to Planet Lambert which had catalyzed the whole disaster (and they'd left -- nonconscious -- watchdog software running, to monitor his actions, and take over the task if he failed) . . . but he was still the man who'd built and launched Elysium, and apparently they trusted him above anyone else to rescue them from their disintegrating universe, just as he'd rescued the founders from their legendary deteriorating Earth.

Two of the three 'hermits' among the founders -- Irene Shaw and Pedro Callas -- had responded to the emergency signals sent into their pyramids from the hub. Despite their millennia of silence, they hadn't sealed their worlds off completely from information from the rest of Elysium.

Thomas Riemann, apparently, had.

Maria checked the clock on the interface window; they had fourteen minutes left.

Durham had set a program running, hours before, to try to break into Riemann's pyramid. He'd succeeded in forging new links with the processors, but without Riemann's personal code, any instructions piped in would be ignored -- and a time-lock triggered by each incorrect attempt made scanning through all ninety-nine-digit combinations impractical. So Durham had instructed a metaprogrammer to build a TVC 'machine' to isolate and dissect one of Riemann's processors, to scrutinize the contents of its memory, and to deduce the code from the heavily encrypted tests within.

As the program zeroed in on the final result, Maria said sharply, 'You could have done that for my pyramid, couldn't you? And let me sleep?'

Durham shook his head, without looking at her. 'Done it from where? I had no access to the border. This is only possible because the other founders have granted me carte blanche.'

'I think you could have burrowed through somehow, if you'd set your mind to it.'

He was silent for a while, then he conceded, 'Perhaps I could have. I did want you to see Planet Lambert. I honestly believed that I had no right to let you sleep through contact.'

She hunted for a suitably bitter reply -- then gave up and said wearily, 'You had no right to wake me -- but I'm glad I saw the Lambertians.'

The code-breaking program said, 'In.'

There was no time left for decorum, for explaining the crisis and justifying the evacuation. Durham issued a sequence of commands, to freeze all the software running in the pyramid, analyze it, extract all the essential data, and bundle it into the new Garden-of-Eden. Riemann and his children need never know the difference.

The software had other ideas. It acknowledged the access code, but refused to halt.

Maria turned aside and retched drily. How many people were in there? Thousands? Millions? There was no way of knowing. What would happen if the changes in the grid engulfed them? Would the worlds they inhabited implode and vanish, like the inanimate City?

When she could bring herself to look again, Durham had calmly changed tack. He said, 'I'm trying to break the lock on communication. See if I can get in on any level, and at least talk to someone. Maybe from the inside they'll have more control; we can't halt their software and download it en masse, but maybe they can do that themselves.'

'You have eleven minutes.'

'I know.' He hesitated. 'If I have to, I can stick around and launch these people separately. I don't imagine they care whether or not they're in the same universe as the rest of the Elysians.'

'Stick around? You mean clone yourself, and launch one version with the rest of us -- ?'

'No. Zemansky's organized a hundred people to verify the launch from within. I don't have to be there.'

Maria was horrified. 'But -- why leave yourself out? Why risk it?'

He turned to her and said placidly, 'I'm not splitting myself, not again. I had enough of that on twenty-four Earths. I want one life, one history. One explanation. Even if it has to come to an end.'

The program he'd been running beeped triumphantly and flashed up a message. 'There's a data port for granting physical interaction with one environment, and it seems to be intact.'

Maria said, 'Send in a few thousand robots, sweep the place for signs of life.'

Durham was already trying it. He frowned. 'No luck. But I wonder if . . .'

He created a doorway a few meters to his right; it seemed to lead into a lavishly decorated corridor.

Maria said queasily, 'You have seven minutes. The port's not working: if a robot can't materialize . . .'

Durham stood and walked through the doorway, then broke into a run. Maria stared after him. But there was no special danger 'in there' -- no extra risk. The software running their models was equally safe, wherever they pretended their bodies to be.

She caught up with Durham just as he reached an ornate curved staircase; they were upstairs in what seemed to be a large two-story house. He clapped her on the shoulder. 'Thank you. Try downstairs, I'll keep going up here.'

Maria wished she'd disabled all her human metabolic constraints -- but she was too agitated now to try to work out how to make the changes, too awash with adrenaline to do anything but run down corridors bellowing, 'Is there anyone home?'

At the end of one passage, she burst through a door and found herself out in the garden.

She looked about in despair. The grounds were enormous -- and apparently deserted. She stood catching her breath, listening for signs of life. She could hear birdsong in the distance, nothing else.

Then she spotted a white shape in the grass, near a flowerbed full of tulips.

She yelled, 'Down here!' and hurried toward it.

It was a young man, stark naked, stretched out on the lawn with his head cradled in his hands. She heard breaking glass behind her, and then a heavy thud on the ground; she turned to see Durham pick himself up and limp toward her.

She knelt by the stranger and tried to wake him, slapping his cheeks. Durham arrived, ashen, clearly shorn of his artificial tranquility. He said, 'I think I've sprained an ankle. I could have broken my neck. Don't take any risks -- something strange is going on with our physiology; I can't override the old-world defaults.'

Maria seized the man by the shoulders and shook him hard, to no effect. 'This is hopeless!'

Durham pulled her away. 'I'll wake him. You go back.'

Maria tried to summon up a mind's-eye control panel to spirit her away. Nothing happened. 'I can't connect