Permutation City (31 page)

They kissed again. She was sure.

They undressed each other on the way to the bedroom. He said, "Tell me what you want, tell me what you like. I haven't done this for a long time."

"How long?"

"Several lives ago."

He was skilled with his tongue, and persistent. She almost came -- but before it could happen, everything broke down into isolated sensations: pleasant but meaningless, faintly absurd. She closed her eyes and willed it, but it was like trying to cry for no reason. When she pushed him gently away, he didn't complain, or apologize, or ask stupid questions; she appreciated that.

They rested, and she explored his body. He was probably the oldest man she'd ever seen naked; certainly the oldest she'd ever touched.
Fifty.
He was . . . loose, rather than flabby; muscle had wasted rather than turned to fat. It was almost impossible to imagine Aden -- twenty-four years old, and hard as a statue -- ever succumbing to the same process. But he would. And her own body had already begun.

She slithered around and took his penis in her mouth, trying to psych herself past the comic strangeness of the act, trying to grow drunk on the stench of it, working with her tongue and teeth until he begged her to stop. They rearranged their bodies clumsily so they were side by side; he entered her and came at once. He cried out, bellowing in obvious pain, not histrionic delight. He gritted his teeth and turned ashen as he withdrew; she held his shoulders until he could explain. "My . . . left testicle went into spasm. It just . . . happens sometimes. It feels like it's being crushed in a vise." He laughed and blinked away the tears. She kissed him and ran a finger around his groin.

"That's awful. Does it still hurt?"

"Yes. Don't stop."

Afterward, she found she didn't want to touch him; his skin turned clammy as their sweat dried, and when he seemed to fall asleep, she disentangled herself from his embrace and shifted to the edge of the bed.

She didn't know what she'd done: complicated everything, set herself up for yet another stage in their convoluted relationship -- or simply marked the end of it, bidden him farewell? An hour of disastrous sex hadn't resolved anything: she still felt guilty for taking the money, "taking advantage" of him.

What would she do, if he wanted to see her again?
She couldn't face the prospect of spending the next six months listening to him fantasize about the grand future which lay ahead for his homemade universe. She'd taken some pride in the fact that she'd never once humored him, never pretended for a moment to have accepted his theories -- and she'd never met a nominally sane person who could disagree with her so graciously. But there'd be something dishonest about trying to forge a lasting friendship between them, in the face of her skepticism. And if she ever succeeded in disillusioning him . . . she'd probably feel guilty about that, as well.

The long day was catching up with her, it was too hard to think it through. Decisions would have to wait until morning.

Light from the kitchen spilled through the doorway onto her face; she called out softly to the house controller, to no effect, so she got up and switched off the light manually. She heard Durham stir as she felt her way back into the room. She paused in the doorway, suddenly reluctant to approach him.

He said, "I don't know what you think, but I didn't plan this."

She laughed.
What did he think he'd done? Seduced her?
"Neither did I. All I ever wanted from
you
was your money."

He was silent for a moment, but she could see his eyes and teeth flashing in the dark, and he seemed to be smiling.

He said, "That's all right. All I wanted from you was your soul."

20

(Can't you time trip?)

Resting between descents, Peer looked up and finally realized what had been puzzling him. The clouds above the skyscraper were motionless; not merely stationary with respect to the ground, but frozen in every detail. The wispiest tendrils at the edges, presumably vulnerable to the slightest breeze, remained undisturbed for as long as he studied them. The shape of every cloud seemed flawlessly natural -- but all the dynamism implicit in the wind-wrought forms, compelling at a glance, was pure illusion. Nothing in the sky was changing.

For a moment, he was simply bemused by this whimsical detail. Then he remembered why he'd chosen it.

Kate had vanished.
She'd lied; she hadn't cloned herself at all. She'd moved to Carter's city, leaving no other version behind.

Leaving him -- or half of him -- alone.

The revelation didn't bother him. On the skyscraper, nothing ever did. He clung to the wall, recuperating happily, and marveled at what he'd done to heal the pain. Back in cloud time, before he'd always been descending.

He'd set up the environment as usual -- the city, the sky, the building -- but frozen the clouds, as much to simplify things as to serve as a convenient reminder.

Then he'd mapped out a series of cues for memory and mood changes over fifteen subjective minutes. He'd merely sketched the progression, like a naive musician humming a melody to a transcriber; the software he'd used had computed the actual sequence of brain states. Moment would follow moment "naturally"; his model-of-a-brain would not be forced to do anything, but would simply follow its internal logic. By fine-tuning that logic in advance and loading the right memories, the desired sequence of mental events would unfold: from A to B to C to . . . A.

Peer looked over his shoulder at the ground, which never grew closer, and smiled. He'd dreamed of doing this before, but he'd never had the courage. Losing Kate forever -- while knowing that he was with her -- must have finally persuaded him that he had nothing to gain by putting it off any longer.

The scheme wouldn't slip his mind completely -- he could vaguely remember experiencing exactly the same revelation several times before -- but his short-term memory had been selectively impaired to limit the clarity of this recursive false history, and once he was distracted, a series of free associations would eventually lead him back to
exactly
the state of mind he'd been in at the cycle's beginning. His body -- with respect to every visible cue in the environment -- would also be back where it had started. The ground and sky were static, and every story of the building was identical, so his perceptions would be the same. And every muscle and joint in his body would have recovered perfectly, as always.

Peer laughed at his cloud-self's ingenuity, and started to descend again. It was an elegant situation, and he was glad he'd finally had a cloud-reason to make it happen.

There was one detail, though, which he couldn't focus on, one choice he'd made back in cloud time which he seemed to have decided to obscure from himself completely.

Had he programmed his exoself to let him run through the cycle a predetermined number of times? ABCABCABC . . . and then some great booming DBF breaking through the sky like the fist of God -- or a tendril of cumulus actually moving -- putting an end to his perpetual motion? A grappling hook could tear him from the side of the building, or some subtle change in the environment could nudge his thoughts out of their perfectly circular orbit. Either way, experiencing one uninterrupted cycle would be the same as experiencing a thousand, so if there was an alarm clock ticking away at all, his next cycle -- subjectively -- would be the one when the buzzer went off.

And if there was no clock? He might have left his fate in external hands. A chance communication from another Copy, or some event in the world itself, could be the trigger which would release him.

Or he might have chosen absolute solipsism. Grinding through the cycle whatever else happened, until his executor embezzled his estate, terrorists nuked the supercomputers, civilization crumbled, the sun went out.

Peer stopped and shook his head to flick sweat out of his eyes. The sense of
déjá vu
the action triggered was, presumably, purely synthetic; it told him nothing about the number of times he'd actually repeated the gesture. It suddenly struck him as unlikely that he'd done anything as inelegant as running the cycle more than once. His subjective time closed up in a loop, rolled in on itself; there was no need to follow the last moment with an
external
repetition of the first. Whatever happened -- externally -- "afterward," the loop was subjectively seamless and complete. He could have shut himself down completely, after computing a single cycle, and it would have made no difference.

The breeze picked up, cooling his skin. Peer had never felt so tranquil; so physically at ease, so mentally at peace. Losing Kate must have been traumatic, but he'd put that behind him. Once and for ever.

He continued his descent.

21

(Remit not paucity)

JUNE 2051

Maria woke from a dream of giving birth. A midwife had urged her, "Keep pushing! Keep pushing!" She'd screamed through gritted teeth, but done as she was told. The "child" had turned out to be nothing but a blood-stained statue, carved from smooth, dark wood.

Her head was throbbing. The room was in darkness. She'd taken off her wristwatch, but she doubted that she'd been asleep for long; if she had, the bed would have seemed unfamiliar, she would have needed time to remember where she was, and why. Instead, the night's events had come back to her instantly. It was long after midnight, but it wasn't a new day yet.

She sensed Durham's absence before reaching across the bed to confirm it, then she lay still for a while and listened. All she heard was distant coughing, coming from another flat. No lights were on; she would have seen the spill.

The smell hit her as she stepped out of the bedroom. Shit and vomit, with a sickly sweet edge. She had visions of Durham reacting badly to a day of stress and a night of champagne, and she almost turned around and went back to the bedroom, to open the window and bury her face in a pillow.

The bathroom door was half-closed, but there were no sound effects suggesting that he was still in there; not a moan. Her eyes began to water. She couldn't quite believe that she'd slept through all the noise.

She called out, "Paul? Are you all right?" There was no reply. If he was lying unconscious in a pool of vomit, alcohol had nothing to do with it; he had to be seriously ill. Food poisoning? She pushed open the door and turned on the light.

He was in the shower recess. She backed out of the room quickly, but details kept registering long after she'd retreated. Coils of intestine. Bloodred shit. He looked like he'd been kneeling, and then sprawled sideways. At first, she was certain that she'd seen the knife, red against the white tiles -- but then she wondered if in fact she'd seen nothing but the Rorschach blot of a random blood stain.

Maria's legs started to give way. She made it to one of the chairs. She sat there, light-headed, fighting to remain conscious; she'd never fainted in her life, but for a time it was all she could do to keep herself from blacking out.

The first thing she felt clearly was a sense of astonishment at her own stupidity, as if she'd just marched, with her eyes wide open, straight into a brick wall.
Durham had believed that his Copy had achieved immortality
--
and proved the dust hypothesis. The whole purpose of his own life had been fulfilled by the project's completion. What had she expected him to do, after that? Carry on selling insurance?

It was Durham she'd heard screaming through gritted teeth, shaping her dream.

And it was Durham who'd
kept pushing,
Durham who looked like he'd tried to give birth.

She called for an ambulance. "He's cut his abdomen open with a knife. The wound is very deep. I didn't look closely, but I think he's dead." She found that she could speak calmly to the emergency services switchboard puppet; if she'd had to say the same things to a human being, she knew she would have fallen apart.

When she hung up, her teeth started chattering, and she kept emitting brief sounds of distress which didn't seem to belong to her. She wanted to get dressed before the ambulance and police arrived, but she didn't have the strength to move -- and the thought of even caring if she was discovered naked began to seem petty beyond belief. Then something broke through her paralysis, and she rose to her feet and staggered around the room, picking up the clothes they'd scattered on the floor just hours before.

She found herself fully dressed, slumped in a corner of the living room, reciting a litany of excuses in her head.
She'd never humored him. She'd argued against his insane beliefs at every opportunity. How could she have saved him? By walking out on the project? That would have changed nothing. By trying to get him committed? His doctors had already pronounced him cured.

The worst thing she'd done was stand by and let him shut down his own Copy.

And there was still a chance
--