Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  I had to give that a lot of thought. I’d fantasised this situation a thousand times, but I could no longer remember the details—although I did recall that I’d usually assumed that Anderson would recognise me, and start volunteering excuses and explanations straight away.

  Finally, I said, ‘I want you to tell me why you killed my wife.’

  ‘I didn’t kill your wife. Miller killed your wife.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s not true. I know. The cops told me. Don’t bother lying, because I know.’

  He stared at me blandly. I wanted to lose my temper and scream, but I had a feeling that, in spite of the gun, that would have been more comical than intimidating. I could have pistol-whipped him, but the truth is I was afraid to go near him.

  So I shot him in the foot. He yelped and swore, then leant over to inspect the damage. ‘Fuck you!’ he hissed. ‘Fuck you!’ He rocked back and forth, holding his foot. ‘I’ll break your fucking neck! I’ll fucking kill you!’ The wound bled a little through the hole in his boot, but it was nothing compared to the movies. I’d heard that the vaporising ammunition had a cauterising effect.

  I said, ‘Tell me why you killed my wife.’

  He looked far more angry and disgusted than afraid, but he dropped his pretence of innocence. ‘It just happened,’ he said. ‘It was just one of those things that happens.’

  I shook my head, annoyed. ‘No. Why? Why did it happen?’

  He moved as if to take off his boot, then thought better of it. ‘Things were going wrong. There was a time lock, there was hardly any cash, everything was just a big fuck-up. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.’

  I shook my head again, unable to decide if he was a moron, or if he was stalling. ‘Don’t tell me “it just happened”. Why did it happen? Why did you do it?’

  The frustration was mutual; he ran a hand through his hair and scowled at me. He was sweating now, but I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or from fear. ‘What do you want me to say? I lost my temper, all right? Things were going badly, and I lost my fucking temper, and there she was, all right?’

  The dizziness struck me again, but this time it didn’t subside. I understood now; he wasn’t being obtuse, he was telling the entire truth. I’d smashed the occasional coffee cup during a tense situation at work. I’d even, to my shame, kicked our dog once, after a fight with Amy: Why? I’d lost my fucking temper, and there she was.

  I stared at Anderson, and felt myself grinning stupidly. It was all so clear now. I understood. I understood the absurdity of everything I’d ever felt for Amy—my ‘love’, my ‘grief’. It had all been a joke. She was meat, she was nothing. All the pain of the past five years evaporated; I was drunk with relief. I raised my arms and spun around slowly. Anderson leapt up and sprung towards me; I shot him in the chest until I ran out of bullets, then I knelt down beside him. He was dead.

  I put the gun in my jacket. The barrel was warm. I remembered to use my handkerchief to open the front door. I half expected to find a crowd outside, but of course the shots had been inaudible, and Anderson’s threats and curses were not likely to have attracted attention.

  A block from the house, a patrol car appeared around a corner. It slowed almost to a halt as it approached me. I kept my eyes straight ahead as it passed. I heard the engine idle. Then stop. I kept on walking, waiting for a shouted command, thinking: if they search me and find the gun, I’ll confess; there’s no point in prolonging the agony.

  The engine spluttered, revved noisily, and the car roared away.

  * * *

  Perhaps I’m not the number-one most obvious suspect. I don’t know what Anderson was involved in since he got out; maybe there are hundreds of other people who had far better reasons for wanting him dead, and perhaps when the cops have finished with them, they’ll get around to asking me what I was doing that night. A month seems an awfully long time, though. Anyone would think they didn’t care.

  The same teenagers as before are gathered around the entrance, and again the mere sight of me seems to disgust them. I wonder if the taste in fashion and music tattooed on their brains is set to fade in a year or two, or if they have sworn lifelong allegiance. It doesn’t bear contemplating.

  This time, I don’t browse. I approach the sales counter without hesitation.

  This time, I know exactly what I want.

  What I want is what I felt that night: the unshakeable conviction that Amy’s death—let alone Anderson’s—simply didn’t matter, any more than the death of a fly or an amoeba, any more than breaking a coffee cup or kicking a dog.

  My one mistake was thinking that the insight I gained would simply vanish when the implant cut out. It hasn’t. It’s been clouded with doubts and reservations, it’s been undermined, to some degree, by my whole ridiculous panoply of beliefs and superstitions, but I can still recall the peace it gave me, I can still recall that flood of joy and relief, and I want it back. Not for three days; for the rest of my life.

  Killing Anderson wasn’t honest, it wasn’t ‘being true to myself.’ Being true to myself would have meant living with all my contradictory urges, suffering the multitude of voices in my head, accepting confusion and doubt. It’s too late for that now; having tasted the freedom of certainty, I find I can’t live without it.

  ‘How can I help you, sir?’ The salesman smiles from the bottom of his heart.

  Part of me, of course, still finds the prospect of what I am about to do totally repugnant.

  No matter. That won’t last.

  The Safe-Deposit Box

  I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

  * * *

  I wake just before the alarm goes off (I usually do), so I’m able to reach out and silence it the instant it starts screeching. The woman beside me doesn’t move; I hope the alarm wasn’t meant for her too. It’s freezing cold and pitch black, except for the bedside clock’s red digits slowly coming into focus. Ten to four! I groan softly. What am I? A garbage collector? A milkman? This body is sore and tired, but that tells me nothing; they’ve all been sore and tired lately, whatever their profession, their income, their lifestyle. Yesterday I was a diamond merchant. Not quite a millionaire, but close. The day before I was a bricklayer, and the day before that I sold menswear. Crawling out of a warm bed felt pretty much the same each time.

  I find my hand travelling instinctively to the switch for the reading light on my side of the bed. When I click it on, the woman stirs and mumbles, ‘Johnny?’ but her eyes remain closed. I make my first conscious effort to access this host’s memories; sometimes I can pick up a frequently used name. Linda?

  Could be. Linda. I mouth it silently, looking at the tangle of soft brown hair almost hiding her sleeping face.

  The situation, if not the individual, is comfortingly familiar. Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife. I whisper to her, ‘I love you,’ and I mean it; I love, not this particular woman, (with a past I’ll barely glimpse, and a future that I have no way of sharing), but the composite woman of which, today, she is a part—my nickering, inconstant companion, my lover made up of a million pseudorandom words and gestures, held together only by the fact that I behold her, known in her entirety to no one but me.

  In my romantic youth, I used to speculate: Surely I’m not the only one of my kind? Might there not be another like me, but who wakes each morning in the body of a woman? Might not whatever mysterious factors determine the selection of my host act in parallel on her, drawing us together, keeping us together day after day, transporting us, side by side, from host couple to host couple?

  Not only is it unlikely, it simply isn’t true. The last time (nearly twelve years ago now) that I cracked up and started spouting the unbelievable truth, my host’s wife did not break in with shouts of relief and recognition, and her own, identical, confession. (
She didn’t do much at all, actually. I expected her to find my rantings frightening and traumatic, I expected her to conclude at once that I was dangerously insane. Instead, she listened briefly, apparently found what I was saying either boring or incomprehensible, and so, very sensibly, left me alone for the rest of the day.)

  Not only is it untrue, it simply doesn’t matter. Yes, my lover has a thousand faces, and yes, a different soul looks out from every pair of eyes, but I can still find (or imagine) as many unifying patterns in my memories of her, as any other man or woman can find (or imagine) in their own perceptions of their own most faithful lifelong companion.

  Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife.

  I climb out from under the blankets and stand for a moment, shivering, looking around the room, eager to start moving to keep myself warm, but unable to decide what to do first. Then I spot a wallet on top of the chest of drawers.

  I’m John Francis O’Leary, according to the driver’s licence. Date of birth: 15 November, 1951—which makes me one week older than when I went to bed. Although I still have occasional daydreams about waking up twenty years younger, that seems to be as unlikely for me as it is for anyone else; in thirty-nine years, so far as I know, I’ve yet to have a host born any time but November or December of 1951. Nor have I ever had a host either born, or presently living, outside this city.

  I don’t know how I move from one host to the next, but since any process could be expected to have some finite effective range, my geographical confinement is not surprising. There’s desert to the east, ocean to the west, and long stretches of barren coast to the north and south; the distances from town to town are simply too great for me to cross. In fact, I never even seem to get close to the outskirts of the city, and on reflection that’s not surprising: if there are one hundred potential hosts to the west of me, and five to the east, then a jump to a randomly chosen host is not a jump in a random direction. The populous centre attracts me with a kind of statistical gravity.

  As for the restrictions on host age and birthplace, I’ve never had a theory plausible enough to believe for more than a day or two. It was easy when I was twelve or thirteen, and could pretend I was some kind of alien prince, imprisoned in the bodies of Earthlings by a wicked rival for my cosmic inheritance; the bad guys must have put something in the city’s water, late in 1951, which was drunk by expectant mothers, thus preparing their unborn children to be my unwitting jailers. These days I accept the likelihood that I’ll simply never know the answer.

  I am sure of one thing, though: both restrictions were essential to whatever approximation to sanity I now possess. Had I ‘grown up’ in bodies of completely random ages, or in hosts scattered worldwide, with a different language and culture to contend with every day, I doubt that I’d even exist—no personality could possibly emerge from such a cacophony of experiences. (Then again, an ordinary person might think the same of my own, relatively stable, origins.)

  I don’t recall being John O’Leary before, which is unusual. This city contains only six thousand men aged thirty-nine, and of those, roughly one thousand would have been born in November or December. Since thirty-nine years is more than fourteen thousand days, the odds by now are heavily against first-timers, and I’ve visited most hosts several times within memory.

  In my own inexpert way, I’ve explored the statistics a little. Any given potential host should have, on average, one thousand days, or three years, between my visits. Yet the average time I should expect to pass without repeating any hosts myself is a mere forty days (the average to date is actually lower, twenty-seven days, presumably because some hosts are more susceptible than others). When I first worked this out it seemed paradoxical, but only because the averages don’t tell the whole story; a fraction of all repeat visits occur within weeks rather than years, and of course it’s these abnormally fast ones that determine the rate for me.

  In a safe-deposit box (with a combination lock) in the centre of the city, I have records covering the past twenty-two years. Names, addresses, dates of birth, and dates of each visit since 1968, for over eight hundred hosts. One day soon, when I have a host who can spare the time, I really must rent a computer with a database package and shift all that crap on to disk; that would make statistical tests a thousand times easier. I don’t expect astounding revelations; if I found some kind of bias or pattern in the data, well, so what? Would that tell me anything? Would that change anything? Still, it seems like a good thing to do.

  Partly hidden under a pile of coins beside the wallet is—oh, bliss!—an ID badge, complete with photo. John O’Leary is an orderly at the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute. The photo shows part of a light blue uniform, and when I open his wardrobe there it is. I believe this body could do with a shower, though, so I postpone dressing.

  The house is small and plainly furnished, but very clean and in good repair. I pass one room that is probably a child’s bedroom, but the door is closed and I leave it that way, not wanting to risk waking anyone. In the living room, I look up the Pearlman Institute in the phone book, and then locate it in a street directory. I’ve already memorised my own address from the licence, and the Institute’s not far away; I work out a route that shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, at this hour of the morning. I still don’t know when my shift starts; surely not before five.

  Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stare for a moment into my new brown eyes, and I can’t help noticing that John O’Leary is not bad looking at all. It’s a thought that leads nowhere. For a long while now, thankfully, I’ve managed to accept my fluctuating appearance with relative tranquillity, though it hasn’t always been that way. I had several neurotic patches, in my teens and early twenties, when my mood would swing violently between elation and depression, depending on how I felt about my latest body. Often, for weeks after departing an especially good-looking host (which of course I’d have delayed for as long as possible, by staying awake night after night), I’d fantasise obsessively about returning, preferably to stay. At least an ordinary, screwed-up adolescent knows he has no choice but to accept the body in which he was born. I had no such comfort.

  I’m more inclined now to worry about my health, but that’s every bit as futile as fretting over appearance. There’s no point whatsoever in me exercising, or watching my diet, since any such gesture is effectively diluted one-thousandfold. ‘My’ weight, ‘my’ fitness, ‘my’ alcohol and tobacco consumption, can’t be altered by my own personal initiative—they’re public health statistics, requiring vastly expensive advertising campaigns to budge them even slightly.

  After showering, I comb my hair in imitation of the ID photo, hoping that it’s not too out of date.

  Linda opens her eyes and stretches as I walk, naked, back into the bedroom, and the sight of her gives me an erection at once. I haven’t had sex for months; almost every host lately seems to have managed to screw himself senseless the night before I arrived, and to have subsequently lost interest for the following fortnight. Apparently, my luck has changed. Linda reaches out and grabs me.

  ‘I’ll be late for work,’ I protest.

  She turns and looks at the clock. ‘That’s crap. You don’t start until six. If you eat breakfast here, instead of detouring to that greasy truck stop, you won’t have to leave for an hour.’

  Her fingernails are pleasantly sharp. I let her drag me towards the bed, then I lean over and whisper,

  ‘You know, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.’

  * * *

  My earliest memory is of my mother reverently holding a bawling infant towards me, saying, ‘Look, Chris! This is your baby brother. This is Paul! Isn’t he beautiful?’ I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Siblings were like pets or toys; their number, their ages, their sexes, their names, all fluctuated as senselessly as the furniture or the wallpaper.

  Parents were clearly superior; they changed appearance and behaviour, but at least their names stayed the same. I naturally assumed that when I gr
ew up, my name would become ‘Daddy’, a suggestion that was usually greeted with laughter and amused agreement. I suppose I thought of my parents as being basically like me; their transformations were more extreme than my own, but everything else about them was bigger, so that made perfect sense. That they were in a sense the same from day to day, I never doubted; my mother and father were, by definition, the two adults who did certain things: scolded me, hugged me, tucked me into bed, made me eat disgusting vegetables, and so on. They stood out a mile, you couldn’t miss them. Occasionally one or the other was absent, but never for more than a day.

  The past and future weren’t problems; I simply grew up with rather vague notions as to what they actually were. ‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ were like ‘once upon a time’—I was never disappointed by broken promises of future treats, or baffled by descriptions of alleged past events, because I treated all such talk as intentional fiction. I was often accused of telling ‘lies’, and I assumed that was just a label applied to stories that were insufficiently interesting. Memories of events more than one day old were clearly worthless ‘lies’, so I did my best to forget them.

  I’m sure I was happy. The world was a kaleidoscope. I had a new house to explore every day, different toys, different playmates, different food. Sometimes the colour of my skin would change (and it thrilled me to see that my parents, brothers and sisters almost always chose to make their own skin the same as mine). Now and then I woke up as a girl, but at some point (around the age of four, I think) this began to trouble me, and soon after that, it simply stopped happening.

  I had no suspicion that I was moving, from house to house, from body to body. I changed, my house changed, the other houses, and the streets and shops and parks around me, changed. I travelled now and then to the city centre with my parents, but I thought of it not as a fixed location (since it was reached by a different route each time) but as a fixed feature of the world, like the sun or the sky.