Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  The whole thing was done under general anaesthetic. I woke with a headache like a hammer blow and a taste in my mouth like I’d thrown up rotten cheese. The first time I moved without thinking of my stitches; it was the last time I made that mistake.

  I managed to raise my head.

  She was lying on her back in the middle of a cot, which now looked as big as a football field. Wrinkled and pink just like any other baby, her face screwed up, her eyes shut, taking a breath, then howling, then another breath, another howl, as if screaming were every bit as natural as breathing. She had thick dark hair (the program had said she would, and that it would soon fall out and grow back fair). I climbed to my feet, ignoring the throbbing in my head, and leant over the wall of the cot to place one finger gently on her cheek. She didn’t stop howling, but she opened her eyes, and, yes, they were blue.

  ‘Daddy loves you,’ I said. ‘Daddy loves his Angel.’ She closed her eyes, took an extra-deep breath, then screamed. I reached down and, with terror, with dizzying joy, with infinite precision in every movement, with microscopic care, I lifted her up to my shoulder and held her there for a long, long time.

  Two days later they sent us home.

  * * *

  Everything worked. She didn’t stop breathing. She drank from her bottle, she wet herself and soiled her nappies, she cried for hours, and sometimes she even slept.

  Somehow I managed to stop thinking of her as a Cutie. I threw out the Black Box, its task completed. I sat and watched her watch the glittering mobile I’d suspended above her cot, I watched her learning to follow movements with her eyes when I set it swinging and twisting and tinkling, I watched her trying to lift her hands towards it, trying to lift her whole body towards it, grunting with frustration, but sometimes cooing with enchantment. Then I’d rush up and lean over her and kiss her nose, and make her giggle, and say, again and again, ‘Daddy loves you! Yes, I do!’

  I quit my job when my holiday entitlement ran out. I had enough saved to live frugally for years, and I couldn’t face the prospect of leaving Angel with anybody else. I took her shopping, and everyone in the supermarket succumbed to her beauty and charm. I ached to show her to my parents, but they would have asked too many questions. I cut myself off from my friends, letting no one into the flat, and refusing all invitations. I didn’t need a job, I didn’t need friends, I didn’t need anyone or anything but Angel.

  I was so happy and proud, the first time she reached out and gripped my finger when I waved it in front of her face. She tried to pull it into her mouth. I resisted, teasing her, freeing my finger and moving it far away, then suddenly offering it again. She laughed at this, as if she knew with utter certainty that in the end I would give up the struggle and let her put it briefly to her gummy mouth. And when that happened, and the taste proved uninteresting, she pushed my hand away with surprising strength, giggling all the while.

  According to the development schedule, she was months ahead, being able to do that at her age. ‘You little smartie!’ I said, talking much too close to her face. She grabbed my nose then exploded with glee, kicking the mattress, making a cooing sound I’d never heard before, a beautiful, delicate sequence of tones, each note sliding into the next, almost like a kind of birdsong.

  I photographed her weekly, filling album after album. I bought her new clothes before she’d outgrown the old ones, and new toys before she’d even touched the ones I’d bought the week before. ‘Travel will broaden your mind,’ I said, each time we prepared for an outing. Once she was out of the pram and into the stroller, seated and able to look at more of the world than the sky, her astonishment and curiosity were sources of endless delight for me. A passing dog would have her bouncing with joy, a pigeon on the footpath was cause for vocal celebration, and cars that were too loud earned angry frowns from Angel that left me helpless with laughter, to see her tiny face so expressive of contempt.

  It was only when I sat for too long watching her sleeping, listening too closely to her steady breathing, that a whisper in my head would try to remind me of her predetermined death. I shouted it down, silently screaming back nonsense, obscenities, meaningless abuse. Or sometimes I would quietly sing or hum a lullaby, and if Angel stirred at the sound I made, I would take that as a sign of victory, as certain proof that the evil voice was lying.

  Yet at the very same time, in a sense, I wasn’t fooling myself for a minute. I knew she would die when the time came, as one hundred thousand others had died before her. And I knew that the only way to accept that was by doublethink, by expecting her death while pretending it would never really come, and by treating her exactly like a real, human child, while knowing all along that she was nothing more than an adorable pet. A monkey, a puppy, a goldfish.

  * * *

  Have you ever done something so wrong that it dragged your whole life down into a choking black swamp in a sunless land of nightmares? Have you ever made a choice so foolish that it cancelled out, in one blow, everything good you might ever have done, made void every memory of happiness, made everything in the world that was beautiful, ugly, turned every last trace of self-respect into the certain knowledge that you should never have been born?

  I have.

  I bought a cheap copy of the Cutie kit.

  I should have bought a cat. Cats aren’t permitted in my building, but I should have bought one anyway. I’ve known people with cats, I like cats, cats have strong personalities, a cat would have been a companion I could have given attention and affection to, without fuelling my obsession: if I’d tried dressing it up in baby clothes and feeding it from a bottle, it would have scratched me to pieces and then shrivelled my dignity with a withering stare of disdain.

  I bought Angel a new set of beads one day, an abacus-like arrangement in ten shiny colours, to be suspended above her in her cot. She laughed and clapped as I installed it, her eyes glistening with mischief and delight.

  Mischief and delight?

  I remembered reading somewhere that a young baby’s ‘smiles’ are really caused by nothing but wind —and I remembered my annoyance; not with the facts themselves, but with the author, for feeling obliged to smugly disseminate such a tedious truth. And I thought, what’s this magic thing called ‘humanity’, anyway? Isn’t half of it, at least, in the eyes of the beholder?

  ‘Mischief? You? Never!’ I leant over and kissed her.

  She clapped her hands and said, very clearly, ‘Daddy!’

  * * *

  All the doctors I’ve seen are sympathetic, but there’s nothing they can do. The time bomb inside her is too much a part of her. That function, the kit performed perfectly.

  She’s growing smarter day by day, picking up new words all the time. What should I do?

  (a) Deny her stimuli?

  (b) Subject her to malnutrition?

  (c) Drop her on her head? Or,

  (d) None of the above?

  Oh, it’s all right, I’m a little unstable, but I’m not yet completely insane: I can still understand the subtle difference between fucking up her genes and actually assaulting her living, breathing body. Yes, if I concentrate as hard as I can, I swear I can see the difference.

  In fact, I think I’m coping remarkably well: I never break down in front of Angel. I hide all my anguish until she falls asleep.

  Accidents happen. Nobody’s perfect. Her death will be quick and painless. Children die around the world all the time. See? There are lots of answers, lots of sounds I can make with my lips while I’m waiting for the urge to pass—the urge to kill us both, right now; the purely selfish urge to end my own suffering. I won’t do it. The doctors and all their tests might still be wrong. There might still be a miracle that can save her. I have to keep living, without daring to hope. And if she does die, then I will follow her.

  There’s one question, though, to which I’ll never know the answer. It haunts me endlessly, it horrifies me more than my blackest thoughts of death:

  Had she never said a word, would I really ha
ve fooled myself into believing that her death would have been less tragic?

  Into Darkness

  The tone from the buzzer rises in both pitch and loudness the longer it’s on, so I leap out of bed knowing that it’s taken me less than a second to wake. I swear I was dreaming it first, though, dreaming the sound long before it was real. That’s happened a few times. Maybe it’s just a trick of the mind; maybe some dreams take shape only in the act of remembering them. Or maybe I dream it every night, every sleeping moment, just in case.

  The light above the buzzer is red. Not a rehearsal.

  I dress on my way across the room to thump the acknowledgement switch; as soon as the buzzer shuts off, I can hear the approaching siren. It takes me as long to lace my shoes as everything else combined. I grab my backpack from beside the bed and flick on the power. It starts flashing LEDs as it goes through its self-checking routines.

  By the time I’m at the kerb, the patrol car is braking noisily, rear passenger door swinging open. I know the driver, Angelo, but I haven’t seen the other cop before. As we accelerate, a satellite view of The Intake in false-colour infrared—a pitch-black circle in a landscape of polychromatic blotches—appears on the car’s terminal. A moment later, this is replaced by a street map of the region—one of the newer far northern suburbs, all cul-de-sacs and crescents—with The Intake’s perimeter and centre marked, and a dashed line showing where The Core should be. The optimal routes are omitted; too much clutter and the mind balks. I stare at the map, trying to commit it to memory. It’s not that I won’t have access to it, inside, but it’s always faster to just know. When I close my eyes to see how I’m going, the pattern in my head looks like nothing so much as a puzzle-book maze.

  We hit the freeway, and Angelo lets loose. He’s a good driver, but I sometimes wonder if this is the riskiest part of the whole business. The cop I don’t know doesn’t think so; he turns to me and says, ‘I gotta tell you one thing; I respect what you do, but you must be fucking crazy. I wouldn’t go inside that thing for a million dollars.’ Angelo grins—I catch it in the rear-view mirror—and says, ‘Hey, how much is the Nobel prize, anyway? More than a million?’

  I snort. ‘I doubt it. And I don’t think they give the Nobel prize for the eight-hundred-metre steeplechase.’ The media seem to have decided to portray me as some kind of expert; I don’t know why—unless it’s because I once used the phrase ‘radially anisotropic’ in an interview. It’s true that I carried one of the first scientific ‘payloads’, but any other Runner could have done that, and these days it’s routine. The fact is, by international agreement, no one with even a microscopic chance of contributing to the theory of The Intake is allowed to risk their life by going inside. If I’m atypical in any way, it’s through a lack of relevant qualifications; most of the other volunteers have a background in the conventional rescue services.

  I switch my watch into chronograph mode, and synch it to the count that the terminal’s now showing, then do the same to my backpack’s timer. Six minutes and twelve seconds. The Intake’s manifestations obey exactly the same statistics as a radioactive nucleus with a half-life of eighteen minutes; seventy-nine per cent last six minutes or more—but multiply anything by 0.962 every minute, and you wouldn’t believe how fast it can fall. I’ve memorised the probabilities right out to an hour (ten per cent), which may or may not have been a wise thing to do. Counter to intuition, The Intake does not become more dangerous as time passes, any more than a single radioactive nucleus becomes ‘more unstable’. At any given moment—assuming that it hasn’t yet vanished—it’s just as likely as ever to stick around for another eighteen minutes. A mere ten per cent of manifestations last for an hour or more—but of that ten per cent, half will still be there eighteen minutes later. The danger has not increased.

  For a Runner, inside, to ask what the odds are now, he or she must be alive to pose the question, and so the probability curve must start afresh from that moment. History can’t harm you; the ‘chance’ of having survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once you’ve done it. As the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into certainty, one way or another.

  Whether or not any of us really think this way is another question. You can’t help having a gut feeling that time is running out, that the odds are being whittled away. Everyone keeps track of the time since The Intake materialised, however theoretically irrelevant that is. The truth is, these abstractions make no difference in the end. You do what you can, as fast as you can, regardless.

  It’s two in the morning, the freeway is empty, but it still takes me by surprise when we screech on to the exit ramp so soon. My stomach is painfully tight. I wish I felt ready, but I never do. After ten real calls, after nearly two hundred rehearsals, I never do. I always wish I had more time to compose myself, although I have no idea what state of mind I’d aim for, let alone how I’d achieve it. Some lunatic part of me is always hoping for a delay. If what I’m really hoping is that The Intake will have vanished before I can reach it, I shouldn’t be here at all.

  * * *

  The coordinators tell us, over and over: ‘You can back out any time you want to. Nobody would think any less of you.’ It’s true, of course (up to the point where backing out becomes physically impossible), but it’s a freedom I could do without. Retiring would be one thing, but once I’ve accepted a call I don’t want to have to waste my energy on second thoughts, I don’t want to have to endlessly reaffirm my choice. I’ve psyched myself into half believing that I couldn’t live with myself, however understanding other people might be, and that helps a little. The only trouble is, this lie might be self-fulfilling, and I really don’t want to become that kind of person.

  I close my eyes, and the map appears before me. I’m a mess, there’s no denying it, but I can still do the job, I can still get results. That’s what counts.

  I can tell when we’re getting close, without even searching the skyline; there are lights on in all of the houses, and families standing in their front yards. Many people wave and cheer as we pass, a sight that always depresses me. When a group of teenagers, standing on a street corner drinking beer, scream abuse and gesture obscenely, I can’t help feeling perversely encouraged.

  ‘Dickheads,’ mutters the cop I don’t know. I keep my mouth shut.

  We take a corner, and I spot a trio of helicopters, high on my right, ascending with a huge projection screen in tow. Suddenly, a corner of the screen is obscured, and my eye extends the curve of the eclipsing object from this one tiny arc to giddy completion.

  From the outside, by day, The Intake makes an impressive sight: a giant black dome, completely non-reflective, blotting out a great bite of the sky. It’s impossible not to believe that you’re confronting a massive, solid object. By night, though, it’s different. The shape is still unmistakable, cut in a velvet black that makes the darkest night seem grey, but there’s no illusion of solidity; just an awareness of a different kind of void.

  The Intake has been appearing for almost ten years now. It’s always a perfect sphere, a little more than a kilometre in radius, and usually centred close to ground level. On rare occasions, it’s been known to appear out at sea, and slightly more often, on uninhabited land, but the vast majority of its incarnations take place in populated regions.

  The currently favoured hypothesis is that a future civilisation tried to construct a wormhole that would let them sample the distant past, bringing specimens of ancient life into their own time to be studied. They screwed up. Both ends of the wormhole came unstuck. The thing has shrunk and deformed, from—presumably—some kind of grand temporal highway, bridging geological epochs, to a gateway that now spans less time than it would take to cross an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. One end—The Intake—is a kilometre in radius; the other is about a fifth as big, spatially concentric with the first, but displaced an almost immeasurably small time into the future. We call the inner sphere—the wormhole’s destination,
which seems to be inside it, but isn’t—The Core.

  Why this shrivelled-up piece of failed temporal engineering has ended up in the present era is anyone’s guess; maybe we just happened to be halfway between the original endpoints, and the thing collapsed symmetrically. Pure bad luck. The trouble is, it hasn’t quite come to rest. It materialises somewhere on the planet, remains fixed for several minutes, then loses its grip and vanishes, only to appear at a new location a fraction of a second later. Ten years of analysing the data has yielded no method for predicting successive locations, but there must be some remnant of a navigation system in action; why else would the wormhole cling to the Earth’s surface (with a marked preference for inhabited, dry land) instead of wandering off on a random course into interplanetary space? It’s as if some faithful, demented computer keeps valiantly trying to anchor The Intake to a region which might be of interest to its scholarly masters; no Palaeozoic life can be found, but twenty-first-century cities will do, since there’s nothing much else around. And every time it fails to make a permanent connection and slips off into hyperspace, with infinite dedication, and unbounded stupidity, it tries again.

  Being of interest is bad news. Inside the wormhole, time is mixed with one spatial dimension, and—whether by design or physical necessity—any movement which equates to travelling from the future into the past is forbidden. Translated into the wormhole’s present geometry, this means that when The Intake materialises around you, motion away from the centre is impossible. You have an unknown time—maybe eighteen minutes, maybe more, maybe less—to navigate your way to the safety of The Core, under these bizarre conditions. What’s more, light is subject to the same effect; it only propagates inwards. Everything closer to the centre than you lies in the invisible future. You’re running into darkness.