Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  The door is an easy exit for me, but less so for anyone who came in that way—especially someone in the throes of grief. I stare into the darkness of the room’s inwards corner, and yell, ‘Crouch down, as low as you can,’ then mime doing so. I pluck the demolition gun from my backpack, and aim high. The recoil, in normal space, would send me sprawling; here it’s a mere thump.

  I step forward, giving up my own chance to use the door. There’s no immediate sign that I’ve just blasted a metre-wide hole in the wall; virtually all of the dust and debris is on the inwards side. I finally reach a man kneeling in the corner, his hands on his head; for a brief moment I think he’s alive, that he took this position to shield himself from the blast. No pulse, no respiration. A dozen broken ribs, probably; I’m not inclined to check. Some people can last for an hour, pinned between walls of brick and an invisible, third wall that follows them ruthlessly into the corner, every time they slip, every time they give ground. Some people, though, do exactly the worst thing; they squeeze themselves into the inward-most part of their prison, obeying some instinct which, I’m sure, makes sense at the time.

  Or maybe he wasn’t confused at all. Maybe he just wanted it to be over.

  I hoist myself through the hole in the wall. I stagger through the kitchen. The fucking plan is wrong wrong wrong, a door I’m expecting doesn’t exist. I smash the kitchen window, then cut my hand on the way out.

  I refuse to glance at the map. I don’t want to know the time. Now that I’m alone, with no purpose left but saving myself, everything is jinxed. I stare at the ground, at the fleeting magic golden arrows, trying not to count them.

  One glimpse of a festering hamburger discarded on the road, and I find myself throwing up. Common sense tells me to turn and face backwards, but I’m not quite that stupid. The acid in my throat and nose brings tears to my eyes. As I shake them away, something impossible happens.

  A brilliant blue light appears, high up in the darkness ahead, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. I shield my face, then peer between my fingers. As I grow used to the glare, I start to make out details.

  A cluster of long, thin, luminous cylinders is hanging in the sky, like some mad upside-down pipe organ built of glass, bathed in glowing plasma. The light it casts does nothing to reveal the houses and streets below. I must be hallucinating; I’ve seen shapes in the darkness before, although never anything so spectacular, so persistent. I run faster, in the hope of clearing my head. The apparition doesn’t vanish, or waver; it merely grows closer.

  I halt, shaking uncontrollably. I stare into the impossible light. What if it’s not in my head? There’s only one possible explanation. Some component of the wormhole’s hidden machinery has revealed itself. The idiot navigator is showing me its worthless soul.

  With one voice in my skull screaming, No! and another calmly asserting that I have no choice, that this chance might never come again, I draw the demolition gun, take aim, and fire. As if some puny weapon in the hands of an amoeba could scratch the shimmering artifact of a civilisation whose failures leave us cowering in awe.

  The structure shatters and implodes in silence. The light contracts to a blinding pinprick, burning itself into my vision. Only when I turn my head am I certain that the real light is gone.

  I start running again. Terrified, elated. I have no idea what I’ve done, but the wormhole is, so far, unchanged. The afterimage lingers in the darkness, with nothing to wipe it from my sight. Can hallucinations leave an afterimage? Did the navigator choose to expose itself, choose to let me destroy it?

  I trip on something and stagger, but catch myself from falling. I turn and see a man crawling down the road, and I bring myself to a rapid halt, astonished by such a mundane sight after my transcendental encounter. The man’s legs have been amputated at the thighs; he’s dragging himself along with his arms alone. That would be hard enough in normal space, but here, the effort must almost be killing him.

  There are special wheelchairs which can function in the wormhole (wheels bigger than a certain size buckle and deform if the chair stalls) and if we know we’ll need one, we bring one in, but they’re too heavy for every Runner to carry one just in case.

  The man lifts his head and yells, ‘Keep going! Stupid fucker!’ without the least sign of doubt that he’s not just shouting at empty space. I stare at him and wonder why I don’t take the advice. He’s huge: big-boned and heavily muscled, with plenty of fat on top of that. I doubt that I could lift him—and I’m certain that if I could, I’d stagger along more slowly than he’s crawling.

  Inspiration strikes. I’m in luck, too; a sideways glance reveals a house, with the front door invisible but clearly only a metre or two inwards of where I am now. I smash the hinges with a hammer and chisel, then manoeuvre the door out of the frame and back to the road. The man has already caught up with me. I bend down and tap him on the shoulder. ‘Want to try sledding?’

  I step inwards in time to hear part of a string of obscenities, and to catch an unwelcome close-up of his bloody forearms. I throw the door down on to the road ahead of him. He keeps moving; I wait until he can hear me again.

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ he mutters.

  It’s awkward, but it works. He sits on the door, leaning back on his arms. I run behind, bent over, my hands on his shoulders, pushing. Pushing is the one action the wormhole doesn’t fight, and the inwards force makes it downhill all the way. Sometimes the door slides so fast that I have to let go for a second or two, to keep from overbalancing.

  I don’t need to look at the map. I know the map, I know precisely where we are; The Core is less than a hundred metres away. In my head I recite an incantation: The danger does not increase. The danger does not increase. And in my heart I know that the whole conceit of ‘probability’ is meaningless; the wormhole is reading my mind, waiting for the first sign of hope, and whether that comes fifty metres, or ten metres, or two metres from safety, that’s when it will take me.

  Some part of me calmly judges the distance we cover, and counts: Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one… I mumble random numbers to myself, and when that fails, I reset the count arbitrarily: Eighty-one, eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five, eighty-nine…

  A new universe, of light, stale air, noise-and people, countless people—explodes into being around me. I keep pushing the man on the door, until someone runs towards me and gently prises me away. Elaine. She guides me over to the front steps of a house, while another Runner with a first-aid kit approaches my bloodied passenger. Groups of people stand or sit around electric lanterns, filling the streets and front yards as far as I can see. I point them out to Elaine. ‘Look. Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘John? You OK? Get your breath. It’s over.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’ I glance at my watch. ‘Twenty-one minutes. Forty-five per cent.’ I laugh, hysterically. ‘I was afraid of forty-five per cent?’

  My heart is working twice as hard as it needs to. I pace for a while, until the dizziness begins to subside. Then I flop down on the steps beside Elaine.

  A while later, I ask, ‘Any others still out there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great.’ I’m starting to feel almost lucid. ‘So… how did you go?’

  She shrugs. ‘OK. A sweet little girl. She’s with her parents somewhere round here. No complications; favourable geometry.’ She shrugs again. Elaine is like that; favourable geometry or not, it’s never a big deal.

  I recount my own experience, leaving out the apparition. I should talk to the medical people first, straighten out what kind of hallucination is or isn’t possible, before I start spreading the word that I took a pot shot at a glowing blue pipe organ from the future.

  Anyway, if I did any good, I’ll know soon enough. If The Intake does start drifting away from the planet, that shouldn’t take long to make news; I have no idea at what rate the parting would take place, but surely the very next manifestation would be highly unlikely to be on the Earth’s surface. Deep in t
he crust, or halfway into space—

  I shake my head. There’s no use building up my hopes, prematurely, when I’m still not sure that any of it was real.

  Elaine says, ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I check the time again. Twenty-nine minutes. Thirty-three per cent. I glance down the street impatiently. We can see out into the wormhole, of course, but the border is clearly delineated by the sudden drop in illumination, once outward-bound light can no longer penetrate. When The Intake moves on, though, it won’t be a matter of looking for subtle shifts in the lighting. While the wormhole is in place, its effects violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (biased thermal motion, for a start, clearly decreases entropy). In parting, it more than makes amends; it radially homogenises the space it occupied, down to a length scale of about a micron. To the rock two hundred metres beneath us, and the atmosphere above—both already highly uniform—this will make little difference, but every house, every garden, every blade of grass—every structure visible to the naked eye—will vanish. Nothing will remain but radial streaks of fine dust, swirling out as the high-pressure air in The Core is finally free to escape.

  Thirty-five minutes. Twenty-six per cent. I look around at the weary survivors; even for those who left no family or friends behind, the sense of relief and thankfulness at having reached safety has no doubt faded. They—we—just want the waiting to be over. Everything about the passage of time, everything about the wormhole’s uncertain duration, has reversed its significance. Yes, the thing might set us free at any moment—but so long as it hasn’t, we’re as likely as not to be stuck here for eighteen more minutes.

  Forty minutes. Twenty-one per cent.

  ‘Ears are really going to pop tonight,’ I say. Or worse; on rare occasions, the pressure in The Core can grow so high that the subsequent decompression gives rise to the bends. That’s at least another hour away, though—and if it started to become a real possibility, they’d do an air drop of a drug that would cushion us from the effect.

  Fifty minutes. Fifteen per cent.

  Everyone is silent now; even the children have stopped crying.

  ‘What’s your record?’ I ask Elaine.

  She rolls her eyes. ‘Fifty-six minutes. You were there. Four years ago.’

  ‘Yeah. I remember.’

  ‘Just relax. Be patient.’

  ‘Don’t you feel a little silly? I mean, if I’d known, I would have taken my time.’

  One hour. Ten per cent. Elaine has dozed off, her head against my shoulder. I’m starting to feel drowsy myself, but a nagging thought keeps me awake.

  I’ve always assumed that the wormhole moves because its efforts to stay put eventually fail—but what if the truth is precisely the opposite? What if it moves because its efforts to move have always, eventually, succeeded? What if the navigator breaks away to try again, as quickly as it can—but its crippled machinery can do no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success, for every eighteen minutes of striving?

  Maybe I’ve put an end to that striving. Maybe I’ve brought The Intake, finally, to rest.

  Eventually, the pressure itself can grow high enough to be fatal. It takes almost five hours, it’s a one-in-one-hundred-thousand case, but it has happened once already, there’s no reason at all it couldn’t happen again. That’s what bothers me most: I’d never know. Even if I saw people dying around me, the moment would never arrive when I knew, for certain, that this was the final price.

  Elaine stirs without opening her eyes. ‘Still?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I put an arm around her; she doesn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Well. Don’t forget to wake me when it’s over.’

  Appropiate Love

  ‘Your husband is going to survive. There’s no question about it.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment and almost screamed with relief. At some point during the last thirty-nine sleepless hours, the uncertainty had become far worse than the fear, and I’d almost succeeded in convincing myself that when the surgeons had said it was touch and go, they’d meant there was no hope at all.

  ‘However, he is going to need a new body. I don’t expect you want to hear another detailed account of his injuries, but there are too many organs damaged, too severely, for individual transplants or repairs to be a viable solution.’

  I nodded. I was beginning to like this Mr. Allenby, despite the resentment I’d felt when he’d introduced himself: at least he looked me squarely in the eye and made clear, direct statements. Everyone else who’d spoken to me since I’d stepped inside the hospital had hedged their bets; one specialist had handed me a Trauma Analysis Expert System’s print-out, with one hundred and thirty-two ‘prognostic scenarios’ and their respective probabilities.

  A new body. That didn’t frighten me at all. It sounded so clean, so simple. Individual transplants would have meant cutting Chris open, again and again—each time risking complications, each time subjecting him to a form of assault, however beneficial the intent. For the first few hours, a part of me had clung to the absurd hope that the whole thing had been a mistake; that Chris had walked away from the train wreck, unscratched; that it was someone else in the operating theatre—some thief who had stolen his wallet. After forcing myself to abandon this ludicrous fantasy and accept the truth—that he had been injured, mutilated, almost to the point of death—the prospect of a new body, pristine and whole, seemed an almost equally miraculous reprieve.

  Allenby went on, ‘Your policy covers that side of things completely; the technicians, the surrogate, the handlers.’

  I nodded again, hoping that he wouldn’t insist on going into all the details. I knew all the details. They’d grow a clone of Chris, intervening in utero to prevent its brain from developing the capacity to do anything more than sustain life. Once born, the clone would be forced to a premature, but healthy, maturity, by means of a sequence of elaborate biochemical lies, simulating the effects of normal ageing and exercise at a sub-cellular level. Yes, I still had misgivings—about hiring a woman’s body, about creating a brain-damaged ‘child’—but we’d agonised about these issues when we’d decided to include the expensive technique in our insurance policies. Now was not the time to have second thoughts.

  ‘The new body won’t be ready for almost two years. In the mean time, the crucial thing, obviously, is to keep your husband’s brain alive. Now, there’s no prospect of him regaining consciousness in his present situation, so there’s no compelling reason to try to maintain his other organs.

  That jolted me at first—but then I thought: Why not? Why not cut Chris free from the wreck of his body, the way he’d been cut free from the wreck of the train? I’d seen the aftermath of the crash replayed on the waiting room TV: rescue workers slicing away at the metal with their clean blue lasers, surgical and precise. Why not complete the act of liberation? He was his brain—not his crushed limbs, his shattered bones, his bruised and bleeding organs. What better way could there be for him to await the restoration of health, than in a perfect, dreamless sleep, with no risk of pain, unencumbered by the remnants of a body that would ultimately be discarded?

  ‘I should remind you that your policy specifies that the least costly medically sanctioned option will be used for life support while the new body is being grown.’

  I almost started to contradict him, but then I remembered: it was the only way that we’d been able to shoehorn the premiums into our budget; the base rate for body replacements was so high that we’d had to compromise on the frills. At the time, Chris had joked, ‘I just hope they don’t get cryonic storage working in our lifetimes. I don’t much fancy you grinning up at me from the freezer, every day for two years.’

  ‘You’re saying you want me to keep nothing but his brain alive—because that’s the cheapest method?’

  Allenby frowned sympathetically. ‘I know, it’s unpleasant having to think about costs, at a time like this. But I stress that the clause refers to medically sanctioned procedures. We certainly woul
dn’t insist that you do anything unsafe.’

  I nearly said, angrily: You won’t insist that I do anything. I didn’t, though; I didn’t have the energy to make a scene—and it would have been a hollow boast. In theory, the decision would be mine alone. In practice, Global Assurance were paying the bills. They couldn’t dictate treatment, directly—but if I couldn’t raise the money to bridge the gap, I knew I had no choice but to go along with whatever arrangements they were willing to fund.

  I said, ‘You’ll have to give me some time, to talk to the doctors, to think things over.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Absolutely. I should explain, though, that of all the various options—’

  I put up a hand to silence him. ‘Please. Do we have to go into this right now? I told you, I need to talk to the doctors. I need to get some sleep. I know: eventually, I’m going to have to come to terms with all the details… the different life-support companies, the different services they offer, the different kinds of machines… whatever. But it can wait for twelve hours, can’t it? Please.’

  It wasn’t just that I was desperately tired, probably still in shock—and beginning to suspect that I was being railroaded into some off-the-shelf ‘package solution’ that Allenby had already costed down to the last cent. There was a woman in a white coat standing nearby, glancing our way surreptitiously every few seconds, as if waiting for the conversation to end. I hadn’t seen her before, but that didn’t prove that she wasn’t part of the team looking after Chris; they’d sent me six different doctors already. If she had news, I wanted to hear it.

  Allenby said, ‘I’m sorry, but if you could just bear with me for a few more minutes, I really do need to explain something.’