Axiomatic

by Greg Egan

  I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and where has it brought me?

  To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps along the path to enlightenment.

  And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

  For four years, I’ve been following a false tao—pursuing an illusion of freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of striving—but now I see the way to transform that journey into—

  Into what? A short cut to damnation?

  ‘Damnation’? There’s no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now—but I know that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to me.

  For several seconds, I’m paralysed by indecision—shot through with pure dread—but then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I leave the freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.

  These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by disuse into autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, façade intact, dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor showroom, the latest four-year-old—fuel cell models proudly on display already looking like bizarre relics from another century.

  Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and déjà vu. In spite of everything, part of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first time—not passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of dogma, strangely comforting formulae reawakened from memories of my last perihelion.

  Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have known God’s perfect love—and then walked away?

  It’s unthinkable. How could I have turned my back on Him?

  I come to a row of pristine houses: I know they’re uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan robots keep the lawns trimmed, the leaves swept, the walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west, and I’ll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that way, gladly.

  Almost gladly.

  The only trouble is… with each step south it grows harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures—let alone Catholic dogma—are full of the most grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a perfect, loving God be such a dog’s breakfast of threats and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanity’s place in the universe?

  Errors of fact? The metaphors had to be chosen to suit the world-view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis?

  Contradictions? Tests of faith—and humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic included.

  Logic especially.

  It’s no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves and fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to be taken literally? If that’s the case, though, what’s left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of pompous theatrics? If God did in fact become man, suffer, die, and rise again to save me, then I owe Him everything… but if it’s just a beautiful story, then I can love my neighbour with or without regular doses of bread and wine.

  I veer south-east.

  The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely stranger, and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws of Physics that have come to know Themselves through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are encoded in the fine structure constant, and the value of the density omega. The human race—in whatever form, robot or organic—will keep on advancing for the next ten billion years, until we can give rise to the hyperintelligence which will cause the finely tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

  If we don’t die out in the next few millennia.

  In which case, other intelligent creatures will perform the task. It doesn’t matter who carries the torch.

  Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what a civilisation of posthumans, robots, or aliens, might or might not do ten billion years from now? What does any of this grandiose shit have to do with me?

  I finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead of me—and right on cue, the existentialist attractor to the west firmly steers me away from the suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but only slightly—it’s too hot to run, but more to the point, sudden acceleration can have some peculiar side effects, bringing on unexpected philosophical swerves.

  As I narrow the gap, she turns at the sound of my footsteps.

  I say, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi.’ She doesn’t seem exactly thrilled to see me—but then, this isn’t exactly the place for it.

  I fall into step beside her. ‘You left without me.’

  She shrugs. ‘I wanted to be on my own for a while. I wanted to think things over.’

  I laugh. ‘If you wanted to think, you should have stayed on the freeway.’

  ‘There’s another spot ahead. In the park. It’s just as good.’

  She’s right—although now I’m here to spoil it for her. I ask myself for the thousandth time: Why do I want us to stay together? Because of what we have in common? But we owe most of that to the very fact that we are together—travelling the same paths, corrupting each other with our proximity. Because of our differences, then? For the sake of occasional moments of mutual incomprehensibility? But the longer we’re together, the more that vestige of mystery will be eroded; orbiting each other can only lead to a spiralling together, an end to all distinctions.

  Why, then?

  The honest answer (here and now) is: food and sex—although tomorrow, elsewhere, no doubt I’ll look back and brand that conclusion a cynical lie.

  I fall silent as we drift towards the equilibrium zone. The last few minutes’ confusion still rings in my head, satisfyingly jumbled, the giddy succession of truncated epiphanies effectively cancelling each other out, leaving nothing behind but an amorphous sense of distrust. I remember a school of thought from pre-Meltdown days which proclaimed, with bovine good intentions—confusing laudable tolerance with sheer credulity—that there was something of value in every human philosophy… and what’s more, when you got right down to it, they all really spoke the same ‘universal truths’, and were all, ultimately, reconcilable. Apparently, none of these supine ecumenicists have survived to witness the palpable disproof of their hypothesis; I expect they all converted, three seconds after Meltdown, to the faith of whoever was standing closest to them at the time.

  Maria mutters angrily, ‘Wonderful!’ I look up at her, then follow her gaze. The park has come into view, and if it’s time to herself she wanted, she has more than me to contend with. At least two dozen other tramps are gathered in the shade. That’s rare, but it does happen; equilibrium zones are the slowest parts of everybody’s orbits, so I suppose it’s not surprising that occasionally a group of us ends up becalmed together.

  As we come closer, I notice something stranger: everybody reclining on the grass is facing the same way. Watching something—or someone—hidden from view by the trees.

  Someone. A woman’s voice reaches us, the words indistinct at this distance, but the tone mellifluous. Confident. Gentle but persuasive.

  Maria says nervously, ‘Maybe we should stay back. Maybe the equilibrium’s shifted.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I’m as worried as she is—but intrigued as well. I don’t feel much of a tug from any of the familiar local attractors—but then, I can’t be sure that my curiosity itself isn’t a new hook for an old idea.

  I say, ‘Let’s just… skirt around the rim of the park. We can’t ignore this; we have to find out what’s going on.’ If a nearby basin has expanded and captured the park, then keeping our distance from the speaker is no guarantee of freedom; it’s not her words, or her lone presence, that could harm us—but Maria (knowing all this, I’m sure) accepts my ‘strategy’ for warding off
the danger, and nods assent.

  We position ourselves in the middle of the road at the eastern edge of the park, without noticeable effect. The speaker, middle-aged I’d guess, looks every inch a tramp, from the dirt-stiff clothes to the crudely cut hair to the weathered skin and lean build of a half-starved perennial walker. Only the voice is wrong. She’s set up a frame, like an easel, on which she’s stretched a large map of the city; the roughly hexagonal cells of the basins are neatly marked in a variety of colours. People used to swap maps like this all the time, in the early years; maybe she’s just showing off her prize possession, hoping to trade it for something worthwhile. I don’t think much of her chances; by now, I’m sure, every tramp relies on his or her own mental picture of the ideological terrain.

  Then she lifts a pointer and traces part of a feature I’d missed: a delicate web of blue lines, weaving through the gaps between the hexagons.

  The woman says, ‘But of course it’s no accident. We haven’t stayed out of the basins all these years by sheer good luck—or even skill.’ She looks out across the crowd, notices us, pauses a moment, then says calmly, ‘We’ve been captured by our own attractor. It’s nothing like the others—it’s not a fixed set of beliefs, in a fixed location—but it’s still an attractor, it’s still drawn us to it from whatever unstable orbits we might have been on. I’ve mapped it—or part of it—and I’ve sketched it as well as I can. The true detail may be infinitely fine—but even from this crude representation, you should recognise paths that you’ve walked yourselves.’

  I stare at the map. From this distance, the blue strands are impossible to follow individually; I can see that they cover the route that Maria and I have taken, over the last few days, but—

  An old man calls out, ‘You’ve scrawled a lot of lines between the basins. What does that prove?’

  ‘Not between all the basins.’ She touches a point on the map. ‘Has anyone ever been here? Or here? Or here? No? Here? Or here? Why not? They’re all wide corridors between attractors—they look as safe as any of the others. So why have we never been to these places? For the same reason nobody living in the fixed attractors has: they’re not part of our territory; they’re not part of our own attractor.’

  I know she’s talking nonsense, but the phrase alone is enough to make me feel panicky, claustrophobic. Our own attractor. We’ve been captured by our own attractor. I scan the rim of the city on the map; the blue line never comes close to it. In fact, the line gets about as far from the centre as I’ve ever travelled, myself…

  Proving what? Only that this woman has had no better luck than I have. If she’d escaped the city, she wouldn’t be here to claim that escape was impossible.

  A woman in the crowd—visibly pregnant—says, ‘You’ve drawn your own paths, that’s all. You’ve stayed out of danger—I’ve stayed out of danger—we all know what places to avoid. That’s all you’re telling us. That’s all we have in common.’

  ‘No!’ The speaker traces a stretch of the blue line again. ‘This is who we are. We’re not aimless wanderers; we’re the people of this strange attractor. We have an identity—a unity—after all.’

  There’s laughter, and a few desultory insults from the crowd. I whisper to Maria, ‘Do you know her? Have you see her before?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have. Isn’t it obvious? She’s some kind of robot evangelist—’

  ‘She doesn’t talk much like one.’

  ‘Rationalist—not Christian or Mormon.’

  ‘Rationalists don’t send evangelists.’

  ‘No? Mapping strange attractors; if that’s not rationalist jargon, what is it?’

  Maria shrugs. ‘Basins, attractors—they’re all rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from somewhere.’

  The woman says, ‘I’ll build my church on sand. And I’ll ask no one to follow me—and yet, you will. You all will.’

  I say, ‘Let’s go.’ I take Maria’s arm, but she pulls free angrily.

  ‘Why are you so against her? Maybe she’s right.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Everyone else has an attractor—why can’t we have one of our own? Stranger than all the rest. Look at it: it’s the most beautiful thing on the map.’

  I shake my head, horrified. ‘How can you say that? We’ve stayed free. We’ve struggled so hard to stay free.’

  She shrugs. ‘Maybe. Or maybe we’ve been captured by what you call freedom. Maybe we don’t need to struggle any more. Is that so bad? If we’re doing what we want, either way, why should we care?’

  Without any fuss, the woman starts packing up her easel, and the crowd of tramps begins to disperse. Nobody seems to have been much affected by the brief sermon; everyone heads off calmly on their own chosen orbits.

  I, say, ‘The people in the basins are doing what they want. I don’t want to be like them.’

  Maria laughs. ‘Believe me, you’re not.’

  ‘No, you’re right, I’m not: they’re rich, fat and complacent; I’m starving, tired, and confused. And for what? Why am I living this way? That robot’s trying to take away the one thing that makes it all worthwhile.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I’m tired and hungry, too. And maybe an attractor of my own will make it all worthwhile.’

  ‘How?’ I laugh derisively. ‘Will you worship it? Will you pray to it?’

  ‘No. But I won’t have to be afraid any more. If we really have been captured—if the way we live is stable, after all—then putting one foot wrong won’t matter: we’ll be drawn back to our own attractor. We won’t have to worry that the smallest mistake will send us sliding into one of the basins. If that’s true, aren’t you glad?’

  I shake my head angrily. ‘That’s bullshit—dangerous bullshit. Staying out of the basins is a skill, it’s a gift. You know that. We navigate the channels, carefully, balancing the opposing forces—’

  ‘Do we? I’m sick of feeling like a tightrope walker.’

  ‘Being sick of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true! Don’t you see? She wants us to be complacent! The more of us who start to think orbiting is easy, the more of us will end up captured by the basins—’

  I’m distracted by the sight of the prophet hefting her possessions and setting off. I say, ‘Look at her: she may be a perfect imitation—but she’s a robot, she’s a fake. They’ve finally understood that their pamphlets and their preaching machines won’t work, so they’ve sent a machine to lie to us about our freedom.’

  Maria says, ‘Prove it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got a knife. If she’s a robot, go after her, stop her, cut her open. Prove it.’

  The woman, the robot, crosses the park, heading north-west, away from us. I say, ‘You know me; I could never do that.’

  ‘If she’s a robot, she won’t feel a thing.’

  ‘But she looks human. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stick a knife into a perfect imitation of human flesh.’

  ‘Because you know she’s not a robot. You know she’s telling the truth.’

  Part of me is simply glad to be arguing with Maria, for the sake of proving our separateness—but part of me finds everything she’s saying too painful to leave unchallenged.

  I hesitate a moment, then put down my pack and sprint across the park towards the prophet.

  She turns when she hears me, and stops walking. There’s no one else nearby. I halt a few metres away from her, and catch my breath. She regards me with patient curiosity. I stare at her, feeling increasingly foolish. I can’t pull a knife on her: she might not be a robot, after all—she might just be a tramp with strange ideas.

  She says, ‘Did you want to ask me something?’

  Almost without thinking, I blurt out, ‘How do you know nobody’s ever left the city? How can you be so sure it’s never happened?’

  She shakes her head. �
�I didn’t say that. The attractor looks like a closed loop to me. Anyone who’s been captured by it could never leave. But other people may have escaped.’

  ‘What other people?’

  ‘People who weren’t in the attractor’s basin.’

  I scowl, confused. ‘What basin? I’m not talking about the people of the basins, I’m talking about us.’

  She laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean the basins that lead to the fixed attractors. Our strange attractor has a basin, too: all the points that lead to it. I don’t know what this basin’s shape is: like the attractor itself, the detail could be infinitely fine. Not every point in the gaps between the hexagons would be part of it: some points must lead to the fixed attractors—that’s why some tramps have been captured by them. Other points would belong to the strange attractor’s basin. But others—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Other points might lead to infinity. To escape.’

  ‘Which points?’

  She shrugs. ‘Who knows? There could be two points, side by side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leading—eventually—out of the city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.’

  ‘But you said we’d all been captured, already—’

  She nods. ‘After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied into their respective attractors. The attractors are the stable part: the basins lead into the attractors, but the attractors lead into themselves. Anyone who was destined for a fixed attractor must be in it by now—and anyone who was destined to leave the city has already gone. Those of us who are still in orbit will stay that way. We have to understand that, accept that, learn to live with it… and if that means inventing our own faith, our own religion—’

  I grab her arm, draw my knife, and quickly scrape the point across her forearm. She yelps and pulls free, then clasps her hand to the wound. A moment later, she takes it away to inspect the damage, and I see the thin red line on her arm, and a rough wet copy on her palm.