Zendegi

by Greg Egan

  The bare grey rock between the dome and the maze sloped gently downwards; Martin was impressed that the platforms beneath their feet could tilt to accommodate this effect so seamlessly, and without the delays and noises he remembered from clunky sloping treadmills in the gym. There were no loose rocks or sudden shifts in height; at ground level at least, the landscape promised nothing that the technology couldn’t deliver. Martin looked up at the clear blue sky and felt a surge of elation - followed immediately by a pang of unease. If Javeed got hooked on this at least he wouldn’t end up as a couch potato. But then, if Zendegi wasn’t even bad for his health, what excuse would there be to lure him away from it in favour of real adventures beneath real skies?

  As they approached the maze, Martin saw how finely detailed the mosaic was, with blue and gold tiles as richly hued as any that adorned the mosques of Esfahan. The pattern was a complex system of intersecting grids and stars twisting across the surface. They walked around the building until they came to an opening in the wall - or rather, the mouth of a long passage whose own walls merged with the outer one. The passage was open to the sky; because the walls were so high, Martin hadn’t realised before that the ‘building’ had no roof. This was an outdoor maze, not a claustrophobic warren of tunnels.

  There were words set into the tiles near the entrance: ‘Find the fountain, and change the world,’ he read. He laughed. ‘Okay, shall we go in and look for the fountain?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Stay close to me. If we get separated, or there’s anything happening you don’t like, just give it the thumbs-down.’

  ‘Okay, Baba.’

  Martin searched Javeed’s face for any hint of anxiety, then caught himself wondering what kind of subtleties might be lost along the way in the imperfect process that was painting the image in front of him. But his son’s voice was being conveyed to him unchanged, and he’d sounded confident enough. ‘Okay, pesaram.’

  They walked side by side into the maze. The sun was high enough and the passage wide, to keep the walls around them from plunging them into gloom. Martin kept glancing at the lush patterns of the mosaic, wondering if they might encode some kind of clue. If they did, it wasn’t obvious, but at least there were no images of bull-headed monsters creeping into the design.

  They came to their first junction. ‘Raast ya chap?’ Martin asked.

  ‘We should toss a coin,’ Javeed suggested.

  ‘Hmm. I wonder . . .’ Martin reached into his pocket; the gloves interfered with his sense of touch, but from the sensation against his leg through the material of his trousers he was fairly sure he’d gripped a thousand-rial coin. But when he took his hand out, Zendegi was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the coin’s existence. ‘No. Maybe next time we can find out how to get some local currency.’ He put the invisible coin back in his pocket carefully, not wanting to drop it into the sphere and trip up on it later.

  ‘Raast,’ Javeed decided. They turned to the right.

  After a while Martin heard children’s voices, shouts echoing between the tiles from somewhere not too far away. ‘Hey! So we’re not alone.’

  ‘What if they get to the fountain before us?’ Javeed’s icon managed a near-perfect it’s the end of the world if I don’t win look.

  ‘I don’t know. Do you want to go faster?’

  Javeed nodded enthusiastically. Martin started jogging, and Javeed ran to keep up with him. It was hard to accept, viscerally, that there could be no grazed knees from the rocky ground here - let alone the kind of tearful collisions with the walls that were almost guaranteed in the real world, when Javeed had friends over and they chased each other from room to room. Martin didn’t want to keep fretting about the downside, but he wondered if the mismatch between visual cues and physical consequences might stunt a child’s instincts for dealing with obstacles in real life.

  The passage turned left, offering them no choice this time. Martin heard footsteps and saw a child darting across an intersection twenty metres or so ahead of them; he or she was gone in an instant, but the voices were closer, and it sounded as if the child was a straggler chasing a group of friends. Javeed pumped his limbs harder, determined to catch up; Martin felt his own pace switch from effortless to distinctly sweaty.

  They reached the intersection and turned right, the way the child had gone, taking them into a short passage that ended in a T-junction. Martin heard laughter that sounded very close, but the echoes made it impossible to judge the direction.

  ‘Which way?’ Javeed fretted.

  ‘Right,’ Martin said firmly, for no particular reason. When they’d first gone in, he’d had some vague idea of using the keep-the-wall-to-your-right rule, which at least had the virtue that you wouldn’t end up going around in circles. But he was beginning to suspect that their free trial would run out long before they solved the maze, whatever strategy they adopted.

  They took the right turn, then the passage forced them left, then left again . . . into a cul-de-sac. Javeed stood at the wall, scowling; the set of his mouth wasn’t quite authentic, but Martin recognised the signs of an incipient tantrum immediately. He leant down beside him. ‘This is what mazes are for,’ he said gently, ‘to get lost in, to make mistakes.’

  ‘You said “right”!’ Javeed replied accusingly, utterly oblivious to Martin’s suggestion that this setback could be acceptable, let alone desirable.

  ‘So we’ll go back to the same place and turn left.’

  ‘But we’ve lost them now!’

  ‘Maybe. We’ll see.’

  Javeed followed him out of the dead end, sulkily refusing to be hurried. Martin examined the mosaics around them, trying to commit the pattern to memory just in case there was some kind of visual cue marking the routes that led nowhere.

  Back at the T-junction, they continued down the passage into the unexplored arm. It wasn’t long before Javeed’s disappointment had faded and they were running again - gloriously confused, if not quite lost. Martin kept hearing shouts and snatches of laughter, always children’s voices. The sound of these elusive playmates made him want to whisper to Javeed, ‘Do you think there are ghosts here? Maybe this is a haunted maze, full of children who never found their way out.’ But he struggled to recall how old he’d been himself before such a notion would have elicited an enjoyable thrill, rather than sheer terror. It seemed wiser to err on the side of caution.

  Then they took a turn and suddenly the children were all around them, coming in the opposite direction and almost colliding with them. There were more than a dozen, as real and unghostly as he and Javeed were to each other. ‘Not that way!’ one of the girls scolded Javeed in Farsi. A boy added, ‘We went that way already, it’s a dead end.’

  Javeed looked confused for a moment, but then he seemed to bond with the group in an instant, with no need for any adult nonsense: no exchange of names, no empty pleasantries, just a discussion of the matter at hand. The children barely acknowledged Martin, but that felt more like a kind of politeness than a deliberate rebuff; they simply weren’t presuming that an adult stranger would want to speak with them, let alone be a part of their game. Martin wasn’t comfortable letting Javeed out of his sight, though, so he tagged along beside him as the mob headed back down the passage, and some of the children attempted to explain to Javeed where they’d been so far and where they thought they were going. Martin couldn’t work out if they’d been performing a systematic sweep of the maze, but he wasn’t about to intrude with his own questions or advice. And Javeed was reconciled to the fact that he wasn’t going to win any race now; it was enough that he’d been accepted into this group.

  Martin let the boisterous chatter flow past him, just keeping an eye on Javeed and checking the mosaics for clues. When the group hit another dead end there were complaints and recriminations, but there was too much collective energy for anyone to start sulking, and no opportunity for disenchantment to lead to blows. Ten minutes later, Martin noticed a distinctive crowding of the mosaic’s
features that he’d seen twice before. Sure enough, a few turns later they reached yet another cul-de-sac. If he’d been alone with Javeed he would have stopped and explained the discovery to him, but as things stood he didn’t want to interfere with the children’s own plans. As they retraced their steps, Javeed chatted happily with the girl beside him, sharing his somewhat optimistic vision of school. ‘And I’m going to build a model plane, and then I’m going to build a car—’

  ‘You can build a plane in Zendegi,’ she interjected, ‘big enough to fly in.’

  Javeed was speechless.

  Martin could see the pattern on the walls growing simpler and more spacious, until they came to a junction where it was almost pared down to a sequence of eight-pointed stars sitting alone in a square grid; all the delicate complications and adornments had been stripped away. The children walked right past this signpost - but five minutes later their own haphazard strategy brought them back to it.

  When they reached the end of the passage and took one last obligatory turn, they found themselves in a courtyard in the centre of the maze. Directly in front of them was an octagonal fountain carved from white stone.

  Shouts of triumph filled the courtyard. Javeed was ecstatic, jumping up and down with delight; Martin wished he could have lofted him into the air, though the way his back had been lately he probably should be grateful that it was impossible here.

  ‘I want to throw a coin in the fountain!’ Javeed said. Martin held out his empty hands. ‘They don’t take our money here, remember?’ No doubt that would be easily fixed once they had Martin’s credit card details.

  Some of the children were gathering around the fountain, searching for a hidden reward. Martin and Javeed joined them, but Martin was curious about more basic things than game-loot. Zendegi wouldn’t play along if you insisted on trying to occupy the same location as a solid object, but what about water?

  Martin said, ‘Try and splash me. See what happens.’

  Javeed hesitated, probably recalling the dose of vertigo he’d received when he’d tried to grab hold of Martin’s legs. But he summoned up his courage and reached into the pool of water at the fountain’s edge. From his expression it was clear that he felt something, but before Martin could ask him to describe the sensation, Javeed had taken him at his word and swatted some of the stuff in his direction. Martin blinked at the stream of droplets, unable to shut off the protective instinct. When he opened his eyes he put a hand to his cheek and felt moisture on his fingertips. Weirdly, he couldn’t decide how convincing the sensation was in itself; the context told him what it should have meant, and his brain just accepted the whole package.

  Javeed laughed and cupped some more water threateningly in his hand, but at the last moment he spared Martin and tipped it onto the ground instead. As it puddled on the grey stone, the hard surface fissured and disintegrated with a steamy hiss, then green blades of grass thrust their way up through the powdery residue.

  Javeed shouted wildly, and soon all the children were joining in, scooping up water and dropping it onto the stone. Martin didn’t want to rob the kids of any of their fun - and he felt a little self-conscious, too - but after a while he couldn’t resist; he cupped some water in his hands and carried it to one of the few remaining patches that had escaped the transformation. That grass and stone felt the same beneath his shoes didn’t really undermine his suspension of disbelief, and when he squatted down to check the texture with his hands it was downright eerie: when his fingertip made contact with a blade of grass, the sensation of gentle springiness created by the haptic glove’s calibrated tickle was more than enough to bolster the illusion.

  That was enough for him; Martin stood aside and watched as the children hunted for the spots they’d missed. Javeed kept crossing the grass around the fountain with handfuls of water that leaked through his fingers before he could find any stone to transmute, but he wasn’t growing frustrated; everyone was having much too good a time.

  A blue-and-gold butterfly hovered beside the fountain. Martin turned towards the sudden shouts of excitement and saw a whole swarm of them peeling off the courtyard’s wall. Someone had splashed the wall, and unlike the change that had been wrought on the ground, this appeared to be self-sustaining; as the tiles of the mosaic became the scales of butterfly wings, their neighbours needed no extra dose of water to follow in their wake.

  Javeed was open-mouthed with astonishment now; his face looked as if it had been pushed beyond the already overblown exemplar he’d given Omar. The walls of the courtyard disappeared beneath a tornado of butterflies that stretched up into the air; a few were flying across the grass, but the swarm as a whole kept its distance, preventing the spectacle from becoming oppressive. The children were shouting and squealing, but nobody seemed frightened. Martin went and stood beside Javeed and they watched in silence as the vortex of change ate its way through the walls of the courtyard and began devouring the surrounding maze. He looked up, afraid that the insects might block out the sky, but the funnel was broadening as it grew, the butterflies dispersing as they ascended.

  As the maze disintegrated, the grass of the courtyard spread out to take its place; like a swarm of locusts in reverse the butterflies were transforming the once barren ground into lush greenery. But even more strikingly, the advancing horde left something intact: people. Apparently not everyone had managed to reach the courtyard, and now the stragglers were being liberated from the confusion of the maze. Martin saw one group of children leaping into the air, trying to catch the blue-and-golden insects.

  When the butterflies reached the edges of the maze they flew off across the rocky desert, leaving behind nothing but an octagonal oasis centred on the fountain.

  As calm descended, Martin could hear his heart pounding. He felt elated, but he was drained as well. He turned to Javeed. ‘You okay, pesaram?’

  Javeed beamed at him. ‘That was fantastic! I want to do it again!’

  Some of the children around them were already disappearing, literally fading into transparency as they departed. Martin said, ‘Not today.’

  ‘But we can come back tomorrow?’

  ‘Not tomorrow.’

  ‘We have to come back!’ Javeed was horrified, as if Martin had shown him this glimpse of paradise only to slam the gates shut.

  ‘Don’t get upset, I didn’t say never.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Give me time to think about it.’

  They headed back towards the dome. Martin knew they didn’t need to return the way they’d come in order to exit from the game, but he was reluctant to yank them out of the experience abruptly.

  As they walked across the grass, he spotted a man and a boy walking a few metres away to their left; the man raised a hand and called out in English, ‘Hi! How’s it going?’

  ‘Hi.’ Martin stopped and waited for them to approach. ‘I was beginning to think I was the only adult here.’

  ‘Me too.’ The man’s icon had blue eyes and brown hair; he sounded like a native English speaker, but Martin couldn’t place his accent.

  ‘I’m Martin, this is my son Javeed. This is our first time in Zendegi.’

  The man said, ‘I’m Luke. This is Hassan.’

  Martin didn’t offer his hand; maybe when he’d had more experience with the gloves the subtleties of the process wouldn’t seem too daunting for a casual gesture. He turned to the boy. ‘Salaam, Hassan. Chetori?’

  ‘Salaam agha,’ Hassan replied shyly.

  ‘Zendegi is great,’ Luke said, ‘but we’re always famished afterwards.’

  ‘Yeah, you can’t fault it for a lack of exercise,’ Martin replied.

  ‘What you need is a snack that’s nutritious,’ Luke enthused, ‘and fun to eat!’

  Martin stared at him. What were the odds that another man with a Western name and an Iranian son would be playing the same game at the same time? ‘You’re not actually a person
, are you?’ he said.

  Luke gazed back with a frozen smile, betraying no hint of offence. ‘I used to think that kebab-o-licious goodness could only come in a real kebab—’

  Martin pointed his thumb to the ground, and found himself back in his castle. He flipped up the goggles’ screens and saw the sphere opening up around him. Within seconds he could see Javeed for real.

  ‘You okay?’

  Javeed nodded, but said nothing. His posture had a hint of reserve that Martin knew was his punishment for failing to set a firm date for their return.

  Martin left the gloves and goggles on the counter beside the desktop and they went downstairs. Omar was dealing with a customer, but Farshid was free and Javeed immediately began bombarding him with every detail of their experience. Martin stood and listened, feeling flat and a little disoriented; it was like coming out of a movie into daylight, or stepping off a plane from somewhere bright and exotic to face the same old mundane sights again.