Permutation City

by Greg Egan

  He wouldn’t have said he loved her. He didn’t ache when they were apart; he just felt pleasantly numb, and looked forward to the next time he’d see her. He was jealous, but not obsessive, and she kept her other lovers out of the way; he rarely had to acknowledge their existence. He never saw Martin again.

  Anna traveled with him to New York. They fell asleep in the middle of a Broadway show, saw the Pixies play at the Mudd Club, climbed the stairs to the top of Manhattan Chase.

  Thomas turned twenty-five. His father promoted him. His mother said, “Look at all your gray hairs.”

  In the spring, Erik disappeared. Anna said casually, “His mother’s gone, she’s moved away.”

  Thomas was hurt; he’d liked having the boy around. He said, “You know, I used to think he might be yours.”

  She was baffled. “Why? I told you he wasn’t. Why would I have lied?”

  Thomas had trouble sleeping. He kept trying to picture the future. When his father died, would he still be seeing Anna, once a fortnight in Hamburg, while she dealt heroin and fucked pimps and junkies? The thought made him sick. Not because he didn’t want everything to stay the same, but because he knew that it couldn’t.

  The Saturday in June was, almost, the second anniversary of the day they’d met. They went to a flea market in the afternoon, and he bought her cheap jewelry. She said, “Anything nicer would be asking for trouble.”

  They ate junk food, went dancing. They ended up back at Anna’s flat at half past two. They danced around the tiny living room, propping each other up, more tired than drunk.

  Thomas said, “God, you’re beautiful.” Marry me.

  Anna said, “I’m going to ask you for something I’ve never asked for before. I’ve been trying to work up the courage all day.”

  “You can ask for anything.” Marry me.

  “I have a friend, with a lot of cash. Almost two hundred thousand marks. He needs someone who can—”

  Thomas stepped back from her, then struck her hard across the face. He was horrified. He’d never hit her before, the thought had never even occurred to him. She started punching him in the chest and face; he stood there and let her do it for a while, then grabbed both her hands by the wrists.

  She caught her breath. “Let go of me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then let go of me.”

  He didn’t. He said, “I’m not a money laundering facility for your friends.”

  She looked at him pityingly. “Oh, what have I done? Offended your high moral principles? All I did was ask. You might have made yourself useful. Never mind. I should have known it was too much to expect.”

  He pushed his face close to hers. “Where are you going to be, in ten years’ time? In prison? At the bottom of the Elbe?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Where? Tell me?”

  She said, “I can think of worse fates. I could end up playing happy families with a middle-aged banker.”

  Thomas threw her toward the wall. Her feet slipped from under her before she hit it; her head struck the bricks as she was going down.

  He crouched beside her, disbelieving. There was a wide gash in the back of her head. She was breathing. He patted her cheeks, then tried to open her eyes; they’d rolled up into her skull. She’d ended up almost sitting on the floor, legs sprawled in front of her, head lolling against the wall. Blood pooled around her.

  He said, “Think fast. Think fast.”

  He knelt over her, one knee to either side, took her face in his hands, then closed his eyes. He brought her head forward, then slammed it back against the wall. Five times. Then he held his fingers near her nostrils, without opening his eyes. He felt no exhalation.

  He backed away from her, turned away and opened his eyes, then walked around the flat, wiping things he might have touched with his handkerchief. Avoiding looking at her. He was crying and shaking, but he couldn’t think why.

  There was blood on his hands, his shirt, his trousers, his shoes. He found a garbage bag, put all his clothes in it, then washed the blood from his skin. There was a black spot in the center of his vision, but he worked around it. He put the garbage bag in his suitcase, and put on fresh clothes: blue jeans and a black T-shirt. He went through the flat, packing away everything that belonged to him. He almost took Anna’s address book, but when he checked he saw that he wasn’t in it. He looked for diaries, but found none.

  Dozens of people had seen them together, month after month. Anna’s neighbors, Anna’s friends. Dozens of people had seen them leave the nightclub. He wasn’t sure how many of her friends knew what he did, where he was from. He’d never told any of them more than his first name, he’d always lied about the rest – but Anna might have told them everything she knew.

  Having been seen with her alive was bad enough; he couldn’t risk being seen walking out the front door the night she was killed.

  The flat was two flights up. The bathroom window opened onto an alley. Thomas threw the suitcase down; it landed with a soft thud. He thought of jumping – almost believing that he could land unhurt, or almost believing that he wouldn’t care – but there was a gray clarity underneath those delusions, and an engine in his skull a billion years old which only wanted to survive.

  He climbed up into the window frame, into the gap left by the sliding half-pane, one foot either side of the track. There was no ledge, as such, just the double brickwork of the wall itself. He had to crouch to fit, but he found he could keep his balance by pushing his left hand up against the top of the frame, jamming himself in place.

  He turned sideways, then reached across the outside wall, and into the frame of the bathroom window of the neighboring flat. He could hear traffic, and music somewhere, but no lights showed from within the flat, and the alley below was deserted. The two windows were scarcely a meter apart, but the second one was closed, halving its width. With one hand on each edge, he shifted his right foot to the neighbor’s window. Then, gripping the intervening wall tightly between his forearms, he moved his left foot across. Finally, securing himself by pressing up with his right hand, he let go of the first frame completely.

  He shuffled across the one-brick’s-width ledge, fighting an impulse to mutter Ave Marias. Pray for us sinners? He realized that he’d stopped weeping. A drainpipe ran close to the far side of the window. He imagined tearing his palms open on jagged rusty metal, but the pipe was smooth; it took all his strength to hold himself in place, gripping it with hands and knees. When he touched the ground with his feet, his legs gave way. But not for long.

  He hid in a public toilet for three hours, staring up at one corner of the room. The lights, the tiles, could have belonged to a prison or an asylum. He found himself disconnected, from the world, the past; his time breaking up into moments, shocks of awareness, shimmering droplets of mercury, beads of sweat.

  This isn’t me. This is something else that believes it’s me. And it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Nobody disturbed him. At six o’clock he walked out into the morning light, and caught a train home.

  Chapter 15

  (Remit not paucity)

  April 2051

  Durham’s North Sydney flat was small, and very sparsely furnished; not at all what Maria had expected. The combined living room and kitchen was all she’d seen, but it was clear from the outside that there wasn’t space for much more. Durham was on the sixteenth floor, but the building was hemmed in on all sides by ugly late-twenties office towers, blue and pink ersatz-marble monstrosities; no expensive harbor views here. For someone who was ripping off gullible millionaires – or even someone who merely sold them insurance – Durham didn’t seem to have much to show for it. Maria thought it unlikely that the place had been set up entirely for her benefit, to fit the story he’d told her: to demonstrate the frugal life-style which supposedly enabled him to pay her out of his own pocket. He’d invited her out of the blue; she would never have had a reason to insist on seeing where he lived.

  She
put her notepad down on the scratched dining table, and turned it so that Durham could read the graphs. “These are the latest results for the two most promising species. A. lithophila has the higher mutation rate, per generation, but it reproduces much more slowly, and it’s more vulnerable to climate change. A. hydrophila is more prolific, with a stabler genome. It’s not intrinsically hardier; it’s just better protected by the ocean.”

  Durham said, “What’s your gut feeling?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “A. litho evolves into a few promising species – which all get wiped out by one major crisis. A. hydro slowly builds up a huge stock of survival-neutral mutations, some of which turn out to be useful on land. The first few hundred thousand species which blow out of the sea don’t make it – but it doesn’t matter, there are always more. Or am I just being swayed too much by terrestrial preconceptions?”

  “The people you’re trying to convince will almost certainly think the same way.”

  Durham laughed. “It wouldn’t hurt to be right, as well as persuasive. If they’re not mutually exclusive ambitions.”

  Maria didn’t reply. She stared down at the notepad; she couldn’t look Durham in the eye. Talking to him by phone, with software filters, had been bearable. And the work itself had been an end in itself; immersed in the elaborate game of Autoverse biochemistry, she’d found it all too easy to carry on, as if it made no difference what it was for. But she’d done next to nothing to make Durham more likely to take her into his confidence. That was why she’d agreed to this meeting – and why she had to take advantage of it.

  The trouble was, now that she was here, she was so ill at ease that she could barely discuss the most neutral technicalities without her voice faltering. If he started spouting lies about his hopes of debating the skeptics of the artificial life mafia in some future issue of Cellular Automaton World, she’d probably start screaming. Or, more likely, throw up on the bare linoleum floor.

  He said, “By the way, I signed the release on your fee this morning – I’ve authorized the trust fund to pay you in full. The work’s been going so well, it only seemed fair.”

  Maria glanced up at him, startled. He looked perfectly sincere, but she couldn’t help wondering – not for the first time – if he knew that she’d been approached by Hayden, knew exactly what she’d been told. She felt her cheeks flush. She’d spent too many years using phones and filters; she couldn’t keep anything from showing on her face.

  She said, “Thank you. But aren’t you’re afraid I might take the first plane to the Bahamas? There’s still a lot of work to be done.”

  “I think I can trust you.”

  There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice – but there really didn’t need to be.

  He said, “Speaking of trust … I think your phone may be bugged. I’m sorry; I should have told you that sooner.”

  Maria stared at him. “How did you know—?”

  “Know? You mean, it is? You’ve had definite signs?”

  “I’m not sure. But how—?”

  “Mine is. Bugged. So it makes sense that yours would be, too.”

  Maria was bewildered. What was he going to do – announce that the fraud squad were watching him? If he came right out and said it, she didn’t think she could dissemble any longer. She’d have to confess that she already knew – and then she’d have to tell him everything Hayden had said.

  Taking the pressure off completely. Ending the farce for good. She had no talent for these stupid games; the sooner they could both stop lying to each other, the better.

  She said, “And who exactly do you think is doing it?”

  Durham paused to think it over, as if he hadn’t seriously considered the question before. “Some corporate espionage unit? Some national security organization? There’s really no way of telling. I know very little about the intelligence community; your guess would be as good as mine.”

  “Then why do you think they’re—?”

  Durham said blithely, “If I was developing a computer, say, thirty orders of magnitude more powerful than any processor cluster in existence, don’t you think people like that might take an interest?”

  Maria almost choked. “Ah. Yes.”

  “But of course I’m not, and eventually they’ll convince themselves of that, and leave us both alone. So there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “Right.”

  Durham grinned at her. “Presumably, they think that just because I’ve commissioned an Autoverse planet, there’s a chance that I might possess the means to actually run it. They’ve searched this place a couple of times; I don’t know what they expected to find. A little black box, sitting in a corner of one of the rooms? Hidden under a pot plant, quietly cracking military codes, raking in a fortune on the stock market – and simulating a universe or two on the side, just to keep from getting bored. Any five-year-old could tell them how ludicrous that is. Maybe they think I’ve found a way to shrink individual processors to the size of an atom. That would just about do it.”

  So much for an end to the lying. He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. All right. Maria forced the words out evenly: “And any five-year-old could tell you that if anyone searched your flat, it was the fraud squad.”

  Durham was still giving nothing away. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I know they’re watching you. They’ve spoken to me. They’ve told me exactly what you’re doing.” Maria faced him squarely now. She was tense at the prospect of a confrontation, but she had nothing to be ashamed of; he was the one who’d set out to deceive her from the start.

  He said, “Don’t you think the fraud squad would need to get a warrant, and search the flat in my presence?”

  “Then maybe it hasn’t been searched at all. That’s not the point.”

  He nodded slightly, as if conceding some minor breach of etiquette. “No, it’s not. You want to know why I lied to you.”

  Maria said, “I know why. Please don’t treat me like an idiot.” Her bitterness surprised her, she’d had to conceal it for so long. “I was hardly going to agree to be your … accomplice—”

  Durham raised one hand from the tabletop, a half conciliatory, half impatient gesture. Maria fell silent, more from astonishment at how calmly he seemed to be taking all this than any desire to give him a chance to defend himself.

  He said, “I lied because I didn’t know if you’d believe the truth or not. I think you might have, but I couldn’t be sure. And I couldn’t risk it. I’m sorry.”

  “Of course I would have believed the truth! It would have made a lot more sense than the bullshit you fed me! But, yes, I can see why you couldn’t risk it.”

  Durham still showed no sign of contrition. “Do you know what it is that I’m offering my backers? The ones who’ve been funding your work?”

  “A sanctuary. A privately owned computer somewhere.”

  “That’s almost true. Depending on what you take those words to mean.”

  Maria laughed cynically. “Oh, yes? Which words do you have trouble with? ‘Privately owned’?”

  “No. ‘Computer.’ And, ‘somewhere.’”

  “Now you’re just being childish.” She reached out and picked up her notepad, slid her chair back and rose to her feet. Trying to think of a parting shot, it struck her that the most frustrating thing was that the bastard had paid her. He’d lied to her, he’d made her an accomplice – but he hadn’t actually swindled her.

  Durham looked up at her calmly. He said, “I’ve committed no crime. My backers know exactly what they’re paying for. The fraud squad, like the intelligence agencies, are jumping to absurd conclusions. I’ve told them the whole truth. They’ve chosen not to believe me.”

  Maria stood by the table, one hand on the back of the chair. “They said you refused to discuss the matter.”

  “Well, that’s a lie. Although what I had to say certainly wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”

  “What did you have to sa
y?”

  Durham gave her a searching look. “If I try to explain, will you listen? Will you sit down and listen, to the end?”

  “I might.”

  “Because if you don’t want to hear the whole story, you might as well leave right now. Not every Copy took me up on the offer – but the only ones who went to the police were the ones who refused to hear me out.”

  Maria said, exasperated, “What do you care what I think, now? You’ve extracted all the Autoverse technobabble from me you could possibly need. And I know nothing more about your scam than the police do; they’ll have no reason to ask me to testify against you, if all I can say in court is ‘Detective Hayden told me this, Detective Hayden told me that.’ So why don’t you quit while you’re ahead?”

  Durham said simply, “Because you don’t understand anything. And I owe you an explanation.”

  Maria looked toward the door, but she didn’t take her hand off the back of the chair. The work had been an end in itself – but she was still curious to know precisely what Durham had intended to do with the fruits of her labor.

  She said, “How was I going to spend the afternoon, anyway? Modeling the survival of Autobacterium hydrophila in sea spray?” She sat. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  Durham said, “Almost six years ago – loosely speaking – a man I know made a Copy of himself. When the Copy woke up, it panicked, and tried to bale out. But the original had sabotaged the software; baling out was impossible.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “I know.”

  “So who was this man?”

  “His name was Paul Durham.”

  “You? You were the original?”

  “Oh, no. I was the Copy.”

  Chapter 16

  (Toy man, picture it)

  June 2045

  Paul felt a hand gripping his forearm. He tried to shake it off, but his arm barely moved, and a terrible aching started up in his shoulder. He opened his eyes, then closed them again in pain. He tried again. On the fifth or sixth attempt, he managed to see a face through washed-out brightness and tears.