Permutation City

Maria thought it over. "The Autoverse rules, alone, won't explain the abundances of the elements -- which is the main problem the Lambertians are trying to solve. So what happens if they miss the whole idea of a cellular automaton, and come up with a completely different theory: something utterly misguided . . . which fits all the data nonetheless? I know, they've grasped everything else about their world far more smoothly than humans ever did, but that doesn't make them perfect. And if they have no tradition of giving up on difficult questions by invoking the hand of a creator, they might cobble together something which explains both the primordial cloud and the chemical properties of the elements -- without coming anywhere near the truth. That's not impossible, is it?"

There was an awkward silence. Maria wondered if she'd committed some terrible faux pas by suggesting that the criteria for contact might never be met . . . but she could hardly be telling these people anything they hadn't already considered.

Then Durham said simply, "No, it's not impossible. So we'll just have to wait and see where the Lambertians' own logic take them."

27

(Rut City)

Peer felt the change begin, and switched off the lathe. He looked around the workshop helplessly, his eyes alighting on object after object which he couldn't imagine living without: the belt sander, the rack full of cutting tools for the lathe, cans of oil, tins of varnish. The pile of freshly cut timber itself. Abandoning these things -- or worse, abandoning his love of them -- seemed like the definition of extinction.

Then he began to perceive the situation differently. He felt himself step back from his life as a carpenter into the larger scheme of things -- or non-scheme: the random stuttering from pretext to pretext which granted his existence its various meanings. His sense of loss became impossible to sustain; his enthusiasm for everything to which he'd been devoted for the past seventy-six years evaporated like a dream. He was not repelled, or bewildered, by the phase he was leaving behind -- but he had no desire to extend or repeat it.

His tools, his clothes, the workshop itself, all melted away, leaving behind a featureless gray plain, stretching to infinity beneath a dazzling blue sky, sunless but radiant. He waited calmly to discover his new vocation -- remembering the last transition, and thinking: These brief moments between are a life in themselves. He imagined picking up the same train of thought and advancing it, slightly, the next time.

Then the empty ground grew a vast room around him, stretching in all directions for hundreds of meters, full of row after row of yellow wooden specimen drawers. A high ceiling with dusty skylights came together above him, completing the scene. He blinked in the gloom. He was wearing heavy black trousers and a waistcoat over a stiff white shirt. His exoself, having chosen an obsession which would have been meaningless in a world of advanced computers, had dressed him for the part of a Victorian naturalist.

The drawers, he knew, were full of beetles. Hundreds of thousands of beetles. He was free, now, to do nothing with his time but study them, sketch them, annotate them, classify them: specimen by specimen, species by species, decade after decade. The prospect was so blissful that he almost keeled over with joy.

As he approached the nearest set of drawers -- where a blank legal pad and pencil were already waiting for him -- he hesitated, and tried to make sense of his feelings. He knew why he was happy here: his exoself had rewired his brain, yet again, as he'd programmed it to do. What more sense did he require?

He looked around the musty room, trying to pin down the source of his dissatisfaction. Everything was perfect, here and now -- but his past was still with him: the gray plain of transition, his decades at the lathe, the times he'd spent with Kate, his previous obsessions. The long-dead David Hawthorne, invincible, clinging to a rock face. None of it bore the slightest connection to his present interests, his present surroundings -- but the details still hovered at the edge of his thoughts: superfluous, anachronistic distractions.

He was dressed for a role -- so why not complete the illusion? He'd tinkered with false memories before. Why not construct a virtual past which "explained" his situation, and his enthusiasm for the task ahead, in terms which befitted the environment? Why not create a person with no memory of Peer, who could truly lose himself in the delights of being unleashed on this priceless collection?

He opened a window to his exoself, and together they began to invent the biography of an entomologist.

+ + +

Peer stared blankly at the flickering electric lamp in the corner of the room, then marched over to it and read the scrawled note on the table beneath.