Permutation City

It sounded bizarre, but Maria could see no flaw in the plan, in principle. She said, "So . . . we're crossing space to meet the aliens, after all?"

"It looks that way."

Repetto echoed the phrase. "Crossing space to meet the aliens. You must have had some strange ideas, in the old days. Sometimes I almost wish I'd been there."

+ + +

Maria gave in and learned how to use a mind's eye control panel to switch between her Elysian body and her Autoverse telepresence robot. She stretched the robot's arms and looked around the glistening flight deck of the Ambassador. She was lying in an acceleration couch, alongside the other three members of the crew. According to the flight plan, the robot was almost weightless now -- but she'd chosen to filter out the effects of abnormal gravity, high or low. The robot knew how to move itself, in response to her wishes, under any conditions; inflicting herself with space sickness for the sake of "realism" would be absurd. She was not in the Autoverse, after all -- she had not become this robot. Her entire model-of-a-human-body was still being run back in Elysium; the robot was connected to that model in a manner not much different from the nerve-induction link between a flesh-and-blood visitor to a VR environment, and his or her software puppet.

She flicked a mental switch and returned to the cloned apartment. Durham, Repetto and Zemansky sat in their armchairs, staring blankly ahead; little more than place markers, really. She went back to the Ambassador, but opened a small window in a corner of her visual field, showing the apartment through her Elysian eyes. If she was merely running a puppet in the Autoverse, she wanted to be clear about where her "true" body was supposed to be located. Knowing that there was an unobserved and insensate shop-window dummy occupying a chair on her behalf was not quite enough.

From the acceleration couch, she watched a -- solid -- display screen, high on the far wall of the flight deck, which showed their anticipated trajectory, swooping down on a shallow helical path toward Planet Lambert. They'd injected the ship through the border at the nearest possible point -- one hundred and fifty thousand kilometers above the orbital plane -- with a convenient preexisting velocity; it would take very little fuel to reach their destination, and descend.

She said, "Does anyone know if they ever bothered to rehearse a real landing in this thing?" Her vocal tract, wherever it was, felt perfectly normal as she spoke -- but the timbre of her voice sounded odd through the robot's ears. The tricks being played on her model-of-a-brain to edit out the growing radio time lag between her intentions and the robot's actions didn't bear thinking about.

Durham said, "Everything was rehearsed. They recreated the whole prebiotic planetary system for the test flights. The only difference between then and now was that they could materialize the ship straight into the vacuum, wherever they liked -- and control the puppet crew directly."

Violating Autoverse laws all over the place. It was unnerving to hear it spelled out: the lifeless Autoverse, in all its subatomic detail, had been a mere simulation; the presence of the Lambertians had made all the difference.

A second display screen showed the planet itself, an image from a camera outside the hull. The view was no different from that which the spy software had shown her a thousand times; although the camera and the robot's eyes were subject to pure Autoverse physics, once the image was piped into her non-Autoverse brain, the usual false-color conventions were employed. Maria watched the blue-and-white disk growing nearer, with a tightening in her chest. Free falling with the illusion of weight. Descending and staying still.

She said, "Why show ourselves to the Lambertians, immediately? Why not send Mouthpiece ahead to prepare the ground -- to make sure that they're ready to face us? There are no animals down there larger than a wasp -- and none at all with internal skeletons, walking on their hind legs. Humanoid robots one hundred and eighty centimeters tall will look like something out of their nightmares."

Repetto replied, "Novel stimuli aren't disabling for the Lambertians. They're not going to go into shock. But we'll certainly grab their attention."

Durham added, "We've come to reveal ourselves as the creators of their universe. There's not much point being shy about it."