Collected short fiction.., p.69
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 69
Her fusion-powered body needed no rest, but at noon she stopped walking and sat cross-legged on the ground.
Qing joined her. She looked around at the barren rocks, the delicate sky, the far horizon. “Twenty light-years?” she said. “I’m glad I came.”
· · · · ·
Their days were full of small challenges, and small discoveries. To cross a mountain range required skill and judgement as well as stamina; to understand the origins of each wind-blasted outcrop took careful observation and a strong visual imagination, as well as a grasp of the basic geological principles.
Still, even as they clambered down one treacherous, powdery cliff-face, Ikat wondered soberly if they’d reached the high-tide mark of human exploration. The Orchid Seed’s modest speed and reach had never been exceeded; the giant telescopes had found no hints of life out to a hundred light-years, offering little motivation to launch a new probe. The shift to software was becoming cheaper every year, and if that made travel to the stars easier, there were a thousand more alluring destinations closer to home. When you could pack a lifetime of exotic experiences into a realtime hour, capped off with happiness by fiat, who would give up decades of contemporaneity to walk on a distant world? There were even VR games, based on telescope imagery, where people fought unlikely wars with implausible alien empires on the very ground she was treading.
“What are you planning to do when you get home?” she asked Qing that night. They had brought nothing with them from the base camp, so they simply slept on the ground beneath the stars.
“Back to work, I suppose.” He ran his own successful engineering consultancy; so successful that it didn’t really need him. “What else is there? I’m not interested in crawling up a computer’s arse and pretending that I’ve gone to heaven. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I was retired, happily enough. Waiting for death, I suppose.” It hadn’t felt like that, though.
Qing said, “These aren’t the highest mountains on the planet, you know. The ones we’ve just crossed.”
“I know that.”
“There are some that reach into a pretty good vacuum.”
Duty’s atmosphere was thin even on the ground; Ikat had no reason to doubt this assertion. “What’s your point?” she asked.
He turned to her, and gave her his strangest robot smile. “From a mountain like that, a coil gun could land a package of nanomachines on Patience.”
Patience was a third the mass of Duty, and had no atmosphere to speak of. “To what end?”
Qing said, “High vacuum, relativistic launch speeds. What we started doesn’t have to stop here.”
She searched his face, unsure if he was serious. “Do you think the Flower would give us what we needed? Who knows how Khamoush have programmed it?”
“I tested the nanoware, back on Procellarum. I know how to make it give us whatever we ask.”
Ikat thought it over. “Do we know how to describe everything we’ll need? To identify a new target? Plan a whole new mission?” The Orchard Seed had taken thousands of people decades to prepare.
Qing said, “We’ll need telescopes, computing resources. We can bootstrap our way up, step by step. Let’s see how far we get in three months. And if we solve all the other problems, maybe we can go one step further: build a seed that will self-replicate when it reaches its destination, launching a couple of new seeds of its own.”
Ikat rose to her feet angrily. “Not if you want my help! We have no right to spew mindless replicators in all directions. If someone from Earth wants to follow the seed we launch, and if they make their own decision when they get there to reach out further, then that’s one thing, but I’m not starting any kind of self-sustaining chain reaction that colonises the galaxy while everyone sits at home playing VR games.”
Qing stood up, and made a calming gesture. “All right, all right! I was just thinking out loud. The truth is, we’ll be struggling to launch anything before it’s time to go home. But better to try, than spend three months taking in the scenery.”
Ikat remained wary for a moment, then she laughed with relief. “Absolutely. Let the real geologists back on Earth fret about these rocks; I’ve had enough of them already for a lifetime.”
They didn’t wait for dawn; they headed back for the base camp immediately.
As they approached the mountains, Qing said, “I thought it would give me some great sense of accomplishment, to come here and see with my own eyes that this thing I helped to start was finally complete. But if I could wish my descendants one blessing now, it would be never to see the end, never to find completion.”
Ikat stopped walking, and mimed a toast. “To the coming generations. May they always start something they can’t finish.”
The Infinite Assassin
From Axiomatic by Greg Egan; Millennium, London, 1995. First published in Interzone # 48, June 1991.
* * * * *
One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.
Why? They tell me I’m stable. Reliable. Dependable. After each debriefing, The Company’s psychologists (complete strangers, every time) shake their heads in astonishment at their printouts, and tell me that I’m exactly the same person as when ‘I’ went in.
The number of parallel worlds is uncountably infinite—infinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integers—making it difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions, but roughly speaking, it seems that I’m unusually invariant: more alike from world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to be useful. Enough to do the job.
How The Company knew this, how they found me, I’ve never been told. I was recruited at the age of nineteen. Bribed. Trained. Brainwashed, I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe the real constant is the way I’ve been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have all emerged the same. I don’t know.
· · · · ·
Detectors scattered across the planet have sensed the faint beginnings of the whirlpool, and pinned down the centre to within a few kilometres, but that’s the most accurate fix I can expect by this means. Each version of The Company shares its technology freely with the others, to ensure a uniformly optimal response, but even in the best of all possible worlds, the detectors are too large, and too delicate, to carry in closer for a more precise reading.
A helicopter deposits me on wasteland at the southern edge of the Leightown ghetto. I’ve never been here before, but the boarded-up shopfronts and grey tower blocks ahead are utterly familiar. Every large city in the world (in every world I know) has a place like this, created by a policy that’s usually referred to as differential enforcement. Using or possessing S is strictly illegal, and the penalty in most countries is (mostly) summary execution, but the powers that be would rather have the users concentrated in designated areas than risk having them scattered amongst the community at large. So, if you’re caught with S in a nice clean suburb, they’ll blow a hole in your skull on the spot, but here, there’s no chance of that. Here, there are no cops at all.
I head north. It’s just after four a.m., but savagely hot, and once I move out of the buffer zone, the streets are crowded. People are coming and going from nightclubs, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling houses, brothels. Power for street lighting has been cut off from this part of the city, but someone civic-minded has replaced the normal bulbs with self-contained tritium/phosphor globes, spilling a cool, pale light like radioactive milk. There’s a popular misconception that most S users do nothing but dream, twenty-four hours a day, but that’s ludicrous; not only do they need to eat, drink and earn money like everyone else, but few would waste the drug on the time when their alter egos are themselves asleep.
Intelligence says there’s some kind of whirlpool cult in Leightown, who may try to interfere with my work. I’ve been warned of such groups before, but it’s never come to anything; the slightest shift in reality is usually all it takes to make such an aberration vanish. The Company, the ghettos, are the stable responses to S; everything else seems to be highly conditional. Still, I shouldn’t be complacent. Even if these cults can have no significant impact on the mission as a whole, no doubt they have killed some versions of me in the past, and I don’t want it to be my turn, this time. I know that an infinite number of versions of me would survive—some whose only difference from me would be that they had survived—so perhaps I ought to be entirely untroubled by the thought of death.
But I’m not.
Wardrobe have dressed me with scrupulous care, in a Fat Single Mothers Must Die World Tour souvenir reflection hologram T-shirt, the right style of jeans, the right model running shoes. Paradoxically, S users tend to be slavish adherents to ‘local’ fashion, as opposed to that of their dreams; perhaps it’s a matter of wanting to partition their sleeping and waking lives. For now, I’m in perfect camouflage, but I don’t expect that to last; as the whirlpool picks up speed, sweeping different parts of the ghetto into different histories, changes in style will be one of the most sensitive markers. If my clothes don’t look out of place before too long, I’ll know I’m headed in the wrong direction.
A tall, bald man with a shrunken human thumb dangling from one ear lobe collides with me as he runs out of a bar. As we separate, he turns on me, screaming taunts and obscenities. I respond cautiously; he may have friends in the crowd, and I don’t have time to waste getting into that kind of trouble. I don’t escalate things by replying, but I take care to appear confident, without seeming arrogant or disdainful. This balancing act pays off. Insulting me with impunity for thirty seconds apparently satisfies his pride, and he walks away smirking.
As I move on, though, I can’t help wondering how many versions of me didn’t get out of it so easily.
I pick up speed to compensate for the delay.
Someone catches up with me, and starts walking beside me. ‘Hey, I liked the way you handled that. Subtle. Manipulative. Pragmatic. Full marks.’ A woman in her late twenties, with short, metallic-blue hair.
‘Fuck off. I’m not interested.’
‘In what?’
‘In anything.’
She shakes her head. ‘Not true. You’re new around here, and you’re looking for something. Or someone. Maybe I can help.’
‘I said, fuck off.’
She shrugs and falls behind, but calls after me, ‘Every hunter needs a guide. Think about it.’
· · · · ·
A few blocks later, I turn into an unlit side street. Deserted, silent; stinking of half-burnt garbage, cheap insecticide, and piss. And I swear I can feel it: in the dark, ruined buildings all around me, people are dreaming on S.
S is not like any other drug. S dreams are neither surreal nor euphoric. Nor are they like simulator trips: empty fantasies, absurd fairy tales of limitless prosperity and indescribable bliss. They’re dreams of lives that, literally, might have been lived by the dreamers, every bit as solid and plausible as their waking lives.
With one exception: if the dream life turns sour, the dreamer can abandon it at will, and choose another (without any need to dream of taking S … although that’s been known to happen). He or she can piece together a second life, in which no mistakes are irrevocable, no decisions absolute. A life without failures, without dead ends. All possibilities remain forever accessible.
S grants dreamers the power to live vicariously in any parallel world in which they have an alter ego—someone with whom they share enough brain physiology to maintain the parasitic resonance of the link. Studies suggest that a perfect genetic match isn’t necessary for this—but nor is it sufficient; early childhood development also seems to affect the neural structures involved.
For most users, the drug does no more than this. For one in a hundred thousand, though, dreams are only the beginning. During their third or fourth year on S, they start to move physically from world to world, as they strive to take the place of their chosen alter egos.
The trouble is, there’s never anything so simple as an infinity of direct exchanges, between all the versions of the mutant user who’ve gained this power, and all the versions they wish to become. Such transitions are energetically unfavourable; in practice, each dreamer must move gradually, continuously, passing through all the intervening points. But those ‘points’ are occupied by other versions of themselves; it’s like motion in a crowd—or a fluid. The dreamers must flow.
At first, those alter egos who’ve developed the skill are distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems there’s a kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible, including each one’s exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.
The first few times the symmetry is broken, there’s usually nothing but a brief shudder, a momentary slippage, an almost imperceptible world-quake. The detectors record these events, but are still too insensitive to localise them.
Eventually, some kind of critical threshold is crossed. Complex, sustained flows develop: vast, tangled currents with the kind of pathological topologies that only an infinite-dimensional space can contain. Such flows are viscous; nearby points are dragged along. That’s what creates the whirlpool; the closer you are to the mutant dreamer, the faster you’re carried from world to world.
As more and more versions of the dreamer contribute to the flow, it picks up speed—and the faster it becomes, the further away its influence is felt.
The Company, of course, doesn’t give a shit if reality is scrambled in the ghettos. My job is to keep the effects from spreading beyond.
I follow the side street to the top of a hill. There’s another main road about four hundred metres ahead. I find a sheltered spot amongst the rubble of a half-demolished building, unfold a pair of binoculars, and spend five minutes watching the pedestrians below. Every ten or fifteen seconds, I notice a tiny mutation: an item of clothing changing; a person suddenly shifting position, or vanishing completely, or materialising from nowhere. The binoculars are smart; they count up the number of events which take place in their field of view, as well as computing the map coordinates of the point they’re aimed at.
I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, and look back on the crowd that I passed through on my way here. The rate is substantially lower, but the same kind of thing is visible. Bystanders, of course, notice nothing; as yet, the whirlpool’s gradients are so shallow that any two people within sight of each other on a crowded street would more or less shift universes together. Only at a distance can the changes be seen.
In fact, since I’m closer to the centre of the whirlpool than the people to the south of me, most of the changes I see in that direction are due to my own rate of shift. I’ve long ago left the world of my most recent employers behind—but I have no doubt that the vacancy has been, and will continue to be, filled.
I’m going to have to make a third observation to get a fix, some distance away from the north-south line joining the first two points. Over time, of course, the centre will drift, but not very rapidly; the flow runs between worlds where the centres are close together, so its position is the last thing to change.
I head down the hill, westwards.
· · · · ·
Amongst the crowds and lights again, waiting for a gap in the traffic, someone taps my elbow. I turn, to see the same blue-haired woman who accosted me before. I give her a stare of mild annoyance, but I keep my mouth shut; I don’t know whether or not this version of her has met a version of me, and I don’t want to contradict her expectations. By now, at least some of the locals must have noticed what’s going on—just listening to an outside radio station, stuttering randomly from song to song, should be enough to give it away—but it’s not in my interest to spread the news.
She says, ‘I can help you find her.’
‘Help me find who?’
‘I know exactly where she is. There’s no need to waste time on measurements and calc—’
‘Shut up. Come with me.’
She follows me, uncomplaining, into a nearby alley. Maybe I’m being set up for an ambush. By the whirlpool cult? But the alley is deserted. When I’m sure we’re alone, I push her against the wall and put a gun to her head. She doesn’t call out, or resist; she’s shaken, but I don’t think she’s surprised by this treatment. I scan her with a handheld magnetic resonance imager; no weapons, no booby traps, no transmitters.
I say, ‘Why don’t you tell me what this is all about?’ I’d swear that nobody could have seen me on the hill, but maybe she saw another version of me. It’s not like me to screw up, but it does happen.
She closes her eyes for a moment, then says, almost calmly, ‘I want to save you time, that’s all. I know where the mutant is. I want to help you find her as quickly as possible.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? I have a business here, and I don’t want to see it disrupted. Do you know how hard it is to build up contacts again, after a whirlpool’s been through? What do you think—I’m covered by insurance?’
I don’t believe a word of this, but I see no reason not to play along; it’s probably the simplest way to deal with her, short of blowing her brains out. I put away the gun and take a map from my pocket. ‘Show me.’
She points out a building about two kilometres northeast of where we are. ‘Fifth floor. Apartment 522.’
‘How do you know?’
‘A friend of mine lives in the building. He noticed the effects just before midnight, and he got in touch with me.’ She laughs nervously. ‘Actually, I don’t know the guy all that well … but I think the version who phoned me had something going on with another me.’
‘Why didn’t you just leave when you heard the news? Clear out to a safe distance?’
