Peer said gently, but audibly, "You know how busy I am. And when I'm working --"
She laughed derisively. "Working? Is that what you call it? Taking pleasure from something that would bore the stupidest factory robot to death?" Her hair was long and jet black, whipping up around her face as if caught by the wind at random -- but always concealing just enough to mask her expression.
"You're still --" The wind drowned out his words; Kate had disabled his aphysical intelligibility. He shouted, "You're still a sculptor, aren't you? You ought to understand. The wood, the grain, the texture --"
"I understand that you need prosthetic interests to help pass the time -- but you could try setting the parameters more carefully."
"Why should I?” Being forced to raise his voice made him feel argumentative; he willed his exoself to circumvent the effect, and screamed calmly: "Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It's perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I'm not stuck on any one thing forever, however much you think I'm wasting my time, it's only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?"
"You could still be more selective."
"What did you have in mind? Something socially useful? Famine relief work? Counseling the dying? Or something intellectually challenging? Uncovering the fundamental laws of the universe? I have to admit that the TVC rules have slipped my mind completely; it might take me all of five seconds to look them up again. Searching for God? That's a difficult one: Paul Durham never returns my calls. Self discovery -- ?"
"You don't have to leave yourself open to every conceivable absurdity."
"If I limited the range of options, I'd be repeating myself in no time at all. And if you find the phase I'm passing through so unbearable, you can always make it vanish: you can freeze yourself until I change."
Kate was indignant. "I have other time frames to worry about besides yours!"
"The Elysians aren't going anywhere." He didn't add that he knew she'd frozen herself half a dozen times already. Each time for a few more years than the time before.
She turned toward him, parting her hair" to show one baleful eye. "You're fooling yourself, you know. You're going to repeat yourself, eventually. However desperately you reprogram yourself, in the end you're going to come full circle and find that you've done it all before."
Peer laughed indulgently, and shouted, "We've certainly been through all this before -- and you know that's not true. It's always possible to synthesize something new: a novel art form, a new field of study. A new aesthetic, a new obsession." Falling through the cool late afternoon air beside her was exhilarating, but he was already missing the smell of wood dust.
Kate rendered the air around them motionless and silent, although they continued to descend. She released his hand, and said, "I know we've been through this before. I remember what you said last time: If the worst comes to the worst, for the first hundred years you can contemplate the number one. For the second hundred years you can contemplate the number two. And so on, ad infinitum. Whenever the numbers grow too big to hold in your mind, you can always expand your mind to fit them. QED. You'll never run out of new and exciting interests."
Peer said gently, "Where's your sense of humor? It's a simple proof that the worst-case scenario is still infinite. I never suggested actually doing that."
"But you might as well." Now that her face was no longer concealed, she looked more forlorn than angry -- by choice, if not necessarily by artifice. "Why do you have to find everything so . . . fulfilling? Why can't you discriminate? Why can't you let yourself grow bored with things -- then move on? Pick them up again later if you feel the urge."
"Sounds awfully quaint to me. Very human."
"It did work for them. Sometimes."
"Yes. And I'm sure it works for you, sometimes. You drift back and forth between your art and watching the great Elysian soap opera. With a decade or two of aimless depression in between. You're dissatisfied most of the time -- and letting that happen is a conscious choice, as deliberate, and arbitrary, as anything I impose on myself. If that's how you want to live, I'm not going to try to change you. But you can't expect me to live the same way."
She didn't reply. After a moment, the bubble of still air around them blew away, and the roar of the wind drowned the silence again.
Sometimes he wondered if Kate had ever really come to terms with the shock of discovering that stowing away had granted them, not a few hundred years in a billionaires' sanctuary, but a descent into the abyss of immortality. The Copy who had persuaded David Hawthorne to turn his back on the physical world; the committed follower -- even before her death -- of the Solipsist Nation philosophy; the woman who had needed no brain rewiring or elaborate external contrivances to accept her software incarnation . . . now acted more and more like a flesh-and-blood-wannabe -- or rather, Elysian-wannabe -- year by year. And there was no need for it. Their tiny slice of infinity was as infinite as the whole; ultimately, there was nothing the Elysians could do that Kate couldn't.
Except walk among them as an equal, and that was what she seemed to covet the most.
True, the Elysians had deliberately set out to achieve the logical endpoint of everything she'd ever believed Copies should be striving for -- while she'd merely hitched a ride by mistake. Their world would "always" (Elysian instant compared to Elysian instant) be bigger and faster than her own. So "naturally" -- according to archaic human values which she hadn't had the sense to erase -- she wanted to be part of the main game. But Peer still found it absurd that she spent her life envying them, when she could have generated -- or even launched -- her own equally complex, equally populous society, and turned her back on the Elysians as thoroughly as they'd turned their back on Earth.
It was her choice. Peer took it in his stride, along with all their other disagreements. If they were going to spend eternity together, he believed they'd resolve their problems eventually -- if they could be resolved at all. It was early days yet. As it always would be.
He rolled over and looked down at the City -- or the strange recursive map of the City which they made do with, buried as they were in the walls and foundations of the real thing. Malcolm Carter's secret parasitic software wasn't blind to its host; they could spy on what was going on in the higher levels of the program which surreptitiously ran them, even though they couldn't affect anything which happened there. They could snatch brief, partial recordings of activity in the real City, and play them back in a limited duplicate environment. It was a bit like . . . being the widely separated letters in the text of Ulysses which read: Peer and Kate read, "Leopold Bloom wandered through Dublin." If not quite so crude an abridgment.
Certainly, the view from the air was still breathtaking; Peer had to concede that it was probably indistinguishable from the real thing. The sun was setting over the ocean as they descended, and the Ulam Falls glistened in the east like a sheet of amber set in the granite face of Mount Vine. In the foothills, a dozen silver needles and obsidian prisms, fanciful watchtowers, caught the light and scattered it between them. Peer followed the river down, through lush tropical forests, across dark plains of grassland, into the City itself.