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.
TALK TO ME. SOMETHING IS WRONG.
He hesitated, then created a door beside the lamp. Kate stepped through. She was ashen.
She said, "I spend half my life trying to reach you. When is it going to stop?" Her tone was flat, as if she wanted to be angry, but didn't have the strength. Peer raised a hand to her cheek; she pushed it away.
He said, "What's the problem?"
"The problem? You've been missing for four weeks."
Four weeks? Peer almost laughed, but she looked so shaken that he stopped himself. He said, "You know I get caught up in what I'm doing. It's important to me. But I'm sorry if you were worried --"
She brushed his words aside. "You were missing. I didn't say: You didn't answer my call. The environment we're standing in -- and its owner -- did not exist."
"Why do you think that?"
"The communications software announced that there was no process accepting data addressed to your personal node. The system lost you."
Peer was surprised. He hadn't trusted Malcolm Carter to start with, but after all this time it seemed unlikely that there were major problems with the infrastructure he'd woven into the City for them.
He said, "Lost track of me, maybe. For how long?"
"Twenty-nine days."
"Has this ever happened before?"
Kate laughed bitterly. "No. What -- do you think I would have kept it to myself? I have never come across a basic software failure of any kind, until now. And there are automatic logs which confirm that. This is the first time."
Peer scratched his neck beneath the starched collar. The interruption had left him disoriented; he couldn't remember what he'd been doing when the flashing lamp had caught his attention. His memory needed maintenance. He said, "It's worrying -- but I don't see what we can do, except run some diagnostics, try to pinpoint the problem."
"I ran diagnostics while the problem was happening."
"And -- ?"
"There was certainly nothing wrong with the communications software. But none of the systems involved with running you were visible to the diagnostics."
"That's impossible."
"Did you suspend yourself?"
"Of course not. And that wouldn't explain anything; even if I had, the systems responsible for me would still have been active."
"So what have you been doing?"
Peer looked around the room, back to where he'd been standing. There was a specimen drawer on one of the desks, and a thick legal pad beside it. He walked up to the desk. Kate followed.
He said, "Drawing beetles, apparently." Perhaps a hundred pages of the pad had been used and flipped over. An unfinished sketch of one of the specimens was showing. Peer was certain that he'd never seen it before.
Kate picked up the pad and stared at the drawing, then flipped back through the previous pages.
She said, "Why the pseudonym? Aren't the clothes affectation enough?"
"What pseudonym?"
She held the pad in front of him, and pointed to a signature. "Sir William Baxter, frs."
Peer steadied himself against the desk, and struggled to fill the gap. He'd been playing some kind of memory game, that much was obvious -- but surely he would have set things up so he'd understand what had happened, in the end? When Kate made contact, breaking the spell, his exoself should have granted him a full explanation. He mentally invoked its records; the last event shown was his most recent random transition. Whatever he'd done since, there was no trace of it.
He said dully, "The name means nothing to me."
Stranger still, the thought of spending twenty-nine days sketching beetles left him cold. Any passion he'd felt for insect taxonomy had vanished along with his memories -- as if the whole package had belonged to someone else entirely, who'd now claimed it, and departed.
28
As the City slowly imprinted itself upon her brain -- every dazzling sunset leaving its golden afterimage burning on her nonexistent retinas, every journey she made wiring maps of the nonexistent streets into her nonexistent synapses -- Maria felt herself drifting apart from her memories of the old world. The details were as sharp as ever, but her history was losing its potency, its meaning. Having banished the idea of grieving for people who had not died -- and who had not lost her -- all she seemed to have left to feel was nostalgia . . . and even that was undermined by contradictions.
She missed rooms, streets, smells. Sometimes it was so painful it was comical. She lay awake thinking about the shabbiest abandoned buildings of Pyrmont, or the cardboard stench of ersatz popcorn wafting out of the VR parlors on George Street. And she knew that she could reconstruct her old house, all of its surroundings, all of Sydney, and more, in as much detail as she wished; she knew that every last idiot ache she felt for the amputated past could be dealt with in an instant. Understanding exactly how far she could go was more than enough to rid her of any desire to take a single step in that direction.
But having chosen to make no effort to relieve the pangs of homesickness, she seemed to have forfeited her right to the emotion. How could she claim to long for something which she could so easily possess -- while continuing to deny it to herself?
So she tried to set the past aside. She studied the Lambertians diligently, preparing for the day when contact would be permitted. She tried to immerse herself in the role of the legendary eighteenth founder, roused from her millennia of sleep to share the triumphant moment when the people of Elysium would finally come face to face with an alien culture.
Lambertian communities -- despite some similarities to those of terrestrial social insects -- were far more complex, and much less hierarchical, than the nests of ants or the hives of bees. For a start, all Lambertians were equally fertile; there was no queen, no workers, no drones. The young were conceived in plants at the periphery of the local territory, and upon hatching usually migrated hundreds of kilometers to become members of distant communities. There, they joined teams and learned their speciality -- be it herding, defense against predators, or modeling the formation of planetary systems. Specialization was usually for life, but team members occasionally changed professions if the need arose.