Recursion

Herb didn’t rise to the bait. “So this city is a reject. That’s why everything is so misshapen.” He paused for thought. “Even so, this is weird. You’d expect the whole place just to collapse, or maybe not to have gotten built at all. Just end up as a pile of machines.” Like on my planet, he added ruefully to himself.

“Usually you’d be right. But sometimes the fault is very subtle. That’s what happened here. I would guess that the suicide mechanism isn’t working properly. Everything seems to have formed correctly, but nothing has shriveled away when finished with. That’s why everything is still fused together.”

Johnston idly reached up and patted a silver loop hanging from the ceiling. “Probably why the scaffolding and struts are still hanging around, too.”

“How can you touch that if we’re not here?” Herb asked.

“How can you hear sounds and see things? How come your feet touch the ground? Listen, Herb, when I model something, I do it properly.”

And that, it seemed, was all the explanation Herb was getting for the moment.

At last! Herb thankfully saw the bottom of the escalator approaching. A large, elongated archway loomed ahead of them. But through it he could see only darkness…

“Amazing when you think about it,” Johnston continued. “It helps you grasp just how extensive the Enemy Domain is. I mean, you can see it shaded in on the Star Charts, but that doesn’t give you any real sense of scale. We’re currently walking down an escalator at the edge of an extremely large city on a nondescript planet that has been practically forgotten by the Domain. You’d think it would destroy this place and start again; instead, it uses the planet as a staging post. Ah, well. It has given us an opportunity.”

Johnston reached the bottom of the steps and hurried through the archway into the station beyond.

“Hell’s teeth!” he shouted.

“Robert! What is it?”

Herb clattered the last few steps into the station. He could see something moving.

Johnston was bending to pick up his hat from the tiled floor, an embarrassed grin across his face.

“I forgot what we were for a moment.”

Herb didn’t feel anywhere near so calm. The vaulted spaces of the station roof were swarming with large, metal, spiderlike creatures: thin metal abdomens and long, spindly legs. They moved lazily backwards and forwards, crawling over each other’s bodies. One of them dropped from the ceiling, landing nearby. It turned around blindly for a moment before scuttling to the platform edge and dropping down onto the tracks. It rapidly headed off down a dark tu

“What the hell?” Herb danced back across the platform in panic.

Johnston couldn’t stop laughing “Just VNMs. Construction robots! If only you could see your face.” He gasped for breath. “They can’t commit suicide, remember? They don’t know what to do when they’ve finished their work. These tu

He straightened up and wiped a tear from his eye. “They gave me a bit of a start, too, I must admit. But you. Your face.” A thought suddenly occurred to him and he giggled. “Can you imagine what would happen if the Enemy Domain sent colonists here now? Can you imagine them coming down here to catch a train?”

“That isn’t fu

“Ah. I suppose not.”

Johnston seemed to gain some self-control. He turned left then right, sniffing the air for a moment.

“This way, I guess,” he said, pointing down one tu

Herb looked horrified. “What? With all those robots scuttling back and forth?”

Johnston shook his head. “I told you before. We’re not really here. We just needed to find a clear path. The train tracks should be conductive enough. If not…Well, I guess we’ll never find out about it.”

“Just a minute…” said Herb, but it was already too late. They were no longer in the station.

Johnston got it right the first time.

“Not that that should be any surprise,” he said, looking around the basement of the space elevator. Herb felt his knees give way. The space he was standing in was just too big. He felt like a microbe, looking up into the bell of an enormous trumpet. The tiled floor seemed to vanish as it approached the distant, inward-curving walls. Long cables ran down from the seeming infinity above to burrow themselves into the floor all around them. There was a hollowness to the air, a feeling of resonance stilled and of themselves standing in the low-density part of the wave. If the space elevator was a trumpet, the mouthpiece must be out in space. Herb felt delirious: the hollowness that he felt was the sound blown by the emptiness above.

He reeled a little. He wasn’t thinking straight and he knew it. His mind couldn’t grasp the sheer size of the room.

“This is part of the Enemy Domain?” whispered Herb, eyes wide. He swallowed.

“What?” said Johnston, taking in Herb’s awestruck expression. “Oh, this is nothing. We almost built space elevators like this in Earth space. They’d have been bigger than this, too. The EA didn’t allow them, though. There is tremendous stress on one of these things. If they snap…” He paused, looking thoughtful. “The question is why the Enemy Domain thought it was needed…Anyway, come on. We’ll ride that cable up to the top.”

Whistling tunelessly, Johnston shuffled toward the cable he had just indicated. Herb followed him, looking upward. He felt ridiculously exposed, as if people were watching from above, ready to drop something down on him.

They walked in silence for a while. The cable was farther away than it looked: the sheer size of their surroundings confused the eye.

“Hey, Johnston. Why can’t you just jump us there?” he called.

“Because,” said Johnston. “Anyway. I want you to get some idea of the scale of this thing.”

“Bollocks,” Herb muttered under his breath. “You just didn’t think of it.”

“Yes I did. And stop whispering to yourself. I have excellent hearing.”

“You bloody well would, wouldn’t you? Mr. Perfect. What’s going on here, anyway? What do you mean when you say we’re not really here?”

Johnston sighed hugely. “You mean you still haven’t worked it out?”

Herb wasn’t going to respond to such an obvious attempt at goading him. “You’ve already done this bit. Just tell me.”

Johnston shrugged. “I suppose I have,” he said. “Okay. Think about it. We don’t want the Enemy Domain to know we’re spying on it, do we? No. So that means we have to observe it by passive means wherever possible.”

“What, telescope, electromagnetic emissions, and so on?”

“Yup. Which is all very well, but it doesn’t tell us much. We need to be a bit clever. So what I did was, I made a copy of our personalities while you were sleeping on your ship, then I fired them on a narrow beam toward the Necropolis. I was banking on the fact that there must be some processing spaces remaining on this planet that could contain them. As always, I was right.”

Herb nodded as he digested that information. “So I’m not really me, is that what you’re saying? I’m just a personality construct? The real you and me are still sitting on board my ship, pla

“Oh, you’re the real you,” Johnston said. “You’re just not the one sitting on your ship anymore.”

Herb felt sick. “How could you do this? What have you done to me? I don’t care if I’m a personality construct; I still feel real. Who gave you the right to do this to me?”

The emotion drained from Johnston’s face. He gazed at Herb with an empty expression. “You gave me the right, Herb, when you agreed to help me on this mission. Don’t you remember?”

Herb held Johnston’s gaze for a moment. Silence. Then Herb swallowed and looked away. “Yeah. Whatever. So that’s why the most important thing we have to do is to get back to ourselves. Do you have any idea how?”