摘要： Greg Egan - Unstable Orbits In the Space Of Lies

UNSTABLE ORBITS IN THE SPACE OF LIES
By Greg Egan
I always feel safest sleeping on the freeway — or at least, those stretches
of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium between the
surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully along the
fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a
faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatown — not quite drowned
out by the influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism
from the west, and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual
hedonism from the north), I can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that
Maria and I are not going to wake up believing, wholeheartedly and
irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of
insight induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing powers of tax
reform.
So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the horizon — and Maria
gone — I don’t panic. No faith, no world view, no belief system, no culture,
could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The borders of the
basins of attraction do fluctuate, advancing and retreating by tens of
metres daily — but it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have
penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I can’t
think why she would have walked off and left me, without a word — but
Maria does things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice
versa. Even after a year together, we still have that.
I don’t panic — but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want to get too far behind.
I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way she would have
headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she departed, that
should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.
The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted — but it’s possible to
steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions. The easiest
way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant
attractor to build up momentum — while taking care to arrange to be
deflected at the last minute by a countervailing influence.
Choosing the first attractor — the belief to which surrender must be feigned
— is always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like
sniffing the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes it seems like
pure introspection, like trying to determine ‘my own’ true beliefs . . . and
sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these apparent
opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zen — and that’s how it
strikes me now . . . which in itself just about answers the question. The
balance here is delicate, but one influence is marginally stronger: Eastern
philosophies are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from
where I stand — and knowing the purely geographical reasons for this
doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between
the freeway and the railway line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my
sleeping bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my pack, and
start walking.
A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my solitude:
without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to make
use of them: one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the food.
Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors
seem to tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just aren’t
worth the cost — although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical
monoculture have their own unique ‘reasons’ for not starving us amoral
tramps into submission. I take out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of
my vegetable gardens when I passed by last night; it makes a pathetic
breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think about the bread rolls that I’ll steal
when I’m back with Maria again, and my anticipation almost overshadows
the bland, woody taste of the present.
The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section flanked by deserted
factories and abandoned houses, and against this background of relative
silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger and
clearer. That glib label — ‘Chinatown’ — was always an oversimplification,
of course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct
cultures besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to
Cambodian, from Thai to Timorese — and several varieties of every religion
from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has vanished now, and the
homogeneous amalgam that finally stabilised would probably seem utterly
bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the district. To the
present-day citizens, of course, the strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s
the definition of stability, the whole reason the attractors exist. If I
marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find myself sharing the local
values and beliefs, I’d be perfectly happy to stay that way for the rest of
my life.
I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though — any more than I expect the
Earth to dive straight into the Sun. It’s been almost four years since
Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.
* * * *
I’ve heard dozens of ‘explanations’ for the events of that day, but I find
most of them equally dubious — rooted as they are in the world-views of
particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it, on 12
January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen
threshold — of global population, perhaps — and suffered a sudden,
irreversible change of psychic state.
Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all, nobody found themself
drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of
empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed locked
inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or
perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was so
thoroughly breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket
of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out
effortlessly.)
In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap operas of
other people’s inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever . . .
but our skulls became completely permeable to each other’s values and
beliefs, each other’s deepest convictions.
At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are confused and
nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think), finding God
(or some equivalent) anew every six seconds — seeing no visions, hearing
no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of dream
logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggering — while ideas moved
between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I
wanted it to stop, badly — I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had
stayed the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other tramps
compare these early mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to
being picked up and dumped by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after
hour — but looking back, I find myself reminded most of a bout of
gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long, feverish night of interminable
vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached, my
skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time I thought I lacked the
strength to expel anything more from my body, another spasm took hold of
me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed positively
transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some harsh — but
ultimately benevolent — deity. At the time, it was the most religious
experience I’d ever been through.
All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance,
mutating and hybridising along the way . . . like those random populations
of computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments
to demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the
historical clashes of the very same beliefs — with the length and
timescales drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot
less bloodshed, now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely
mental arena, rather than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or
extermination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth
to possess all but the righteous . . .
The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded by pre-Meltdown
clustering of cultures and religions — and in other places, by pure chance —
certain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold, to
start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random
detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant
belief had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors
conquered, the faster they grew. Fortunately — in this city, at least — no
single attractor was able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed
in, sooner or later, by equally powerful neighbours — or confined by sheer
lack of population at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-residential
land.
Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into more or less
the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the population
having moved — or changed — until they were content to be exactly where
— and who — they were.
I happened to end up between attractors — affected by many, but captured
by none — and I’ve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the
knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have
thinned, but a core of us remains free.
In the early years, the people of the attractors used to send up robot
helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case for their
respective metaphors for what had happened — as if a well-chosen analogy
for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while for
some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered
obsolete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniques —
and that still hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a
battery-powered TV set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a
broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged
‘simulation’ of Meltdown as a colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous
pixels, obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The commentator spouted
jargon about self-organising systems — and lo, with the magic of hindsight,
the flickers of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal
cells, isolated by moats of darkness (unpopulated except for the barely
visible presence of a few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones
were meant to be us).
I don’t know how things would have turned out if there hadn’t been the
pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to allow
people to live and work without travelling outside their own basins — the
regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractor — most of which
are only a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where
that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been exactly plugged into
the global village these last few years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.)
Living on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its
wealth than those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should
be glad that most people are content with the status quo — and I’m
certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and
prosper.
I’d rather die than join them, that’s all.
(Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)
* * * *
The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are no regions
of perfect neutrality — or if there are, they’re too small to find, probably
too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly drift as the conditions
within the basins varied. Near enough is fine for a night, but if I tried to
live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever attractor
held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway me.
Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true that we’re spared each
other’s inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels
itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more coherent,
more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth, no
doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here
on the surface, though, where it’s physically impossible to be equidistant
from everyone, I’m forced to keep moving to average out the effects as
best I can.
Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the countryside, and living in
glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the
equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food. With Maria? If
she’ll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Haifa dozen
times, we’ve told ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey . . .
but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would
take us safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually
deflected back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, it’s
simply a matter of finding it — and if all the rumours from other tramps
have turned out to be dead ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people
who could know for certain how to leave the city are those who’ve stumbled
on the right path and actually departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.
Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and ask myself
what I ‘really want’:
To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of my own mute
soul?
To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin civilisation? For the sake of
prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one
elaborate set of self-affirming lies?
Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?
The answer, of course, depends on where I’m standing.
* * * *
More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a second glance. I
picture my hunger as an object — another weight to carry, not much heavier
than my pack — and it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my mind
grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my
face, and the pleasure of walking.
After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a deep tranquillity,
together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd part is, I have no
idea what it is that I think I understand; I’m experiencing the pleasure of
insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope of replying to
the question: insight into what? The feeling persists, regardless.
I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and where has it brought
me?
To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps along the path
to enlightenment.
And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.
For four years, I’ve been following a false tao — pursuing an illusion of
freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of striving — but now I see the
way to transform that journey into—
Into what? A short cut to damnation?
‘Damnation’? There’s no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill of desires.
Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now — but I know
that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to
me.
For several seconds, I’m paralysed by indecision — shot through with pure
dread — but then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I leave the
freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.
These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of sun-bleached
wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by disuse into
autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, façade intact, dark
within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor
showroom, the latest — four-year-old — fuel cell models proudly on display
already looking like bizarre relics from another century.
Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this squalor hits me
with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and déjà vu. In spite of everything, part
of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first time —
not passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of

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