Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 by Penny Publications

would pass: each day a shimmering jewel, unique as snowf lakes... yet somehow all the same.
    For too long I'd succumbed to that temptation: just one more day, week, month, year. Just another day to enjoy another dose of happiness, and prove yet again that Cockaigne really was utopia.
    If I was ever going to complete my plan, it had to be now. I had to stop postponing the conclusion of my grand scheme.
    "Would you like to be part of my next trick?" I asked.
    "Of course," Veronica replied, laughing. "What, right now?"
    "Yes, right now." I walked through the backstage corridors, Veronica trailing behind me. We entered the auditorium's main chamber: the seats empty, the spotlights off, the curtain still draped across the stage. I immediately felt a vast nostalgia for everything I was about to leave behind. Here in Cockaigne, I could build an auditorium orbiting a black hole, and use it for a single performance. Life was not so straightforward elsewhere.
    "The audience have all gone home," Veronica said. "Is this a private show, just for me?"
    She thought it would only be a little joke: just another of the surprises that we sometimes sprang upon each other to keep our love fresh, to keep the days sparkling diamond bright.
    "Let's sit down," I said, and we sat in the front row.
    "We've known each other a long time," I began. In truth, it was longer than I wanted to think about. "You know I wasn't born in Cockaigne. I came here from outside."
    Lots of people arrive in Cockaigne every year. It wouldn't be utopia if you couldn't get in.
    "I was already an escapologist. When I arrived, I took the opportunity to expand my repertoire, and perform grander exploits. But technology is a two-edged sword. It lets you perform all kinds of stunts, yet it makes them too easy. If we want genuine danger, we have to add it ourselves: sabotage behind the curtain, and whatnot. That's just a way of performing more diff icult feats. Escapology is about the challenge—we have to find that challenge somewhere.
    "There's a lot of rivalry among escapologists," I went on, "but we're also colleagues and friends. We talk about what kinds of shows are the best, the ones that put you at the top of your profession. Is it those that most impress the audience? Or is it about the technicalities of the feat itself: the pure escape? What's the hardest possible escape that anyone can perform?"
    I looked at Veronica to see if she could guess the answer. She frowned. "I suppose it would be coming back from the dead."
    "But that isn't very hard at all," I said, "not with modern technology. You died inside the black hole, and yet here you are. Anyone can be restored from backup. Everyone in Cockaigne is immortal!"
    "So it's not death?"
    "There are many forms of death, including stasis," I replied. "But a long time ago, when we were drinking one night, we talked about the hardest possible escape. And we came to the conclusion that it was the escape from utopia."
    We'd congregated at an awards banquet: a gathering of peers, a noisy conversation full of ribaldry and rivalry. Implicit in the discussion of the hardest escape was that anyone performing it would become the supreme escapologist, at the pinnacle of our profession. And like any ambitious performer, I wanted to be the best.
    Veronica laughed. "Escape from utopia? It's not exactly like escaping from an iron cage or a black hole, is it?"
    "Isn't it? There are only two things that def ine escapology: the feat must be possible, but it must be diff icult. And utopia fulf ils those criteria exactly." I raised my hand and checked them off on my fingers. "It isn't utopia if you
can't
leave. So it's possible to escape. But it isn't utopia if you
want
to leave. That makes it diff icult."
    I remembered how I'd searched for utopia. I knew it must exist: among inf inite parallel universes, everything exists somewhere. The hard part had been verifying Cockaigne among the multitude of candidates. Yet I'd always been meticulous: as