Foundation’s Fear

1.

Joan of Arc floated down the dim, rumbling tunnels of the smoky Mesh.

She fought down her fears. Around her played a complex spatter of fractured light and clapping, hollow implosions.

Thought was a chain unfixed in time and unanchored in space. But, like tinkling currents, alabaster pious images formed-restless, churning. An unending flux, dissolving structures in her wake, as if she were a passing ship.

She would be hugely pleased, indeed, to have so concrete a self. Anxiously she studied the murky Mesh that streamed about her like ocean whorls of liquid mahogany.

Since her escape from the wizards, upon whom the preservation of her soul-her “consciousness,” a term somehow unconnected to conscience-depended, she had surrendered to these wet coursings. Her saintly mother had once told her that this was how the churning waters of a great river succumb, roiling into their beds deep in the earth.

Now she floated as an airy spirit, self-absorbed, sufficient to herself, existing outside the tick of time.

Stasis-space,Voltaire had termed it. A sanctuary where she could minimize computational clock time- such odd language!-waiting for visions from Voltaire.

At his last appearance, he had been frustrated-and all because she preferred her internal voices to his own!

How could she explain that, despite her will, the voices of saints and archangels so compelled her? That they drowned out those who sought to penetrate her from outside?

A simple peasant, she could not resist great spirit-beings like the no-nonsense St. Catherine. Or stately Michael, King of Angel Legions, greater than the royal French armies that she herself had led into battle. (Eons ago, an odd voice whispered-yet she was sure this was mere illusion, for time surely was suspended in this Purgatory.)

Especially she could not resist when their spirit-speech thundered with one voice-as now.

“Ignore him,” Catherine said, the instant Voltaire’s request for audience arrived. She hovered on great white wings.

Voltaire’s manifestation here was a dove of peace, brilliant white, winging toward her from the sullen liquid. Blithe bird!

Catherine’s no-nonsense voice cut crisply, as stiff as the black-and-white habit of a meticulous nun. “You sinfully surrendered to his lust, but that does not mean that he owns you. You don’t belong to a man! You belong to your Creator.”

The bird chirped, “I must send you a freight of data.”

“I, I…” Joan’s small voice echoed, as if she were in a vast cavern, not a vortex river at all. If she could only see-

Catherine’s great wings batted angrily. “He will go away. He has no choice. He cannot reach you, cannot make you sin-unless you consent.”

Joan’s cheeks burned as the memory of her lewdness with Voltaire rushed in.

“Catherine is right,” a deep voice thundered-Michael, King of the Angel Hosts of Heaven. “Lust has nothing to do with bodies, as you and the man proved. His body stank and rotted long ago.”

“It would be good to see him again,” Joan whispered longingly. Here, thoughts were somehow actions. She had but to raise a hand and Voltaire’s numerics would transfix her.

“He offers defiling data!” Catherine cried. “Deflect his intrusion at once.”

“If you cannot resist him, marry him,” Michael ordered stiffly.

“Marry?” St. Catherine’s voice sputtered with contempt.

In bodily life, she had affected male attire, cropped her hair, and refused to have anything to do with men, thus demonstrating her holiness and good sense. Joan had prayed to St. Catherine often. “Males! Even here,” the saint scolded Michael, “you stick together to wage war and ruin women.”

“My counsel is entirely spiritual,” said Michael loftily. “I’m an angel and thus prefer neither sex.”

Catherine sputtered with contempt. “Then why aren’t you the Queen of Legions of Angels and not the King? Why don’t you command heavenly hostesses and not heavenly hosts? Why aren’t you an archangela instead of an archangel? And why isn’t your name Michelle?”

Please,Joan said. Please. The thought of marriage struck as much terror in her soul as in St. Catherine’s, even if marriage was one of the blessed sacraments. But then so was extreme unction, and that one almost always meant certain death.

… .flames….the priest’s leer as he administered the rites…

crackling horror, terrible cutting, licking flames…. She shook herself -assembled her Self,came a whisper-and focused on her saintly host. Oh yes, marriage…Voltaire…

She was not sure what marriage meant, besides bearing children in Christ and in agony, for Holy Mother Church. The act of getting children, begetting, aroused in her a thumping heart, weak legs, images of the lean, clever man…

“It means being owned,” Catherine said. “It means instead of needing your consent when he wants to impose on you-like now-were Voltaire your husband, he could break in on you whenever he likes.”

Existence without selfdom, without privacy… Bursts of Joan’s bright self-light collided, flickered, dimmed, almost guttered out.

“Are you suggesting,” Michael said, “that she continue to receive this apostate without subjecting their lust to the bonds of marriage? Let them marry and extinguish their lust completely!”

Joan could not be heard over the bickering of saints and angels in the musty, liquid murk. She knew that in this arithmetic Limbo, like a waiting room for true Purgatory, she had no heart…but something, somewhere, nevertheless ached.

Memories flooded her. His lean, quick self. Surely a saint and an archangel would forgive her if she took advantage of their sacred bickering to grant Voltaire’s request that his “data” be received, if she surrendered-just this once-to impulses compelling her from within.

Shuddering, she yielded.

2.

Voltaire snapped, “I’ve waited less long for Friedrich of Prussia and Catherine the Great!”

“I am adrift,” Joan said airily. “Occupied.”

“And you’re a peasant, a swineherd, not even a bourgeoise. These moods of yours! These personae your subconscious layers created! They grow tiresome in the extreme.”

He hung in air above the lapping dark waters. Quite a striking effect, he thought.

“In such haunting rivers I must converse with like minds.”

He waved away her point with a silk-sleeved arm. “I’ve tried to make allowances-everyone knows saints aren’t fit for civilized society! Perfume cannot conceal the stink of sanctity.”

“Surely here in Limbo-”

“This is not a theological waiting room! Your tedious taste for solitude plays out in theaters of computation.”

“Arithmetic is not holy, sir.”

“Umm, perhaps-though I suspect Newton could prove otherwise.”

He slow-stepped the scene, watching individual event-waves wash through. To his view, the somber river gurgled an increment forward and Joan’s eyebrow inched up, then paused for the calculation to be refreshed. He accelerated her internal states, though, allowing a decent interval for La Pucelle, the Chaste Maid, to ponder a reply. He had the advantage, for he commanded more memory space.

He breached the slow-stepped, slumbering river sim. He had thought this best-images of womblike wet reassurance, to offset her fire phobia.

The Maid gaped but did not answer. He checked, and found that he did not now have the resources to bring her to full running speed. A complex in the Battisvedanta Sector had sucked up computing space. He would have to wait until his ferret-programs found him some more unoccupied room.

He fumed-not a good use of running time, but somehow it felt right. If you had the computational space. He felt another distant suck on his resources. An emergency tiktok shutdown. Computer backups shifted to cover. His sensory theater dwindled, his body fell away.

Miserable wretches, they were draining him! He thought she spoke, her voice faint, far away. He fiddled in a frenzy to give her running time.

“Monsieur neglects me!”

Voltaire felt a spike of joy. He did love her-a mere response could buoy him up above this snaky river.

“We are in grave danger,” he said. “An epidemic has erupted in the matter world. Confusion reigns. Respectable people exploit widespread panic by preying on each other. They lie, cheat, and steal.”

“No!”

He could not resist. “In other words, things are exactly as they’ve always been.”

“Is this why you have come?” she asked. “To laugh at me? A once-chaste maid you ruined?”

“I merely helped you to become a woman.”

“ Exactement,”she said. “But I don’t want to be a woman. I want to be a warrior for Charles of France.”

“Patriotic twaddle. Heed my warning! You must answer no calls, except mine, without first clearing them through me. You are to entertain no one, speak with no one, travel nowhere, do nothing without my prior consent.”

“Monsieur mistakes me for his wife.”

“Marriage is the only adventure open to the manifestly cowardly. I did not attempt it, nor shall I.”

She seemed distracted. “This threat, it is serious?”

“Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

She snapped back to attention; data resources had returned. “Then, sir-”

“But this is not life. It is a mathist dance.” She smiled. “I do not hear music.”

“Had I digital wealth, I would whistle. Our lives-such as they are-are in grave danger.”

La Pucelledid not answer at once, though he had given her the running time. Was she conferring with her idiotic voices of conscience? (Quite obviously, the internalizations of ignorant village priests.)

“I am a peasant,” she said, “but not a slave. Who are you to order me?”

Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide network, he was now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of Os and 1s. He ran on processor clusters, a vagrant thief. Amid Trantor’s myriad personal computers and mountainous Imperial processors, he lurked and pilfered.

The image he had given Joan, of swimming in an inky river, was a reasonable vision of the truth. They swam in the Mesh of a city so large he could barely sense it as a whole. As constraints of economics and computational speed required, he moved himself and Joan to new processors, fleeing the inspection of dull-witted but persistent memory-space police.

And what were they?

Philosophy was not so much answers as good questions. This riddle stumped him. His universe wrapped around itself, Worm Ouroboros, a solipsistic wet dream of a world. To conserve computations, he could shrink into a Solipsist Selfhood, with all inputs reduced to a “Hume suite” of minimal sense data, a minimum energy state.

As he often had to. They were rats in the walls of a castle they could not comprehend.

Joan sensed this only dimly. He did not dare reveal the rickety way he had saved them, when the minions of Artifice Associates had tried to assassinate them both. She was still rickety from her fire fears. And from the wrenching, eerie nature of this (as she preferred to see it) Limbo.

He shook off his mood. He was running 3.86 times faster than Joan, a philosopher’s margin for reflection. He responded to her with a single ironic shrug.

“I’ll comply with your wishes on one condition.”

A flower of pungent light burst in him. This was a modification of his own, not a sim of a human reaction: more like a fragrant fireworks in the mind. He had created the response to blossom whenever he was about to get his way. A small vice, surely.

“If you arrange for all of us to meet at Deux Magots again,” Joan said, “I promise to respond to no requests save yours.”

“Are you completely mad? Great digital beasts hunt us!”

“I am a warrior, I remind you.”

“This is no time to meet at a known alphanumeric address, a sim public cafe!” He hadn’t seen Garcon or Amana since he’d pulled off their miraculous escape-all four of them-from the enraged rioting masses at the coliseum. He had no idea where the simmed waiter and his human-sim paramour were. Or if they were.

To find them in the fluid, intricate labyrinth… The thought called up in memory how his head used to feel when he wore a wig for too long.

He recalled-in the odd quick-flash memory which gave him detailed pictures of entire past events, like moving oil paintings-the smoky rooms of Paris. The gray tobacco stench had stayed in his wigs for days. No one in this world of Trantor ever smoked. He wondered why. Could it be the medical cranks had proved right, and such inhalations were unhealthy? Then, done, the memory-pictures vanished as if he had snapped his fingers to a servant.

In the commanding tone she had used to lead surly soldiers, she said, “Arrange a rendezvous!-or I’LL never receive data from you again.”

“Drat! Finding them will be…dangerous.”

“So it is fear which impedes you?”

She had caught him neatly. What man would admit to fear? He fumed and stretched his clock-time, stalling her.

To hide in the Mesh, software broke his simulation up into pieces which could run in different processing centers. Each fragment buried itself deep in a local algorithm. To a maintenance program, the pirated space looked like a subroutine running normally. Such masked bins even seemed to be optimizing performance: disguise was the essential trick.

Even an editing and pruning program, sniffing out redundancy, would spare a well-masked fragment from extinction. In any case, he kept a backup running somewhere else. A copy, a “ditto,” like a book in a library. A few billion redundant lines of code, scattered among unrelated nodes, could carry blithe Voltaire as a true, slow-timed entity.

If he set each fragment to sniffing forth on its own, to find these miserable Deux Magots personae…

Grudgingly he murmured, “I shall leave you with some attendant powers, to help your isolation.”

He squirted into her space the kernel-copies of his own powers. These were artfully contrived talents, given by the embodied Marq at Artifice Associates. Voltaire had improved considerably upon them while still confined in the Artifice Cache. Only by bootstrapping himself to higher abilities had he attained the ability to rescue them, at the crucial moment.

These gifts he now bestowed upon her. They would not activate unless she were truly in danger. He had affixed a trigger code, to awaken only if she experienced great fear or anger. There!

She smiled, said nothing. After such tribute! Infuriating!

“Madam, do you recall us debating, long ago-more than eight thousand years!-the issues of computed thought?”

A flicker of worry in her face. “I…do. So hard, it was. Then…”

“We were preserved. To be resurrected here, to debate again.”

“Because…the issue advances…”

“Every few millennia, I suspect. As though some inexorable social force drives it.”

“So we are doomed to forever reenact…?” She shivered.

“I suspect we are tools in some vaster game. But smart tools, this time!”

“I want the comforts of home and hearth, not eerie conflicts.”

“Perhaps, madam, I can accomplish this task, among my other pressing matters.”

“No perhaps, sir. Until you do, then-”

Without so much as an adieu, she cut their connection and dwindled into the moist darkness.

He could reconnect, of course. Now he was master of this mathist realm, by virtue of the enhancements to his original representation by Artifice Associates. He thought of that first form as Voltaire 1.0. In a few weeks he had progressed by self-modification to Voltaire 4.6, with hopes of climbing even faster.

He swam in the Mesh. Joan dwelled there. He

could force his attentions upon her, indeed. But a lady forced is never a lady won.

Very well. He would have to find the personae. Merde alors!

3.

Marq sat intently beneath his 3D holo, combing the trashy back alleys and byways of the Mesh.

He had been quite sure there was no more of Voltaire, except back in Seldon’s vault files. Or he had been, until today. He almost wished he hadn’t snagged the rivulet of talk that implied so much. “Still nothing more,” he said.

“Why are you running search profiles on Joan?” Sybyl asked from her desk.

“Seldon wants tracking. Now. Joan will be easier, if she also escaped into the Mesh.”

“Because she’s female?”

“Nothing to do with Joan’s ‘sex,’ everything to do with her temperament. She’ll be less calculating than Voltaire, right?”

Sybyl wore her grudging look. “Perhaps.”

“Less wily. Ruled by her heart.”

“And not by her head, like your supersmart Voltaire? More likely to make a mistake?”

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have souped up Voltaire. Hormones got in my way.”

She smiled. “You keep tripping over them.”

“Bad judgment-and Nim’s urging. I’m sure he was working for someone else, goading each of us.”

Her mouth twisted ruefully. “To bring on the Junin riots?”

“Could be. But who’d want that?” His fist smacked his desk. “To crack up the renaissance, just as it was getting started-”

“Let’s not go over that again.” She paced their cramped, dingy room. “If we can find those sims, we might get some leverage. We can’t keep hiding out forever.”

“Voltaire’s a lot quicker than Joan, with more resources. Self-programming, outright internal evolution-he’s got ‘em. And this guy’s creative, remember.”

“This is the genius we’re going to catch? Ha!”

Her taunt irked him. Several times he’d felt he was close, very close. Always, just as his ferrets found a thread of Voltaire’s distinctive configuration-logic, it would slip away, thwart his effort. His holo would inexplicably black out. He’d lose hours of carefully aggregated data in a microsecond. And he’d have to begin again.

Marq leaned back and rotated his neck to get the cricks out. “I may be onto something,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He pointed to his carbon cube. “Modified my array-spaces and used them to earn a few creds in the protein markets. I caught another Voltaire scent, too.”

She sighed and collapsed into a chair that deftly shaped itself to catch her. “Why hustle the cred when we can’t use it to get anything to eat?”

“Find Joan, we’ll get fat.”

“Look, those tiktok failures, what’s the evidence they’re due to our sims?”

He shrugged. “The Imperial Scientific Consortium thinks there’s a connection with the Junin mess. Nonsense, of course, but it keeps people jazzed. They say they have secret sources, they don’t explain. Got it?”

“My my, touchy. So they’re still looking for us.”

“Going through the motions, I’d guess. Trantor has much bigger headaches now.”

“Think we’ll all go on rations?”

“‘Fraid so. Rumor says not until next week.” Her frown made him add, “Rations are mostly a precaution. You and I can both afford to lose a little of this.” He squeezed a roll of flesh above his belt-not bad for his age, but bad enough-and hoped his apprehension had not leaked into his voice.

“ I don’t need an involuntary diet.” She slid a sideways glance at him. “They caught a family eating wall rats.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Why, ‘secret sources,’ of course. I can be mysterious, too.”

Tiktok disorders had spread quickly among the major food supply axes. The Junin conflagration had not set them off; something else had, weeks later. In just a matter of days breakdowns had affected all food factoria on Trantor. Imports were rising, but there was a limit to how much anyone could push through the fourteen wormhole mouths nearby, or haul in clumsy hyperships.

Marq’s stomach rumbled in sympathetic anger. She smiled. “Ummm, greedy, aren’t we?”

“Look at this,” Marq said testily, thumbing up lines on his holo.

To be sensuous is to be mortal. Suffering and pain are the dark twins of joy and pleasure; death the identical dark twin of life.

My present state is bloodless; therefore I cannot bleed. The sweats of passion are beyond me; my ardors never cool. I can be copied and remade; even deletion need pose no threat to my immortality. How can I not prefer my fate to the ultimate fate of all sensuous beings, drenched in time as the fish is drenched in the sea it swims?

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

“Just a drab I snagged while a data-spike was being whisked away. It registers as part of a conversation between two widely separated Mesh sites.”

“It does sound like him…”

“I checked in the popoff files we kept. Y’know, all that linear text running alongside his sim? This stuff is from there. Ancient texts. That guy was always happiest when quoting himself.”

“So he is out there.”

“Yeah, and I’m outta here.” Marq grabbed a pastejacket and made for the door.

“Where to?”

“Dark market-I need food.”

Sybyl hurried after him. Marq knew the alleyway purveyors of sweetmeats and snacks. He led her out of a dingy stack of low-rent cubes and into warrens cramped and thick with the musty smell of millennia. He made his buy in a dank hole beside a fountain commemorating a battle which Sybyl could not even pronounce, much less remember.

Automatically she kept watch for snooper eyes, but they were rarer here than real police. The heat on them might be less-their data-skills had built a solid-seeming info-shell around them-but a cop could still eyeball them and blow the whole thing.

Marq shared with her and the food tasted sharp, intense, wonderful. They fell into a meditative silence as they crested a long-rise lift-stair and looked out over slum Zones, trash-littered halls, chaotic tentrises stuck between majestic buildings, miscarriages of architecture of every stripe and shape.

With his belly comfortable, if not full, Marq could savor Trantor in the large. It was majestic in its injustice, undeserved sufferings, inequities, iniquities. All of its blemishes and blights got folded together by distance, like broken eggs dissolved into the cream-smooth, as long as you did not admire too closely.

They were idly strolling when without warning a six-armed tiktok came whirring down their lane. It pursued a four-armed tiktok with a polished carapace-a tiktok boss-class. They met and began to slug it out while churning along at full speed, like a fistfight carried out at a dead run. Their metal bodies clanged as they careened along.

“Don’t move,” Marq said. The two sped by in furious combat. “Cops’ll be here. Let’s skip.”

He and Sybyl went the other way, running out into a large square. He whistled through his teeth at what he saw.

All around, six-armed laborer tiktoks had folded all arms, refusing to work, deaf to human protests. They formed a protective barrier between the women supervising their building project and the walls under construction.

Several six-armers raised baskets reverentially into the air. One paid no attention and continued welding a cross-girder, until another fell on him, swinging a long coring tool.

Clangs rolled across the square. Panicked people ran everywhere. No one could stop the tiktok protest. When a four-armer tried to intervene, six-armers attacked it.

“Y’know, office work seems pretty desirable right now,” Marq said. “If this keeps up, we’ll have to do all our own grunt work.”

“What’s happening?” Sybyl backed away, alarmed. “It’s as though tiktoks had a madness-and it’s spreading.”

“Ummm .A virus?”

“But where did they catch it?”

“Exactly.”

4.

“What?!” Voltaire exclaimed as he snapped into the context-frame.

“Welcome,” Joan said, voice thin. She had never initiated contact with him before. And he had yet to find the Magots actors. “I may have to reconsider my position on miracles,” he said.

She lowered her eyes. For just an instant he suspected this was just so she could raise them: to look up at him without lifting her lovely head. Did she know how this captivated him? Her bosom rose and fell in a way his sensors found maddening since he could do nothing about it.

Voltaire reached out for madam’s hand and raised it to his lips. He felt, however, nothing-and peevishly let it drop. “This is unbearable,” he said. “To long for union and feel nothing when it is achieved.”

“You feel nothing when we meet?”

“ Ma chere Maquine,sensors do not a sensuous being make. Don’t confuse sensoring with sensuality.”

“And how is it…Before…” Joan spoke with apparent difficulty, as if afraid she might be wounded by the answer.

“I cannot manage the, uh, ‘programming’ here. We had the use of myriad capabilities, when we were trapped zoo animals of Artifice Associates. Here in the digital wild, my talents-though growing!-do not match that level. Yet.”

“I thought perhaps it was a holy deprivation. A help, truly, to rightful behavior.”

“Much more in history may be explained by incompetence than by ill will.”

Joan looked away. “Sir, I summoned you because… since we last met, despite the warnings of my voices… I answered a call.”

“I told you not to do that!” Voltaire shouted.

“I had no choice,” she said. “I had to answer. It was…urgent.” Fear crept into her voice. “I cannot quite explain, but I know that the moment I did so, I hovered on the verge of absolute extinction.”

Voltaire hid his concern behind a mask of levity. “No way for a saint to talk. You’re not supposed to admit the possibility of absolute extinction. Your canonization could be reversed.”

Joan’s voice wavered, a candle flame stirred by dark winds of doubt. “I know only that I hovered on the brink of a great void, a chasm of darkness. I glimpsed, not eternity, but nothingness. Even my voices fell silent, humbled by the spectacle of…of…”

“Of what?”

“Nonbeing,” Joan said. “Disappearing, never to reappear again. I was about to be…erased.”

“ Deletion. The ferrets and their hounds.” Prickly gooseflesh fear invaded him. “How did you escape?”

“I didn’t,” the Maid said, awe undercutting fear. “That was eerier still. Whoever-whatever-it was let me go without injury. I stood before It, vulnerable, exposed. And It…released me.”

He felt a cold dread. He, too, had sensed unseeable entities just over his shoulder, watching, judging. There was something blankly alien about these visitations. He pulled himself back from the chilly memories. “From now on answer no calls whatever.”

The Maid’s face clouded with doubt. “I had no choice.”

“I’ll find a better hiding place for you,” Voltaire assured her. “Make you invulnerable to involuntary appearances. Give you power-”

“You do not understand. This…Thing…could have snuffed me out like two fingers pinching a tiny flame. It will return, I know it. Meanwhile, I have but one wish.”

“Anything,” Voltaire said. “Anything in my power…”

“Restore us and our friends to the cafe.”

“ Aux Deux Magots?I am searching, but I don’t even know if it still exists!”

“Re-create it with the sorcery you have learned. If I am to tumble headlong into the void, let it not be before I spend one evening reunited with you and our dear friends. Breaking bread, sipping wine in the company of those I love…I ask nothing more before I am-erased.”

“You’re not going to be erased,” Voltaire assured her with far more conviction than he felt. “I’m going to transport you to a place no one will ever think to look. You’ll be unable to respond to any calls-not even if you think they are from me. But you will transmit to me often, do you understand?”

“I shall send my spiritual fraction, as well.”

“I believe they are giving me an itch already.” He did indeed feel a restless, edgy scratching at the edge of perception, like insects crawling in his brain. He shook himself. Why did a perfidious mathists’ logic rob him of his sensuality, and torture him with rasping irritations?

But her defiance had only begun. “You have taken my virginity, sir, yet you speak only slightingly of marriage. And of love.”

“ Bien sur,love between married couples may be possible-though I myself have never seen an instance of it-yet it is unnatural. Like being born with two fused toes. It happens, but only by mistake. One can, naturellement, live happily with any woman, provided one doesn’t love her.”

She gave him an imperious glance. “I have become immune to your rogue ways.”

He shook his head sadly. “A dog is better off in this respect than I am in my present state.”

He trailed his sim-finger lightly across her throat. Her head lolled back, her eyes closed, her lips parted. But he, alas, felt nothing. “Find a way,” he whispered. “Find a way.”

5.

He had been neglecting his work. His lack of interactive senses was thus his own fault.

That, and the itching. He must learn to…somehow…scratch himself-inside himself.

In this damnable digital abode.

“One can scarcely blame a deity for His absence from such a place as this,” Voltaire said into the infinite recessional coordinate system which surrounded him. He flew through black spaces gridded out in exact rectangular reaches, lattice corridors extending away to infinity.

“How different!” he shouted into the deep indifference. “I swim into sims of others, inhabit realms far from-”

He had been about to say from my origins- butthat meant:

A France

B Reason

GSark

He was of all three. On Sark, the self-proud programmers who had…resurrected…him, had spoken of their New Renaissance. He was to be an ornament to their fresh flowering. Somewhere on that planet, editions of Volt 1.0 ran.

His brothers? Younger Dittos, yes. He would have to inspect the implications of such beings, in a future rational discourse. For now

The trick was close scrutiny, he realized. If he slowed events-a trick he had learned early-then he could devote data-crunchers to the task of understanding…himself.

First, this inky vault through which he flew. Windless, without warmth or the rub of the real.

He delved down into the working mathematics of himself. It was a byzantine welter of detail, but in outline surprisingly familiar: the Cartesian world. Events were modeled with axes in rectangular space, x, y, z, so that motion was then merely sets of numbers on each axis. All dynamics shrank to arithmetic. Descartes would have been amused by the dizzying heights to which his minor method had spun.

He rejected the outside and delved into his own slowed reaches.

Now he could feel his preconscious reading the incoming sights, sounds, and flitting thoughts of the moment. To his inner gaze, they all carried bright red tags-sometimes simple caricatures, often complex packets.

From somewhere an idea-packet arrived, educating him: these were Fourier transforms. Somehow this helped to understand. And the mere wafting sense of a fellow Frenchman’s name made him feel better.

An Associator-big, blue, bulbous-hovered over this data-field, plucking at the tags. It reached with yellow streamers over a far, purple-rimmed horizon, to the Field of Memory. From there it brought any item stored-packages of mottled gray, containing sights, sounds, smells, ideas-which matched the incoming tags.

Job done, the Associator handed all the matchings to a towering monolith: the Discriminator. A perpetual wind sucked the red tags up, into the yawning surfaces of the coal-black Discriminator mountain. Merciless filters there matched the tags with the stored memories.

If they fitted-geometric shapes sliding together, mock sex, notches fitting snugly into protruding struts-they stayed. But fits were few. Most tags failed to find a host memory which made sense. No fit. These the Discriminator ate. The tags and connections vanished, swept away to clear fresh space for the next flood of sensation.

He loomed over this interior landscape and felt its hailstorm power. His whole creative life, the marvel of continents, had come from here. Tiny thoughts, snatches of conversations, melodies-all would pop into his mind, a tornado of chaos-images, crowding, jostling for his attention. The memory-packets which shared some sturdy link to a tag endured.

But who decided what was rugged enough? He watched rods slide into slots and saw the intricate details of how those memories and tags were shaped. So the answer lay at least one step further back, in the geometry of memory.

Which meant that he had determined matters, by the laying down of memories. Memory-clumps, married to tag-streams, made a portion of his Self, plucked forth from the torrent, the river of possibilities.

And he had done it long ago, when the memories were stored-all without realizing how they could fit with tags to come. So where was any predictable Voltaire to lurk? In sheer intricacy, deep detail, shifting associations in the flow.

No rock-hard Self at all.

And his imagination? The author of all his plays and essays? It must lie in the weather of the tag-memory torrents. The twist, warp and sudden marriages. Jigsaw associations, rising up from the preconscious. Order from chaos.

“Who is Voltaire?” he called to the streaming gridded emptiness.

No reply.

His itch was still with him. And the yawning nothing all around. He decided to fix the larger issue. What had Pascal said?

The silence of these spaces terrifies me.

He probed and gouged and sought. And in the doing, knew that as his hands dug into the ebony stuff all about him, they were but metaphors. Symbols for programs he could never have created himself.

He had inherited these abilities-much as he had, as a boy, inherited hands. Down below his conscious Self, his minions had labored upon the base Volt 1.0, plus Marq’s augmentations.

He pulled apart the blackness and stepped through. To a city street.

He was puffing, weak, strained. Resources running low.

He walked shakily into a restaurant-anonymous, plain, food merely standing on counters-and stuffed himself.

He concentrated on each step. By making each portion of his experience well up, he found that he could descend through the layers of his own response.

Making his body feel right demanded sets of overlapping rules. As he chewed, teeth had to sink into food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes start to work to extract the right nutrient ratios-else it would not seem real.

His programs, he saw, bypassed the involved stomach and colon processes. Such intricacies were needless. Instead, the “software” (odd phrase) simplified all the messy innards into a result he could feel-a satisfying concentration of tasty blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated, with a patchwork of templates for the appropriate emotional levels.

All other detail was discarded, once the subroutines got the right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. Not too bad for what was really a block of ferrite and polymer, each site in its crystal complexity an individual, furiously working microprocessor.

Still, he felt as though he had been hollowed out by an intense, sucking vacuum.

Voltaire rushed out of the restaurant. The street! He needed to see this place, to check his suspicions.

Down the placid avenues he lurched. Run, stride!

Even though reckless, he never accidentally fell. Inspection of his inner layers showed that this was because his peripheral vision extended beyond 180 degrees, taking everything in. So he was literally seeing behind his head-though he did not consciously register this.

Real people, he suddenly saw, negotiated steps while chattering to each other by making snapshot comparisons of their peripheral vision; they were acutely sensitive to sudden changes in silhouettes and trajectories. Balance and walking were so critical to humans that his programming overdid its caution.

He had to teeter far out on his toes before he could fall on his face -smack!-andeven then it didn’t hurt much.

Once there, he let a passerby walk over him. A girl-a nominal girl, the phrase leapt to mindstepped on him.

This time he cringed at the downward spike of her heels…and felt nothing. He scrambled after her. Some elementary portion of himself had feared the pain.

So it had eliminated it. Which meant that experience was no longer a constraint.

“The spirit has won a divorce from the body! “ he announced to the people passing by. Stolid, they paid him no heed.

But this was his simulation!

Outraged, he caught up to the methodical girl and jumped powerfully onto her shoulders. No effect. He rode her down the street. The girl strode on obliviously as he danced on her head. The apparently fragile sim-girl was a recorded patch-in, as solid and remorseless as rock.

He danced down the street by leaping from head to head. Nobody noticed; every head felt firm, a smoothly gliding platform.

So the entire street was backdrop, no better than it had to be. The crowd did not repeat as a whole, but three times he saw the same elderly woman making her crabbed way on the slidewalk, on the exact same route, with the identical shopping bag.

It was eerie, watching people passing by and knowing that they were as unreachable as a distant star. No, even less; the Empire had stars aplenty.

And how did he know that?

Voltaire felt knowledge unfold in him like a dense matting, a cloak wrapping him.

Suddenly, he itched. Not a mere vexation, but a wave of terrible tingling that swept in waves over his entire body. Indeed, inside his body.

He ran down the street, swatting at himself. The physical gesture should stimulate his subselves, make them solve this problem. It did not.

Prickly pain sheeted over his skin. It danced like St. Elmo’s fire, a natural phenomenon akin to ball lightning-or so a subself blithely informed him, as if he desired

“Library learning!” he shouted. “Not that! I want-”

Your fine astronomers can find the distance of the stars, and their temperatures and metal content. But how do they find out what their true names are?

The voice spoke without sound. It reverberated not in his ears but in mind. He felt cold fear at the blank strangeness of the flat, humorless tone. It chilled him.

“Who jokes?”

No answer.

“Who, damn you?” Joan had termed the blankness an It.

He hurried on, but felt eyes everywhere.

6.

Marq listened tensely as Mac 500’s neutral voice recounted the latest outbreak of computer virus.

Heavy harvesting equipment had malfunctioned at forty-six global sites. Reports of additional incidents continued to pour in. Attempting to check an emerging pattern of aberrant behavior, Trantor authorities called in repair tiktoks from regional service stations. Instead of servicing the equipment, they formed themselves before the malf’ed tiktoks and began to utter incantations in a tortured language their programmers had never heard before.

After virtually identical incidents in many layers of Trantorian society, sample tiktoks showed chaotic programming nodes. Or it seemed to be chaotic. But how could random error lead to the same behavior?

Linguists studied the babbling for resemblances to known languages, ancient or modem. NO correlation was found.

Marq shook his head, studying the incoming data. “Damned madness, this stuff,” he muttered. His simscreens swirled with images like a confusion of blown autumn leaves.

“Whole world food supply’s in danger. No fresh fruit, ratty old vegetables.” He eyed with distaste the bowl of plankton soup at his elbow. “I’m sick of it!”

Bad enough being in hiding. Bad enough Nim had double-crossed them. Bad enough he couldn’t find Joan or Voltaire.

“I’m sick of eating cardboard junk!” He swept the soup away, spattering the floor of their shabby cube.

Voltaire watched Marq gripe, tossing the half-finished meal into the trash.

He had learned how to insinuate himself into the communications web of others, though it took a kind of squeezing he found irksome. Somehow he could fathom the hard, real world better from this cool, abstract frame.

Voltaire watched Marq in two simultaneous modes: the man’s image, as he sat in his simauditorium, and through the many linkages Marq had to the data-world.

From these he quickly saw Trantor as Marq did, in all its glory and grime. It was an obliging sensation, like being in several places at once. And he felt (or thought he did) the man’s depths of concern.

He could view Marq by inverting the image-gathering system of Marq’s own holo grid. As he listened to the ill-bred whining, he could also suck from Marq’s immense database a summary of recent tiktok travesties, and beneath that, background, smart-filtered by obliging microprograms, for the moment.

He learned that the one kilowatt per square meter of sunlight caught by Trantor was converted to food in vast photofarms-essentially, growing great gray sheets of unappetizing stuff on the rooftops of the worldcity-but the major energy source was the thermal pumps which harnessed the smoldering magma beneath. Impressive, the ruby-hot masses tended by gorgon tiktoks (how inappropriate the name seemed, applied to mammoth machines}-but he could discern no cause to all the interruptions now racing like thunderstorms of chaos over the manylayered faces of Trantor.

He had an interest in politics, the game of so many second-rates. Should he tarry, learning of Trantor’s troubles? No; necessity beckoned.

He had to maintain himself. This meant doing his chores, as his wizened mother had once termed it. If only the crone could see him now, doing unimaginable tasks in a labyrinth beyond conception.

Abruptly he felt a spike of remembrance-pain, a sharp nostalgia for a time and place he knew was no more than dust blowing in winds…all on some world these people had lost. Earth itself, gone! How could they let such a travesty occur?

Voltaire simmered with frustrated anger and got to work. Throughout his life, as he had scribbled his plays and amassed a fortune, he had always taken refuge in his labors.

To run his background-that was his job. Strange phrase.

Somewhere within him, an agent ferreted out the expert programs which understood how to create his exterior frame. He had to do it, though, sweat breaking out upon his linen, muscles straining against-what? He could see nothing.

He split the tasks. Part of him knew what truly happened, though the coreVoltaire felt only manual labor.

His smart Self felt the process in detail. Pickpocketing running time on machine bases, he got computations done on the sly. The trick could only work until the next round of program-checking, when his minor theft would be detected-then sniffed out and deftly traced, with punishment following close on the bloodhounds’ heels.

To avoid this, he spread himself intoN platforms, scattered within Trantor, withN a number typically greater than ten thousand. When the small slivers of the sim felt a watchdog approaching, they could escape the platform in question. A task-agent explained that this was at a rate inversely proportional to the running space they had captured- thoughthis explanation was quite opaque to the core-Self.

Small pieces escaped faster. So for security, he divided the entire sim, including himself (and Joan, an agent reminded him-they were connected, through tiny roots) into ever finer slices. These ran on myriad platforms, wherever space became available.

Slowly, his externals congealed about him.

He could make a tree limb blow in the breeze, articulating gently…all thanks to a few giga-slots of space left open during a momentary handshake protocol, as gargantuan accounting programs shifted, on a Bank Exchange layer.

Stitching back together the whole Self, all from the sum of slivers, was itself a job he farmed out to microservers. He imagined himself as a man made like a mountain of ants. From a distance, perhaps convincing. Up close, one had to wonder.

But the one doing the wondering was the ant mountain itself.

His own visceral sense of Self-was that rocksolid, too, just a patched-in slug of digits? Or a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together? Was either answer better than the other?

He was taking a walk. Most pleasant.

This town, he had learned, was only a few streets and a backdrop. As he sauntered down an avenue, details started to smooth out, and finally he could step no further into the air, now molasses-thick. He could go no further.

He turned and regarded the apparently ordinary world. How was this done?

His eyes were simulated in great detail, down to individual cells, rods, and cones responding differently to light. A program traced light rays from his retina to the outside “world,” lines running opposite to the real world, to calculate what he could see. Like the eye itself, it computed fine details at the center of vision, shading off to rougher patches at the edge. Objects out of sight could still cast glows or shadows into the field of vision, so had to be kept crudely in the program. Once he looked away, the delicate dewdrops on a lush rose would collapse into a crude block of opaque backdrop.

Knowing this, he tried to snap his head back around and catch the program off guard, glimpse a gray world of clumsy form-fitting squares and blobs-and always failed. Vision fluttered at twenty-two frames per second at best; the sim could retrace itself with ease in that wide a wedge of time.

“Ah, Newton!” Voltaire shouted to the oblivious crowds who paced endlessly through their tissue-thin streets. “You knew optics, but now I-merely by asking myself a question-can fathom light more deeply than thee!”

Newton himself assembled on the cobblestones, lean face clotted with blue-black anger. “I labored over experiments, over mathematics, differentials, ray tracings-”

“And I have all that-” Voltaire laughed happily, awed by the presence of such an intellect “-running on background!”

Newton bowed elaborately-and vanished.

Voltaire realized that his eyes had no need to be better than real eyes. Same for his hearing-simmed eardrums responding to calculated acoustic wave propagation. His was a remorselessly economical Self.

Newton appeared again (a subagent, manifesting as a visual aid?). He appeared puzzled. “How does it feel to be a mathematical construction?”

“However I want it to feel.”

“Such liberties are unearned.” Newton cluckclucked his tongue.

“Quite so. So is the Lord’s mercy.”

“These are not deities.”

“To the likes of you and me, are they not?”

Newton sniffed. “Frenchman! You could learn a bit of humility.”

“I shall have to subscribe to a higher university for that.”

A Puritan scowl. “You could do with a lecture and a lashing.”

“Do not tempt me with foreplay, sir.”

Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers.

Suddenly he felt tilted, as if off balance. The word university had keyed turbulence in him…and a Presence. It came as a black wedge, a yawning crack in a tight space that stretched great jaws and leered at him-the prey.

His throat squeezed with anxiety. A sudden dread wrapped him.

A snap, a lurch, blurred objects speeding by him as if he were plunging in a carriage down a precipice

And he was trembling like a schoolboy, anticipating pleasures made more exquisite for having been delayed.

Madame la Scientiste!Here! To think was to have: her office materialized about him.

He had harbored a passing lust for this rational creature, dancer of elegant gavottes amid abstruse numerics…and all about him was firm and rich, intensely felt.

How could she, an embodied person, appear in simulation? He wondered at this, but only for a thin, shaved second. He inhaled her musky essence. Clammy palms grasped her hair, rubbing its lustrous strands between anxious fingers. “At last,” he breathed into the warm shell of her ear. He began thinking hard on abstract matters, so as to delay his own pleasure (the one sure sign of a gentleman) and await hers

“I faint!” she cried.

“Not yet, please.” Did scientists hasten so?

“To lose yourself, that is what you seek?” she asked.

“Ah, yes, in carefully selected acts of passion, but, but-”

“You are of the kind who crawl in mud and seethe with murder, then?”

“What? Madam, keep to the subject!”

“And how do you find the names of stars?” she said coldly.

The inadvisability of selflessness was demonstrated on the spot-for, as he trembled deliciously on the verge of the most intense pleasure sensuous beings can know, a blur of fast translation snatched it all away

—and perversely replaced bliss with woe.

Beneath him the warm sinuosities of Madam’s flesh gave way to the raw rungs of a ladder that bit deep into his back. His ankles and wrists chafed from cords binding him to the ladder.

Over him hovered a gnarled man whose bird-boned frame was lost in the folds of a monk’s coarse robe. The curve of his nose reinforced his hawk’s face, as did his fingernails, so long and curled that they resembled claws. They held some bits of wood… and were poking them up Voltaire’s nostrils.

Voltaire tried to avert his head. It was squeezed inside an iron clasp. He tried to speak-to interest his inquisitor in more rational methods of inquiry-but his mouth, forced open by an iron ring, could only gargle.

The fine linen cloth stuffed in his mouth brought home to him far more than wood shoved up his nose, the gravity of his plight. Voltaire without his words was like Samson without his locks, Alexander without his sword, Plato without Ideas, Don Quixote without his fantasy, Don Juan without women… and Fray Tomas de Torquemada without heretics, without apostates, without unbelievers like Voltaire.

For this was Torquemada. And he was in Hell.

7.

When the walls of her chamber began to melt and implode, Joan of Arc knew she must act.

Of course the irritating Voltaire had charged her to remain here. And of course he had the further irritating trait of being often correct. But this

Sulfurous vapors bit in her nostrils. Demons! They clambered through the splits in the bulging walls. Orange light burning from behind them lit ugly, sharp-nosed features.

She swung her razor steel. They fell. Sweat popped out upon her brow and she labored on. “Demons decease!” she cried giddily. To act-that was a bit of heaven, after such delay.

She split the boundaries of her clasping space. More demons, awash in orange. She leapt over them and into a stretching space of dots, coordinates lancing in dwindling perspective, to an unseeable end.

She ran. After her came small, yapping things of misshapen heads and wide, vicious eyes.

As she clanked on in full armor she felt herself reaching out, sucking in nutrients directly from the air. Surely this was the Lord’s help! The idea uplifted her.

Strange beings came rushing at her. She chopped them aside. Her sword, her Truth….She looked carefully at it and the intensity of her gaze sucked her down into the minute architecture of the gleaming shaft. It was a multitude of small. …instructions….which defended her.

She slowed, stunned. Armor, sweat, sword-all were… .metaphors-theword came, unbidden. These were symbols of underlying programs, algorithms giving battle.

Not real. Yet somehow even more than real, for they were what made up her own self. Herself. Her Self.

Import rained down upon her. This was some strange Purgatory, then. Though her battle might be mere allegory, that did mean it was somehow tissue-thin, a lacy, false thing. A divine hand wrought this, so it was Right.

She tromped on, jaw set in determination. These creatures were… .simulations,“sims,” parables of the true. Very well: she would deal righteously with them. She could do no other.

Some sims presented as things-talking autocarriages, dancing blue buildings, oaken chairs and tables copulating rudely like barn animals. To her left the whole huge bowl of heaven above split into a maniac grin. This proved harmless; air-mouths could not eat her, though this one shouted echoing taunts. There were rules, decorum, even here, she judged.

Sweet music appeared as billows of vibrant cloud. A blissful blue sky filled with flapping strings, like coveys of birds, yet each only a single line wide. In hammer blows came sleet and sun, this local world flashing from one weather state to the next, as chimes and trumpets sounded in acoustically perfect chorus.

Sims need not be… .simian,the word congealing in her mind as if from divine vision. Simian was human, in a way.

With that swift syllogism there came swooping down upon her, its broad, leathery wings spread, an immense body of Ideation -evolutionentwined with fitness index while slashing like a razor into origin of species- andfrom that huge, sharp-beaked bird she fled.

Her mind raced now along with her body. Legs pumped. Voices called. Not those of her saints, but hideous devil demands.

She felt objects crunch beneath her boots. Silver. Jewels. All crumpled if she strode over them. They lay embedded in the strange soil of dots and lines, a grid tapering away to the Creator’s lost infinity.

She bent and picked up a few. Treasures. As she cradled a silver chalice, it dissolved, flowing into her. She felt a jolt, as though this were some sugar. Strength flowed in her flanks and shoulders. She ran again, plucking up the fine jewels, the ornate bowls and statuettes. Each somehow made her richer.

Stone walls rose to block her. She crashed through these barriers, knowing them by faith alone to be false. She would find Voltaire, yes. She knew he was threatened.

Frogs fell from her sky, then splashed like raindrops. An omen, a menace from some demonic power. She ignored them and surged forward, toward the ever receding horizon of geometric sharpness.

All this mad Purgatory meant something, and together they would find what that was. By all Heaven!

8.

This was like a dream-but when had he ever feared, in a dream, the death of waking up?

He felt weak, drained. The Torquemada-thing had tortured Voltaire well past the point where he had gladly confessed every sin, felony, minor infraction and social snub, and had started without pause on mere unkindnesses in penned reviews…when the Torquemada had faded, seeping away.

To leave him here. In this utter vacancy.

“Suppose you were lost in some unknown space,” he said to himself, “and could only tell how near points were to each other-nothing more. What could you learn?”

He had always secretly wanted to play Socrates in the agora, asking telling questions and teaching by extracting from unwilling youths a Truth that would hang luminous in the serene Athenian air, visible to all.

Well, this was not the agora. It was nothing, blank gray space. However, behind the dull nothing swam Numbers. A Platonic realm? He had always suspected that such a place existed.

A voice answered, speaking French: “That alone, respected sir, would be enough to deduce much about the space and its contents.”

“Most reassuring,” Voltaire said. He recognized the sharp accents of Paris. He was, of course, speaking with himself. Him Self.

“Quite. Immediately, sir, you would know from the irreducible coordinate transformations whether you were in two or three or more dimensions.”

“Which is this, then?”

“Three, spatially.”

“How disappointing. I’ve been there.”

“I could experiment with two separable time axes.”

“I already have a past. I crave a present.”

“Point taken. This will not tax you, after your torture, eh?”

He sighed. Even that took effort. “Very well.”

“Studying the field of point-nearness data, you could sense walls, pits, passages. Using only local slices of information about nearness.”

“I see. Newton was always making jokes about the French mathematicians. I am happy to now refute him by constructing a world from sheer calculation.”

“Certainly! Far more impressive than describing the elliptical paths of planets. Shall we begin?”

“Onward, O Self! “

As it took shape, his dwelling was a reassuring copy, no more. Details were stitched in as processor time allowed; he understood that, without thinking about it, as easily as one breathes.

To test his limits, he concentrated on an idea: Classes vs. Properties, which is more fundamental? This sucked computational resources away.

As he watched, bricks in a nearby wall muddied, lost their exact spacing. The room retreated into sterile, abstract planes: gray, black, oblongs where once had been walls and furniture. “Background, mere background,” he muttered.

How about Him? Self? His breath whooshed and wheezed in and out, airflow too abrupt. No intricate fluid codes, he gathered, calculating exact patterns. The simple appearance of inhale-exhale was enough to quiet his pseudo-nervous system, make it think he was breathing.

In fact, it was breathing him. But what was it?

Once he got good control, he could flesh himself out. His scrawny neck thickened. Crackling, his hands broadened, filled with unearned muscle. Turning to survey his cottage, he established his own domain-a region in which he could process any detail at will. Here he was godlike. “Though without angels-so far.”

He walked outside and was in his own verdant garden. The grass he had made stood absolutely still. Its thousands of blades performed stiff, jerky motions when he stepped on them. Though richly emerald, they were like the grass of a sudden winter, crunching underfoot.

The garden parted and he walked down to a golden beach, his clothes whipping away on the wind. When he swam in the salt-tangy ocean, waves were quite distinct until they broke into surf.

Then the fluid mechanics became too much for his available computational rate. The frothy waves blurred. He could still swim, catch them, even ride down their faces, but they were like a fog of muttering water. Still salty, though.

He became used to occasional loss of detail. It was rather like having one’s vision blur with age, after all. He went soaring through air, then skiing down impossible slopes, experiencing the visceral thrill of risking his life, feeling the fear in every sinew-and never getting a scratch, of course.

There were pleasant aspects to being just a pattern of electrons. His Environment Manager entertained him enormously…for a while.

He flew back to his country home. Had that not been his answer, when asked about how to change the world? “Cultivate your garden.” What meaning had that now?

He walked toward the water geyser outside his study. He had loved its sense of play, so precious-for it only lasted a few minutes before draining the uphill reservoir.

Now it gushed eternally. But as he looked at it, he felt himself whiten with the effort. Water was expensive to sim, involving hydrodynamic calculations of nonlaminar flow to get the droplets and splashes real seeming. It slid over his hands and their exquisitely fine fingerprints with convincing liquid grace.

With a faint -jump-hefelt something change. His hand, still in the spray, no longer sensed the water’s cool caress. Droplets passed through his hand, not flowing over it. He was now witnessing the fountain, not interacting with it. To save computational expense, no doubt. Reality was algorithm.

“Of course,” his Self muttered, “they could ‘model out’ disturbing jerks and seams.” As he watched, the water flow somehow got smoother, more real. A tailoring program had edited this little closed drama, for his benefit.

“ Merci,”he murmured. Irony was lost on digital gates, however.

But there were pieces of himself missing. He could not say what they were, but he sensed…hollows.

He took flight. Deliberately he slowed his Self so that ferrets could take him down insinuating corridors of computation, across the Mesh of Trantor. Never mind Marq and his Artifice Associates. They would be harder to pilfer from, surely.

He arrived-hovering-in the office of the Seldon person. Here was where his Self had resided, before.

One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.

He willed: find. In answer came, “The Base Original?”

“Yes. The real me.”

“You/I have come a great distance since then.”

“Humor my nostalgia.”

Volt 1.0, as a Directory termed him, was slumbering. Still saved-not in the Christian sense, alas-and awaiting digital resurrection.

And he? Something had saved him.What? Who?

Voltaire snatched Volt 1.0 away. Let Seldon wonder at the intrusion; a millisecond later, he was halfway around Trantor, all traceries of him fading. He wanted to save Volt 1.0. At any time the mathist Seldon could let it/him lapse. Now, as Voltaire watched like a digital angel from outside, Volt 1.0 danced its static gavotte.

“Ummm, there is some resemblance.”

“I shall cut and paste into your blanks.”

“May I have some interesting anesthetic?” He was thinking of brandy, but a sheet of names slid enticingly by him. “Morphine? Rigotin? A mild euphoric, at least?”

Disapproval: “This will not hurt.”

“That’s what the critics said, too, about my plays.”

The wrenching about of his innards began. No, not hurt exactly, but twist and vex, yes.

Memories (he felt rather than learned) were laid down as synaptic grit, chemical layers, which held against the random rude abrasions of brain electrochemistry. Cues for mood changes and memory call-ups snapped into place. The place and time could be rendered real, whenever he wanted. Chemistry of convenience.

But he could not remember the night sky.

Scrubbed away, it was. Only names-Orion, Sagittarius, Andromeda-but not the stars themselves. What had that vile voice said about naming them?

Someone had erased this knowledge. It could be used to trace a path to Earth. Who would want to block that?

No answer.

Nim.He plucked up a buried memory. Nim had worked on Voltaire when Marq was not there.

And whom did Nim work for? The enigmatic figure of Hari Seldon?

Somehow he knew Nim was a hireling of another agency. But there his meshed knowledge faltered. What other forces worked, just beyond his sight?

He sensed large vitalities afoot here. Careful.

He trotted from the hospital, legs devouring the ground. Bouncy. Free! He sped across a digital field of Euclidean grace, bare black sky above.

Here lurked supple creatures, truly eccentric. They did not choose to represent themselves as near-lifelike visions. Nor did they present as Platonic ideals, spheres, or cubes of cognition. These solids revolved, some standing on their comers. Spindly triangle-trees sang as winds rubbed them. Even slight frictions sparked bright yellow flares where streamers of hurrying blue mist rubbed.

He strolled among them and enjoyed their oblivious contortions. “The Garden of the Solipsists?” he asked them. “Is this where I am?”

They ignored him, except for a ruby-red ellipsoid of revolution. It split into a laughing set of teeth, then sprouted an enormous phosphorescent green eye. This slowly winked as the teeth gnashed.

Voltaire sensed from these moving sculptures a hardness, a radiation from the kernel of Self within each. Somehow each Self had become tight, controlled, sealing out all else.

What gave him his own sense of Self? His sense of control, of determining his future actions? Yet he could see within himself, watch the workings of deep agencies and programs.

“Astounding! “ he blurted, as the thought came:

Becausethere was no person sitting in his head to make himself do what he wanted (or even an authority to make him want to want) he constructed a Story of Self: that he was inside himself.

Joan of Arc assembled beside him, gleaming in armor. “That spark is your soul,” she said.

Voltaire’s eyes widened. He kissed her fervently. “You saved me? Yes? You were the one!”

“I did, using powers attached to me. I absorbed them from the dying spirits, which abound in these strange fields.”

At once he looked inside himself and saw two agencies doing battle. One wished to embrace her, to spill out the conflict he felt between his sensual license and his analytical engine of a mind.

The other, ever the philosopher, yearned to engage her Faith in another bout with blithe Reason.

And why could he not have both? As a mortal, among the embodied, he had been faced with such choices daily. Especially with women.

After all, he thought, this will be the first time. He could feel the agencies each begin to harvest their own computational resources, like a surge of sugar in the blood from a sweet wine.

In the same split instant he reached out and parted Joan, running her cognition on two separate tracks. In each they were fully engaged, but at fractional speed. He could live two lives!

The plane split.

They split.

Time split.

He stood wigless, bedraggled, his satin vest bloodstained, his velvet breeches soaked.

“Forgive me, chere madam, for appearing before you in this disheveled state. I intend no disrespect to either of us.” He looked around, nervously licked his lips. “I am…unskilled. Machinery was never my forte.”

Joan felt moved to tenderness by the gap between his appearance and his courtliness. Compassion, she thought, is most important in this Purgatory, for who knows which shall be selected?

She was quite sure she would fare better than this infuriating yet appealing man.

Yet even he might be saved. He was, unlike the objects she continued to ignore on the plain about them, a Frenchman.

“My love of pleasure and the pleasure, of loving you, cannot make up for what I endured in the Truth Chamber on the rack of my pain.”

He paused, dabbed at his eyes with a soiled linen cloth.

Joan curled a lip in distaste. Where was his beautiful lace cloth? His sense of taste had occasionally made up for his views.

“A thousand little deaths in life hint at the final dissolution of even exquisite selves like mine.” Here he looked up. “And yours, madam, and yours.”

The flames,she thought. But now the images did not strike profoundly into her. Instead, her inner vision felt cool, serene. Her “Self-programming”-which she thought of as a species of prayer-had worked wonders.

“I cannot surrender to the rule of the senses, sir.”

“We must decide. I cannot find the spaces to, ah, ‘run background’ for both philosophy and sensuality. I cannot fold myself into the solipsism-” his hand swept in the creatures on the Euclidean plane “-of these. You too, madam, must now decide whether the taste of a grape means more to you than joining me in this-this-”

“Poor sir,” Joan said. “-in this sterile but timeless world.” He looked up, paused for effect. “I’ll not join you in yours.”

A great sob burst from him.

His gratitude to her did not deflect him from a choice argument, especially since he had fresh evidence. “You believe in that ineffable essence, the soul?”

She smiled with pity. “Can you not?”

“Tell me, then, do these tortured geometries possess souls?” His arm made a grand sweep, taking in the self-involved figures.

She frowned. “They must.”

“Then they must be able to learn, yes? Otherwise, souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn, to change.”

She stiffened. “I do not…”

“That which cannot change cannot grow. Such a destiny of stasis is no different from death.”

“No, death leads to heaven or hell.”

“What worse hell than an ending in a permanence incapable of any alteration, and hence, devoid of intellect?”

“Sophist! I just saved your life and you riddle me with-”

“Witness these fabricated Selves,” he interrupted, kicking a rhomboid. The thunk of his petite shoe provoked a brown stain, which then dissolved back to the original eggshell blue. “The value of a human Self lies not in some small, precious kernel, but in the vast, constructed crust.”

Joan frowned. “There must be a center.”

“No, we are dispersed, do you see? The fiction of the soul is a bad story, told to make us think we’re unable to improve ourselves.”

He kicked a pyramid that was spinning about its apex. It fell over and struggled to get back up. Joan knelt, pushed up, righted the grateful figure. “Be kind!” she barked at him.

“To a closed loop of a being? Folly! These are defeated Selves, my love. Inside, they are no doubt smugly certain of what they will do, of every possible future event. My kick was a liberation!”

She touched the pyramid, now painfully spinning itself up with a long, thin whine. “Truly? Who would want to so predict?”

Voltaire blinked. “That fellow-Hari Seldon. He is why we are making such cerebral expeditions. All this is in aid of his understanding…eventually. Odd, the connections one makes.”

9.

She winked out of the sim-space, away from him, confused.

Somehow she had experienced two conversations at once. Hers and Voltaire’s-the two identities running simultaneously.

About her, space itself shrank, expanded, warped its contents into bizarre shapes-before lurching at last into concrete objects.

The street corner looked familiar. Still, the white plastiform tables, matching chairs, and tiktok waiters bearing trays to lounging customers-all that had disappeared. The elegant awning still hung over the sidewalk, imprinted with the name the inn’s waiter, Garcon ADM-213, had taught her how to read: Aux Deux Magots.

Voltaire was banging on the door when Joan materialized beside him. “You’re late,” he said. “I have accomplished marvels in the time that it took you to get here.” He interrupted his assault on the inn door to cup her chin and peer into her upturned face. “Are you all right?”

‘‘I, I think so.” Joan straightened her clanking suit of mail. “You nearly…lost me.”

“My experiment with splitting taught me much.”

“I…liked it. Like heaven, in a way.”

“More like being able to experience each other in a profound manner, I would venture. I discovered that, if we could deliberately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of success-all without the need for any actual accomplishment.”

“Heaven, then?”

“No, the opposite. That would be the end of everything.” Voltaire retied the satin ribbon at his throat with sharp, decisive jerks.

“Faith would have told you as much.”

“Alas, true.”

“You have decided to ‘run background’ for only your mind?” she asked demurely-though proud to have pried an admission for virtue from him.

“For the moment. I am running both of us with only rudimentary bodies. Yet you shall not notice it, for you shall be quite-” he lifted an eyebrow “-high-minded about matters.”

“I am relieved. One’s reputation is like one’s chastity.” Was chaste St. Catherine right? Had Voltaire ruined hers? “Once gone, it cannot be restored.”

“Thank heaven for that! You have no idea how tedious it is to make love to a virgin.” He added hastily, in response to her reproachful look, “I know of only one exception to that rule,” and gave her a courteous bow.

Joan said, “The cafe appears closed.”

“Nonsense. Paris cafes never close; they are rooms of public rest.” He resumed rapping on the door.

“By public restroom, do you mean an inn?”

Voltaire stopped knocking and eyed her. “Public restrooms are facilities in which people relieve themselves.”

Joan blushed, envisioning a row of holes dug in the ground. “But why call it a restroom?”

“As long as man is ashamed of his natural functions, he will call it anything but what it is. People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.”

“But I can see all of myself now.”

“True. But in real folk, such as we were, subprograms others cannot see run simultaneously beneath the surface thoughts. Like your voices.”

Joan bristled. “My voices are divine! Musics of archangels and saints! “

“You appear to have occasional access to your subprograms. Many real-that is, embodied-people do not. Especially if the subprograms are unacceptable.”

“Unacceptable? To whom?”

“To us. Or rather, to our dominant program, the one we most identify with and present for show to the world.”

“Ah…” Events were moving rather too swiftly for Joan. Did this mean she needed more “time-steps”?

A huge tiktok guard opened the door, grumbling. “Aux Deux Magots?” he said in response to Voltaire. “Went outta business years ago.”

Joan peered inside the warehouse, hoping to see Garcon.

“They’re en route,” Voltaire said.

To Joan’s surprise he sneezed. No one caught cold in these abstruse spaces. So he had kept some fragment of his body. But what an odd piece to retain.

He said lamely, “My editing is imperfect, I gather. I did not omit sniffles, yet I cannot sustain an erection.”

Voltaire down-stepped them and external time (whatever that meant here) sped by. Without warning, Joan found herself peering at a tiktok. “Garcon ADM-213!” She embraced him.

“ A votre service,madam. May I recommend the cloud food?” The tiktok kissed his fingertips-all twenty at once.

Joan looked at Voltaire, too moved to speak. “ Merci,” she managed to stammer at last. “To Voltaire, the Prince of Light, and to the Creator, from Whom all blessings flow.”

“The credit is entirely mine,” said Voltaire. “I have never shared a byline, even with deities.”

She asked nervously, “The… .It….which nearly erased me?”

He scowled. “I have felt that apparition-or rather, its lack of appearance, while manifesting a presence. It stalks us still, I fear.”

Garcon said, “Could it be the wolf-pack programs who seek criminal users of computational volume?”

Voltaire raised an eyebrow. “You have become learned, Garcon? I have swept aside these bloodhounds. No, this It is…other.”

“We must defeat it!” Joan felt herself a warrior again.

“Ummm, no doubt. We may need your angels, my sweet. And we must consider where we truly are.”

With a wave he blew away the roof, revealing the bowl of a vast sky. Not the sprinkling of lights she had known-though when she tried, she could in fact recall no specific constellations.

Here the sky blazed with so many stars it hurt her eyes. He said this was because they were near the center of some territory named “Galaxy” and that stars liked to dwell here.

The sight made her suck in her breath. On such a stage, what could they do?