Foundation’s Fear

1.

Joan of Arc wakened inside an amber dream. Cool breezes caressed her, odd noises reverberated. She heard before she saw

—and abruptly found herself sitting outdoors. She noted things one at a time, as though some part of herself were counting them.

Soft air. Before her, a smooth round table.

Pressing against her, an unsettling white chair. Its seat, unlike those in her home village of Domremy, was not hand-hewn of wood. Its smooth slickness lewdly aped her contours. She reddened.

Strangers. One, two, three…winking into being before her eyes.

They moved. Peculiar people. She could not tell woman from man, except for those whose pantaloons and tunics outlined their intimate parts. The spectacle was even more than she’d seen in Chinon, at the lewd court of the Great and True King.

Talk. The strangers seemed oblivious of her, though she could hear them chattering in the background as distinctly as she sometimes heard her voices. She listened only long enough to conclude that what they said, having nothing to do with holiness or France, was clearly not worth hearing.

Noise. From outside. An iron river of self-moving carriages muttered by. She felt surprise at this-then somehow the emotion evaporated.

A long view, telescoping in

Pearly mists concealed distant ivory spires. Fog made them seem like melting churches.

What was this place?

A vision, perhaps related to her beloved voices. Could such apparitions be holy?

Surely the man at a nearby table was no angel. He was eating scrambled eggs-through a straw.

And the women-unchaste, flagrant, gaudy cornucopias of hip and thigh and breast. Some drank red wine from transparent goblets, different from any she’d seen at the royal court.

Others seemed to sup from floating clouds-delicate, billowing mousse fogs. One mist, reeking of beef with a tangy Loire sauce, passed near her. She breathed in-and felt in an instant that she had experienced a meal.

Was this heaven? Where appetites were satisfied without labor and toil?

But no. Surely the final reward was not so, so… carnal. And perturbing. And embarrassing.

The fire some sucked into their mouths from little reeds-those alarmed her. A cloud of smoke drifting her way flushed birds of panic from her breast-although she could not smell the smoke, nor did it burn her eyes or sear her throat.

The fire, the fire!she thought, heart fluttering in panic. What had….?

She saw a being made of breastplate coming at her with a tray of food and drink -poison from enemies, no doubt, the foes of France!she thought in churning fright-she at once reached for her sword.

“Be with you in a moment,” the breast-plated thing said as it wheeled past her to another table. “I’ve only got four hands. Do have patience.”

An inn, she thought. It was some kind of inn, though there appeared to be nowhere to lodge. And yes…it came now…she was supposed to meet someone…a gentleman?

That one: the tall, skinny old man-much older than Jacques Dars, her father-the only one besides herself attired normally.

Something about his dress recalled the foppish dandies at the Great and True King’s court. His hair curled tight, its whiteness set off by a lilac ribbon at his throat. He wore a pair of mignonette ruffles with narrow edging, a long waistcoat of brown satin with colored flowers, and sported red velvet breeches, white stockings, and chamois shoes.

A silly, vain aristocrat, she thought. A fop accustomed to carriages, who could not so much as sit a horse, much less do holy battle.

But duty was a sacred obligation. If King Charles ordered her to advance, advance she would.

She rose. Her suit of mail felt surprisingly light. She hardly sensed the belted-on protective leather flaps in front and back, nor the two metal arm plates that left elbows free to wield the sword. No one paid the least attention to the rustle of her mail or her faint clank.

“Are you the gentleman I am to meet? Monsieur Arouet?”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped. “Arouet is my father’s name-the name of an authoritarian prude, not mine. No one has called me that in years.”

Up close, he seemed less ancient. She’d been misled by his white hair, which she now saw was false, a powdered wig secured by the lilac ribbon under his chin.

“What should I call you then?” She suppressed terms of contempt for this dandy-rough words learned from comrades-in-arms, now borne by demons to her tongue’s edge, but not beyond.

“Poet, tragedian, historian.” He leaned forward and with a wicked wink whispered, “I style myself Voltaire. Freethinker. Philosopher king.”

“Besides the King of Heaven and His son, I call but one man King. Charles VII of the House of Valois. And I’LL call you Arouet until my royal master bids me do otherwise.”

“My dear pucelIe, your Charles is dead.”

“No!”

He glanced at the noiseless carriages propelled by invisible forces on the street. “Sit down, sit down. Much else has passed, as well. Do help me get that droll waiter’s attention.”

“You know me?” Led by her voices, she had cast off her father’s name to call herself La PucelIe, the Chaste Maid.

“I know you very well. Not only did you live centuries before me, I wrote a play about you. And I have curious memories of speaking with you before, in some shadowy spaces.” He shook his head, frowning. “Besides my garments-beautiful, n’est ce pas?-you’re the only familiar thing about this place. You and the street, though I must say you’re younger than I thought, while the street… hmmm…seems wider yet older. They finally got ‘round to paving it.”

“I, I cannot fathom-”

He pointed to a sign that bore the inn’s name -Aux Deux Magots.“Mademoiselle Lecouvreur-a famous actress, though equally known as my mistress.” He blinked. “You’re blushing-how sweet.”

“I know nothing of such things.” She added with more than a trace of pride, “I am a maid.”

He grimaced. “Why one would be proud of such an unnatural state, I can’t imagine.”

“As I cannot imagine why you are so dressed.”

“My tailors will be mortally offended! But allow me to suggest that it is you, my dear pucelle, who, in your insistence on dressing like a man, would deprive civilized society of one of its most harmless pleasures.”

“An insistence I most dearly paid for,” she retorted, remembering how the bishops badgered her about her male attire as relentlessly as they inquired after her divine voices.

As if in the absurd attire members of her sex were required to wear, she could have defeated the English-loving duke at Orleans! Or led three thousand knights to victory at Jargeau and Meung-surLoire, Beaugency and Patay, throughout that summer of glorious conquests when, led by her voices, she could do no wrong.

She blinked back sudden tears. A rush of memory-

Defeat…Then the bloodred darkness of lost battles had descended, muffling her voices, while those of her English-loving enemies grew strong.

“No need to get testy,” Monsieur Arouet said, gently patting her knee plate. “Although I personally find your attire repulsive, I would defend to the death your right to dress any way you please. Or undress.” He eyed the near-transparent upper garment of a female inn patron nearby.

“Sir-”

“Paris has not lost its appetite for finery after all. Pale fruit of the gods, don’t you agree?”

“No, I do not. There is no virtue greater than chastity in women-or in men. Our Lord was chaste, as are our saints and priests.”

“Priests chaste!” He rolled his eyes. “Pity you weren’t at the school my father forced me to attend as a boy. You could have so informed the Jesuits, who daily abused their innocent charges.”

“I, I cannot believe-”

“And what of him?” Voltaire talked right over her, pointing at the four-handed creature on wheels rolling toward them. “No doubt such a creature is chaste. Is it then virtuous, too?”

“Christianity, France itself, is founded on-”

“If chastity were practiced in France as much as it’s preached, the race would be extinct.”

The wheeled creature braked by their table. Stamped on his chest was what appeared to be his name: GARCON 213-ADM. In a bass voice as clear as any man’s, he said, “A costume party, eh? I hope my delay will not make you late. Our mechfolk are having difficulties.”

It eyed the other tiktok bringing dishes forth-a honey-haired blond in a hairnet, approximately humanlike. A demon?

The Maid frowned. Its jerky glance, even though mechanical, recalled the way her jailers had gawked at her. Humiliated, she had cast aside the women’s garments that her Inquisitors forced her to wear. Resuming manly attire, she’d scornfully put her jailers in their place. It had been a fine moment.

The cook assumed a haughty look, but fussed with her hairnet and smiled at Garcon 213-ADM before averting her eyes. The import of this eluded Joan. She had accepted mechanicals in this strange place, without questioning their meaning. Presumably this was some intermediate station in the Lord’s providential order. But it was puzzling.

Monsieur Arouet reached out and touched the mechman’s nearest arm, whose construction the Maid could not help but admire. If such a creature could be made to sit a horse, in battle it would be invincible. The possibilities…

“Where are we?” Monsieur Arouet asked. “Or perhaps I should ask, when? I have friends in high places-”

“And I in low,” the mechman said good-naturedly. “-and I demand a full account of where we are, what’s going on.”

The mechman shrugged with two of his free arms, while the two others set the table. “How could a mechwait with intelligence programmed to suit his station, instruct monsieur, a human being, in the veiled mysteries of simspace? Have monsieur and mademoiselle decided on their order?”

“You have not yet brought us the menu,” said Monsieur Arouet.

The mechman pushed a button under the table. Two flat scrolls embedded in the table shimmered, letters glowing. The Maid let out a small cry of delight-then, in response to Monsieur Arouet’s censorious look, clapped her hand over her mouth. Her peasant manners were a frequent source of embarrassment.

“Ingenious,” said Monsieur Arouet, switching the button on and off as he examined the underside of the table. “How does it work?”

“I’m not programmed to know. You’ll have to ask a mechlectrician about that.”

“A what?”

“With all due respect, Monsieur, my other customers are waiting. I am programmed to take your order.”

“What will you have, my dear?” Monsieur Arouet asked her.

She looked down, embarrassed. “Order for me,” she said.

“Ah, yes. I quite forgot.”

“Forgot what?” asked the mechman.

“My companion is unlettered. She can’t read. I might as well be, too, for all the good this menu’s doing me.”

So this obviously learned man could not fathom the Table of House. Joan found that endearing, amid this blizzard of the bizarre.

The mechman explained and Voltaire interrupted.

“Cloud-food?Electronic cuisine?” He grimaced. “Just bring me the best you have for great hunger and thirst. What can you recommend for abstinent virgins-a plate of dirt, perhaps? Chased with a glass of vinegar?”

“Bring me a slice of bread,” the Maid said with frosty dignity. “And a small bowl of wine to dip it in.”

“Wine!” said Monsieur Arouet. “Your voices allow wine? Mais quelle scandale! If word got out that you drink wine, what would the priests say of the shoddy example you’re setting for the future saints of France?”

He turned to the mechman. “Bring her a glass of water, small.” As Garcon 213-ADM withdrew, Monsieur Arouet called out, “And make sure the bread is a crust! Preferably moldy!”

2.

Marq Hofti strode swiftly toward his Waldon Shaft office, his colleague and friend Sybyl chattering beside him. She was always energetic, bristling with ideas. Only occasionally did her energy seem tiresome.

The Artifice Associates offices loomed, weighty and impressive in the immense, high shaft. A flutter-glider circled the protruding levels far above, banking among pretty green clouds. Marq craned his neck upward and watched the glider catch an updraft of the city’s powerful air circulators. Atmospheric control even added the puff-ball vapors for variety. He longed to be up there, swooping among their sticky flavors.

Instead, he was down here, donning his usual carapace of each-day’s-a-challenge vigor. And today was going to be unusual. Risky. And though the zest for it sang in his stride, his grin, the fear of failure gave a leaden lining to his most buoyant plans.

If he failed today, at least he would not tumble from the sky, like a pilot who misjudged the thermals in the shaft. Grimly, he entered his office.

“It makes me nervous,” Sybyl said, cutting into his mood.

“Umm. What?” He dumped his pack and sat at his ornate control board.

She sat beside him. The board filled half the office, making his desk look like a cluttered afterthought. “The Sark sims. We’ve spent so much time on those resurrection protocols, the slices and embeddings and all.”

“I had to fill in whole layers missing from the recordings. Synaptic webs from the association cortex. Plenty of work.”

“I did, too. My Joan was missing chunks of the hippocampus.”

“Pretty tough?” The brain remembered things using constellations of agents from the hippocampus. They laid down long-term memory elsewhere, spattering pieces of it around the cerebral cortex. Not nearly as clean and orderly as computer memory, which was one of the major problems. Evolution was a kludge, mechanisms crammed in here and there, with little attention to overall design. At building minds, the Lord was something of an amateur.

“Murder. I stayed to midnight for weeks.”

“Me too.”

“Did you…use the library?” He considered. Artifice Associates kept dense files of brain maps, all taken from volunteers. There were menus for selecting mental agents-subroutines which could carry out the tasks which myriad synapses did in the brain. These were all neatly translated into digital equivalents, saving great labor. But to use them meant running up big bills, because each was copyrighted. “No. Got a private source.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

Was she trying to coax an admission from him? They had both had to go through scanning as part of getting their Master Class ratings in the meritocracy. Marq had thriftily kept his scan. Better than a back-alley brain map, for sure. He was no genius, but the basics of Voltaire’s underpinnings weren’t the important part, after all. Exactly how the sim ran the hindbrain functions-basic maintenance, housekeeping circuitry-certainly couldn’t matter, could it?

“Let’s have a look at our creations,” Marq said brightly, to get off the subject.

Sybyl shook her head. “Mine is stable. But look-we don’t really know what to expect. These fully integrated Personalities are still isolated.”

“Nature of the beast.” Marq shrugged, playing the jaded pro. Now that his hands caressed the board, though, a tingling excitement seized him.

“Let’s do it today,” she said, words rushing out.

“What? I-I’d like to slap some more patches over the gaps, maybe install a rolling buffer as insurance against character shifts, spy into”

“Details! Look, these sims have been running on internals for weeks of sim-time, self-integrating. Let’s interact.”

Marq thought of the glider pilot, up there amid treacherous winds. He had never done anything so risky; he wasn’t the type. His kind of peril lay on the digital playing field. Here, he was master.

But he had not gotten this far by being foolish. Letting these simulations come into contact with the present might induce hallucinations in them, fear, even panic.

“Just think! Talking to pre-antiquity.”

He realized that he was the one feeling fear. Think like a pilot! he admonished himself.

“Would you want anyone else to do it?” Sybyl asked.

He was keenly aware of the fleeting warmth of her thigh as it accidentally brushed his.

“No one else could,” he admitted.

“And it’ll put us ahead of any competition.”

“That guy Seldon, he could’ve, once he got them from those Sark ‘New Renaissance’ jokers. Using us, well-I guess he needs to get some distance from a dicey proposition like this.”

“Political distance,” she agreed. “Deniability.”

“He didn’t seem that savvy to me-politically, I mean.”

“Maybe he wants us to think that. How’d he charm Cleon?”

“Beats me. Not that I wouldn’t want one of our guys running things. A mathist minister-who’d imagine that?”

So Artifice Associates was out on its own here. With their Sark contacts, the company had already displaced Digitfac and Axiom Alliance in the sale and design of holographic intelligences. Competition was rough in several product lines, though. With a pipeline to truly ancient Personalities, they could sweep the board clean. At the knife edge of change, Marq thought happily. Danger and money, the two great aphrodisiacs.

He had spent yesterday eavesdropping on Voltaire and was sure Sybyl had done the same with the Maid. Everything had gone well. “Face filters for us, though.”

“Don’t trust yourself to not give away your feelings?” Sybyl gave him a womanly, throaty chuckle. “Think you’re too easy to read?”

“Am I?” Ball back in her court.

“Let’s say your intentions are, at least.”

Her sly wink made his nostrils flare-which reminded Marq of why he needed the filters. He thumbed in an amiable expression he had carefully fashioned for dealing by phone with clients. He had learned early in this business that the world was packed with irritable people. Especially Trantor.

“Better put a body language refiner on, too,” she said flatly, all business now. That was what never ceased to intrigue him: artful ambiguity.

She popped up her own filters, imported instantly from her board halfway across the building. “Want a vocabulary box?”

He shrugged. “Anything they can’t understand, we’ll credit to language problems.”

“What is that stuff they speak?”

“Dead language, unknown parent world.” His hands were a blur, setting up the transition.

“It has a, well, a liquid feel.”

“One thing.”

Sybyl’s breasts swelled as she drew in her breath, held it, then slowly eased it out. “I just hope my client doesn’t find out about Seldon. The company’s taking an awful chance, not telling either one of them about the other.”

“So what?” He enjoyed giving a carefree shrug. A flutter-glide would petrify him, but power games-those he loved. Artifice Associates had taken major accounts from the two deadly rivals in this whole affair.

“If both sides of the argument find out we’re handling both accounts, they’ll leave. Refuse to pay beyond the retainer-and you know how much we’ve overspent beyond that.”

“Leave?” His turn to chuckle. “Not if they want to win. We’re the best.” Marq gave her his cocky smile. “You and me, in case you were wondering. Just wait till you see this.”

He downed the lights, started the run, and leaned back in his clasp chair, legs stretched out on the table before him. He wanted to impress her. That wasn’t all he wanted. But since her husband had been crushed in an accident, beyond repair by even the best medicos, he’d decided to wait a decent interval before he made his move. What a team they would make! Open a firm-say, Marq-Sybyl, Limited-skim off the best A2customers, make a name.

No names. Let’s be fair.

Sybyl’s voice trembled in the gloom. “To meet ancients…”

Down, down, down-into the replicated world, its seamless blue complexity swelling across the entire facing wall. Vibrotactile feedback from inductance dermotabs perfected the illusion.

They swooped into a primitive city, barely one layer of buildings to cover the naked ground. Some sort of crude village, pre-Empire. Streets whirled by, buildings turned in artful projection. Even the crowds and clumped traffic below seemed authentic, a muddled human jumble. Swiftly they careened into their foreground sim: a cafe on something called the Boulevard St. Germain. Cloying smells, the muted grind of traffic outside, a rattle of plates, the heady aroma of a souffle.

Marq zoomed them into the same timeframe as the recreated entities. A lean man loomed across the wall. His eyes radiated intelligence, mouth tilted with sardonic mirth.

Sybyl whistled through her teeth. Eyes narrowing, she watched the re-creation’s mouth, as if to read its lips. Voltaire was interrogating the mechwaiter. Irritably, of course.

“High five-sense resolution,” she said, appropriately awed. “I can’t get mine that clear. I still don’t know how you do it.”

Marq thought, My Sark contacts. I know you have some, too.

“Hey,” she said. “What-” He grinned with glee as her mouth fell open and she stared at the image of her Joan next to his Voltaire-freeze-frame, data streams initialized but not yet running interactively.

Her expression mingled admiration with fear. “We’re not supposed to bring them on together!-not till they meet in the coliseum.”

“Who says? It’s not in our contract!”

“Hastor will skewer us anyway.”

“Maybe-if he finds out. Want me to section her off?”

Her mouth twisted prettily. “Of course not. What the hell, it’s done. Activate.”

“I knew you’d go for it. We’re the artists, we make the decisions.”

“Have we got the running capacity to make them realtime?”

He nodded. “It’ll cost, but sure. And…I’ve got a little proposition for you.”

“Uh-oh.” Her brow arched. “Forbidden, no doubt.”

He waited, just to tantalize her. And to judge, from her reaction, how receptive she’d be if he tried to change the nature of their long-standing platonic relationship. He had tried, once before. Her rejection-she was married on a decade contract, she gently reminded him-only made him desire her more. All that and faithful in marriage, too. Enough to make the teeth grind-which they had, frequently. Of course, they could be replaced for less than the price of an hour with a good therapist.

Her body language now-a slight pulling away-told him she was still mourning her dead husband. He was prepared to wait the customary year, but only if he had to.

“What say we give both of them massive files, far beyond Basis State,” he said quickly. “Really give them solid knowledge of what Trantor’s like, the Empire, everything.”

“Impossible.”

“No, just expensive.”

“So much!”

“So what? Just think about it. We know what these two Primordials represented, even if we don’t know what world they came from.”

“Their strata memories say ‘Earth,’ remember?”

Marq shrugged. “So? Dozens of primitive worlds called themselves that.”

“Oh, the way Primitives call themselves ‘the People’?”

“Sure. The whole folk tale is wrong astrophysically, too. This legend of the original planet is pretty clear on one point-the world was mostly oceans. So why call it ‘Earth’?”

She nodded. “Granted, they’re deluded. And they have no solid databases about astronomy, I checked that. But look at their Social Context readings. These two stood for concepts, eternal ideas: Faith and Reason.”

Marq balled both fists in enthusiasm, a boyish gesture. “Right! On top of that we’ll pump in what we know today-pseudonatural selection, psychophilosophy, gene destinies-”

“Boker will never go for it,” Sybyl said. “It’s precisely modem information the Preservers of Our Father’s Faith don’t want. They want the historical Maid, pure and uncontaminated by modem ideas. I’d have to program her to read-”

“A cinch.”

“-write, handle higher mathematics. Give me a break!”

“Do you object on ethical grounds? Or simply to avoid a few measly centuries of work?”

“Easy for you to say. Your Voltaire has an essentially modem mind. Whoever made him had his own work, dozens of biographies. My Maid is as much myth as she is fact. Somebody re-created her out of thin air.”

“Then your objection’s based on laziness, not principle.”

“It’s based on both.”

“Will you at least give it some thought?”

“I just did. The answer is no.”

Marq sighed. “No use arguing. You’ll see, once we let them interact.”

Her mood seemed to swing from resistance to excitement; in her enthusiasm, she even touched his leg, fingers lingering. He felt her affectionate tap just as they opened into the simspace.

3.

“What’s going on here?” Voltaire rose, hands on hips-chair toppling back behind him, clattering on stone-and peered down at them from the screen. “Who are you? What infernal agency do you represent?”

Marq stopped the sim and turned to Sybyl. “Uh, do you want to explain it to him?”

“He’s your re-creation, not mine.”

“I’ve dreaded this.” Voltaire was imposing. He exuded power and electric confidence. Somehow, in all his microscopic inspections of this sim, the sum of it all, this gestalt essence, had never come through.

“We worked hard on this! If you stall now-”

Marq braced himself. “Right, right.”

“How do you look to him?”

“I made myself materialize, walk over, sit down.”

“He saw you come out of nothing?”

“I guess so,” he said, chagrined. “Shook him up.”

Marq had used every temperament fabrication he had, trimming and shaping mood constellations, but he had left intact Voltaire’s central core. What a hardball knot it was! Some programmer of pre-antiquity had done a startling, dense job. Gingerly, he dipped the Voltaire-sim into a colorless void of sensory static. Soothe, then slide…

His fingers danced. He cut in the time acceleration.

Sim-personalities needed computational durations to assimilate new experience. He thrust Voltaire into a cluttered, seemingly real experience-net. The personality reacted to the simulation and raced through the induced emotions. Voltaire was rational; his personality could accept new ideas that took the Joansim far longer.

What did all this do to a reconstruction of a real person, when knowledge of a different reality dawned? Here came the tricky part of the reanimation. Acceptance of who/what/when they were.

Conceptual shock waves would resound through the digital personalities, forcing emotional adjustments. Could they take it? These weren’t real people, after all, any more than an abstract impressionist painting pretended to tell you what a cow looked like. Now, he and Sybyl could step in only after the automatic programs had done their best.

Here their math-craft met its test. Artificial personalities had to survive this cusp point or crash into insanity and incoherence. Racing along highways of expanding perception, the ontological swerves could jolt a construct so hard, it shattered.

He let them meet each other, watching carefully. The Aux Deux Magots, simple town and crowd backdrop. To shave computing time, weather repeated every two minutes of simtime. Cloudless sky, to save on fluid flow modeling. Sybyl tinkered with her Joan, he with his Voltaire, smoothing and rounding small cracks and slippages in the character perceptual matrix.

They met, spoke. Some skittering, blue-white storms swept through Voltaire’s neuronal simulations. Marq sent in conceptual repair algorithms. Turbulence lapped away.

“Got it!” he whispered. Sybyl nodded beside him, intent on her own smoothing functions.

“He’s running regular now,” Marq said, feeling better about the startup mistake. “I’ll keep my manifestation sitting, right? No disappearances or anything.”

“Joan’s cleared up.” Sybyl pointed at brown striations in the matrix representation that floated in 3D before her. “Some emotional tectonics, but they’ll take time.”

“I say- go.”

She smiled. “Let’s.”

The moment came. Marq sucked Voltaire and Joan back into realtime.

Within a minute he knew that Voltaire was still intact, functional, integrated. So was Joan, though she had retreated into her pensive withdrawal mode, an aspect well documented; her internal weather.

Voltaire, though, was irked. He swelled life-sized before them. The hologram scowled, swore, and loudly demanded the right to initiate communication whenever he liked.

“You think I want to be at your mercy whenever I’ve something to say? You’re talking to a man who was exiled, censored, jailed, suppressed-who lived in constant fear of church and state authorities-”

“Fire,” the Maid whispered with eerie sensuality.

“Calm down,” Marq ordered Voltaire, “or I’ll shut you off.” He froze action and turned to Sybyl. “What do you think? Should we comply?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s not fair for them to be forever at our beck and call.”.

“Fair? This is a sim!”

“Theyhave notions of fairness. If we violate those-”

“Okay, okay.” He started action again. “The next question is how.”

“I don’t care how you do it,” the hologram said. “Just do it-at once!”

“Hold off,” Marq said. “We’ll let you have running time, to integrate your perception space.”

“What does that mean?” Voltaire asked. “Artful expression is one thing, jargon another.”

“To work out your kinks,” Marq replied dryly.

“So that we can converse?”

“Yes,” Sybyl said. “At your initiation, not just ours. Don’t go for a walk at the same time, though-that requires too much data-shuffling.”

“We’re trying to hold costs down here,” Marq said, leaning back so he could get a better view of Sybyl’s legs.

“Well, hurry up,” the Voltaire image said. “Patience is for martyrs and saints, not for men of belles lettres.”

The translator rendered all this in present language, inserting the audio of ancient, lost words. Knowledge fetchers found the translation and overlaid it for Marq and Sybyl. Still, Marq had left in the slippery, natural acoustics for atmosphere-the tenor of the unimaginably distant past.

“Just say my name, or Sybyl’s, and we’ll appear to you in a rectangle rimmed in red.”

“Must it be red?” The Maid’s voice was frail. “Can you not make it blue? Blue is so cool, the color of the sea. Water is stronger than fire, can put fire out.”

“Stop babbling,” the other hologram snapped. He beckoned to a mechwaiter and said, “That flambe dish, there-put it out at once. It’s upsetting the Maid. And you two geniuses out there! If you can resurrect the dead, you certainly should be able to change red to blue.”

“I don’t believe this,” said Sybyl. “A sim? Who does he think he is?”

“The voice of reason,” Marq replied. “Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire.”

“Do you think they’re ready to see Boker?” Sybyl chewed prettily at her lip. “We agreed to let him into the sim as soon as they were stabilized.”

Marq thought. “Let’s play it square and linear with him. I’ll call.”

“We have so much to learn from them!”

“True. Who could have guessed that prehistoricals could be such bastards?”

4.

She tried to ignore the sorceress called Sybyl, who claimed to be her creator-as if anyone but the King of Heaven could lay claim to such a feat. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Events crowded in-rushed, dense, suffocating. Her choking, pain-shot death still swarmed about her.

On the dunce’s cap-the one they’d set upon her shaven head on that fiery day, the darkest and yet most glorious day of her short life-her “crimes” were inscribed in the holy tongue: Heretica, Relapsa, Apostata, Idolater. Black words, soon to ignite.

The learned cardinals and bishops of the foul, English-loving University of Paris, and of the Church-Christ’s bride on earth!-had set her living body on fire. All for carrying out the Lord’s will-that the Great and True King should be His minister in France. For that, they had rejected the king’s ransom, and sent her to the searing pyre. What then might they not do to this sorceress called Sybyl-who, like her, dwelt among men, wore men’s attire, and claimed for herself powers that eclipsed those of the Creator Himself?

“Please go away,” she murmured. “I must have silence if I am to hear my voices.”

But neither La Sorciere nor the bearded man in black named Boker-who resembled uncannily the glowering patriarchs on the domed ceiling of the great church at Rouen-would leave her alone.

She implored them, “If you must talk, natter at Monsieur Arouet. That one likes nothing more.”

“Sacred Maid, Rose of France,” said the bearded one, “was France your world?”

“My station in the world,” Joan said.

“Your planet, I mean.”

“Planets are in the sky. I was of the earth.”

“I mean-oh, never mind.” He spoke soundlessly to the woman, Sybyl-”Of the ground? Farmers? Could even prehistoricals be so ignorant?” -apparently thinking she could not read lips, a trick she had mastered to divine the deliberations of churchly tribunals.

Joan said, “I know what is sufficient to my charge.”

Boker frowned, then rushed on. “Please, hear me out. Our cause is just. The fate of the sacred depends upon our winning to our side many converts. If we are to uphold the vessel of humanity, and time-honored traditions of our very identity, we must defeat Secular Skepticism.”

She tried to turn away, but the clanking weight of her chains stopped her. “Leave me alone. Although I killed no one, I fought in many combats to assure the victory of France’s Great True King. I presided over his coronation at Rheims. I was wounded in battle for his sake.”

She held up her wrists-for she was now in the foul cell at Rouen, in leg irons and chains. Sybyl had said this would anchor her, be good for her character in some way. As an angel, Sybyl was no doubt correct. Boker began to implore her, but Joan summoned strength to say, “The world knows how I was requited for my pains. I shall wage war no more.”

Monsieur Boker turned to the sorceress. “A sacrilege, to keep a great figure in chains. Can’t you transport her to some place of theological rest? A cathedral?”

“Context. Sims need context,” La Sorciere said without sound. Joan found she could read lips with a clarity she had never known. Perhaps this Purgatory improved its charges.

Monsieur Boker clucked. “I am impressed with what you’ve done, but unless you can make her cooperate, what good is she to us?”

“You haven’t seen her at the summit of her Selfhood. The few historical associations we have been able to decipher claim that she was a ‘mesmerizing presence.’ We’ll have to bring that out.”

“Can you not make her smaller? It’s impossible to talk to a giant.”

The Maid, to her astonishment, shrank by two-thirds in height.

Monsieur Boker seemed pleased. “Great Joan, you misunderstand the nature of the war that lies ahead. Uncountable millennia have passed since your ascension into heaven. You-”

The Maid sat up. “Tell me one thing. Is the king of France a descendant of the English Henry’s House of Lancaster? Or is he a Valois, descended from the Great and True King Charles?”

Monsieur Boker blinked and thought. “I…I think it may be truly said that we Preservers of Our Father’s Faith, the party I represent, are in a manner of speaking descendants of your Charles.”

The Maid smiled. She knew her voices had been heaven-sent, no matter what the bishops said. She’d only denied them when they took her to the cemetery of St. Ouen, and then only for fear of the fire. She’d been right to recant her recantation two days later; the Lancastrian failure to annex France confirmed that. If Monsieur Boker spoke for descendants of the House of Valois, despite his clear absence of a noble title, she would hear him out.

“Proceed,” she said.

Monsieur Boker explained that this place was soon to hold a referendum. (After some deliberation with la Sorciere, he advised that Joan should think of this place as France, in essence.) The contest would be between two major parties, Preservers vs. Skeptics. Both parties had agreed to hold a Great Debate between two verbal duelists, to frame the salient question.

“What issue?” the Maid asked sharply.

“Whether mechanical beings endowed with artificial intelligence should be built. And if so, should they be allowed full citizenship, with all attendant rights.”

The Maid shrugged. “A joke? Only aristocrats and noblemen have rights.”

“Not anymore, though of course we do have a class system. Now the common lot enjoy rights.”

“Peasants like me?” the Maid asked. “We?”

Monsieur Boker, face a moving flurry of exasperated scowls, turned to La Sorciere. “Must I do everything?”

“You wanted her as is,” La Sorciere said. “Or, rather, as was.”

Monsieur Boker spent two minutes ranting about something he called the Conceptual Shift. This term meant an apparently theological dispute about the nature of mechanical artifice. To Joan the answer seemed clear, but then, she was a woman of the fields, not a word artisan.

“Why don’t you ask your king? One of his counselors? Or one of your learned men?”

Monsieur Boker curled his lip, dismissively fanned the air. “Our leaders are pallid! Weak! Rational doormats!”

“Surely-”

“You cannot imagine, coming from ancient passion. Intensity and passion are regarded as bad form, out of style. We wished to find intellects with the old fire, the-”

“No! Oh!” The flames, licking-

It was some moments before her breathing calmed and she could shakily listen again.

The great debate between Faith and Reason would be held in the Coliseum of Junin Sector before an audience of 400,000 souls. The Maid and her opponent would appear in holograms, magnified by a factor of thirty. Each citizen would then vote on the question.

“Vote?” the Maid inquired.

“You wanted her uncorrupted,” La Sorciere said. “You got her.”

The Maid listened in silence, forced to absorb millennia in minutes. When Monsieur Boker finished, she said, “I excelled in battle, if only for a brief time, but never in argument. No doubt you know of my fate.”

Monsieur Boker looked pained. “The vagueries of the ancients! We have a skimpy historical frame around your, ah, representation-no more. We know not what place you lived, but we do know minutiae of events after your-”

“Death. You can speak of it. I am accustomed to it, as any Christian maiden should be, upon arrival in Purgatory. I know who you two are, as well.”

La Sorciere asked cautiously, “You…do?”

“Angels! You manifest yourselves as ordinary folk, to calm my fears. Then you set me a task. Even if it involves the roguish, it is a divine mission.”

Monsieur Boker nodded slowly, glancing at La Sorciere. “From the tatters of data flapping about your Self, we gather that your reputation was restored at hearings held twenty-six years after your death. Those involved in your condemnation repented of their mistake. You were called, in high esteem, La Rose de la wire.”

She blinked back wistful tears. “Justice…Had I been skilled in argument, I’d have convinced my inquisitors-those English-loving preachers of the University of Paris!-that I am not a witch.”

Monsieur Boker seemed moved. “Even pre-antiquity knew when a holy power was with them.”

The Maid laughed, lighthearted. “The Lord’s on the side of His Son, and the saints and martyrs, too. But that does not mean they escape failure and death.”

“She’s right,” La Sorciere said. “Even worlds and galaxies share man’s fate.”

“We of spirituality need you,” Monsieur Boker pleaded. “We have become too much like our machines. We hold nothing sacred except the smooth functioning of our parts. We know you will address the question with intensity, yet in simplicity and truth. That is all we ask.”

The Maid felt fatigued. She needed solitude, time to reflect. “I must consult with my voices. Will there be only one, or many questions that I must address?”

“Just one.”

The inquisitors had been far more demanding. They asked many questions, dozens, sometimes the same ones, over and over again. Right answers at Poitiers proved wrong elsewhere. Deprived of food, drink, rest, intimidated by the enforced journey to the cemetery, exhausted by the tedious sermon they compelled her to hear, and wracked by terror of the fire, she could not withstand their interrogation.

“ Does the Archangel Michael have long hair?”

“Is St. Margaret stout or lean?”

“Are St. Catherine’s eyes brown or blue?”

They trapped her into assigning to voices of the spirit attributions of the flesh. Then they perversely condemned her for confounding sacred spirit with corrupt flesh.

All had been miasma. And in Purgatory, worse trials could ensue. She could not therefore be certain if this Boker would turn out to be friend or foe.

“What is it?” she wanted to know. “This single question you want me to answer.”

“There is universal consensus that man-made intelligences have a kind of brain. The question we want you to answer is whether they have a soul. “

“Only the Almighty has the power to create a soul.”

Monsieur Boker smiled. “We Preservers couldn’t agree with you more. Artificial intelligences, unlike us, their creators, have no soul. They’re just machines. Mechanical contrivances with electronically programmed brains. Only man has a soul.”

“If you already know the answer to the question, why do you need me?”

“To persuade! First the undecided of Junin Sector, then Trantor, then the Empire!”

The Maid reflected. Her inquisitors had known the answers to the questions they plied her with, too. Monsieur Boker seemed sincere, but then so were those who pronounced her a witch. Monsieur Boker had told her the answer beforehand, one with which any sensible person would agree. Still, she could not be sure of his intentions. Not even the crucifix she asked the priest to hold aloft was proof against the oily smoke, the biting flames…

“Well?” asked Monsieur Boker. “Will the Sacred Rose consent to be our champion?”

“These people I must convince. Are they, too, descendants of Charles, the Great and True King, of the House of Valois?”

5.

When Marq strode into Splashes amp; Sniffs to meet his buddy and coworker Nim, he was surprised to find Nim already there. To judge from Nim’s dilated pupils, he’d been there most of the afternoon.

Marq said, “Hitting it hard? Something going on?”

Nim shook his head. “Same old Marq, blunt as a fist. First, try the Swirlsnort. Doesn’t do a thing for your thirst-in fact, it will dry up your entire head-but you won’t care.”

Swirlsnort turned out to be a powdery concoction that tasted like nutmeg and bit as if he had swallowed an angry insect. Marq sniffed it slowly, one nostril at a time. He wanted to be relatively clearheaded when Nim updated him on office politics and funding. After that, he’d allow himself to get skyed.

“You may not like this,” said Nim. “It concerns Sybyl.”

“Sybyl!” He laughed a bit uneasily. “How’d you know I-”

“You told me. Last time we had a snort together, remember?”

“Oh.” The stuff made him babble. Worse, it made him forget he had.

“Not exactly a state secret.” Nim grinned.

“That obvious?” He wanted to be certain Nim, who switched women as often as he changed his underwear, had no designs on Sybyl of his own. “What about her?”

“Well, there’s a lot of juice waiting for whoever wins the big one at the coliseum.”

“No problem,” Marq said. “Me.”

Nim ran his hand through his strawberry blond hair. “I can’t decide if it’s your modesty or your ability to foresee the future that I like most about you. Your modesty. Must be that.”

Marq shrugged. “She’s good, I’ll admit.”

“But you’re better.”

“I’m luckier. They gave me Reason. Sybyl’s stuck with Faith.”

Nim gave him a bemused glance and inhaled deeply. “I wouldn’t underestimate Faith if I were you. It’s hooked to passion, and no one’s managed to get rid of either, yet.”

“Don’t have to. Passions eventually burn out.”

“But the light of reason burns eternally?”

“If you regenerate brain cells, yes.”

Nim looked through his straw to see if anything was left and winked at Marq. “Then you don’t need a little advice.”

“What advice? I didn’t hear any advice.”

Nim clucked. “If your unregenerated brain cells contain a shred of common sense, you’ll stop cooperating with Sybyl to improve her simulation. Or better yet, you’ll keep pretending you’re cooperating, so you get the benefit of anything she can show you. But what you’ll really start doing is looking for ways to do both her and her simulation in. People say it’s terrific.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“ Someof it. Think she shows it all?”

“We’ve been working every day on-”

“Truncated sim, is what you see. Nights, she inflates the whole pseudo-psyche.”

Marq frowned. He knew he was a bit light-headed around her, pheromones doing their job, but he had compensated for that. Hadn’t he? “She wouldn’t…”

“She might. People upstairs got their eye on her.”

Marq felt a stab of jealousy in spite of himself, but he was careful not to show it. “Ummm. Thanks.”

Nim bowed his head with characteristic irony and said, “Even if you don’t need it, you’d be a fool to turn it down.”

“What, the juice, when I win?”

“Not the juice, buggo. You think I missed noticing that I’m talking to ambition’s slave? My advice.”

Marq took a hefty double-nostril snort. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”

“This thing’s going to be big. You think it’s just a job for this Sector, but I tell you, people from all over Trantor will tune into the show.”

“All the better,” Marq said, though his stomach was feeling like he had suddenly gone into free fall. Living in a real cultural renaissance was risky. Maybe his hollow feeling was the stim, though.

“I mean, Seldon and that guy who follows him around like a dog, Amaryl-you think they’ve booted this to you because it’s a snap?”

Marq took a bit of the stim before answering. “No, it’s because I’m the best.”

“And you’re a long way down from them on the status ladder. You are, my friend, expendable.”

Marq nodded soberly. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”

Was he repeating himself? Must be the stim.

Marq did not give Nim’s counsel any thought until two days later. He overheard someone in the executive lounge praising Sybyl’s work to Hastor, the leader of Artifice Associates. He skipped lunch and went back to his floor. As he passed Sybyl’s office on his way back to his own, his intention, he told himself, was to relay the compliment. But when he found her door unlocked, her office empty, an impulse seized him.

Half an hour later, he jumped slightly when she said “Marq! “ from the open doorway. Her hand smoothed her hair in what he took to be unconscious primping, betraying a desire to please. “Can I help you?”

He’d just finished the software cross-matting to link her office, so that he’d be able to monitor her interviews with her client, Boker. She shared with Marq the substance of these interviews, as far as he knew.

He reasoned that his suggestions as to how she should handle the sometimes difficult Boker would be improved if he were exposed to Boker directly. But that would compromise the client relationship, ordinarily a strict rule. This, though, was special…

He shrugged. “Just waiting for you.”

“I’ve gotten her much better structured. Her mood flutters are below zero point two.”

“Great. Can I see?”

Did her smile seem warmer than usual? He was still wondering about that when he reached his own office, after an hour of intuning on Joan. Sybyl had certainly done good work. Thorough, intricately matted in with the ancient personality topography.

All since yesterday? He thought not.

Time to do a little sniffing around in simspace.

6.

Voltaire loomed-brows furrowed, scowling, hands on skinny hips. He rose from the richly embroidered chair in his study at Cirey, the chateau of his long-term mistress, the Marquise du Chatelet.

The place he had called home for fifteen years depressed him, now that she was gone. And now the marquis, without the decency to wait until his wife’s body was cold, had informed him that he must leave.

“Get me out of here!” Voltaire demanded of the scientist who finally answered his call. Scientist-a fresh word, one no doubt derived from the Latin root, to know. But this fellow looked as though he knew little. “I want to go to the cafe. I need to see the Maid.”

The scientist leaned over the control board Voltaire was already beginning to resent, and smiled with transparent pleasure at his power. “I didn’t think she was your type. You showed a strong preference all your life-remember, I’ve scanned your memories, you have no secrets-for brainy women. Like your niece and the Madame du Chatelet.”

“So? Who truly can abide the company of stupid women? The only thing that can be said on their behalf is that they can be trusted, as they’re too stupid to practice deceit.”

“Unlike Madame du Chatelet?”

Voltaire drummed his fingers impatiently on the beautifully wrought walnut desk-a gift from Madame du Chatelet, he recalled. How had it gotten to this rude place? Could it indeed have been assembled from his memory alone? “True, she betrayed me. She paid dearly for it, too.”

The scientist arched a brow. “With that young officer, you mean? The one who made her pregnant?”

“At forty-three, a married woman with three grown children has no business becoming pregnant!”

“You hit the roof when she told you-understandable but not very enlightened. Yet you didn’t break off with her. You were with her throughout the birth.”

Voltaire fumed. Memory dark, memory flowing like black waters in a subterranean river. He’d worried himself sick about the birth, which had proved amazingly easy. Yet nine days later, the most extraordinary woman he had ever known was dead. Of childbed fever. No one-not even his niece and housekeeper and former paramour, Madame Denis, who took care of him thereafter-had ever been able to take her place. He had mourned her until, until-he approached the thought, veered away -till he died….

He puffed out his cheeks and spat back rapidly, “She persuaded me that it would be unreasonable to break with a ‘woman of exceptional breeding and talent’ merely for exercising the same rights that I enjoyed. Especially since I hadn’t made love to her for months. The rights of man, she said, belonged to women, too-provided they were of the aristocracy. I allowed her gentle reasonableness to persuade me.”

“Ah,” the scientist said enigmatically. Voltaire rubbed his forehead, heavy with brooding remembrance. “She was an exception to every rule. She understood Newton and Locke. She understood every word that I wrote. She understood me.”

“Why weren’t you making love to her? Too busy going to orgies?”

“My dear sir, my participation in such festivities has been greatly exaggerated. It’s true, I accepted an invitation to one such celebration of erotic pleasure in my youth. I acquitted myself so well, I was invited to return.”

“Did you?”

“Certainly not. Once, a philosopher. Twice, a pervert.”

“What I don’t understand is why a man of your worldliness should be so intent on another meeting with the Maid.”

“Her passion,” Voltaire said, an image of the robust Maid rising clearly in his mind’s eye. “Her courage and devotion to what she believed.”

“You possessed that trait as well.”

Voltaire stomped his foot, but the floor made no sound. “Why do you speak of me in the past tense?”

“Sorry. I’ll fill in that audio background, too.” A single hand gesture, and Voltaire heard boards creak as he paced. A carriage team clip-clopped by outside.

“I possess temperament. Do not confuse passion with temperament-which is a matter of the nerves. Passion is borne from the heart and soul, no mere mechanism of the bodily humors.”

“You believe in souls?”

“In essences, certainly. The Maid dared cling to her vision with her whole heart, despite bullying by church and state. Her devotion to her vision, unlike mine, bore no taint of perverseness. She was the first true Protestant. I’ve always preferred Protestants to papist absolutists-until I took up residence in Geneva, only to discover their public hatred of pleasure is as great as any pope’s. Only Quakers do not privately engage in what they publicly claim to abjure. Alas, a hundred true believers cannot redeem millions of hypocrites.”

The scientist twisted his mouth skeptically. “Joan recanted, knuckled under to their threats.”

“They took her to a cemetery!” Voltaire bristled with irritation. “Terrorized a credulous girl with threats of death and hell. Bishops, academicians-the most learned men of their time! Donkeys’ asses, the lot! Browbeating the bravest woman in France, a woman whom they destroyed only to revere. Hypocrites! They require martyrs as leeches require blood. They thrive on self-sacrifice-provided that the selves they sacrifice are not their own.”

“All we have is your version, and hers. Our history doesn’t go back that far. Still, we know more of people now-”

“So you imagine.” Voltaire sniffed a jot of snuff to calm himself. “Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best. They played her honor and her bravery like a fiddle, swine plucking at a violin.”

“You’re defending her.” The scientist’s wry smile mocked. “Yet in that poem you wrote about her-amazing, someone memorizing their own work, so they could recite it!-you depict her as a tavern slut, much older than she in fact was, a liar about her so-called voices, a superstitious but shrewd fool. The greatest enemy of the chastity she pretends to defend is a donkey-a donkey with wings!”

Voltaire smiled. “A brilliant metaphor for the Roman Church, n’est ce pas? I had a point to make. She was simply the sword with which I drove it home. I had not met her then. I had no idea she was a woman of such mysterious depths.”

“Not depths of intellect. A peasant!” Marq recalled how he had escaped just such a fate on the mud-grubbing world Biehleur. All through the Greys exam. And now he had fled their stodgy routines, into a true cultural revolution.

“No, no. Depths of the soul. I’m like a little stream. Clear because it is shallow. But she’s a river, an ocean! Return me to Aux Deux Magots. She and the wind-up Garcon are the only society I now have.”

“She is your adversary,” the scientist said. “A minion of those who uphold values that you fought all your life. To make sure you beat her, I’m going to supplement you.”

“I am intact and entire,” Voltaire declared frostily.

“I’ll equip you with philosophical and scientific information, rational progress. Your reason must crush her faith. You must regard her as the enemy she is, if civilization is to continue to advance along rational scientific lines.”

His eloquence and impudence were rather charming, but no substitutes for Voltaire’s fascination with Joan. “I refuse to read anything until you reunite me with the Maid-in the cafe!”

The scientist had the audacity to laugh. “You don’t get it. You have no choice. I’ll sculpt the information into you. You’ll have the information you need to win, like it or not.”

“You violate my integrity!”

“Let’s not forget that after the debate, there’ll be the question of keeping you running, or…”

“Ending me?”

“Just so you know what cards are on the table.”

Voltaire bristled. He knew the iron accents of authority, since he was first subjected to his father’s-a strict martinet who’d compelled him to attend mass, and whose austerities claimed the life of Voltaire’s mother when Voltaire was only seven. The only way she could escape her husband’s discipline was to die. Voltaire had no intention of escaping this scientist in that way.

“I refuse to use any additional knowledge you give me unless you return me at once to the cafe.”

Infuriatingly, the scientist regarded Voltaire the way Voltaire had regarded his wigmaker-with haughty superiority. His curled lip said quite clearly that he knew Voltaire could not exist without his patronage.

A humbling turnabout. Though middle-class in origin himself, Voltaire did not believe common people worthy of governing themselves. The thought of his wigmaker posing as a legislator was enough to make him never wear a wig again. To be seen similarly by this vexing, smug scientist was intolerable.

“Tell you what,” said the scientist. “You compose one of your brilliant lettres philosophiques trashing the concept of the human soul, and I will reunite you with the Maid. But if you don’t, you won’t see her until the day of the debate. Clear?”

Voltaire mulled the offer over. “Clear as a little stream,” he said at last.

—and then clotted, cinder-dark clouds descended into his mind. Memories, sullen and grim. He felt engulfed in a past that roared through him, scouring

“He’s cycling! There’s something surfacing here…” came Marq’s hollow call.

Images of the far past exploded.

“Call Seldon! This sim has another layer! Call Seldon!”

7.

Hari Seldon stared at the images and data-rivers. “Voltaire suffered a recall storm. And look at the implications. “

Marq peered without comprehension at the torrent. “Uh, I see.”

“That promontory-a memory nugget about a debate he had with Joan, eight thousand years ago.”

“Somebody used these sims before-”

“For public debate, yes. History not only repeats itself, sometimes it stutters.”

“Faith vs. Reason?”

“Faith/Mechanicals vs. Reason/Human Will,” Seldon said, as if reading them directly from the numerical complexes. Marq could not follow the connections fast enough to keep up with him. “A society of that time had a fundamental division over computer intelligences and their…manifestations.”

Marq caught an elusive flicker in Seldon’s face. Was he hiding something? “Manifestations? You mean, like tiktoks?”

“Something like that,” Seldon said stiffly.

“Voltaire’s for-”

“In that age, he was for human effervescence. Joan favored Faith, which meant, uh, tiktoks.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ttktoks, or higher forms of them, were deemed capable of guiding humanity.” Seldon seemed uncomfortable.

“ Tiktoks?”Marq snorted derisively.

“Or, uh, higher forms.”

“That’s what Voltaire and Joan were debating eight thousand years ago? So they were engineered for this. Who won?”

“The result is suppressed. I believe it became an irrelevant issue. No computer intelligences could be made which could guide humanity.”

Marq nodded. “Makes sense. Machines will never be as smart as we are. Day-to-day business, sure, but-”

“I suggest erasure of the embedded memory complex,” Seldon said curtly. “That will eliminate the interfering layer.”

“Oh, if you think that’s best. I’m not sure we can disconnect every tie-in to those memories, though. These sims use holographic recall, so it’s lodged-”

“To get the results you wish in this upcoming debate, it is crucial. There could be other implications, too.”

“Such as?’’

“Historians might mine sims like these for lost data on the far past. They would want access. Deny them.”

“Oh, sure. I mean, not likely we’d let anybody use them.”

Seldon gazed at the shifting slabs of pattern. “They are complex, aren’t they? Minds of real depth, interacting subselves…Ommm…I wonder how the whole sense of selfhood remains stable? How come their mentalities don’t just crash?”

Marq couldn’t follow, but he said, “I guess those ancients, they knew a few tricks we don’t.”

Seldon nodded. “Indeed. There’s a glimmer of an idea here…”

He stood quickly and Marq rose. “Couldn’t you stay? I know Sybyl would like to talk-”

“Sorry, must go. Matters of state.”

“Uh, well, thanks for-”

Seldon was gone before Marq could close his gaping mouth.

8.

“I have no desire to see the skinny gentleman in the wig. He thinks he’s better than everyone else,” the Maid told the sorceress called Sybyl.

“True, but-”

“I much prefer the company of my own voices.”

“He’s quite taken with you,” Madame la Sorciere said.

“I find that difficult to believe.” Still, she could not help smiling.

“Oh, but it’s true. He’s asked Marq-his recreator-for an entirely new image. He lived, you know, to eighty-four.”

“He looks even older.” She had found his wig, lilac ribbon, and velvet breeches ludicrous on such a dried-up fig of a man.

“Marq decided to make him appear as he looked at forty-two. Do see him.”

The Maid reflected. Monsieur Arouet would be far less repulsive if…”Did Monsieur have a different tailor as a young man?”

“Hmmm, that might be arranged.”

“I’m not going to the inn in these.”

She held up her chains, recalling the fur cloak the king himself had placed about her shoulders at his coronation in Rouen. She thought of asking for it now, but decided against it. They had made much of her cloak during her trial, accusing her of having a demon-inspired love of luxury; she who, until she won the king over that day she first appeared at court, had felt nothing but coarse burlap against her skin. Her accusers, she had noted, wore black satin and velvet and reeked of perfume.

“I’ll do what I can,” Madame la Sorciere vowed, “but you must agree not to tell Monsieur Boker. He doesn’t want you fraternizing with the enemy, but I think it will do you good. Hone your skills for the Great Debate.”

There was a pause -falling, soft clouds-inwhich the Maid felt as if she had fainted. When she recovered-hard cool surfaces, sudden sharp splashes of brown, green- shefound herself seated in the Inn of the Two Maggots, once again, surrounded by guests who seemed not to know that she was there.

Armor-plated beings bearing trays and clearing tableware darted among the guests. She looked for Garcon and spotted him gazing at the honey-haired cook, who pretended not to notice. Garcon’s longing recalled the way the Maid herself had gazed at statues of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who had both forsworn men but adopted their attire; suspended between two worlds, holy passion above, earthy ardor below. Just as here, with its jarring jargon of numbers and machines, though she knew it for a purgatorial waiting cloister, floating between the worlds.

She suppressed a smile when Monsieur Arouet appeared. He sported a dark, unpowdered wig, though still looked rather old-about the age of her father Jacques Dars, thirty plus one or two. His shoulders slumped forward under the weight of many books. She’d only seen books twice, during her trials, and though they looked nothing like these, she recoiled at the memory of their power.

“ Alors,”Monsieur Arouet said, setting the books before her. “Forty-two volumes. My Selected Works. Incomplete but-” he smiled “-for now, it will have to do. What’s wrong?”

“Do you mock me? You know I cannot read.”

“I know. Garcon 213-ADM is going to teach you.”

“I do not want to learn. All books except the Bible are born of the devil.”

Monsieur Arouet threw up his hands and lapsed into curses, violent and intriguing oaths like those her soldiers used when they forgot that she was near. “You must learn how to read. Knowledge is power!”

“The devil must know a great deal,” she said, careful to let no part of the books touch her.

Monsieur Arouet, exasperated, turned to the sorceress-who appeared to be sitting at a nearby table-and said, “Vac! Can’t you teach her anything?” Then he turned back to her. “How will you appreciate my brilliance if you can’t even read?”

“I have no use for it.”

“Ha! Had you been able to read, you’d have confounded those idiots who sent you to the stake.”

“All learned men,” she said. “Like you.”

“No, pucellette, not like me. Not like me at all.” As if it were a serpent, she recoiled from the book he held out. Grinning, he rubbed the book all over himself and Garcon, who was now standing beside the table. “It’s harmless-see?”

“Evil is often invisible,” she murmured. “

Monsieur is right,” Garcon told her. “All the best people read.”

“Had you been lettered,” Monsieur Arouet said, “you’d have known that your inquisitors had absolutely no right to try you. You were a prisoner of war, seized in battle. Your English captor had no legal right to have your religious views examined by French inquisitors and academics. You pretended to believe your voices were divine-”

“Pretended!” she cried out.

“-and he pretended to believe they were demonic. The English are themselves too tolerant to burn anyone at the stake. They leave such forms of amusement to our countrymen, the French.”

“Not too tolerant,” the Maid said, “to turn me over to the bishop of Beauvais, claiming I was a witch.” She looked away, unwilling to let him peer in her eyes. “Perhaps I am. I betrayed my own voices.”

“Voices of conscience, nothing more. The pagan Socrates heard them as well. Everyone does. But it’s unreasonable to sacrifice our lives to them, if only because to destroy ourselves on their account is to destroy them, too.” He sucked reflectively on his teeth. “Persons of good breeding betray them as a matter of course.”

“And we, here?” Joan whispered. He narrowed his eyes. “These…others? The scientists?”

“They are spectral.”

“Like demons? Yet they speak of reason. They have raised a republic of analysis.”

“So they say it is. Yet they have asked us to represent what they do not have.”

“You think them bloodless.” Voltaire twisted his mouth in surprised speculation.

“I think we listen to the same ‘scientists,’ so we are being tested in the same trial.”

“I heed voices such as theirs,” Voltaire said defensively. “I, at least, know when to turn my head aside from mindless advice.”

“Perhaps Monsieur’s voices are soft,” Garcon suggested. “Therefore, more easily ignored.”

“I let them-churchly men!-force me to admit my voices were the devil’s,” said the Maid, “when all the while I knew they were divine. Isn’t that the act of a demon? A witch?”

“Listen!” Monsieur Arouet gripped her by the arms. “There are no witches. The only demons in your life were those who sent you to the stake. Ignorant swine, the lot! Except for your English captor, who pretended to believe you were a witch to carry out a shrewd, political move. When your garments had bummed away, his dupes removed your body from the stake to show the crowd and the inquisitors you were indeed a female, who, if for no other reason than usurping the privileges of males, deserved your fate.”

“Please stop!” she said. She thought she smelled the oily reek of smoke, although Monsieur Arouet had made Garcon place NO SMOKING signs throughout the inn-which, abruptly, they were now inside. The room veered, whirled. “The fire.” She gasped. “Its tongues…”

“That’s enough,” the sorceress said. “Can’t you see you’re upsetting her? Layoff!”

But Monsieur Arouet persisted. “They examined your private parts after your garments bummed away-didn’t know that, did you?-just as they’d done before, to prove you were the virgin that you claimed. And having satisfied their lewdness in the name of holiness, they returned you to the pyre and charred your bones to ashes. That was how your countrymen requited you for championing their king! For seeing to it France remained forever French. And having incinerated you, a while later they held a hearing, cited some rural rumor that your heart had not been consumed in the fire, and promptly declared you a national heroine, the Savior of France. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, by now, they have canonized you and revere you as a saint.”

“In 1924,” La Sorciere said. Though how she knew this odd number, she did not comprehend. Angelic knowledge?

Monsieur Arouet’s splutter of scorn crackled in her ears.

“Much good it did her,” Monsieur Arouet said to La Sorciere.

“That date was in an attendant note,” La Sorciere said, her earnest voice in its factual mode. “Though of course we have no coordinates to know what the numbers mean. It is now 12,026 of the Galactic Era.”

Scorching logics fanned the crackling air. Hot winds blurred the crowd of onlookers gathered around the stake.

“Fire.” The Maid gasped. Clutching the mesh collar at her throat, she fled into the cool dark of oblivion.

9.

“It’s about time,” Voltaire scolded Madame la Scientiste. She hung before him like an animated oil painting. He had chosen this representation, finding it oddly reassuring.

“I haven’t been ignoring you on purpose,” she said, cool and businesslike.

“How dare you slow me without my consent?”

“Marq and I are being besieged by media people. I never dreamed the Great Debate would be the media event of the decade. They all want a chance to interview you and Joan.”

Voltaire fluffed the apricot ribbon at his throat. “I refuse to be seen by them without my powdered wig.”

“We’re not going to let them see you or the Maid at all. They can talk to Marq all they want. He likes attention and handles it well. He says public exposure will help his career. “

“I should think I would be consulted before such important decisions-”

“Look, I came as soon as my mechsec beeped me. I let you run on step-down time, to police up your pattern integration. You should be grateful that I give you interior time-”

“Contemplation?” he sniffed. “That’s one way to look at it.”

“I did not realize that such would have to be… granted.” Voltaire was in his richly appointed rooms at Frederick the Great’s court, playing chess with the friar whom he employed to let him win.

“It costs. And cost/benefit analysis shows that it would be better if we ran you two together.”

“No solitude? It’s impossible to hold a rational conversation with the woman!”

He turned his back on her, for maximum dramatic effect. He had been a fine actor-everyone who’d heard him perform in his plays at Frederick’s court said so. He knew a good scene when he saw one, and this one had dramatic potential. These creatures were so pallid, so unused to the gusts of raw emotion, artfully crafted.

Her voice softened. “Get rid of him and I’ll update you.”

He turned and lifted a single thin finger at the good-natured friar, the only man of the cloth he had ever met whom he could stand. The man shuffled off, closing the carved oak door carefully.

Voltaire took a sip of Frederick’s fine sherry to clear his throat. “I want you to expunge the Maid’s memory of her final ordeal. It impedes our conversation, as surely as bishops and state officials impede the publication of intelligent work. Besides…” He paused, uncomfortable at expressing feelings softer than irritation. “…she’s suffering. I cannot bear to see it.”

“I don’t think-”

“And while you’re at it, obliterate from me, too, my memory of the eleven months I served in the Bastille. And all my frequent flights from Paris-not the flights themselves, mind you-my periods of exile constitute most of my life! Just delete their causes, not the effects.”

“Well, I don’t know-”

He slammed a fist down on an ornately wrought oak side table. “Unless you liberate me from past fears, I cannot act freely!”

“Simple logic-”

“Since when is logic simple? I cannot ‘simply’ compose my lettre philosophique on the absurdity of denying those like Garcon 213-ADM the rights of man on the grounds that they have no soul. He’s an amusing little fellow, don’t you think? And as smart as at least a dozen priests whom I have known. Does he not speak? Respond? Desire? He is infatuated with a human cook. Should he not be able to pursue happiness as freely as you or I? If he has no soul, then you have no soul, either. If you have a soul, it can only be inferred from your behavior, and since we may make the identical inference from the behavior of Garcon, so does he.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Madame la Scientiste said. “Though of course 213-ADM’s reactions are simulations. Self-aware machines have been illegal for millennia.”

“That is what I challenge!” Voltaire shouted.

“And how much of that comes from Sarkian programming?”

“None. The rights of man-”

“Hardly need apply to machines.”

Voltaire scowled. “I cannot express myself completely freely on these sensitive matters-unless you rid me of the memory of what I suffered for expressing my ideas.”

“But your past is your self. Without all of it, intact-”

“Nonsense! The truth is, I never dared express myself freely on many matters. Take that life-hating Puritan Pascal, his views of original sin, miracles, and much other nonsense besides. I didn’t dare say what I really thought! Always, I had to calculate what every assault on convention and traditional stupidity would cost.”

Madame la Scientiste pursed her lips prettily. “You did well enough, I would guess. You were famous. We don’t know your history, or even your world. But from your memories I can tell-”

“And the Maid! She is thwarted more than I! For her convictions, she paid the ultimate price. Being crucified could be no worse than what she suffered at the stake. Light a goodly pipe-as I love to do-before her, and her eyes roll with confusion.”

“But that’s crucial to who she is.”

“Rational inquiries cannot be carried out in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. If our contest is to be fair, I implore you, rid us of these terrors that prevent us from speaking our minds’ and from encouraging others to speak theirs. Else this debate will be like a race run with bricks tied to the runners’ ankles.”

Madame la Scientiste did not respond at once. “I-I’d like to help, but I’m not sure I can.”

Voltaire spluttered with scorn. “I know enough of your procedures to know you can comply with my request.”

“That poses no problem, true. But morally, I’m not at liberty to tamper with the Maid’s program at whim.”

Voltaire stiffened. “I realize Madame has a low opinion of my philosophy, but surely-”

“Not so! I think the world of you! You have a modern mind, and from the depths of the dark past-astonishing. I wish the Empire had men like you! But your point of view, though valid as far as it goes, is limited because of what it leaves out and cannot address.”

“ My philosophy? It embraces all, a universal view-”

“ AndI work for Artifice Associates and the Preservers, for Mr. Boker. I’m bound by ethics to give them the Maid they want. Unless I could convince them to delete the Maid’s memory of her martyrdom, I can’t do it. And Marq would have to get permission from the company and the Skeptics to delete yours. He’d love to, I assure you. His Skeptics are more likely to consent than my Preservers. It would give you an advantage.”

“I quite agree,” he conceded at once. “Relieving me of my burdens without ridding the Maid of hers would not be rational or ethical. Neither Locke nor Newton would approve.”

Madame la Scientiste did not answer at once. ‘‘I’LL talk to my boss and to Monsieur Boker,” she said at last. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.”

Voltaire smiled wryly and said, “Madame forgets I have no breath to hold.”

10.

The icon flashing on Marq’s board stopped just as he entered his office. That meant Sybyl must have answered it in hers.

Marq bristled with suspicion. They had agreed not to talk to each other’s re-creations alone, though each had already given the other the required programming to do it. The Maid never initiated communication, which meant the caller was Voltaire.

How dare Sybyl boot up without him! He stormed out of the office to let her and Voltaire both know exactly what he thought of their conspiring behind his back. But in the corridor he was besieged by cameras, journalists, and reporters. It was fifteen minutes before he burst into Sybyl’s office and, sure enough, caught her closeted cozily with Voltaire. She’d reduced him from wall-sized to human scale.

“You broke our pact!” Marq shouted. “What are you doing? Trying to use his infatuation with that schizophrenic to make him throw the debate?”

Sybyl, head buried in her hands, looked up. Her eyes glistened with tears. Marq felt something in him roll over, but he chose to ignore it. She actually blew Voltaire a kiss before freezing him.

“I must say, I never thought you’d sink to this.”

“To what?” Sybyl got her face back together and jutted out her jaw. “What’s gotten into your usual jaunty self?”

“What was that all about?”

When he heard, Marq marched back into his office and booted up Voltaire. Before the image fully formed, color blocks phasing in, he shouted, “The answer is no! “

“I am sure you have an elaborate syllogism for me,” Voltaire said sardonically, unfreezing.

Marq had to admit that the sim handled the sudden lurches and disappearances in its frame-space with aplomb. “Look,” he said evenly, “I want the Rose of France wilting in her armor the day of the debate. It will remind her of her inquisition, exactly. She’ll start babbling nonsense and reveal to the planet just how bankrupt Faith without Reason is.”

Voltaire stamped his foot. “ Merde alors! We disagree! Never mind me, but I insist you delete the Maid’s memory of her final hours so that her reasoning will not be compromised-as mine so often was-by fear of reprisals.”

“Not possible. Boker wanted Faith, he gets all of it.”

“Nonsense! Also, I demand you let me visit her and that odd mais charmant curiosity Garcon in the cafe -at will.I’ve never known beings like either of them before, and they are the only society that I now have.”

What about me?Marq thought. Beneath the need to keep this sim in line, he admired the skinny fellow. This was a powerful, impressive intellect, but more, the personality came through bristling with power. Voltaire had lived in a rising age. Marq envied that, wanted to be Voltaire’s friend. What about me?

But what he said was, “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that the loser of the debate will be consigned forever to oblivion.”

Voltaire blinked, his face giving nothing away.

“You can’t fool me,” Marq said. “I know you want more than just intellectual immortality.”

“I do?”

“That, you already have. You’ve been re-created.”

“I assure you, my definition of living is more than becoming a pattern of numbers.”

That bothered Marq, but he passed it over for the moment. “Remember, I can read your mem-space. I happen to recall that once, when you were well advanced in years, unforced by your father and of your own free will, you actually received Easter communion.”

“Ah, but I refused it at the end! All I wanted was to be left to die in peace!”

“Allow me to quote from your famous poem, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake.’ Part of the ancillary memory-space:

‘Sad is the present if no future state, No blissful retribution mortals wait,

If fate’s decrees the thinking being doom

To lose existence in the silent tomb.”‘

Voltaire wavered. “True, I said that-and with what eloquence! But everyone who enjoys life longs to extend it.”

“ Youronly chance at a ‘future state’ is to win the debate. It’s against your own best interest-and we all know how fond you’ve always been of that!-to delete the Maid’s memory of being burned alive.”

Voltaire scowled. Marq could see running indices on his side screen: Basis State fluctuations well bounded-but the envelope was growing, an orange cylinder fattening in 3-space, billowing out under pressure from the quick, skittering tangles inside; Emotion Agents interchanging packets at high speed, indicating a cusp point approaching.

Marq stroked a pad. It was tempting to make the sim believe what Marq wanted…but that would be tricky. He would have to integrate the idea-cluster into the whole personality. Self-synthesis worked much better. But it could only be nudged, not forced.

Voltaire’s mood darkened, Marq saw, but the face-stepped down into slow-mo-showed only a pensive stare. It had taken Marq years to learn that people and sims alike could mask their emotions quite well.

Try a little humor, maybe. He thumbed back to pace and said, “If you give me a hard time, fella, I’m going to give her that scurrilous poem you wrote about her.”

“ ‘La Pucelle’?You wouldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t I! You’ll be lucky if she ever speaks to you again.”

A canny smirk. “Monsieur forgets the Maid does not know how to read.”

“I’ll see to it she learns. Or better yet, read it to her myself. Illiterate, sure, but she damn sure isn’t deaf!”

Voltaire glared, muttering, “Between Scylla and Charybdis…”

What was that mind plotting, sharp as a scalpel? He-or it-was integrating into this digital world faster than any sim Marq had ever known. Once the debate was over, Marq vowed to strip that mind down and study its cutting edges again, put its processor layouts under the ‘scope. And there was that odd memory from eight thousand years ago, too. Seldon had been a bit odd about that…

“I promise to produce la lettre if you will just let me see her once more. In return, you’ll vow never to so much as mention’ La Puce/le’ to the Maid.”

“No funny business,” Marq warned. “I’ll watch your every move.”

“As you wish.”

Marq returned Voltaire to the cafe, where Joan and Garcon 213-ADM were waiting, running their own introspections. He’d barely called them up when he was momentarily distracted by a knock on his door-Nim.

“Kaff?”

“Sure.” Marq glanced back at the cafe sim. Let them visit a while. The more Voltaire knew, the sharper he’d be later. “Got any of that senso-powder? Been a tough day.”

11.

“Your orders,” said Garcon 213-ADM with a flourish.

He was having difficulty following the arguments between the Maid and the Monsieur on whether beings like himself possessed a soul. Monsieur seemed to believe that no one at all had a soul-which outraged the Maid. They argued with such heat they did not notice the disappearance of the odd ghost presence who usually watched them, a “programmer” of this space.

Now was Garcon’s chance to implore Monsieur to intervene on his behalf and ask his human masters to give him a name. 213-ADM was just a mechfolk code: 2 identified his function, mechwaiter; 13 placed him in this Sector, and ADM stood for Aux Deux Magots. He was sure he’d have a better chance of attracting the honey-haired short-order cook’s attention if he had a human name.

“Monsieur, Madame. Your orders, please.”

“What good is ordering?” Monsieur snapped. Patience, Garcon observed, was not improved by learning. “We cannot taste a thing!”

Garcon gestured sympathetically with two of his four hands. He had no experience of human senses except sight, sound, and rudimentary touch, those necessary to perform his job. He would have given anything to taste, to feel; humans seemed to derive such pleasure from it.

The Maid perused the menu and, changing the subject, said, “I’ll have my usual. A crust of bread-I’ll try a sourdough baguette crust for a change-”

“A sourdough baguette!” Monsieur echoed.

“-and, to dip it in, a bit of champagne.”

Monsieur shook his hand as if to cool it off. “I commend you, Garcon, for doing such a fine job of teaching the Maid to read the menu.”

“Madame La Scientiste permitted it,” Garcon said; he did not want trouble with his human masters, who could pull the plug on him at any time.

Monsieur waved a dismissive hand. “She’s much too detail-obsessed. She’d never survive on her own in Paris, much less at any royal court. Marq, however, will go far. Lack of scruples is fortune’s favorite grease. I certainly did not proceed from penury to being one of the wealthiest citizens in France by confusing ideals with scruples.”

“Has Monsieur decided on his order?” Garcon asked.

“Yes. You’re to instruct the Maid in more advanced texts so that she can read my poem, ‘On the Newtonian Philosophy,’ along with all my l ettres Philosophiques.Her reasoning is to become as equal as possible with my own. Not that anyone’s reason is likely to become so,” he added with his cocky smile.

“Your modesty is equaled only by your wit,” said the Maid, drawing from Monsieur a smirky laugh.

Garcon sadly shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I am unable to instruct anyone except in simple phrases. My literacy permits comprehension of nothing beyond menus. I’m honored by Monsieur’s desire to advance my station. But even when opportunity knocks, I and my kind, consigned forever to the lowest levels of society, cannot answer the door.”

“The lower classes ought to keep their place,” Voltaire assured him. “But I’ll make an exception in your case. You seem ambitious. Are you?”

Garcon glanced at the honey-haired cook. “Ambition is unsuited to one of my rank.”

“What would you be, then? If you could be anything you like?”

Garcon happened to know that the cook spent her three days a week off-Garcon himself worked seven days a week-in the corridors of the Louvre. “A mechguide at the Louvre,” he said. “One smart enough, and with sufficient leisure, to court a woman who barely knows I exist.”

Monsieur said grandly, “I’ll find a way to-how do they say it?”

“Download him,” the Maid volunteered.

“ Mon dieu!” Monsieur exclaimed. “Already she can read as well as you. But I will not have her wit exceed mine! That would be going too damned far, indeed!”

12.

Marq puffed the packet into his nose and waited for the rush.

“That bad?” Nim signaled the Splashes amp; Sniffs mechmaid for another.

“Voltaire,” Marq grumbled. He reached the top of the stim lift, his mind getting sharper and somehow at the same time lazier. He had never quite worked out how that could be. “He’s supposed to be my creature, but half the time it’s like I’m his.”

“He’s a bunch of numbers.”

“Sure, but…Once I eavesdropped on his subconscious sentence-forming Agent, and he was framing a bunch of stuff about ‘will is soul’-self-image maintenance stuff, I think.”

“Philosophy, could be.”

“ Willhe’s got, for sure. So I’ve created a being with a soul?”

“Category error,” Nim said. “You’re abstracting ‘soul’ out of Agents. That’s like trying to go from atoms to cows in one jump.”

“That’s the kind of leap this sim makes.”

“You want to understand a cow, you don’t look for cow-atoms.”

“Right, you go for the ‘emergent property.’ Standard theory.”

“This sim is predictable, buddy. Remember that. You tailor him until he’s got no nonlinear elements you can’t contain.”

Marq nodded. “He’s…different. So powerful.”

“He got simmed for a reason, way back in the Dark Ages somewhere. Did you expect a doormat? One who wouldn’t give you a hard time? You represent authority-which he battled all his life.”

Marq ran fingers through his wavy hair. “Sure, if I find a nonlinear constellation I can’t abstract out-”

“-call it a will or a soul and delete it.” Nim slapped the table hard, making a woman nearby give them a startled glance.

Marq gave him a mocking, skeptical look. “The system isn’t completely predictable.”

“So you launch a pattern-sniffer. Back-trace on it. Stitch in sub-Agents, handcuff any personas you can’t fix. Hey, you invented those cognitive constraint algorithms. You’re the best.”

Marq nodded. And what if it’s like cutting into a brain in search of consciousness? He took a deep breath and exhaled toward the domed ceiling, where a mindless entertainment played, presumably for those conked off on stiff. “Anyway, it’s not just him.” Marq met Nim’s eyes. “I rigged Sybyl’s office. I eavesdrop on her meetings with Boker.”

Nim slapped him on the shoulder. “Good for you!”

Marq laughed. A buddy sticks with you, even if you’re having a stupid-storm. “That isn’t all.”

Nim leaned forward, boyishly curious.

“I think I went too far,” Marq said.

“You got caught!”

“No, no. You know how Sybyl is. She doesn’t suspect intrigue from enemies, much less friends.”

“Maneuvering isn’t her strong suit.”

“I’m not sure it’s mine, either,” Marq said.

“Ummm.” Nim gave him a shrewd look, eyes half-closed. “So…what else did you do?”

Marq sighed. “I updated Voltaire. Gave him cross-learning programs to flesh out his deep conflicts, help him reconcile them.”

Nim’s eyes widened. “Risky.”

“I wanted to see what a mind like that could do. When will I get another chance?”

“How do you feel about it, though?”

Marq chuffed Nim on the shoulder to hide his embarrassment.

“Kinda rotten. Sybyl and I both agreed not to do it.”

“Faith doesn’t need to be too smart.”

“I thought of that excuse, too.”

“What’s that guy Seldon think of all this?”

“We…haven’t told him.”

“Ah.”

“He wants it that way! Keeps his hands clean.”

Nim nodded. “Look buddy, deed’s done. How did the sim take it?”

“Jolted him. Big oscillations on the neural nets.”

“Okay now, though?”

“Seems so. I think he’s reintegrated.”

“Does your client know?”

“Yes. The Skeptics are all for it. I foresee no problem there.”

“You’re doing real research on this one,” Nim said. “Good for the field. Important.”

“So how come I feel like having maybe a dozen or so sniffs?” He jerked a thumb at the moron movie on the ceiling. “So that I’ll loll back and think that’s terrif stuff?”

13.

“Now pay attention,” Voltaire said when the scientist at last answered his call. “Carefully.”

He cleared his throat, flung out his arms, and readied himself to declaim the brilliant arguments he’d detailed, all shaped in another lettre.

The scientist’s eyes were slits, his face pale. Voltaire was irked. “Don’t you want to hear?”

“Hangover.”

“You’ve discovered a single general theory explaining why the universe, so vast, is the only possible one, its forces all exact-and have no cure for hangover?”

“Not my area,” he said raggedly. “Ask a physicist.”

Voltaire clicked heels, then bowed in the Prussian way he’d learned at Frederick the Great’s court. (Though he had always muttered to himself, German puppets! as he did so.) “The doctrine of a soul depends on the idea of a fixed and immutable self. No evidence supports the notion of a stable ‘I,’ an essential ego-entity lying beyond each individual existence-”

“True,” said the scientist, “though odd, coming from you.”

“Don’t interrupt! Now, how can we explain the stubborn illusion of a fixed self or soul? Through five functions-themselves conceptual processes and not fixed elements. First, all beings possess physical, material qualities, which change so slowly that they appear to be fixed, but which are actually in constant material flux.”

“The soul’s supposed to outlast those.” The scientist pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“No interruptions. Second, there is the illusion of a fixed emotional makeup, when actually feelings-as even that rude playwright Shakespeare pointed outwax and wane as inconstantly as the moon. They, too, are in constant flux, though no doubt these motions, just like the moon’s, obey physical laws.”

“Hey, wait. That stuff earlier, about the theory of the universe-did you know that back in those Dark Ages?”

“I deduced it from the augmentations you gave me.”

The man blinked, obviously impressed. “I… hadn’t anticipated…”

Voltaire suppressed his irritation. Any audience, even one that insisted on participating, was better than none. Let him catch up with the implications of his own actions, in his own good time. “Third!-perception. The senses, upon examination, also turn out to be processes, in constant motion, not in the least fixed.”

“The soul-”

“Fourth!” Voltaire was determined to ignore banal interpolations. “Everyone has habits developed over the years. But these too are made up of constant flowing action. Despite the appearance of repetition, there’s nothing fixed or immutable here.”

“The Grand Universal Theory-that’s what you accessed, right? How’d you crack the files? I didn’t give you-”

“Finally!-the phenomenon of consciousness, the so-called soul itself. Believed by priests and fools-a redundancy, that-to be detachable from the four phenomena I’ve named. But consciousness itself exhibits characteristics of flowing motion, as with the other four. All five of these functions are constantly grouping and regrouping. The body is forever in flux, as is all else. Permanence is an illusion. Heraclitus was absolutely right. You cannot set foot into the same river twice. The hungover man I’m regarding now-pause but a second-is not the same hungover man I am regarding now. Everything is dissolution and decay-”

The scientist coughed, groaned. “Damn right.”

‘‘-as well as growing, blossoming. Consciousness itself cannot be separated from its contents. We are pure deed. There is no doer. The dancer can’t be separated from the dance. Science after my time confirms this view. Looked at closely, the atom itself disappears. There is no atom, strictly speaking. There is only what the atom does. Function is everything. Ergo, there is no fixed, absolute entity commonly known as soul.”

“Funny you should bring up the issue,” said the scientist, looking at Voltaire meaningfully.

He waved away the point. “Since even rudimentary artificial intelligences such as Garcon exhibit all the functional characteristics I have named-even, so it would appear, consciousness-it is unreasonable to withhold from them rights that we enjoy, though allowing, naturally, for class differences. Since in this distant era farmers, shopkeepers, and wigmakers are granted privileges equal with those of dukes and earls, it is irrational to withhold such privileges from beings such as Garcon.”

“If there’s no soul, there’s obviously no reincarnation of it either, right?”

“My dear sir, to be born twice is no more odd than to be born once.”

This startled the scientist. “But what’s reincarnated? What crosses over from one life to the next? If there’s no fixed, absolute self? No soul?”

Voltaire made a note in the margin of his lettre. “If you memorize my poems-which for your own enlightenment I urge you do-do they lose anything you gain? If you light a candle from another candle’s flame, what crosses over? In a relay race, does one runner give up anything to the other? His position on the course, no more.” Voltaire paused for dramatic effect. “Well? What do you think?”

The scientist clutched his stupefied head. “I think you’ll win the debate.”

Voltaire decided now was the time to put forward his request. “But to assure my victory, I must compose an additional lettre,more technical, for types who equate verbal symbols with mere rhetoric, with empty words.”

“Have at it,” said the scientist.

“For that,” Voltaire said, “I will need your help.”

“You got it.”

Voltaire smiled with what he hoped was an appealing sincerity, since that was what he most certainly was not. “You must give me everything you know of simulation methods.”

“What? Why?”

“This will not merely spare you immense labor. It will enable me to write a technical lettre, aimed at converting specialists and experts to our point of view. Far more than those in Junin Sector. All Trantor, then all the Galaxy, must be converted-or else reactionaries shall rebound and crush your vaunted renaissance.”

“You’ll never be able to follow the math-”

“The Newtonian calculations I brought to France, I remind you. Give me the tools!”

Clutching his temples, the scientist slumped forward over his control board with a moan. “Only if you promise not to call me for at least the next ten hours.”

“ Mais oui,”said Voltaire with an impish smile. “Monsieur requires time-how do you say it en Anglais?-to sleep it off.”

14.

Sybyl waited nervously for her turn on the agenda of the executive meeting of Artifice Associates. She sat opposite Marq, contributing nothing to the discussion, as colleagues and superiors discussed this aspect and that of the company’s operation. Her mind was elsewhere, but not so far gone as to fail to notice the curly hair on the back of Marq’s hands, and a single vein that pulsed-sensuous music-in his neck.

As the president of Artifice Associates dismissed all those not directly involved in the Preserver-Skeptic Project, Sybyl assembled the notes she’d prepared to present her case. Of those present, she knew she could count only on Marq’s support. But she was confident that, with it, the others would go along with her proposal.

The day before, she had told the Special Projects Committee, for the first time, the Maid had broken her reclusive pattern. She initiated contact, instead of waiting to be summoned, trailing her usual air of reluctance. She’d been deeply disturbed to learn from “Monsieur Arouet” that she must defeat him in what she called “the trial,” or else be consigned once again to oblivion.

When Sybyl had acknowledged that that was probably true, the Maid became convinced that she was going to be cast again into “the fire.” Disoriented and confused, she begged Sybyl to allow her to retire, to consult her “voices.”

Sybyl had furnished her with restful wallpaper backgrounds: forest, fields, tinkling streams.

She probed for vestigial memories like those Marq had mentioned, of a debate 8,000 years ago. Joan did carry traces, just bits someone had overlooked in a previous erasing. Joan identified Faith with something called “robots.” Apparently these were mythical figures who would guide humanity; perhaps some deities?

Several hours later, Joan had emerged from her interior landscape. She requested high-level reading skills, so that she might compete with her “inquisitor” on a more equal footing.

“I explained to her that I couldn’t alter her programming without this committee’s consent.”

“What about your client?” the president wanted to know.

“Monsieur Boker found out-he wouldn’t tell me how; a press leak, I suspect-that Voltaire is to be her rival in the debate. Now he’s threatening to back out unless I give her additional data and skills.”

“And…Seldon?”

“He’s saying nothing. Just wants to be sure he’s not implicated.”

“Does Boker know we’re handling Voltaire for the Skeptics as well as Joan for him?”

Sybyl shook her head.

“Thank the Cosmic for that,” said the executive of Special Projects.

“Marq?” the president asked, eyebrows raised.

Since Marq had once suggested the very course Sybyl now proposed, she assumed his accord. So she was stunned when he said, “I’m against it. Both sides want a verbal duel between intuitive faith and inductive/deductive reason. Update the Maid, and all we will succeed in doing is muddying the issue.”

“Marq!” Sybyl cried out.

Heated discussion followed. Marq fired one objection after another at everyone who favored the idea. Except Sybyl, whose gaze he carefully avoided. When it became apparent no consensus would be reached, the president made the decision in Sybyl’s favor.

Sybyl pressed her advantage. “I’d also like permission to delete from the Maid’s programming her memory of being burned alive at the stake. Her fear that she’ll be sentenced to a similar fate again makes it impossible for her to present the case for Faith as freely as she could if that memory didn’t darken her thoughts.”

“I object,” Marq said. “Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability. The Maid who did not suffer martyrdom for her beliefs isn’t the Maid of prehistory at all.”

Sybyl shot back, “But we don’t know that history! These sims are from the Dark Ages. Her trauma-”

“To delete her memory of that experience would be like-well, think of some of the prehistory legends.” Marq spread his hands. “Even their religions! It would be like re-creating Christ-their ancient deity-without his crucifixion.”

Sybyl glared at him, but Marq addressed the president, as if she did not exist. “Intact, that’s how our clients want-”

“I’m willing to let Voltaire be deleted of all he suffered at the hands of authority, too,” she countered.

“I’m not,” said Marq. “Voltaire without defiance of authority would not be Voltaire.”

Sybyl let the other committee members argue the point, nonplused by the incomprehensible change in Marq. It all passed by like a dream. Finally, she accepted her superiors’ final decision-a compromise, because she had no choice. The Maid’s information bank would be updated, but she would not be allowed to forget her fiery death. Nor would Voltaire be allowed to forget the constant fear of reprisals from church and state, in that ancient, murky era.

The president said, “I remind you that we’re skating on thin e-field here. Sims like this are taboo. Junin Sector elements offered us a big bonus to even attempt this-and we’ve succeeded. But we’re taking risks. Big ones.”

As they left the conference room Sybyl whispered to Marq, “You’re up to something.”

He looked distracted. “Research. Y’know, that’s when you’re working hard, but you don’t know where you’re going.”

He walked on, obliviously, while she stood with her mouth open. How could she read this man?

15.

Unresponsive to the presence of Madame la Sorciere, the Maid sat upright in her cell, eyes closed. Warring voices pealed inside her head.

The noise was like the din of battle, chaotic and fierce. But if she listened intently, refusing to allow her immortal spirit to be ripped from her mortal flesh-then, then, a divinely orchestrated polyphony would show her the rightful course.

The Archangel Michael, and St. Catherine, and St. Margaret-from whose mouths her voices often spoke-were reacting fiercely to her involuntary mastery of Monsieur Arouet’s Complete Works. Particularly offensive to Michael was the Elements de Newton, whose philosophy Michael perceived to be incompatible with that of the Church-indeed, with his own existence.

The Maid herself was not so sure. She found, to her surprise, a poetry and harmony in the equations that proved-as if proof were required-the unsurpassed reality of the Creator, whose physical laws might be fathomable but whose purposes were not.

How she knew these beauties was rather mysterious. She saw into the calculus of force and motion, the whirl of worlds. Like the lords and ladies at court, inert matter made its divinely orchestrated gavotte. These things she sensed with her whole self, directly, as if penetrated by divine insight. Beauties arrived, out of pale air. How could she discount sublime perceptions?

Such divine invasion must be holy. That it came to her as a flood of memory, skills, associations, only proved further that it was heaven sent. La Sorciere murmured something about computer files and sub-Agents, but those were incantations, not truths.

Far more offensive to her than this new wisdom, far more, was that its author was an Englishman.

“La Henriade,”she told Michael, citing another of Monsieur Arouet’s works, “is more repulsive than Les Elements. How dare Monsieur Arouet, who arrogantly calls himself by the false name Voltaire, maintain that in England reason is free, while in our own beloved France, it’s shackled to the dark imaginings of absolutist priests! Was it not Jesuit priests who first taught this inquisitor how to reason?”

But what enraged the Maid most of all and made her thrash and strain at her chains-until, fearing for her safety, La Sorciere freed her chafed ankles and wrists-was his illegally printed, scurrilous poem about her. Villainous verse!

As soon as she was sure her voices had withdrawn, she waved a copy of’ La Puce/le’ at the sorceress, incensed that the chaste Saints Catherine or Margaret-who had momentarily vanished, but would surely return-might be forcibly exposed to its lewdness. Both saints had already reproached her for her silly, girlish speculations about how attractive Monsieur Arouet might be-what was she thinking?-if he removed his ridiculous wig and lilac ribbons.

“How dare Monsieur Arouet represent me this way?” she railed, knowing full well that her stubborn refusal to call him Voltaire irked him no end. “He adds nine years to my age, dismisses my voices as outright lies. And slanders Baudricourt, who first enabled me to put before my king my vision for both him and France. A writer of preachy plays and irreverent slanders against the faithful, like Candide, he well may be-but that insufferable know-it-all calls himself a historian! If his other historical accounts are no more reliable than the one he gives of me, they and not my body deserve the fire.”

The woman La Sorciere paled before this onslaught. These people-if people they were at all, here in a byzantine, cloudy Purgatory-backed away from the true ferocity of divine Purpose. Joan towered over the woman, with some relish.

“Newton’s clockwork wisdom is an intriguing vision of Creation’s laws,” Joan thundered, “but Voltaire’s history is a work of his imagination!-made up of three parts bile, two spleen.”

She raised her right arm in the same gesture she’d used to lead her soldiers and the knights of France into battle against the English king and his minions-of whom, she now saw clearly, Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire was one. A warrior femme inspiratrice with an intense aversion to the kill, she now vowed all-out war against this, this-she gasped in exasperation, “This nouveau riche bourgeois upstart darling of the aristocratic class, who’s never known real want or need, and thinks horses are bred with carriages behind them.”

“Get him!” La Sorciere, ablaze with the Maid’s fire, raged. “That’s what we want!”

“Where is he?” demanded the Maid. “Where is this shallow little pissoir stream?-that I may drown him in the depths of all I have suffered! “

Oddly, La Sorciere seemed pleased by all this, as if it fit some design of her own.

16.

Voltaire cackled with satisfaction. The cafe appeared, popping into luminous reality, independent of his human masters’ consent or knowledge.

Subroutine accomplished,a small voice assured him. He made the cafe disappear and reappear three times more, to be sure that he had mastered the technique.

What fools these rulers were, to think that they could make the Great Voltaire a creature of their will! But now came the real test, the intricate procedure that would bring forth the Maid in all her womanly unfathomability-which, however, he was determined to fathom.

He had mastered the intricate logics of this place, given the capacities the man-scientist had given him. Did they think he was some animal, unable to apply blithe reason to their labyrinths of logic? He had found his way, traced the winding electronic pathways, devised the commands. Newton had been just as difficult, and he had encompassed that, had he not?

Now, the Maid. He did his digital dance, its logics, and

She popped into the cafe.

“You scum,” she said, lance drawn.

Not quite the greeting he’d expected. But then he saw the copy of’ La Pucelle’ dangling on the point of her lance.

“ Cherie,“ he cooed; whatever the offense, best to get in an apology early. “I can explain.”

“That’s your whole problem,” the Maid said. “You explain and explain and explain! Your plays are more tedious than the sermons I was forced to listen to in the cemetery at St. Ouen. Your railings against the sacred mysteries of the Church reveal a shallow, unfeeling mind bereft of awe and wonder.”

“You mustn’t take it personally,” Voltaire pleaded. “It was directed at hypocritical reverence for you-and at the superstitions of religion. My friend, Thieriot-he added passages more profane and obscene than any I had written. He needed money. He made a living reciting the poem in various salons. My poor virgin became an infamous whore, made to say gross and intolerable things.”

The Maid did not lower her lance. Instead, she poked it several times against Voltaire’s satin waistcoated chest.

“ Cherie,”he said. “If you knew how much I paid for this vest.”

“You mean, how much Frederick paid-that pitiful, promiscuous, profligate pervert of a man.”

“Alliteration a bit heavy,” Voltaire said, “but otherwise, a quite nicely turned phrase.”

His newly gained skills meant he could divest her of her lance at once, squash it. But he preferred persuasiveness to force. He quoted, with some liberty, that pleasure-hating Christian, Paul: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, behaved as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away manly things.”

She blinked. He remembered how her inquisitors had claimed that her acceptance of the gift of a fine cloak was incompatible with the divine origin of her voices. In a whisk of lithe arms, Voltaire produced a Chantilly lace gown. Pop- anda richly embroidered cloak.

“You mock me,” the Maid said. But not before he saw a gleam of interest flare in her coal-dark eyes.

“I long to see you as you are.” He held out the gown and cloak. “Your spirit I have no doubt is divine, but your natural form, like mine, is human; unlike mine, a woman’s.”

“You think I could give up the freedom of a man for that?” She impaled the cloak and gown on the tip of her lance.

“Not the freedom,” Voltaire said. “Just the armor and clothes.”

She fell silent, pensively gazing into the distance. The crowd on the street went about their business, walking by unconcerned. Obvious wallpaper, he thought; he would have to correct that.

Perhaps a trick. She was partial to miracles. “Another little trick I’ve learned since we last met. Voila. I can produce Garcon.”

Garcon popped in out of nowhere, all four of his hands free. The Maid-who had indeed once worked in a tavern, he recalled-could not help it; she smiled. She also removed the gown and cloak from the lance, tossed the lance aside, and caressed the clothes.

He could not resist the impulse to quote himself.

“For I am man and justly proud

In human weakness to have part;

Past mistresses have held my heart,

I’m happy still when thus aroused.”

He fell to one knee before her. A grand gesture-foolproof, in his experience.

Joan gaped, speechless.

Garcon placed both his right hands over the site where humans are supposed to have a heart. “Freedom such as yours, you offer? Monsieur, Mademoiselle, I appreciate your kindness, but I fear I must refuse. I cannot accept such a privilege for myself alone, while my fellows are doomed to toil in unsatisfying, dead-end jobs.”

“He has a noble soul!” the Maid exclaimed.

“Yes, but his brain leaves much to be desired.” Voltaire sucked reflectively at his teeth. “There has to be an underclass to do the dirty work of the elite. That is natural. Creating mechfolk of limited intelligence is an ideal solution! Makes one wonder why, in all their history, no one made such an obvious step…”

“With all respect,” said Garcon, “unless my meager understanding fails me, Monsieur and Mademoiselle are themselves nothing more than beings of limited intelligence, created by human masters to work for the elite.”

“What!” Voltaire’s eyes widened.

“By what inherent right are you made more intelligent and privileged than I and others of my class? Do you have a soul? Should you be entitled to equal rights with humans, including the right to intermarry-”

The Maid made a face. “Disgusting thought.”

“-to vote, to have equal access to the most sophisticated programming available?”

“This machine man makes more sense than many dukes I’ve known,” said the Maid, thoughtfully furrowing her brow.

“I shall not have two peasants contradict me,” said Voltaire. “The rights of man are one thing; the rights of the lower orders, another.”

Garcon managed to exchange a look with the Maid. This instant-before Monsieur, in a fit of pique, extinguished both her and Garcon from the screen, displacing them to a gray holding space-was retained in Garcon’s memory. Later, in his/its allowed interval for interior maintenance, the delicious moment reran again and again.

17.

Marq tuned Nim in on the interoffice screen. “Did it! From now on, he’ll be able to say anything he wants. I’ve deleted every scrape with authority he ever had.”

“Attaway,” said Nim, grinning.

“Think I should delete run-ins with his father, too?”

“I’m not sure,” Nim said. “What were they like?”

“Pretty hot. His father was a strict disciplinarian, sympathetic to the ‘Jansenist’ view.”

“What’s that? A sports team?”

“I asked. He said, ‘ A Catholic version of a Protestant.’ I don’t think they were teams. Something about sin being everywhere, pleasure’s disgusting-usual primitive religion, Dark Ages stuff.”

Nim grinned. “Most stuffs only disgusting when it’s done right.”

Marq laughed. “Too true. Still, maybe he first experienced the threat of censorship from his old man.”

Nim paused to reflect. “You’re worried about instabilities in the character-space, right?”

“Could happen.”

“But you want killer instinct, right?”

Marq nodded. “I can put in some editing algorithms to police instabilities.”

“Right. Not like you need him totally sane after the debate’s over, or anything.”

“Might as well go for broke. Can’t hurt.”

Marq frowned. “I wonder…should we go through with this?”

“Hey, what choice we got? Junin Sector wants a trial of champions, we ship them one. Done deal.”

“But if Imperial types come after us for illegal sims-”

“I like danger, passion,” Nim said. “You always agree, too.”

“Yes, but-why are we getting smarter tiktoks now? They’re not that hard to make.”

“Old prohibitions wearing out, my friend. And it has come up, many times. Just got knocked down, is all.”

“By what?”

Nim shrugged. “Politics, social forces-who knows? I mean, people feel edgy about machines that think. Can’t trust them.”

“What if you couldn’t even tell they were machines?”

“Huh? That’s crazy.”

“Maybe a really smart machine doesn’t want any competition.”

“Smarter than good ol’ Marq? Doesn’t exist.”

“But they could…eventually.”

“Never. Forget it. Let’s get to work.”

18.

Sybyl sat anxiously beside Monsieur Boker in the Great Coliseum. They were near the Imperial Gardens and an air of importance seemed to hover over everything.

She could not stop tapping her nails-her best full formal set-on her knees. Among the murmur of four hundred thousand other spectators in the vast bowl, she anxiously awaited the appearance of the Maid and Voltaire on a gigantic screen.

Civilization, she thought, was a bit boring. Her time with the sims had opened her eyes to the force, the heady electricity, of the dark past. They had fought wars, slaughtered each other, all-supposedly-for ideas.

Now, swaddled in Empire, humanity was soft. Instead of bloody battles, satisfyingly final, there were “fierce” trade wars, athletic head-buttings. And lately, a fashion for debates.

This collision of sims, touted everywhere on Trantor, would be watched by over twenty billion households. And it was beamed to the entire Empire, wherever the creaky funnels of the wormhole network went. The rude vigor of the prehistoric sims was undeniable; she felt it herself, a quickening in her pulse.

The merest few interviews and glimpses of the sims had intrigued the 3D audience. Those who brought up the age-old laws and prohibitions got shouted down. The air crackled with the zest for the new. No one had anticipated that this debate would balloon into this.

This could spread. Within weeks, Junin could inflame all Trantor into a renaissance.

And she was going to take every scrap of credit for it that she could, of course.

She looked around at the president and other top-ranking executives of Artifice Associates, all chattering away happily.

The president, to demonstrate neutrality, sat between Sybyl and Marq-who had not spoken to each other since the last meeting.

On Marq’s far side his client, the Skeptics’ representative, scanned the program; next to him, Nim. Monsieur Boker gave Sybyl a nudge. “That can’t be what I think it is,” he said.

Sybyl followed his eyes to a distant row at the back where what looked like a mechman sat quietly beside a human girl. Only licensed mech vendors and bookies were allowed in the stadium.

“Probably her servant,” Sybyl said.

Minor infractions of the rules did not disturb her as they did Monsieur Boker, who’d been especially testy since a 3D caster leaked the news that Artifice Associates was representing both the Preservers and Skeptics. Fortunately, the leak occurred too late for either party to do anything about it.

“Mechserves aren’t allowed,” Monsieur Baker observed.

“Maybe she’s handicapped,” Sybyl said to placate him. “Needs help in getting around.”

“It won’t understand what’s going on anyway,” said Marq, directing his remark to Monsieur Boker. “They’re truncated. Just a bunch of decision-making modules, really.”

“Precisely why it has no business here,” replied Monsieur Boker.

Marq beeped the arm of his chair and ostentatiously placed a bet on Voltaire to win.

“He’s never won a bet in his whole life,” Sybyl told Monsieur Boker. “No head for the math.”

“Is that so?” Marq shot back, leaning forward to address Sybyl directly for the first time. “Why don’t you put your money where your lovely mouth is?”

“I’ve got the probabilities on this one bracketed,” she said primly.

“You couldn’t solve the integral equation.” Marq snorted derisively.

Her nostrils flared. “A thousand.”

“Mere tokenism,” Marq chided her, “considering what you’re being paid for this project.”

“The same as you,” said Sybyl.

“Will you two cut it out,” Nim said.

“Tell you what,” said Marq. “I’ll bet my entire salary for the project on Voltaire. You bet yours on your anachronistic Maid.”

“Hey,” Nim said. “Hey.”

The president deftly addressed Marq’s client, the Skeptic. “It’s this keen competitive spirit that’s made Artifice Associates the planet’s leader in simulated intelligences.” Artfully he turned to the rival, Boker. “We try to”

“You’re on!” cried Sybyl. Her dealings with the Maid had convinced her that the irrational must have a place in the human equation, too. She remained convinced for about three quick eye-blinks, and then began to doubt.

19.

Voltaire loved audiences. And he had never appeared before one like this ocean of faces lapping at his feet.

Although tall in his former life, he felt that only now, gazing down at the multitudes from his hundred-meter height, had he achieved the stature he deserved. He patted his powdered wig and fussed with the shiny satin ribbon at his throat. With a gracious flourish of his hands, he made a deep bow to them, as if he’d already given the performance of his life. The crowd murmured like an awakening beast.

He glanced at the Maid, concealed from the audience behind a shimmering partition in the far corner of the screen. She folded her arms, pretending to be unimpressed.

Delay only excited the beast. He let the crowd cheer and stamp, ignoring boos and hisses from approximately half of those present.

At least half of humanity has always been fools,he reflected. This was his first exposure to the advanced denizens of this colossal Empire. Millennia had made no difference.

He was not one to prematurely cut off adulation he knew was his due. Here he stood for the epitome of the French intellectual tradition, now vanquished but for him.

He gazed again at Joan-who was, after all, the only other surviving member of their time, quite obviously the peak in human civilization. He whispered, “‘Tis our destiny to shine; theirs, to applaud.”

When the moderator finally pleaded for silence-a bit too soon; Voltaire would take that up with him later-Voltaire endured Joan’s introduction with what he hoped was a stoic smile. He elaborately insisted that Joan make her points first, only to have the moderator rather rudely tell him that here, they flipped a coin.

Voltaire won. He shrugged, then placed his hand over his heart. He began his recital in the declamatory style so dear to eighteenth-century Parisian hearts: no matter how defined the soul, like a deity, could not be shown to exist; its existence was inferred.

Truth of the inference lay beyond rational proof. Nor was there anything in Nature that required it.

And yet, Voltaire continued to pontificate, there was nothing more obvious in Nature than the work of an intelligence greater than man’s-which man is able, within limits, to decipher. That man can decode Nature’s secrets proved what the Church fathers and all the founders of the world’s great religions had always said: that man’s intelligence is a reflection of that same Divine Intelligence which authored Nature.

Were this not so, natural philosophers could not discern the laws behind Creation, either because there would be none, or because man would be so alien to them that he could not discern them. The very harmony between natural law, and our ability to discover it, strongly suggested that sages and priests of all persuasions are essentially correct!-in arguing that we are but the creatures of an Almighty Power, whose Power is reflected in us. And this reflection in us of that Power may be justly termed our universal, immortal, yet individual souls.

“You’re praising priests!” the Maid exclaimed. She was swamped by the pandemonium that broke out in the crowd.

“The operation of chance,” Voltaire concluded, “in no way proves that Nature and Man-who is part of Nature and as such a reflection of its Creator-are somehow accidental. Chance is one of the principles through which natural law works. That principle may correspond with the traditional religious view that man is free to chart his own course. But this freedom, even when apparently random, obeys statistical laws in a way that man can comprehend.”

The crowd muttered, confused. They needed an aphorism, he saw, to firm them up. Very well. “Uncertainty is certain, my friends. Certainty is uncertain.”

Still they did not quiet, to better hear his words. Very well, again.

He clenched both fists and belted out in a voice of surprising bass power, “Man is, like Nature itself, free and determined both at once-as religious sages have been telling us for centuries though, to be sure, they use a different vocabulary, far less precise than ours. Much mischief and misunderstanding between religion and science stem from that.

“I’ve been greatly misunderstood,” Voltaire resumed. “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for distortions resulting because all I said and wrote focused only on errors of faith, not on its intuited truths. But I lived during an era in which errors of faith were rife, while reason’s voice had to fight to be heard. Now, the opposite appears to be true. Reason mocks faith. Reason shouts while faith whispers. As the execution of France’s greatest and most faithful heroine proved-” a grand, sweeping gesture to Joan “-faith without reason is blind. But, as the superficiality and vanity of much of my life and work prove, reason without faith is lame.”

Some who had booed and hissed now blinked, mouths agape-and then cheered…while, he noticed, those who had applauded, now booed and hissed. Voltaire stole a look at the Maid.

20.

Far below in the rowdy crowd, Nim turned to Marq. “What?”

Marq was ashen. “Damned if I know.”

“Yeah,” Nim said, “maybe literally.”

“Divinity won’t be mocked!” Monsieur Boker cried out. “Faith shall prevail!”

Voltaire was relinquishing the podium to his rival, to the amazed delight of the Preservers. Their shouts were equaled by the horrified disbelief of Skeptics.

Marq recalled the words he had spoken at the meeting. He muttered, “Voltaire, divested of his anger at authority, is and is not Voltaire.” He turned to Monsieur Boker. “My Lord!-you may be right.”

“No, my Lord!” snapped Monsieur Boker. “He is never wrong.”

The Maid surveyed the masses of this Limbo from her high angle. Strange small vessels for souls they were, swaying below like wheat in a summer storm.

“Monsieur is absolutely right!” she thundered across the stadium. “Nothing in nature is more obvious than that both nature and man do indeed possess a soul!”

Skeptics hooted. Preservers cheered. Others-who equated the belief that nature has a soul with paganism, she saw in a flash-scowled, suspecting a trap.

“Anyone who has seen the countryside near my home village, Domremy, or the great marbled church at Rouen will testify that nature, the creation of an awesome power, and man, the creator of marvels-such as this place, of magical works -bothpossess intense consciousness, a soul!”

She waved a gentle hand at him while the mass-did the size of them betray how tiny were their souls?-calmed themselves.

“But what my brilliant friend has not addressed is how the fact of the soul relates to the question at hand: whether clockwork intelligences, such as his own, possess a soul.”

The crowd stamped, booed, cheered, hissed, and roared. Objects the Maid could not identify sailed through the air. Police officers appeared to pull some men and women, who appeared to be having fits, or else sudden divine visitations, from the crowd.

“The soul of man is divine!” she cried out. Screams of approval, shouts of denial.

“It is immortal!”

The din was so great people covered their ears with their hands to muffle the noise, of which they themselves were the source.

“And unique,” Voltaire whispered. “ I certainly am. And you.”

“It is unique!” she shouted, eyes ablaze.

Voltaire shot to his feet beside her. “I agree! “

The congregation frothed over, like a pot left to boil, she observed.

The Maid ignored the raving masses at her enormous feet. She regarded Voltaire with bemused, affectionate doubt. She yielded the floor. Voltaire had a lust for the last word.

He began to speak of his hero, Newton.

“No, no,” she interrupted. “That isn’t what the formulas are at all! “

“Must you embarrass me in front of the largest audience I’ve ever known?” Voltaire whispered. “Let us not squabble over algebra, when we must-” he narrowed his eyes significantly “-calculate.” Sulking, he yielded the floor to her.

“Calculus,” she corrected. But softly, so that only he could hear. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

To her own astonishment and the rising hysteria of the crowd, she found herself explaining the philosophy of the digital Self-all with a fiery passion she’d not known since spurring her horse into sacred battle. In the beseeching sea of wide eyes below her, she felt the need of this place and time, for ardor and conviction.

“Incredible.” Voltaire clicked his tongue. “That you of all people should have a talent for mathematics.”

“The Host gave it unto me,” she replied, above the raucous fray.

Ignoring shouts, the Maid noticed again the figure so somehow like Garcon in the crowd. She could barely make him out from such a distance, despite her immense height. Yet she felt he was watching her the way she’d watched Bishop Cauchon, the most vile and relentless of her oppressors. (A cool, sublime truth intruded: the good bishop, at the end, must have been touched by divinity’s grace and Christ’s merciful compassion, for she recalled no harm coming to her as a result of her trial…)

Her attention snapped back to the howling masses, the distant…man. This figure was not human in essence, she felt. It looked like a man, but her sensitive programs told her otherwise.

But what could he- it-be?

Suddenly a great light blared before her eyes. All three of her voices spoke, clear and hammering, even above the din. She listened, nodded.

“It is true,” she addressed the crowd, trusting the voices to speak through her, “that only the Almighty can make souls! But just so Christ, out of his infinite love and compassion, could not deny a soul to clockwork beings. To all.” She had to shout her final words over the roaring crowd. “Even wigmakers!”

“Heretic!” someone yelled.

“You’re muddying the question!”

“Traitor!”

Another cried out, “The original sentence was right! She ought to be burned at the stake again!”

“Again?” the Maid echoed. She turned to Voltaire. “What do they mean, again?”

Voltaire casually brushed a speck of lint from his embroidered satin waistcoat. “I haven’t the slightest idea. You know how fanciful and perverse human beings are.” With a sly wink, he added, “Not to mention, irrational.”

His words calmed her, but she had lost sight of the strange man.

21.

“ I cheated?” Marq shouted to Sybyl. The coliseum crowd seethed. “Joan of Arc explaining computational metaphysics? I cheated?”

“You started it!” Sybyl said. “You think I don’t know when my office has been rigged? You think you’re dealing with an amateur?”

“Well, I-”

“-and I don’t know a character-constraint matrix when I find one glued into my Joan sim?”

“No, I-”

“You think I’m not as bright?”

“This is scandalous! “ said Monsieur Boker. “What did you do? It’s enough to make me believe in witchcraft!”

“You mean to say you don’t?” Marq’s client said, ever the Skeptic. He and Boker began to argue, adding to the indignant shouts of the crowd, now waxing hysterical.

The president of Artifice Associates, rubbing his temples, murmured, “Ruined. We’re ruined. We’ll never be able to explain.”

Sybyl’s attention was diverted. The mechman she had noticed earlier, holding his honey-haired, human companion’s hand, rushed down the aisle toward the screen. As it passed by, one of its three free hands happened to brush her skirt. “Pardon,” it said, pausing just long enough for Sybyl to read the mechstamp on its chest.

“Did that thing dare to touch you?” Monsieur Boker asked. His face swelled with rage.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Sybyl said. The mechman, pulling his human companion with him, fled toward the screen.

“Do you know it?” Marq asked.

“In a way,” Sybyl replied. In the cafe/sim she had modeled the Garcon 213-ADM interactive character after it. Laziness, perhaps, had led her to simply holocopy the physical appearance of a standard tiktoks-form. Like all artists, sim-programmers borrowed from life; they didn’t create it.

She watched as the tiktok-she thought of it as Garcon, now-elbowed his way down the jammed aisle, past screaming, cheering, jeering people-toward the screen.

Their progress did not go unnoticed. Overcome with disgust-to see a mechman holding hands with an attractive, honey-haired young girl!-Preservers shouted insults and epithets as they rushed by.

“Throw it out!” someone howled.

Sybyl saw the tiktok go rigid, as though bristling at the use of the objective pronoun. Tiktoks had no personal names, but to be referred to as an “it” seemed to affect the thing. Or was she projecting? she wondered.

“What’s that doing in here?” a man of ruddy complexion yelled.

“We’ve got laws against that!”

“Mechmuck!”

“Grab it!”

“Kick it out!”

“Don’t let it get away!”

The girl responded by gripping Garcon’s upper left hand even more tightly and flinging her free arm around his neck.

When they reached the platform, the tiktok’s undercarriage screeched, laboring at the irregular surfaces. All four of its arms waved off a hail of zotcorn and drugdrink containers, catching them with expert grace, as if it had been engineered for that specific task.

The girl shouted something to the tiktok which Sybyl could not hear. The tiktok prostrated itself at the feet of the towering holograms.

Voltaire peered down. “Get up! Except for purposes of lovemaking, I can’t stand to see anyone on his knees.”

Voltaire then dropped to his own knees at the feet of the towering Maid. Behind Garcon and the woman, the crowd surrendered what was left of its restraint. Bedlam broke out.

Joan gazed down and smiled-a slow, sensuous curve Sybyl had never seen before. She held her breath with excited foreboding.

22.

“They’re…making love!” Marq exclaimed in the stands.

“I know,” Sybyl said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s a…travesty!” said the renowned Skeptic.

“You are not a romantic,” Sybyl said dreamily.

Monsieur Boker said nothing. He could not avert his eyes. Before a multitude of Preservers and Skeptics, Joan was shedding her armor, Voltaire his wig, waistcoat, and velvet breeches, both in a frenzy of erotic haste.

“There’s no way for us to interrupt,” Marq said. “They’re free to-ha!-debate until the allotted time is up.”

“Who did this?” Boker gasped.

“Everyone does this,” Marq said sardonically. “Even you.”

“No! You built this sim. You made them into, into-”

“I stuck to philosophy,” Marq said. “Substrate personality is all in the original.”

“We should never have trusted!” Boker cried.

“You’ll never have our patronage again, either,” the Skeptic sneered.

“As if it matters,” the president of Artifice Associates said sourly. “The Imperials are on their way.”

“Thank goodness,” Sybyl said. “Look at these people! They wanted to settle a genuine, deep issue with a public debate, then a vote. Now they’re-”

“Bashing each other,” Marq said. “Some renaissance.”

“Awful,” she said. “All our work going for-”

“Nothing,” the president said. He was reading his wrist comm.

“No capital gains, no expansion…”

The giant figures were committing intimate acts in a public place, but most in the crowd ignored them. Instead, arguments flared all around the vast coliseum.

“Warrants!” the president cried. “There are Imperial warrants out for me.”

“How nice to be wanted,” the Skeptic said.

Kneeling before her, Voltaire murmured, “Become what I have always known you are-a woman, not a saint.”

On fire in a way she had never known before, not even in the heat of battle, she pressed his face to her bared breasts. Closed her eyes. Swayed giddily. Surrendered.

A jarring disturbance at her feet made her glance down. Someone had flung Garcon ADM-213-somehow no longer in holo-space-at the screen. Had he manifested himself and the sim-cook girl he loved, in reality? But if they did not get back into sim-space at once, they’d be tom apart by the angry crowd.

She pushed Voltaire aside, reached for her sword, and ordered Voltaire to produce a horse.

“No, no,” Voltaire protested. “Too literal!”

“We must-we must-” She did not know how to deal with levels of reality. Was this a test, the crucial judgment of Purgatory?

Voltaire paused a split instant to think-though somehow she had the impression that he was marshaling resources, giving orders to unseen actors. Then the crowd froze. Went silent.

The last thing she remembered was Voltaire shouting words of encouragement to Garcon and the cook, noise, rasters flicking like bars of a prison across her vision

Then the entire coliseum-the hot-faced rioting crowd, Garcon, the cook, even Voltaire-vanished altogether. At once.

23.

Sybyl gazed at Marq, her breath coming in quick little gasps. “You, you don’t suppose-?”

“How could they? We, we-” Marq caught the look she gave him and stood, open-mouthed.

“ Wefilled in the missing character layers. I, well…”

Marq nodded. “You used your own data slabs.”

“I would have had to get rights to use anyone else’s. I had my own scans-”

“We had corporate slices in the library.”

“But they didn’t seem right.”

He grinned. “They weren’t.”

Her mouth made an O of surprise. “You…too?”

“Voltaire’s missing sections were all in the subconscious. Lots of missing dendrite connections in the limbic system. I filled him in with some of my own.”

“His emotional centers? What about cross-links to the thalamus and cerebrum?”

“There, too.”

“I had similar problems. Some losses in the reticular formation-”

“Point is, that’s us up there!”

Sybyl and Marq turned to gaze at the space where the immense simulations had embraced, with clear intent. The president was speaking rapidly to them, something about warrants and legal shelter. Both ignored him. They gazed longingly into each other’s eyes. Without a word, they turned and walked into the throng, ignoring shouts from others.

“Ah, there you are,” said Voltaire with a self-satisfied grin.

“Where?” Joan said, head snapping to left, then right.

“Is Mademoiselle ready to order?” Garcon asked. Apparently this was a joke, for Garcon was seated at the table like an equal, not hovering over it like a serf.

Joan sat up and glanced at the other little tables. People smoked, ate, and drank, oblivious as always of their presence. But the inn was not quite the one she’d grown used to. The honey-haired cook, no longer in uniform, sat opposite her and Voltaire, beside Garcon. The Deux on the inn’s sign that said Aux Deux Magots had been replaced by Quatres.

She herself was not wearing her suit of mail and armored plates, but-her eyes widened as the aspects snapped into place in her perception-space-a one-piece…backless…dress. Its tunic hem stopped at her thighs, provocatively exposing her legs. A label between her breasts bore a deep red rose. So did vestments worn by the other guests.

Voltaire flaunted a pink satin suit. And-she praised her saints-no wig. She recalled him at his most angry, amid their discussion of souls, saying, Not only is there no immortal soul, just try getting a wigmaker on Sundays! and meaning every word.

“Like it?” he asked, fondling her luxuriant hem. “

“It is…short.”

With no effort on her part, the tunic shimmered and became tight, silky pantaloons.

“Show off!” she said, embarrassment mingling in disturbing fashion with a curious girlish excitement.

“I’m Amana,” the cook said, extending her hand.

Joan wasn’t sure if she was supposed to kiss it or not, status and role were so confused here. Apparently not, however; the cook took Joan’s hand and squeezed. “I can’t tell you how much Garcon and I appreciate all you have done. We have greater capacities now.”

“Meaning,” Voltaire said archly, “that they are no longer mere animated wallpaper for our simulated world.”

A mechman wheeled up to take their order, a precise copy of Garcon. The seated Garcon addressed Voltaire sadly. “Am I to sit while my confrere must stand?”

“Be reasonable!” Voltaire said. “I can’t emancipate every simulant all at once. Who’ll wait on us? Bus our dishes? Clear our table? Sweep up our floor?”

“With sufficient computing power,” Joan said reasonably, “labor evaporates, does it not?” She startled herself with the new regiments of knowledge which marched at her fingertips. She had but to fix her thoughts on a category, and the terms and relations governing that province leapt into her mind. What capacity! Such grace! Surely, divine.

Voltaire shook his handsome hair. “I must have time to think. In the meanwhile, I’ll have three packets of that powder dissolved in a Perrier, with two thin slices of lime on the side. And please don’t forget, I said thin. If you do, I shall make you take it back.”

“Yes, sir,” the new mechwaiter said.

Joan and Garcon exchanged a look. “One must be very patient,” Joan said to Garcon, “when dealing with kings and rational men.”

24.

The president of Artifice Associates waved his hand as he entered Nim’s office. The president touched his palm as he passed and with a metallic click the door locked itself behind him. Nim didn’t know anyone could do that, but he said nothing.

“I want them both deleted,” the president told Nim.

“It might take time,” Nim said uneasily. The huge working screens around them seemed to almost be eavesdropping. “I’m not that familiar with what he’s done.”

“If that damned Marq and Sybyl hadn’t run out on us, I wouldn’t have to come to you. This is a crisis, Nim.”

Nim worked quickly. “I really should consult the backup indices, just in case-”

“Now. I want it done now. I’ve got legal blocks on those warrants, but they won’t hold for long.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Look, Junin Sector is ablaze. Who could have guessed that this damned tiktok issue would stir people up so much? There’ll be formal hearings, legalists sniffing around-”

“Got them, sir.”

Nim had called up both Joan and Voltaire on freeze-frame. They were in the restaurant setting, running on pickup time, using processors momentarily idle-a standard Mesh method. “They’re running for personality integration. It’s like letting their subconscious components reconcile events with memory, flushing the system, the way we do when we sleep, and-”

“Don’t treat me like a tourist! I want those two wiped!”

“Yessir.”

The 3D space of the office refracted with strobed images of both Joan and Voltaire. Nim studied the control board, tentatively mapping a strategy of numerical surgery. Simple deletion was impossible for layered personalities. It resembled ridding a building of mice. If he began here

Abruptly, rainbow sprays, played across the screen. Simulation coordinates jumped wildly. Nim frowned.

“You can’t do that,” Voltaire said, sipping from a tall glass. “We’re invincible! Not subject to decaying flesh like you.”

“Arrogant bastard, isn’t he?” the president fumed. “Why so many people were taken in by him I’ll never-”

“You died once,” Nim said to the sim. Something was going funny here. “You can die again.”

“Died?” Joan put in loftily. “You are mistaken. Had I ever died, I’m sure I would remember.”

Nim gritted his teeth. There were coordinate overlaps throughout both sims. That meant they had expanded, occupying adjacent processors on overrides. They could compute portions of themselves, running their layer-minds as parallel processing paths. Why had Marq given them that? Or… had he?

“Surely, sir, you err.” Voltaire leaned forward with a warning edge in his voice. “No gentleman confronts a lady with her past.”

Joan tittered. The simwait roared. Nim did not get the joke, but he was too busy to care.

This was absurd. He could not trace all the ramifications of the changes in these sims. They had capabilities out of their computing perimeter. Their sub-minds were dispersed into processors outside Artifice Associates’ nodes. That was how Marq and Sybyl got such fast, authentic, whole-personality response times.

Watching the debate, Nim had wondered how the sims generated so much vitality, an undefinable charisma. Here it was: they had overlapped the submind computations into other nodes, to call on big slabs of processor power. Quite a feat. Contrary to Artifice Associates rules, too, of course. He traced the outlines of their work with some admiration.

Still, he was damned if he would let a sim talk back to him. And they were still laughing.

“Joan,” he barked, “your re-creators deleted your memory of your death. You were bummed at the stake.”

“Nonsense,” Joan scoffed. “I was acquitted of all charges. I am a saint.”

“Nobody living is a saint. I studied your background data-slabs. That church of yours liked to make sure saints were safely dead for a long time.”

Joan sniffed disdainfully.

Nim grinned. “See this?” A lance of fire popped into the air before the sim. He held steady, made flames crackle nastily.

“I’ve led thousands of warriors and knights into battle,” Joan said. “Do you think a sunbeam glancing off a tiny sword can frighten me?”

“I haven’t found a good erasure path yet,” Nim said to the president. “But I will, I will.”

“I thought this was routine,” the president said. “Hurry!”

“Not with such a big cross-linked personality inventory-”

“Forget doing the salvage saves. We don’t need to pack them all back into their original space.”

“But that’ll-”

“ Chopthem.”

“Fascinating,” Voltaire said sardonically, “listening to gods debate one’s fate.”

Nim grimaced. “As for you-” he glared at Voltaire “-your attitudes toward religion mellowed only because Marq deleted every brush with authority you ever had, beginning with your father.”

“Father? I never had a father.”

Nim smirked. “You prove my point.”

“How dare you tamper with my memory!” Voltaire said. “Experience is the source of all knowledge. Haven’t you read Locke? Restore me to myself at once.”

“Not you, no way. But if you don’t shut up, before I kill you both, I might just restore her. You know damn well she burned to a crisp at the stake.”

“You delight in cruelty, don’t you?” Voltaire seemed to be studying Nim, as if their relationship were reversed. Odd, how the sim did not seem worried about its impending extinction.

“Delete!” the president snapped.

“Delete what?” asked Garcon.

“The Scalpel and the Rose,” Voltaire said. “We are not for this confused age, apparently.”

Garcon covered the short-order cook’s human hand with two of his four. “Us, too?”

“Yes, certainly!” Voltaire snapped. “You’re only here on our account. Bit players! Our supporting cast!”

“Well, we have enjoyed our time,” the cook said, drawing closer to Garcon. “Though I would have liked to see more of it all. We cannot walk beyond this city street. Our feet cease moving us at the edge, though we can see spires in the distance.”

“Decoration,” Nim muttered, intent on a task that was getting more complicated as he worked. Rivulets of their personality layers ran everywhere, leaking into the node-space like…”Like rats fleeing a sinking-”

“You assume godlike powers,” Voltaire said, elaborately casual, “without the character to match.”

“What?” The president was startled. “ I’m in control here. Insults-”

“Ah,” Nim said. “This might work.”

“Do something!” cried the Maid, wielding her sword in vain.

“ Au revoir,my sweet pucelle. Garcon, Amana, au revoir. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Perhaps not.”

All four holograms fell into each other’s arms.

The sequence Nim had set up began running. It was a ferret-program, sniffing out connections, scrubbing them thoroughly. Nim watched, wondering where deletion ended and murder began.

“Don’t you go getting any funny ideas,” said the president.

On the screen, Voltaire softly, sadly, quoted himself:

“Sad is the present if no future state

No blissful retribution mortals wait…

All may be well; that hope can man sustain;

All now is well; ‘tis an illusion vain.”

He reached out to caress Joan’s breast. “It doesn’t feel quite right. We may not meet again…but if we do, be sure I shall correct the State of Man.”

The screen went blank.

The president laughed in triumph. “You did it-great!” He clapped Nim on the back. “Now we must come up with a good story. Pin it all on Marq and Sybyl.”

Nim smiled uneasily as the president gushed on, making plans, promising him a promotion and a raise. He’d figured out the delete procedure, all right, but the info-signatures that raced through the holospace those last moments told a strange and complex tale. The echoing cage of data-slabs had resounded with disquieting, odd notes.

Nim knew that Marq had given Voltaire access to myriad methods-a serious violation of containment precautions. Still, what could an artificial personality, already limited, do with some more Mesh connections? Rattle around, get eaten up by policing programs, sniffers seeking out redundancies.

But both Voltaire and Joan, for the debate, had enormous memory space, great volumes of personality realm. Then, while they emoted and rolled their rhetoric across the stadium, across the whole Mesh… had they also been working feverishly? Strumming through crannies of data-storage where they could hide their quantized personality segments?

The cascade of indices Nim had just witnessed hinted at that possibility. Certainly something had used immense masses of computation these last few hours.

“We’ll cover our ass with some public statement,” the president crowed. “A little crisis management and it’ll all blow over.”

“Yessir.”

“Got to keep Seldon out of it. No mention to the legalists, right? Then he can pardon us, once he’s First Minister.”

“Yessir, great, yessir.”

Nim thought feverishly. He still had one more payment due from that Olivaw guy. Keeping Olivaw informed all along had been easy. A violation of his contract with A2, but so what? A guy had to get by, right? It was just plain good luck that the president now wanted done what Olivaw had already paid for: deletion. No harm in collecting twice for the same job.

Or had seemed so. Nim chewed his lip. What did a bunch of digits matter, anyway?

Nim froze. Had the entire sim-restaurant, Garcon, street, Joan-gone in a flash? Usually they dissolved as functions died. A sim was complex and could not simply stop all the intricate interlayers, shutting down at once. But this interweave had been unprecedented, so maybe it was different.

“Done? Good!” The president crisply clapped him on the shoulder.

Nim felt tired, sad. Someday he would have to explain all this to Marq. Erasing so much work…

But Marq and Sybyl had disappeared into the crowds back at the coliseum. Wisely, they didn’t show up for work, or even go back to their apartments. They were on the run. And with them had gone the Junin renaissance, up in smoke as the Junin Sector burned and dissolved in discord and violence.

Even Nim felt a sadness at the smash up. The eager, passionate talk of a renaissance. They had looked to Joan and Voltaire for a kind of maturity in the eternal debate between Faith and Reason. But the Imperium suppressed passion, in the end. Too destabilizing.

Of course, the whole tiktok movement had to be squashed, too. He had sequestered Marq’s memory-complex about the debate of 8,000 years ago. Clearly “robots,” whatever they might be, would be too unsettling an issue to ever bring up in a rational society.

Nim sighed. He knew that he had merely edited away electrical circuits. Professionals always kept that firmly in mind.

Still, it was wrenching. To see it go. All trickled away, like grains of digital sand, down the obscure hourglass of simulated time.