Foundation Fear (16 page)

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 -- both possess 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 Gar�on 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 wig-makers!”

“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.

“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 Gar�on 213-ADM interactive
character after it. Laziness, perhaps, had led her to simply holo-copy the physical
appearance of a standard tiktok-form. Like all artists, sim-programmers borrowed from
life; they didn't create it.

She watched as the tiktok -- she thought of it as Gar�on, 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 Gar�on'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 zot-corn 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 Gar�on 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.

“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 Gar�on 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 torn 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 Gar�on and
the cook, noise, rasters flicking like bars of a prison across her vision --

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

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.

“We filled 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 dendritic
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?” Gar�on asked. Apparently this was a joke, for Gar�on 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
Gar�on. 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 Gar�on 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 Gar�on. The seated Gar�on
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 Gar�on exchanged a look. “One must be very patient,” Joan said to Gar�on, “when
dealing with kings and rational men.”