by Isaac Asimov
“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 A2 customers, 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 soufflé.
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 recreation’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 stra
ta 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!”
“They have 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 flambé 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 ce
rtainly 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 Sorcière 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.
