by Isaac Asimov
“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–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 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? I
t’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.
“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 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 gl
anced 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?”
