Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  –ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

  1.

  JOAN OF ARC floated down the dim, rumbling tunnels of the smoky Mesh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Shuddering, she yielded.

  2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Surely here in Limbo–”

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

  “Arithmetic is not holy, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Monsieur neglects me!”

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

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

  “No!”

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

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

  “I merely helped you to become a woman.”

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

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

  “Monsieur mistakes me for his wife.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide network, he was now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of 0’s and 1’s. He ran on processor clusters, a vagrant thief. Amid Trantor’s myriad personal computers and mountainous Imperial processors, he lurked and pilfered.

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

  And what were they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I am a warrior, I remind you.”

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

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

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

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

  “Drat! Finding them will be... dangerous.”

  “So it is fear which impedes you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Because … the issue advances …”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He swam in the Mesh. Joan dwelled there. He

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

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

  3.

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

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

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

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

  “Because she’s female?”

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

  Sybyl wore her grudging look. “Perhaps.”

  “Less wily. Ruled by her heart.”

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

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

  She smiled. “You keep tripping over them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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