by Isaac Asimov
Her taunt irked him. Several times he’d felt he was close, very close. Always, just as his ferrets found a thread of Voltaire’s distinctive configuration-logic, it would slip away, thwart his effort. His holo would inexplicably black out. He’d lose hours of carefully aggregated data in a microsecond. And he’d have to begin again.
Marq leaned back and rotated his neck to get the cricks out. “I may be onto something,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He pointed to his carbon cube. “Modified my array-spaces and used them to earn a few creds in the protein markets. I caught another Voltaire scent, too.”
She sighed and collapsed into a chair that deftly shaped itself to catch her. “Why hustle the cred when we can’t use it to get anything to eat?”
“Find Joan, we’ll get fat.”
“Look, those tiktok failures, what’s the evidence they’re due to our sims?”
He shrugged. “The Imperial Scientific Consortium thinks there’s a connection with the Junin mess. Nonsense, of course, but it keeps people jazzed. They say they have secret sources, they don’t explain. Got it?”
“My my, touchy. So they’re still looking for us.”
“Going through the motions, I’d guess. Trantor has much bigger headaches now.”
“Think we’ll all go on rations?”
“‘Fraid so. Rumor says not until next week.” Her frown made him add, “Rations are mostly a precaution. You and I can both afford to lose a little of this.” He squeezed a roll of flesh above his belt–not bad for his age, but bad enough–and hoped his apprehension had not leaked into his voice.
“I don’t need an involuntary diet.” She slid a sideways glance at him. “They caught a family eating wall rats.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Why, ‘secret sources,’ of course. I can be mysterious, too.”
Tiktok disorders had spread quickly among the major food supply axes. The Junin conflagration had not set them off; something else had, weeks later. In just a matter of days breakdowns had affected all food factoria on Trantor. Imports were rising, but there was a limit to how much anyone could push through the fourteen wormhole mouths nearby, or haul in clumsy hyperships.
Marq’s stomach rumbled in sympathetic anger. She smiled. “Ummm, greedy, aren’t we?”
“Look at this,” Marq said testily, thumbing up lines on his holo.
To be sensuous is to be mortal. Suffering and pain are the dark twins of joy and pleasure; death the identical dark twin of life.
My present state is bloodless; therefore I cannot bleed. The sweats of passion are beyond me; my ardors never cool. I can be copied and remade; even deletion need pose no threat to my immortality. How can I not prefer my fate to the ultimate fate of all sensuous beings, drenched in time as the fish is drenched in the sea it swims?
“Where did you find this?” she asked.
“Just a drab I snagged while a data-spike was being whisked away. It registers as part of a conversation between two widely separated Mesh sites.”
“It does sound like him....”
“I checked in the popoff files we kept. Y’know, all that linear text running alongside his sim? This stuff is from there. Ancient texts. That guy was always happiest when quoting himself.”
“So he is out there.”
“Yeah, and I’m outta here.” Marq grabbed a pastejacket and made for the door.
“Where to?”
“Dark market–I need food.”
Sybyl hurried after him. Marq knew the alleyway purveyors of sweetmeats and snacks. He led her out of a dingy stack of low-rent cubes and into warrens cramped and thick with the musty smell of millennia. He made his buy in a dank hole beside a fountain commemorating a battle which Sybyl could not even pronounce, much less remember.
Automatically she kept watch for snooper eyes, but they were rarer here than real police. The heat on them might be less–their data-skills had built a solid-seeming info-shell around them–but a cop could still eyeball them and blow the whole thing.
Marq shared with her and the food tasted sharp, intense, wonderful. They fell into a meditative silence as they crested a long-rise lift-stair and looked out over slum Zones, trash-littered halls, chaotic tentrises stuck between majestic buildings, miscarriages of architecture of every stripe and shape.
With his belly comfortable, if not full, Marq could savor Trantor in the large. It was majestic in its injustice, undeserved sufferings, inequities, iniquities. All of its blemishes and blights got folded together by distance, like broken eggs dissolved into the cream-smooth, as long as you did not admire too closely.
They were idly strolling when without warning a six-armed tiktok came whirring down their lane. It pursued a four-armed tiktok with a polished carapace–a tiktok boss-class. They met and began to slug it out while churning along at full speed, like a fistfight carried out at a dead run. Their metal bodies clanged as they careened along.
“Don’t move,” Marq said. The two sped by in furious combat. “Cops’ll be here. Let’s skip.”
He and Sybyl went the other way, running out into a large square. He whistled through his teeth at what he saw.
All around, six-armed laborer tiktoks had folded all arms, refusing to work, deaf to human protests. They formed a protective barrier between the women supervising their building project and the walls under construction.
Several six-armers raised baskets reverentially into the air. One paid no attention and continued welding a cross-girder, until another fell on him, swinging a long coring tool.
Clangs rolled across the square. Panicked people ran everywhere. No one could stop the tiktok protest. When a four-armer tried to intervene, six-armers attacked it.
“Y’know, office work seems pretty desirable right now,” Marq said. “If this keeps up, we’ll have to do all our own grunt work.”
“What’s happening?” Sybyl backed away, alarmed. “It’s as though tiktoks had a madness–and it’s spreading.”
“Ummm. A virus?”
“But where did they catch it?”
“Exactly.”
4.
“What?!” Voltaire exclaimed as he snapped into the context-frame.
“Welcome,” Joan said, voice thin. She had never initiated contact with him before. And he had yet to find the Magots actors. “I may have to reconsider my position on miracles,” he said.
She lowered her eyes. For just an instant he suspected this was just so she could raise them: to look up at him without lifting her lovely head. Did she know how this captivated him? Her bosom rose and fell in a way his sensors found maddening since he could do nothing about it.
Voltaire reached out for madam’s hand and raised it to his lips. He felt, however, nothing–and peevishly let it drop. “This is unbearable,” he said. “To long for union and feel nothing when it is achieved.”
“You feel nothing when we meet?”
“Ma chère Maquine, sensors do not a sensuous being make. Don’t confuse sensoring with sensuality.”
“And how is it... Before...” Joan spoke with apparent difficulty, as if afraid she might be wounded by the answer.
“I cannot manage the, uh, ‘programming’ here. We had the use of myriad capabilities, when we were trapped zoo animals of Artifice Associates. Here in the digital wild, my talents–though growing!–do not match that level. Yet.”
“I thought perhaps it was a holy deprivation. A help, truly, to rightful behavior.”
“Much more in history may be explained by incompetence than by ill will.”
Joan looked away. “Sir, I summoned you because... since we last met, despite the warnings of my voices... I answered a call.”
“I told you not to do that!” Voltaire shouted.
“I had no choice,” she said. “I had to answer. It was... urgent.” Fear crept into her voice. “I cannot quite explain, but I know that the moment I did so, I hovered on the verge of absolute extinction.”
Voltaire hid his concern behind a mask o
f levity. “No way for a saint to talk. You’re not supposed to admit the possibility of absolute extinction. Your canonization could be reversed.”
Joan’s voice wavered, a candle flame stirred by dark winds of doubt. “I know only that I hovered on the brink of a great void, a chasm of darkness. I glimpsed, not eternity, but nothingness. Even my voices fell silent, humbled by the spectacle of... of...”
“Of what?”
“Nonbeing,” Joan said. “Disappearing, never to reappear again. I was about to be... erased.”
“Deletion. The ferrets and their hounds.” Prickly gooseflesh fear invaded him. “How did you escape?”
“I didn’t,” the Maid said, awe undercutting fear. “That was eerier still. Whoever–whatever–it was let me go without injury. I stood before It, vulnerable, exposed. And It... released me.”
He felt a cold dread. He, too, had sensed unseeable entities just over his shoulder, watching, judging. There was something blankly alien about these visitations. He pulled himself back from the chilly memories. “From now on answer no calls whatever.”
The Maid’s face clouded with doubt. “I had no choice.”
“I’ll find a better hiding place for you,” Voltaire assured her. “Make you invulnerable to involuntary appearances. Give you power–”
“You do not understand. This... Thing... could have snuffed me out like two fingers pinching a tiny flame. It will return, I know it. Meanwhile, I have but one wish.”
“Anything,” Voltaire said. “Anything in my power...”
“Restore us and our friends to the cafe.”
“Aux Deux Magots? I am searching, but I don’t even know if it still exists!”
“Re-create it with the sorcery you have learned. If I am to tumble headlong into the void, let it not be before I spend one evening reunited with you and our dear friends. Breaking bread, sipping wine in the company of those I love... I ask nothing more before I am–erased.”
“You’re not going to be erased,” Voltaire assured her with far more conviction than he felt. “I’m going to transport you to a place no one will ever think to look. You’ll be unable to respond to any calls–not even if you think they are from me. But you will transmit to me often, do you understand?”
“I shall send my spiritual fraction, as well.”
“I believe they are giving me an itch already.” He did indeed feel a restless, edgy scratching at the edge of perception, like insects crawling in his brain. He shook himself. Why did a perfidious mathists’ logic rob him of his sensuality, and torture him with rasping irritations?
But her defiance had only begun. “You have taken my virginity, sir, yet you speak only slightingly of marriage. And of love.”
“Bien sur, love between married couples may be possible–though I myself have never seen an instance of it–yet it is unnatural. Like being born with two fused toes. It happens, but only by mistake. One can, naturellement, live happily with any woman, provided one doesn’t love her.”
She gave him an imperious glance. “I have become immune to your rogue ways.”
He shook his head sadly. “A dog is better off in this respect than I am in my present state.”
He trailed his sim-finger lightly across her throat. Her head lolled back, her eyes closed, her lips parted. But he, alas, felt nothing. “Find a way,” he whispered. “Find a way.”
5.
He had been neglecting his work. His lack of interactive senses was thus his own fault.
That, and the itching. He must learn to... somehow... scratch himself–inside himself.
In this damnable digital abode.
“One can scarcely blame a deity for His absence from such a place as this,” Voltaire said into the infinite recessional coordinate system which surrounded him. He flew through black spaces gridded out in exact rectangular reaches, lattice corridors extending away to infinity.
“How different!” he shouted into the deep indifference. “I swim into sims of others, inhabit realms far from–”
He had been about to say from my origins–but that meant:
A France
B Reason
C Sark
He was of all three. On Sark, the self-proud programmers who had... resurrected... him, had spoken of their New Renaissance. He was to be an ornament to their fresh flowering. Somewhere on that planet, editions of Volt 1.0 ran.
His brothers? Younger Dittos, yes. He would have to inspect the implications of such beings, in a future rational discourse. For now
The trick was close scrutiny, he realized. If he slowed events–a trick he had learned early–then he could devote data-crunchers to the task of understanding... himself.
First, this inky vault through which he flew. Windless, without warmth or the rub of the real.
He delved down into the working mathematics of himself. It was a byzantine welter of detail, but in outline surprisingly familiar: the Cartesian world. Events were modeled with axes in rectangular space, x, y, z, so that motion was then merely sets of numbers on each axis. All dynamics shrank to arithmetic. Descartes would have been amused by the dizzying heights to which his minor method had spun.
He rejected the outside and delved into his own slowed reaches.
Now he could feel his preconscious reading the incoming sights, sounds, and flitting thoughts of the moment. To his inner gaze, they all carried bright red tags–sometimes simple caricatures, often complex packets.
From somewhere an idea-packet arrived, educating him: these were Fourier transforms. Somehow this helped to understand. And the mere wafting sense of a fellow Frenchman’s name made him feel better.
An Associator–big, blue, bulbous–hovered over this data-field, plucking at the tags. It reached with yellow streamers over a far, purple-rimmed horizon, to the Field of Memory. From there it brought any item stored-packages of mottled gray, containing sights, sounds, smells, ideas–which matched the incoming tags.
Job done, the Associator handed all the matchings to a towering monolith: the Discriminator. A perpetual wind sucked the red tags up, into the yawning surfaces of the coal-black Discriminator mountain. Merciless filters there matched the tags with the stored memories.
If they fitted–geometric shapes sliding together, mock sex, notches fitting snugly into protruding struts–they stayed. But fits were few. Most tags failed to find a host memory which made sense. No fit. These the Discriminator ate. The tags and connections vanished, swept away to clear fresh space for the next flood of sensation.
He loomed over this interior landscape and felt its hailstorm power. His whole creative life, the marvel of continents, had come from here. Tiny thoughts, snatches of conversations, melodies–all would pop into his mind, a tornado of chaos-images, crowding, jostling for his attention. The memory-packets which shared some sturdy link to a tag endured.
But who decided what was rugged enough? He watched rods slide into slots and saw the intricate details of how those memories and tags were shaped. So the answer lay at least one step further back, in the geometry of memory.
Which meant that he had determined matters, by the laying down of memories. Memory-clumps, married to tag-streams, made a portion of his Self, plucked forth from the torrent, the river of possibilities.
And he had done it long ago, when the memories were stored–all without realizing how they could fit with tags to come. So where was any predictable Voltaire to lurk? In sheer intricacy, deep detail, shifting associations in the flow.
No rock-hard Self at all.
And his imagination? The author of all his plays and essays? It must lie in the weather of the tag-memory torrents. The twist, warp and sudden marriages. Jigsaw associations, rising up from the preconscious. Order from chaos.
“Who is Voltaire?” he called to the streaming gridded emptiness.
No reply.
His itch was still with him. And the yawning nothing all around. He decided to fix the larger issue. What had Pascal said?
The silence of the
se spaces terrifies me.
He probed and gouged and sought. And in the doing, knew that as his hands dug into the ebony stuff all about him, they were but metaphors. Symbols for programs he could never have created himself.
He had inherited these abilities–much as he had, as a boy, inherited hands. Down below his conscious Self, his minions had labored upon the base Volt 1.0, plus Marq’s augmentations.
He pulled apart the blackness and stepped through. To a city street.
He was puffing, weak, strained. Resources running low.
He walked shakily into a restaurant–anonymous, plain, food merely standing on counters–and stuffed himself.
He concentrated on each step. By making each portion of his experience well up, he found that he could descend through the layers of his own response.
Making his body feel right demanded sets of overlapping rules. As he chewed, teeth had to sink into food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes start to work to extract the right nutrient ratios–else it would not seem real.
His programs, he saw, bypassed the involved stomach and colon processes. Such intricacies were needless. Instead, the “software” (odd phrase) simplified all the messy innards into a result he could feel–a satisfying concentration of tasty blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated, with a patchwork of templates for the appropriate emotional levels.
All other detail was discarded, once the subroutines got the right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. Not too bad for what was really a block of ferrite and polymer, each site in its crystal complexity an individual, furiously working microprocessor.
Still, he felt as though he had been hollowed out by an intense, sucking vacuum.
Voltaire rushed out of the restaurant. The street! He needed to see this place, to check his suspicions.
Down the placid avenues he lurched. Run, stride!
Even though reckless, he never accidentally fell. Inspection of his inner layers showed that this was because his peripheral vision extended beyond 180 degrees, taking everything in. So he was literally seeing behind his head–though he did not consciously register this.
