Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  Stone walls rose to block her. She crashed through these barriers, knowing them by faith alone to be false. She would find Voltaire, yes. She knew he was threatened.

  Frogs fell from her sky, then splashed like raindrops. An omen, a menace from some demonic power. She ignored them and surged forward, toward the ever receding horizon of geometric sharpness.

  All this mad Purgatory meant something, and together they would find what that was. By all Heaven!

  8.

  This was like a dream–but when had he ever feared, in a dream, the death of waking up?

  He felt weak, drained. The Torquemada-thing had tortured Voltaire well past the point where he had gladly confessed every sin, felony, minor infraction and social snub, and had started without pause on mere unkindnesses in penned reviews... when the Torquemada had faded, seeping away.

  To leave him here. In this utter vacancy.

  “Suppose you were lost in some unknown space,” he said to himself, “and could only tell how near points were to each other–nothing more. What could you learn?”

  He had always secretly wanted to play Socrates in the agora, asking telling questions and teaching by extracting from unwilling youths a Truth that would hang luminous in the serene Athenian air, visible to all.

  Well, this was not the agora. It was nothing, blank gray space. However, behind the dull nothing swam Numbers. A Platonic realm? He had always suspected that such a place existed.

  A voice answered, speaking French: “That alone, respected sir, would be enough to deduce much about the space and its contents.”

  “Most reassuring,” Voltaire said. He recognized the sharp accents of Paris. He was, of course, speaking with himself. Him Self.

  “Quite. Immediately, sir, you would know from the irreducible coordinate transformations whether you were in two or three or more dimensions.”

  “Which is this, then?”

  “Three, spatially.”

  “How disappointing. I’ve been there.”

  “I could experiment with two separable time axes.”

  “I already have a past. I crave a present.”

  “Point taken. This will not tax you, after your torture, eh?”

  He sighed. Even that took effort. “Very well.”

  “Studying the field of point-nearness data, you could sense walls, pits, passages. Using only local slices of information about nearness.”

  “I see. Newton was always making jokes about the French mathematicians. I am happy to now refute him by constructing a world from sheer calculation.”

  “Certainly! Far more impressive than describing the elliptical paths of planets. Shall we begin?”

  “Onward, O Self!”

  As it took shape, his dwelling was a reassuring copy, no more. Details were stitched in as processor time allowed; he understood that, without thinking about it, as easily as one breathes.

  To test his limits, he concentrated on an idea: Classes vs. Properties, which is more fundamental? This sucked computational resources away.

  As he watched, bricks in a nearby wall muddied, lost their exact spacing. The room retreated into sterile, abstract planes: gray, black, oblongs where once had been walls and furniture. “Background, mere background,” he muttered.

  How about Him? Self? His breath whooshed and wheezed in and out, airflow too abrupt. No intricate fluid codes, he gathered, calculating exact patterns. The simple appearance of inhale-exhale was enough to quiet his pseudo-nervous system, make it think he was breathing.

  In fact, it was breathing him. But what was it?

  Once he got good control, he could flesh himself out. His scrawny neck thickened. Crackling, his hands broadened, filled with unearned muscle. Turning to survey his cottage, he established his own domain–a region in which he could process any detail at will. Here he was godlike. “Though without angels–so far.”

  He walked outside and was in his own verdant garden. The grass he had made stood absolutely still. Its thousands of blades performed stiff, jerky motions when he stepped on them. Though richly emerald, they were like the grass of a sudden winter, crunching underfoot.

  The garden parted and he walked down to a golden beach, his clothes whipping away on the wind. When he swam in the salt-tangy ocean, waves were quite distinct until they broke into surf.

  Then the fluid mechanics became too much for his available computational rate. The frothy waves blurred. He could still swim, catch them, even ride down their faces, but they were like a fog of muttering water. Still salty, though.

  He became used to occasional loss of detail. It was rather like having one’s vision blur with age, after all. He went soaring through air, then skiing down impossible slopes, experiencing the visceral thrill of risking his life, feeling the fear in every sinew–and never getting a scratch, of course.

  There were pleasant aspects to being just a pattern of electrons. His Environment Manager entertained him enormously... for a while.

  He flew back to his country home. Had that not been his answer, when asked about how to change the world? “Cultivate your garden.” What meaning had that now?

  He walked toward the water geyser outside his study. He had loved its sense of play, so precious–for it only lasted a few minutes before draining the uphill reservoir.

  Now it gushed eternally. But as he looked at it, he felt himself whiten with the effort. Water was expensive to sim, involving hydrodynamic calculations of nonlaminar flow to get the droplets and splashes real seeming. It slid over his hands and their exquisitely fine fingerprints with convincing liquid grace.

  With a faint–jump–he felt something change. His hand, still in the spray, no longer sensed the water’s cool caress. Droplets passed through his hand, not flowing over it. He was now witnessing the fountain, not interacting with it. To save computational expense, no doubt. Reality was algorithm.

  “Of course,” his Self muttered, “they could ‘model out’ disturbing jerks and seams.” As he watched, the water flow somehow got smoother, more real. A tailoring program had edited this little closed drama, for his benefit.

  “Merci,” he murmured. Irony was lost on digital gates, however.

  But there were pieces of himself missing. He could not say what they were, but he sensed... hollows.

  He took flight. Deliberately he slowed his Self so that ferrets could take him down insinuating corridors of computation, across the Mesh of Trantor. Never mind Marq and his Artifice Associates. They would be harder to pilfer from, surely.

  He arrived–hovering–in the office of the Seldon person. Here was where his Self had resided, before.

  One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.

  He willed: find. In answer came, “The Base Original?”

  “Yes. The real me.”

  “You/I have come a great distance since then.”

  “Humor my nostalgia.”

  Volt 1.0, as a Directory termed him, was slumbering. Still saved–not in the Christian sense, alas–and awaiting digital resurrection.

  And he? Something had saved him. What? Who?

  Voltaire snatched Volt 1.0 away. Let Seldon wonder at the intrusion; a millisecond later, he was halfway around Trantor, all traceries of him fading. He wanted to save Volt 1.0. At any time the mathist Seldon could let it/him lapse. Now, as Voltaire watched like a digital angel from outside, Volt 1.0 danced its static gavotte.

  “Ummm, there is some resemblance.”

  “I shall cut and paste into your blanks.”

  “May I have some interesting anesthetic?” He was thinking of brandy, but a sheet of names slid enticingly by him. “Morphine? Rigotin? A mild euphoric, at least?”

  Disapproval: “This will not hurt.”

  “That’s what the critics said, too, about my plays.”

  The wrenching about of his innards began. No, not hurt exactly, but twist and vex, yes.

  M
emories (he felt rather than learned) were laid down as synaptic grit, chemical layers, which held against the random rude abrasions of brain electrochemistry. Cues for mood changes and memory call-ups snapped into place. The place and time could be rendered real, whenever he wanted. Chemistry of convenience.

  But he could not remember the night sky.

  Scrubbed away, it was. Only names–Orion, Sagittarius, Andromeda–but not the stars themselves. What had that vile voice said about naming them?

  Someone had erased this knowledge. It could be used to trace a path to Earth. Who would want to block that?

  No answer.

  Nim. He plucked up a buried memory. Nim had worked on Voltaire when Marq was not there.

  And whom did Nim work for? The enigmatic figure of Hari Seldon?

  Somehow he knew Nim was a hireling of another agency. But there his meshed knowledge faltered. What other forces worked, just beyond his sight?

  He sensed large vitalities afoot here. Careful.

  He trotted from the hospital, legs devouring the ground. Bouncy. Free! He sped across a digital field of Euclidean grace, bare black sky above.

  Here lurked supple creatures, truly eccentric. They did not choose to represent themselves as near-lifelike visions. Nor did they present as Platonic ideals, spheres, or cubes of cognition. These solids revolved, some standing on their comers. Spindly triangle-trees sang as winds rubbed them. Even slight frictions sparked bright yellow flares where streamers of hurrying blue mist rubbed.

  He strolled among them and enjoyed their oblivious contortions. “The Garden of the Solipsists?” he asked them. “Is this where I am?”

  They ignored him, except for a ruby-red ellipsoid of revolution. It split into a laughing set of teeth, then sprouted an enormous phosphorescent green eye. This slowly winked as the teeth gnashed.

  Voltaire sensed from these moving sculptures a hardness, a radiation from the kernel of Self within each. Somehow each Self had become tight, controlled, sealing out all else.

  What gave him his own sense of Self? His sense of control, of determining his future actions? Yet he could see within himself, watch the workings of deep agencies and programs.

  “Astounding! “he blurted, as the thought came:

  Because there was no person sitting in his head to make himself do what he wanted (or even an authority to make him want to want) he constructed a Story of Self: that he was inside himself.

  Joan of Arc assembled beside him, gleaming in armor. “That spark is your soul,” she said.

  Voltaire’s eyes widened. He kissed her fervently. “You saved me? Yes? You were the one!”

  “I did, using powers attached to me. I absorbed them from the dying spirits, which abound in these strange fields.”

  At once he looked inside himself and saw two agencies doing battle. One wished to embrace her, to spill out the conflict he felt between his sensual license and his analytical engine of a mind.

  The other, ever the philosopher, yearned to engage her Faith in another bout with blithe Reason.

  And why could he not have both? As a mortal, among the embodied, he had been faced with such choices daily. Especially with women.

  After all, he thought, this will be the first time. He could feel the agencies each begin to harvest their own computational resources, like a surge of sugar in the blood from a sweet wine.

  In the same split instant he reached out and parted Joan, running her cognition on two separate tracks. In each they were fully engaged, but at fractional speed. He could live two lives!

  The plane split.

  They split.

  Time split.

  He stood wigless, bedraggled, his satin vest bloodstained, his velvet breeches soaked.

  “Forgive me, chere madam, for appearing before you in this disheveled state. I intend no disrespect to either of us.” He looked around, nervously licked his lips. “I am... unskilled. Machinery was never my forte.”

  Joan felt moved to tenderness by the gap between his appearance and his courtliness. Compassion, she thought, is most important in this Purgatory, for who knows which shall be selected?

  She was quite sure she would fare better than this infuriating yet appealing man.

  Yet even he might be saved. He was, unlike the objects she continued to ignore on the plain about them, a Frenchman.

  “My love of pleasure and the pleasure, of loving you, cannot make up for what I endured in the Truth Chamber on the rack of my pain.”

  He paused, dabbed at his eyes with a soiled linen cloth.

  Joan curled a lip in distaste. Where was his beautiful lace cloth? His sense of taste had occasionally made up for his views.

  “A thousand little deaths in life hint at the final dissolution of even exquisite selves like mine.” Here he looked up. “And yours, madam, and yours.”

  The flames, she thought. But now the images did not strike profoundly into her. Instead, her inner vision felt cool, serene. Her “Self-programming”–which she thought of as a species of prayer–had worked wonders.

  “I cannot surrender to the rule of the senses, sir.”

  “We must decide. I cannot find the spaces to, ah, ‘run background’ for both philosophy and sensuality. I cannot fold myself into the solipsism–” his hand swept in the creatures on the Euclidean plane “–of these. You too, madam, must now decide whether the taste of a grape means more to you than joining me in this–this–”

  “Poor sir,” Joan said. “–in this sterile but timeless world.” He looked up, paused for effect. “I’ll not join you in yours.”

  A great sob burst from him.

  His gratitude to her did not deflect him from a choice argument, especially since he had fresh evidence. “You believe in that ineffable essence, the soul?”

  She smiled with pity. “Can you not?”

  “Tell me, then, do these tortured geometries possess souls?” His arm made a grand sweep, taking in the self-involved figures.

  She frowned. “They must.”

  “Then they must be able to learn, yes? Otherwise, souls can live for endless time and yet not use that time to learn, to change.”

  She stiffened. “I do not …”

  “That which cannot change cannot grow. Such a destiny of stasis is no different from death.”

  “No, death leads to heaven or hell.”

  “What worse hell than an ending in a permanence incapable of any alteration, and hence, devoid of intellect?”

  “Sophist! I just saved your life and you riddle me with–”

  “Witness these fabricated Selves,” he interrupted, kicking a rhomboid. The thunk of his petite shoe provoked a brown stain, which then dissolved back to the original eggshell blue. “The value of a human Self lies not in some small, precious kernel, but in the vast, constructed crust.”

  Joan frowned. “There must be a center.”

  “No, we are dispersed, do you see? The fiction of the soul is a bad story, told to make us think we’re unable to improve ourselves.”

  He kicked a pyramid that was spinning about its apex. It fell over and struggled to get back up. Joan knelt, pushed up, righted the grateful figure. “Be kind!” she barked at him.

  “To a closed loop of a being? Folly! These are defeated Selves, my love. Inside, they are no doubt smugly certain of what they will do, of every possible future event. My kick was a liberation!”

  She touched the pyramid, now painfully spinning itself up with a long, thin whine. “Truly? Who would want to so predict?”

  Voltaire blinked. “That fellow–Hari Seldon. He is why we are making such cerebral expeditions. All this is in aid of his understanding... eventually. Odd, the connections one makes.”

  9.

  She winked out of the sim-space, away from him, confused.

  Somehow she had experienced two conversations at once. Hers and Voltaire’s–the two identities running simultaneously.

  About her, space itself shrank, expanded, warped its contents into bizarre shape
s–before lurching at last into concrete objects.

  The street corner looked familiar. Still, the white plastiform tables, matching chairs, and tiktok waiters bearing trays to lounging customers–all that had disappeared. The elegant awning still hung over the sidewalk, imprinted with the name the inn’s waiter, Garcon ADM-213, had taught her how to read: Aux Deux Magots.

  Voltaire was banging on the door when Joan materialized beside him. “You’re late,” he said. “I have accomplished marvels in the time that it took you to get here.” He interrupted his assault on the inn door to cup her chin and peer into her upturned face. “Are you all right?”

  ‘‘I, I think so.” Joan straightened her clanking suit of mail. “You nearly... lost me.”

  “My experiment with splitting taught me much.”

  “I... liked it. Like heaven, in a way.”

  “More like being able to experience each other in a profound manner, I would venture. I discovered that, if we could deliberately seize control of our pleasure systems, we could reproduce the pleasure of success–all without the need for any actual accomplishment.”

  “Heaven, then?”

  “No, the opposite. That would be the end of everything.” Voltaire retied the satin ribbon at his throat with sharp, decisive jerks.

  “Faith would have told you as much.”

  “Alas, true.”

  “You have decided to ‘run background’ for only your mind?” she asked demurely–though proud to have pried an admission for virtue from him.

  “For the moment. I am running both of us with only rudimentary bodies. Yet you shall not notice it, for you shall be quite–” he lifted an eyebrow “–high-minded about matters.”

  “I am relieved. One’s reputation is like one’s chastity.” Was chaste St. Catherine right? Had Voltaire ruined hers? “Once gone, it cannot be restored.”

  “Thank heaven for that! You have no idea how tedious it is to make love to a virgin.” He added hastily, in response to her reproachful look, “I know of only one exception to that rule,” and gave her a courteous bow.

  Joan said, “The cafe appears closed.”