Foundations Fear

by Gregory Benford

Page 15

  Here their math-craft met its test. Artificial personalities had to survive this cusp point or crash into insanity and incoherence. Ra­ cing 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 dis­ appearances or anything. ”

  “Joan’s cleared up. ” Sybyl pointed at brown striations in the matrix representation that floated in 3D before her. “Some emotion­ al 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 author­ ities—”

  “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 integ­ rate 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 rect­ angle 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, “Thatflamb é 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 certainly 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. “François-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, Re­ lapsa, 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 sor­ ceress 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.

  “Your planet, I mean. ”

  “Planets are in the sky. I was of the earth. ”

  “I mean—oh, never mind. ” He spoke soundlessly to the woman, Sybyl—“Of the ground? Farmers? Could even prehistoricals be so ignorant?”—apparently thinking she could not read lips, a trick she had mastered to divine the deliberations of churchly tribunals.

  Joan said, “I know what is sufficient to my charge. ”

  Boker frowned, then rushed on. “Please, hear me out. Our cause is just. The fate of the sacred depends upon our winning to our side many converts. If we are to uphold the vessel of humanity, and time-honored traditions of our very identity, we must defeat Secular Skepticism. ”

  She tried to turn away, but the clanking weight of her chains stopped her. “Leave me alone. Although I killed no one, I fought in many combats to assure the victory of France’s Great True King. I presided over his coronation at Rheims. I was wounded in battle for his sake. ”

  She held up her wrists—for she was now in the foul cell at Rouen, in leg irons and chains. Sybyl had said this would anchor her, be good for her character in some way. As an angel, Sybyl was no doubt correct. Boker began to implore her, but Joan summoned strength to say, “The world knows how I was requited for my pains. I shall wage war no more. ”

  Monsieur Boker turned to the sorceress. “A sacrilege, to keep a great figure in chains. Can’t you transport her to some place of theological rest? A cathedral?”

  “Context. Sims need context,” La Sorcière said without sound. Joan found she could read lips with a clarity she had never known. Perhaps this Purgatory improved its charges.

  Monsieur Boker cl
ucked. “I am impressed with what you’ve done, but unless you can make her cooperate, what good is she to us?”

  “You haven’t seen her at the summit of her Selfhood. The few historical associations we have been able to decipher claim that she was a ’mesmerizing presence,’ We’ll have to bring that out. ”

  “Can you not make her smaller? It’s impossible to talk to a giant. ”

  The Maid, to her astonishment, shrank by two-thirds in height.

  Monsieur Boker seemed pleased. “Great Joan, you misunderstand the nature of the war that lies ahead. Uncountable millennia have passed since your ascension into heaven. You—”

  The Maid sat up. “Tell me one thing. Is the king of France a descendant of the English Henry’s House of Lancaster? Or is he a Valois, descended from the Great and True King Charles?”

  Monsieur Boker blinked and thought. “I…I think it may be truly said that we Preservers of Our Father’s Faith, the party I represent, are in a manner of speaking descendants of your Charles. ”

  The Maid smiled. She knew her voices had been heaven-sent, no matter what the bishops said. She’d only denied them when they took her to the cemetery of St. Ouen, and then only for fear of the fire. She’d been right to recant her recantation two days later; the Lancastrian failure to annex France confirmed that. If Monsieur Boker spoke for descendants of the House of Valois, despite his clear absence of a noble title, she would hear him out.

  “Proceed,” she said.

  Monsieur Boker explained that this place was soon to hold a referendum. (After some deliberation with La Sorcière, he advised that Joan should think of this place as France, in essence. ) The contest would be between two major parties, Preservers vs. Skeptics. Both parties had agreed to hold a Great Debate between two verbal duelists, to frame the salient question.

  “What issue?” the Maid asked sharply.

  “Whether mechanical beings endowed with artificial intelligence should be built. And if so, should they be allowed full citizenship, with all attendant rights. ”

  The Maid shrugged. “A joke? Only aristocrats and noblemen have rights. ”

  “Not anymore, though of course we do have a class system. Now the common lot enjoy rights. ”

  “Peasants like me?” the Maid asked. “We?”

  Monsieur Boker, face a moving flurry of exasperated scowls, turned to La Sorcière. “Must I do everything?”

  “You wanted her as is,” La Sorcière said. “Or, rather, as was. ”

  Monsieur Boker spent two minutes ranting about something he called the Conceptual Shift. This term meant an apparently theolo­ gical dispute about the nature of mechanical artifice. To Joan the answer seemed clear, but then, she was a woman of the fields, not a word artisan.

  “Why don’t you ask your king? One of his counselors? Or one of your learned men?”

  Monsieur Boker curled his lip, dismissively fanned the air. “Our leaders are pallid! Weak! Rational doormats!”

  “Surely—”

  “You cannot imagine, coming from ancient passion. Intensity and passion are regarded as bad form, out of style. We wished to find intellects with the old fire, the—”

  “No! Oh!” The flames, licking—

  It was some moments before her breathing calmed and she could shakily listen again.

  The great debate between Faith and Reason would be held in the Coliseum of Junin Sector before an audience of 400,000 souls. The Maid and her opponent would appear in holograms, magnified by a factor of thirty. Each citizen would then vote on the question.

  “Vote?” the Maid inquired.

  “You wanted her uncorrupted,” La Sorcière said. “You got her. ”

  The Maid listened in silence, forced to absorb millennia in minutes. When Monsieur Boker finished, she said, “I excelled in battle, if only for a brief time, but never in argument. No doubt you know of my fate. ”

  Monsieur Boker looked pained. “The vagueries of the ancients! We have a skimpy historical frame around your, ah, representa-tion—no more. We know not what place you lived, but we do know minutiae of events after your—”

  “Death. You can speak of it. I am accustomed to it, as any Christian maiden should be, upon arrival in Purgatory. I know who you two are, as well. ”

  La Sorcière asked cautiously, “You…do?”

  “Angels! You manifest yourselves as ordinary folk, to calm my fears. Then you set me a task. Even if it involves the roguish, it is a divine mission. ”

  Monsieur Boker nodded slowly, glancing at La Sorcière. “From the tatters of data flapping about your Self, we gather that your reputation was restored at hearings held twenty-six years after your death. Those involved in your condemnation repented of their mistake. You were called, in high esteem, La Rose de la Loire. ”

  She blinked back wistful tears. “Justice…Had I been skilled in argument, I’d have convinced my inquisitors—those English-loving preachers of the University of Paris!—that I am not a witch. ”

  Monsieur Boker seemed moved. “Even pre-antiquity knew when a holy power was with them. ”