Foundations Fear

by Gregory Benford

Page 23

  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, shefelt 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 Garçon 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 dis-tant…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? It’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, mur­ mured, “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 café/sim she had modeled the Garçon 213-ADM interactive character after it. Laziness, perhaps, had led her to simply holo-copy the physical appearance of a standard tiktok-form. Like all artists, sim-programmers borrowed from life; they didn’t create it.

  She watched as the tiktok—she thought of it as Garçon, 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 project­ ing? 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 Garçon’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 zot-corn 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 holo­ grams.

  Voltaire peered down. “Get up! Except for purposes of lovemak­ ing, 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 Garçon 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 ar­ mor, 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! T
hey 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 Garçon 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 torn 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 Garçon and the cook, noise, rasters flicking like bars of a prison across her vision—

  Then the entire coliseum—the hot-faced rioting crowd, Garçon, 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, ig­ noring 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?” Garçon asked. Apparently this was a joke, for Garçon was seated at the table like an equal, not hovering over it like a serf.