Foundation's Fear (17 page)

Voltaire cackled with satisfaction. The café appeared, popping into luminous reality, independent of his human masters’ consent or knowledge.

Subroutine accomplished,
a small voice assured him. He made the café disappear and reappear three times more, to be sure that he had mastered the technique.

What fools these rulers were, to think that they could make the Great Voltaire a creature of their will! But now came the real test, the intricate procedure that would bring forth the Maid in all her womanly unfathomability—which, however, he was determined to fathom.

He had mastered the intricate logics of this place, given the capacities the man-scientist had given him. Did they think he was some animal, unable to apply blithe reason to their labyrinths of logic? He had found his way, traced the winding electronic pathways, devised the commands. Newton had been just as difficult, and he had encompassed that, had he not?

Now, the Maid. He did his digital dance, its logics, and—

She popped into the café.

“You scum,” she said, lance drawn.

Not quite the greeting he’d expected. But then he saw the copy of ‘
La Pucelle
’ dangling on the point of her lance.

“
Chérie,
” he cooed; whatever the offense, best to get in an apology early. “I can explain.”

“That’s your whole problem,” the Maid said. “You explain and explain and explain! Your plays are more tedious than the sermons I was forced to listen to in the cemetery at St. Ouen. Your railings against the sacred mysteries of the Church reveal a shallow, unfeeling mind bereft of awe and wonder.”

“You mustn’t take it personally,” Voltaire pleaded. “It was directed at hypocritical reverence for you—and at the superstitions of religion. My friend, Thieriot—he added passages more profane and obscene than any I had written. He needed money. He made a living reciting the poem in various salons. My poor virgin became an infamous whore, made to say gross and intolerable things.”

The Maid did not lower her lance. Instead, she poked it several times against Voltaire’s satin waist-coated chest.

“
Chérie,
” he said. “If you knew how much I paid for this vest.”

“You mean, how much
Fred
erick paid—that pitiful, promiscuous, profligate pervert of a man.”

“Alliteration a bit heavy,” Voltaire said, “but otherwise, a quite nicely turned phrase.”

His newly gained skills meant he could divest her of her lance at once, squash it. But he preferred persuasiveness to force. He quoted, with some liberty, that pleasure-hating Christian, Paul: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, behaved as a child. But when I became a
wo
man, I put away manly things.”

She blinked. He remembered how her inquisitors had claimed that her acceptance of the gift of a fine cloak
was incompatible with the divine origin of her voices. In a whisk of lithe arms, Voltaire produced a Chantilly lace gown.
Pop
—and a richly embroidered cloak.

“You mock me,” the Maid said. But not before he saw a gleam of interest flare in her coal-dark eyes.

“I long to see you as you are.” He held out the gown and cloak. “Your spirit I have no doubt is divine, but your natural form, like mine, is human; unlike mine, a woman’s.”

“You think I could give up the freedom of a man for
that
?” She impaled the cloak and gown on the tip of her lance.

“Not the freedom,” Voltaire said. “Just the armor and clothes.”

She fell silent, pensively gazing into the distance. The crowd on the street went about their business, walking by unconcerned. Obvious wallpaper, he thought; he would have to correct that.

Perhaps a trick. She was partial to miracles. “Another little trick I’ve learned since we last met.
Voilà.
I can produce Garçon.”

Garçon popped in out of nowhere, all four of his hands free. The Maid—who had indeed once worked in a tavern, he recalled—could not help it; she smiled. She also removed the gown and cloak from the lance, tossed the lance aside, and caressed the clothes.

He could not resist the impulse to quote himself.

“For I am man and justly proud

In human weakness to have part;

Past mistresses have held my heart,

I’m happy still when thus aroused.”

He fell to one knee before her. A grand gesture—foolproof, in his experience.

Joan gaped, speechless.

Garçon placed both his right hands over the site where humans are supposed to have a heart. “Freedom such as yours, you offer? Monsieur,
Mademoiselle, I appreciate your kindness, but I fear I must refuse. I cannot accept such a privilege for myself alone, while my fellows are doomed to toil in unsatisfying, dead-end jobs.”

“He has a noble soul!” the Maid exclaimed.

“Yes, but his brain leaves much to be desired.” Voltaire sucked reflectively at his teeth. “There has to be an underclass to do the dirty work of the elite. That is
natural.
Creating mechfolk of limited intelligence is an ideal solution! Makes one wonder why, in all their history, no one made such an obvious step…”

“With all respect,” said Garçon, “unless my meager understanding fails me, Monsieur and Mademoiselle are themselves nothing more than beings of limited intelligence, created by human masters to work for the elite.”

“What!” Voltaire’s eyes widened.

“By what inherent right are you made more intelligent and privileged than I and others of my class? Do
you
have a soul? Should
you
be entitled to equal rights with humans, including the right to intermarry—”

The Maid made a face. “Disgusting thought.”

“—to vote, to have equal access to the most sophisticated programming available?”

“This machine man makes more sense than many dukes I’ve known,” said the Maid, thoughtfully furrowing her brow.

“I shall not have two peasants contradict me,” said Voltaire. “The rights of man are one thing; the rights of the lower orders, another.”

Garçon managed to exchange a look with the Maid. This instant—before Monsieur, in a fit of pique, extinguished both her and Garçon from the screen, displacing them to a gray holding space—was retained in Garçon’s memory. Later, in his/its allowed interval for interior maintenance, the delicious moment reran again and again.

Marq tuned Nim in on the interoffice screen. “Did it! From now on, he’ll be able to say anything he wants. I’ve deleted every scrape with authority he ever had.”

“Attaway,” said Nim, grinning.

“Think I should delete run-ins with his father, too?”

“I’m not sure,” Nim said. “What were they like?”

“Pretty hot. His father was a strict disciplinarian, sympathetic to the ‘Jansenist’ view.”

“What’s that? A sports team?”

“I asked. He said, ‘A Catholic version of a Protestant.’ I don’t think they were teams. Something about sin being everywhere, pleasure’s disgusting—usual primitive religion, Dark Ages stuff.”

Nim grinned. “Most stuff’s only disgusting when it’s done right.”

Marq laughed. “Too true. Still, maybe he first experienced the threat of censorship from his old man.”

Nim paused to reflect. “You’re worried about instabilities in the character-space, right?”

“Could happen.”

“But you want killer instinct, right?”

Marq nodded. “I can put in some editing algorithms to police instabilities.”

“Right. Not like you need him totally sane after the debate’s over, or anything.”

“Might as well go for broke. Can’t hurt.”

Marq frowned. “I wonder…should we go through with this?”

“Hey, what choice we got? Junin Sector wants a trial of champions, we ship them one. Done deal.”

“But if Imperial types come after us for illegal sims—”

“I
like
danger, passion,” Nim said. “You always agree, too.”

“Yes, but—why are we getting smarter tiktoks now? They’re not that hard to make.”

“Old prohibitions wearing out, my friend. And it
has
come up, many times. Just got knocked down, is all.”

“By what?”

Nim shrugged. “Politics, social forces—who knows? I mean, people feel edgy about machines that think. Can’t trust them.”

“What if you couldn’t even tell they were machines?”

“Huh? That’s crazy.”

“Maybe a really smart machine doesn’t want any competition.”

“Smarter than good ol’ Marq? Doesn’t exist.”

“But they could…eventually.”

“Never. Forget it. Let’s get to work.”

Sybyl sat anxiously beside Monsieur Boker in the Great Coliseum. They were near the Imperial Gardens and an air of importance seemed to hover over everything.

She could not stop tapping her nails—her best full formal set—on her knees. Among the murmur of four hundred thousand other spectators in the vast bowl, she anxiously awaited the appearance of the Maid and Voltaire on a gigantic screen.

Civilization, she thought, was a bit boring. Her time with the sims had opened her eyes to the
force,
the heady electricity, of the dark past. They had fought wars, slaughtered each other, all—supposedly—for ideas.

Now, swaddled in Empire, humanity was soft. Instead of bloody battles, satisfyingly final, there were “fierce” trade wars, athletic head-buttings. And lately, a fashion for debates.

This collision of sims, touted everywhere on Trantor, would be watched by over twenty billion households. And it was beamed to the entire Empire, wherever the creaky funnels of the wormhole network went. The rude vigor of the prehistoric sims was undeniable; she felt it herself, a quickening in her pulse.

The merest few interviews and glimpses of the sims had intrigued the 3D audience. Those who brought up the age-old laws and prohibitions got shouted down. The air crackled with the zest for the
new.
No one had anticipated that this debate would balloon into
this.

This could spread. Within weeks, Junin could inflame all Trantor into a renaissance.

And she was going to take every scrap of credit for it that she could, of course.

She looked around at the president and other top-ranking executives of Artifice Associates, all chattering away happily.

The president, to demonstrate neutrality, sat between Sybyl and Marq—who had not spoken to each other since the last meeting.

On Marq’s far side his client, the Skeptics’ representative, scanned the program; next to him, Nim. Monsieur Boker gave Sybyl a nudge. “That can’t be what I think it is,” he said.

Sybyl followed his eyes to a distant row at the back where what looked like a mechman sat quietly beside
a human girl. Only licensed mech vendors and bookies were allowed in the stadium.

“Probably her servant,” Sybyl said.

Minor infractions of the rules did not disturb her as they did Monsieur Boker, who’d been especially testy since a 3D caster leaked the news that Artifice Associates was representing both the Preservers and Skeptics. Fortunately, the leak occurred too late for either party to do anything about it.

“Mechserves aren’t
allowed,
” Monsieur Boker observed.

“Maybe she’s handicapped,” Sybyl said to placate him. “Needs help in getting around.”

“It won’t understand what’s going on anyway,” said Marq, directing his remark to Monsieur Boker. “They’re truncated. Just a bunch of decision-making modules, really.”

“Precisely why it has no business here,” replied Monsieur Boker.

Marq beeped the arm of his chair and ostentatiously placed a bet on Voltaire to win.

“He’s never won a bet in his whole life,” Sybyl told Monsieur Boker. “No head for the math.”

“Is that so?” Marq shot back, leaning forward to address Sybyl directly for the first time. “Why don’t you put your money where your lovely mouth is?”

“I’ve got the probabilities on this one bracketed,” she said primly.

“You couldn’t solve the integral equation.” Marq snorted derisively.

Her nostrils flared. “A thousand.”

“Mere tokenism,” Marq chided her, “considering what you’re being paid for this project.”

“The same as you,” said Sybyl.

“Will you two cut it
out,
” Nim said.

“Tell you what,” said Marq. “I’ll bet my entire salary for the project on Voltaire. You bet yours on your anachronistic Maid.”

“Hey,” Nim said. “Hey.”

The president deftly addressed Marq’s client, the Skeptic. “It’s this keen competitive spirit that’s made Artifice Associates the planet’s leader in simulated intelligences.” Artfully he turned to the rival, Boker. “We try to—”

“You’re on!” cried Sybyl.

Her dealings with the Maid had convinced her that the irrational must have a place in the human equation, too. She remained convinced for about three quick eye-blinks, and then began to doubt.