Foundation's Fear (29 page)

Marq sat intently beneath his 3D holo, combing the trashy back alleys and byways of the Mesh.

He had been quite sure there was no more of Voltaire, except back in Seldon’s vault files. Or he had been, until today. He almost wished he hadn’t snagged the rivulet of talk that implied so much. “Still nothing more,” he said.

“Why are you running search profiles on Joan?” Sybyl asked from her desk.

“Seldon wants tracking.
Now.
Joan will be easier, if she also escaped into the Mesh.”

“Because she’s female?”

“Nothing to do with Joan’s ‘sex,’ everything to do with her temperament. She’ll be less calculating than Voltaire, right?”

Sybyl wore her grudging look. “Perhaps.”

“Less wily. Ruled by her heart.”

“And not by her head, like your supersmart Voltaire? More likely to make a mistake?”

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have souped up Voltaire. Hormones got in my way.”

She smiled. “You keep tripping over them.”

“Bad judgment—and Nim’s urging. I’m sure he was working for someone else, goading each of us.”

Her mouth twisted ruefully. “To bring on the Junin riots?”

“Could be. But who’d want
that
?” His fist smacked his desk. “To crack up the renaissance, just as it was getting started—”

“Let’s not go over that again.” She paced their cramped, dingy room. “If we can find those sims, we might get some leverage. We can’t keep hiding out forever.”

“Voltaire’s a lot quicker than Joan, with more resources. Self-programming, outright internal evolution—he’s got ’em. And this guy’s creative, remember.”

“This is the genius we’re going to catch? Ha!”

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.

“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 paste-jacket 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 tent-rises 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.”

“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 of 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 café.”

“
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.”