“Where are we?” Monsieur Arouet asked. “Or perhaps I should ask, when? I have friends in high places-”
“And I in low,” the mechman said good-naturedly. “-and I demand a full account of where we are, what’s going on.”
The mechman shrugged with two of his free arms, while the two others set the table. “How could a mechwait with intelligence programmed to suit his station, instruct monsieur, a human being, in the veiled mysteries of simspace? Have monsieur and mademoiselle decided on their order?”
“You have not yet brought us the menu,” said Monsieur Arouet.
The mechman pushed a button under the table. Two flat scrolls embedded in the table shimmered, letters glowing. The Maid let out a small cry of delight-then, in response to Monsieur Arouet’s censorious look, clapped her hand over her mouth. Her peasant manners were a frequent source of embarrassment.
“Ingenious,” said Monsieur Arouet, switching the button on and off as he examined the underside of the table. “How does it work?”
“I’m not programmed to know. You’ll have to ask a mechlectrician about that.”
“A what?”
“With all due respect, Monsieur, my other customers are waiting. I am programmed to take your order.”
“What will you have, my dear?” Monsieur Arouet asked her.
She looked down, embarrassed. “Order for me,” she said.
“Ah, yes. I quite forgot.”
“Forgot what?” asked the mechman.
“My companion is unlettered. She can’t read. I might as well be, too, for all the good this menu’s doing me.”
So this obviously learned man could not fathom the Table of House. Joan found that endearing, amid this blizzard of the bizarre.
The mechman explained and Voltaire interrupted.
“Cloud-food?Electronic cuisine?” He grimaced. “Just bring me the best you have for great hunger and thirst. What can you recommend for abstinent virgins-a plate of dirt, perhaps? Chased with a glass of vinegar?”
“Bring me a slice of bread,” the Maid said with frosty dignity. “And a small bowl of wine to dip it in.”
“Wine!” said Monsieur Arouet. “Your voices allow wine? Mais quelle scandale! If word got out that you drink wine, what would the priests say of the shoddy example you’re setting for the future saints of France?”
He turned to the mechman. “Bring her a glass of water, small.” As Garcon 213-ADM withdrew, Monsieur Arouet called out, “And make sure the bread is a crust! Preferably moldy!”
2.
Marq Hofti strode swiftly toward his Waldon Shaft office, his colleague and friend Sybyl chattering beside him. She was always energetic, bristling with ideas. Only occasionally did her energy seem tiresome.
The Artifice Associates offices loomed, weighty and impressive in the immense, high shaft. A flutter-glider circled the protruding levels far above, banking among pretty green clouds. Marq craned his neck upward and watched the glider catch an updraft of the city’s powerful air circulators. Atmospheric control even added the puff-ball vapors for variety. He longed to be up there, swooping among their sticky flavors.
Instead, he was down here, donning his usual carapace of each-day’s-a-challenge vigor. And today was going to be unusual. Risky. And though the zest for it sang in his stride, his grin, the fear of failure gave a leaden lining to his most buoyant plans.
If he failed today, at least he would not tumble from the sky, like a pilot who misjudged the thermals in the shaft. Grimly, he entered his office.
“It makes me nervous,” Sybyl said, cutting into his mood.
“Umm. What?” He dumped his pack and sat at his ornate control board.
She sat beside him. The board filled half the office, making his desk look like a cluttered afterthought. “The Sark sims. We’ve spent so much time on those resurrection protocols, the slices and embeddings and all.”
“I had to fill in whole layers missing from the recordings. Synaptic webs from the association cortex. Plenty of work.”
“I did, too. My Joan was missing chunks of the hippocampus.”
“Pretty tough?” The brain remembered things using constellations of agents from the hippocampus. They laid down long-term memory elsewhere, spattering pieces of it around the cerebral cortex. Not nearly as clean and orderly as computer memory, which was one of the major problems. Evolution was a kludge, mechanisms crammed in here and there, with little attention to overall design. At building minds, the Lord was something of an amateur.
“Murder. I stayed to midnight for weeks.”
“Me too.”
“Did you…use the library?” He considered. Artifice Associates kept dense files of brain maps, all taken from volunteers. There were menus for selecting mental agents-subroutines which could carry out the tasks which myriad synapses did in the brain. These were all neatly translated into digital equivalents, saving great labor. But to use them meant running up big bills, because each was copyrighted. “No. Got a private source.”
She nodded. “Me too.”
Was she trying to coax an admission from him? They had both had to go through scanning as part of getting their Master Class ratings in the meritocracy. Marq had thriftily kept his scan. Better than a back-alley brain map, for sure. He was no genius, but the basics of Voltaire’s underpinnings weren’t the important part, after all. Exactly how the sim ran the hindbrain functions-basic maintenance, housekeeping circuitry-certainly couldn’t matter, could it?
“Let’s have a look at our creations,” Marq said brightly, to get off the subject.
Sybyl shook her head. “Mine is stable. But look-we don’t really know what to expect. These fully integrated Personalities are still isolated.”
“Nature of the beast.” Marq shrugged, playing the jaded pro. Now that his hands caressed the board, though, a tingling excitement seized him.
“Let’s do it today,” she said, words rushing out.
“What? I-I’d like to slap some more patches over the gaps, maybe install a rolling buffer as insurance against character shifts, spy into”
“Details! Look, these sims have been running on internals for weeks of sim-time, self-integrating. Let’s interact.”
Marq thought of the glider pilot, up there amid treacherous winds. He had never done anything so risky; he wasn’t the type. His kind of peril lay on the digital playing field. Here, he was master.
But he had not gotten this far by being foolish. Letting these simulations come into contact with the present might induce hallucinations in them, fear, even panic.
“Just think! Talking to pre-antiquity.”
He realized that he was the one feeling fear. Think like a pilot! he admonished himself.
“Would you want anyone else to do it?” Sybyl asked.
He was keenly aware of the fleeting warmth of her thigh as it accidentally brushed his.
“No one else could,” he admitted.
“And it’ll put us ahead of any competition.”
“That guy Seldon, he could’ve, once he got them from those Sark ‘New Renaissance’ jokers. Using us, well-I guess he needs to get some distance from a dicey proposition like this.”
“Political distance,” she agreed. “Deniability.”
“He didn’t seem that savvy to me-politically, I mean.”
“Maybe he wants us to think that. How’d he charm Cleon?”
“Beats me. Not that I wouldn’t want one of our guys running things. A mathist minister-who’d imagine that?”
So Artifice Associates was out on its own here. With their Sark contacts, the company had already displaced Digitfac and Axiom Alliance in the sale and design of holographic intelligences. Competition was rough in several product lines, though. With a pipeline to truly ancient Personalities, they could sweep the board clean. At the knife edge of change, Marq thought happily. Danger and money, the two great aphrodisiacs.
He had spent yesterday eavesdropping on Voltaire and was sure Sybyl had done the same with the Maid. Everything had gone well. “Face filters for us, though.”