“How do you look to him?”
“I made myself materialize, walk over, sit down.”
“He saw you come out of nothing?”
“I guess so,” he said, chagrined. “Shook him up.”
Marq had used every temperament fabrication he had, trimming and shaping mood constellations, but he had left intact Voltaire’s central core. What a hardball knot it was! Some programmer of pre-antiquity had done a startling, dense job. Gingerly, he dipped the Voltaire-sim into a colorless void of sensory static. Soothe, then slide…
His fingers danced. He cut in the time acceleration.
Sim-personalities needed computational durations to assimilate new experience. He thrust Voltaire into a cluttered, seemingly real experience-net. The personality reacted to the simulation and raced through the induced emotions. Voltaire was rational; his personality could accept new ideas that took the Joansim far longer.
What did all this do to a reconstruction of a real person, when knowledge of a different reality dawned? Here came the tricky part of the reanimation. Acceptance of who/what/when they were.
Conceptual shock waves would resound through the digital personalities, forcing emotional adjustments. Could they take it? These weren’t real people, after all, any more than an abstract impressionist painting pretended to tell you what a cow looked like. Now, he and Sybyl could step in only after the automatic programs had done their best.
Here their math-craft met its test. Artificial personalities had to survive this cusp point or crash into insanity and incoherence. Racing 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 disappearances or anything.”
“Joan’s cleared up.” Sybyl pointed at brown striations in the matrix representation that floated in 3D before her. “Some emotional 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 authorities-”
“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!”
“Theyhave 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 integrate 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 rectangle 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, “That flambe 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. “Francois 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, Relapsa, 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 sorceress 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 Sorciere 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.”