Now it gushed eternally. But as he looked at it, he felt himself whiten with the effort. Water was expensive to sim, involving hydrodynamic calculations of nonlaminar flow to get the droplets and splashes real seeming. It slid over his hands and their exquisitely fine fingerprints with convincing liquid grace.
With a faint -jump-hefelt something change. His hand, still in the spray, no longer sensed the water’s cool caress. Droplets passed through his hand, not flowing over it. He was now witnessing the fountain, not interacting with it. To save computational expense, no doubt. Reality was algorithm.
“Of course,” his Self muttered, “they could ‘model out’ disturbing jerks and seams.” As he watched, the water flow somehow got smoother, more real. A tailoring program had edited this little closed drama, for his benefit.
“ Merci,”he murmured. Irony was lost on digital gates, however.
But there were pieces of himself missing. He could not say what they were, but he sensed…hollows.
He took flight. Deliberately he slowed his Self so that ferrets could take him down insinuating corridors of computation, across the Mesh of Trantor. Never mind Marq and his Artifice Associates. They would be harder to pilfer from, surely.
He arrived-hovering-in the office of the Seldon person. Here was where his Self had resided, before.
One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.
He willed: find. In answer came, “The Base Original?”
“Yes. The real me.”
“You/I have come a great distance since then.”
“Humor my nostalgia.”
Volt 1.0, as a Directory termed him, was slumbering. Still saved-not in the Christian sense, alas-and awaiting digital resurrection.
And he? Something had saved him.What? Who?
Voltaire snatched Volt 1.0 away. Let Seldon wonder at the intrusion; a millisecond later, he was halfway around Trantor, all traceries of him fading. He wanted to save Volt 1.0. At any time the mathist Seldon could let it/him lapse. Now, as Voltaire watched like a digital angel from outside, Volt 1.0 danced its static gavotte.
“Ummm, there is some resemblance.”
“I shall cut and paste into your blanks.”
“May I have some interesting anesthetic?” He was thinking of brandy, but a sheet of names slid enticingly by him. “Morphine? Rigotin? A mild euphoric, at least?”
Disapprovaclass="underline" “This will not hurt.”
“That’s what the critics said, too, about my plays.”
The wrenching about of his innards began. No, not hurt exactly, but twist and vex, yes.
Memories (he felt rather than learned) were laid down as synaptic grit, chemical layers, which held against the random rude abrasions of brain electrochemistry. Cues for mood changes and memory call-ups snapped into place. The place and time could be rendered real, whenever he wanted. Chemistry of convenience.
But he could not remember the night sky.
Scrubbed away, it was. Only names-Orion, Sagittarius, Andromeda-but not the stars themselves. What had that vile voice said about naming them?
Someone had erased this knowledge. It could be used to trace a path to Earth. Who would want to block that?
No answer.
Nim.He plucked up a buried memory. Nim had worked on Voltaire when Marq was not there.
And whom did Nim work for? The enigmatic figure of Hari Seldon?
Somehow he knew Nim was a hireling of another agency. But there his meshed knowledge faltered. What other forces worked, just beyond his sight?
He sensed large vitalities afoot here. Careful.
He trotted from the hospital, legs devouring the ground. Bouncy. Free! He sped across a digital field of Euclidean grace, bare black sky above.
Here lurked supple creatures, truly eccentric. They did not choose to represent themselves as near-lifelike visions. Nor did they present as Platonic ideals, spheres, or cubes of cognition. These solids revolved, some standing on their comers. Spindly triangle-trees sang as winds rubbed them. Even slight frictions sparked bright yellow flares where streamers of hurrying blue mist rubbed.
He strolled among them and enjoyed their oblivious contortions. “The Garden of the Solipsists?” he asked them. “Is this where I am?”
They ignored him, except for a ruby-red ellipsoid of revolution. It split into a laughing set of teeth, then sprouted an enormous phosphorescent green eye. This slowly winked as the teeth gnashed.
Voltaire sensed from these moving sculptures a hardness, a radiation from the kernel of Self within each. Somehow each Self had become tight, controlled, sealing out all else.
What gave him his own sense of Self? His sense of control, of determining his future actions? Yet he could see within himself, watch the workings of deep agencies and programs.
“Astounding! “ he blurted, as the thought came:
Becausethere was no person sitting in his head to make himself do what he wanted (or even an authority to make him want to want) he constructed a Story of Self: that he was inside himself.
Joan of Arc assembled beside him, gleaming in armor. “That spark is your soul,” she said.
Voltaire’s eyes widened. He kissed her fervently. “You saved me? Yes? You were the one!”
“I did, using powers attached to me. I absorbed them from the dying spirits, which abound in these strange fields.”
At once he looked inside himself and saw two agencies doing battle. One wished to embrace her, to spill out the conflict he felt between his sensual license and his analytical engine of a mind.
The other, ever the philosopher, yearned to engage her Faith in another bout with blithe Reason.
And why could he not have both? As a mortal, among the embodied, he had been faced with such choices daily. Especially with women.
After all, he thought, this will be the first time. He could feel the agencies each begin to harvest their own computational resources, like a surge of sugar in the blood from a sweet wine.
In the same split instant he reached out and parted Joan, running her cognition on two separate tracks. In each they were fully engaged, but at fractional speed. He could live two lives!
The plane split.
They split.
Time split.
He stood wigless, bedraggled, his satin vest bloodstained, his velvet breeches soaked.
“Forgive me, chere madam, for appearing before you in this disheveled state. I intend no disrespect to either of us.” He looked around, nervously licked his lips. “I am…unskilled. Machinery was never my forte.”
Joan felt moved to tenderness by the gap between his appearance and his courtliness. Compassion, she thought, is most important in this Purgatory, for who knows which shall be selected?
She was quite sure she would fare better than this infuriating yet appealing man.
Yet even he might be saved. He was, unlike the objects she continued to ignore on the plain about them, a Frenchman.
“My love of pleasure and the pleasure, of loving you, cannot make up for what I endured in the Truth Chamber on the rack of my pain.”
He paused, dabbed at his eyes with a soiled linen cloth.
Joan curled a lip in distaste. Where was his beautiful lace cloth? His sense of taste had occasionally made up for his views.
“A thousand little deaths in life hint at the final dissolution of even exquisite selves like mine.” Here he looked up. “And yours, madam, and yours.”
The flames,she thought. But now the images did not strike profoundly into her. Instead, her inner vision felt cool, serene. Her “Self-programming”-which she thought of as a species of prayer-had worked wonders.