“You may not like this,” said Nim. “It concerns Sybyl.”
“Sybyl!” He laughed a bit uneasily. “How’d you know I-”
“You told me. Last time we had a snort together, remember?”
“Oh.” The stuff made him babble. Worse, it made him forget he had.
“Not exactly a state secret.” Nim grinned.
“That obvious?” He wanted to be certain Nim, who switched women as often as he changed his underwear, had no designs on Sybyl of his own. “What about her?”
“Well, there’s a lot of juice waiting for whoever wins the big one at the coliseum.”
“No problem,” Marq said. “Me.”
Nim ran his hand through his strawberry blond hair. “I can’t decide if it’s your modesty or your ability to foresee the future that I like most about you. Your modesty. Must be that.”
Marq shrugged. “She’s good, I’ll admit.”
“But you’re better.”
“I’m luckier. They gave me Reason. Sybyl’s stuck with Faith.”
Nim gave him a bemused glance and inhaled deeply. “I wouldn’t underestimate Faith if I were you. It’s hooked to passion, and no one’s managed to get rid of either, yet.”
“Don’t have to. Passions eventually burn out.”
“But the light of reason burns eternally?”
“If you regenerate brain cells, yes.”
Nim looked through his straw to see if anything was left and winked at Marq. “Then you don’t need a little advice.”
“What advice? I didn’t hear any advice.”
Nim clucked. “If your unregenerated brain cells contain a shred of common sense, you’ll stop cooperating with Sybyl to improve her simulation. Or better yet, you’ll keep pretending you’re cooperating, so you get the benefit of anything she can show you. But what you’ll really start doing is looking for ways to do both her and her simulation in. People say it’s terrific.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“ Someof it. Think she shows it all?”
“We’ve been working every day on-”
“Truncated sim, is what you see. Nights, she inflates the whole pseudo-psyche.”
Marq frowned. He knew he was a bit light-headed around her, pheromones doing their job, but he had compensated for that. Hadn’t he? “She wouldn’t…”
“She might. People upstairs got their eye on her.”
Marq felt a stab of jealousy in spite of himself, but he was careful not to show it. “Ummm. Thanks.”
Nim bowed his head with characteristic irony and said, “Even if you don’t need it, you’d be a fool to turn it down.”
“What, the juice, when I win?”
“Not the juice, buggo. You think I missed noticing that I’m talking to ambition’s slave? My advice.”
Marq took a hefty double-nostril snort. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”
“This thing’s going to be big. You think it’s just a job for this Sector, but I tell you, people from all over Trantor will tune into the show.”
“All the better,” Marq said, though his stomach was feeling like he had suddenly gone into free fall. Living in a real cultural renaissance was risky. Maybe his hollow feeling was the stim, though.
“I mean, Seldon and that guy who follows him around like a dog, Amaryl-you think they’ve booted this to you because it’s a snap?”
Marq took a bit of the stim before answering. “No, it’s because I’m the best.”
“And you’re a long way down from them on the status ladder. You are, my friend, expendable.”
Marq nodded soberly. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”
Was he repeating himself? Must be the stim.
Marq did not give Nim’s counsel any thought until two days later. He overheard someone in the executive lounge praising Sybyl’s work to Hastor, the leader of Artifice Associates. He skipped lunch and went back to his floor. As he passed Sybyl’s office on his way back to his own, his intention, he told himself, was to relay the compliment. But when he found her door unlocked, her office empty, an impulse seized him.
Half an hour later, he jumped slightly when she said “Marq! “ from the open doorway. Her hand smoothed her hair in what he took to be unconscious primping, betraying a desire to please. “Can I help you?”
He’d just finished the software cross-matting to link her office, so that he’d be able to monitor her interviews with her client, Boker. She shared with Marq the substance of these interviews, as far as he knew.
He reasoned that his suggestions as to how she should handle the sometimes difficult Boker would be improved if he were exposed to Boker directly. But that would compromise the client relationship, ordinarily a strict rule. This, though, was special…
He shrugged. “Just waiting for you.”
“I’ve gotten her much better structured. Her mood flutters are below zero point two.”
“Great. Can I see?”
Did her smile seem warmer than usual? He was still wondering about that when he reached his own office, after an hour of intuning on Joan. Sybyl had certainly done good work. Thorough, intricately matted in with the ancient personality topography.
All since yesterday? He thought not.
Time to do a little sniffing around in simspace.
6.
Voltaire loomed-brows furrowed, scowling, hands on skinny hips. He rose from the richly embroidered chair in his study at Cirey, the chateau of his long-term mistress, the Marquise du Chatelet.
The place he had called home for fifteen years depressed him, now that she was gone. And now the marquis, without the decency to wait until his wife’s body was cold, had informed him that he must leave.
“Get me out of here!” Voltaire demanded of the scientist who finally answered his call. Scientist-a fresh word, one no doubt derived from the Latin root, to know. But this fellow looked as though he knew little. “I want to go to the cafe. I need to see the Maid.”
The scientist leaned over the control board Voltaire was already beginning to resent, and smiled with transparent pleasure at his power. “I didn’t think she was your type. You showed a strong preference all your life-remember, I’ve scanned your memories, you have no secrets-for brainy women. Like your niece and the Madame du Chatelet.”
“So? Who truly can abide the company of stupid women? The only thing that can be said on their behalf is that they can be trusted, as they’re too stupid to practice deceit.”
“Unlike Madame du Chatelet?”
Voltaire drummed his fingers impatiently on the beautifully wrought walnut desk-a gift from Madame du Chatelet, he recalled. How had it gotten to this rude place? Could it indeed have been assembled from his memory alone? “True, she betrayed me. She paid dearly for it, too.”
The scientist arched a brow. “With that young officer, you mean? The one who made her pregnant?”
“At forty-three, a married woman with three grown children has no business becoming pregnant!”
“You hit the roof when she told you-understandable but not very enlightened. Yet you didn’t break off with her. You were with her throughout the birth.”
Voltaire fumed. Memory dark, memory flowing like black waters in a subterranean river. He’d worried himself sick about the birth, which had proved amazingly easy. Yet nine days later, the most extraordinary woman he had ever known was dead. Of childbed fever. No one-not even his niece and housekeeper and former paramour, Madame Denis, who took care of him thereafter-had ever been able to take her place. He had mourned her until, until-he approached the thought, veered away -till he died….
He puffed out his cheeks and spat back rapidly, “She persuaded me that it would be unreasonable to break with a ‘woman of exceptional breeding and talent’ merely for exercising the same rights that I enjoyed. Especially since I hadn’t made love to her for months. The rights of man, she said, belonged to women, too-provided they were of the aristocracy. I allowed her gentle reasonableness to persuade me.”