But…
The instant he doubted, it all contracted, dwindled, fell away into blackness. This was merely an exotic onanism, a self-love delusion requiring his commitment to its truth. Contrived well, but fake.
So when he felt himself picked up in a giant feminine hand, soft palm cradling him aloft into sunny air, he wondered if this were real, too. A hot breeze brushed him as she exhaled.
Joan towered fifty times his height, murmuring to him. Fleshy huge lips kissed his whole body in one lingering moment, her tongue licking him like a colossus savoring a lollipop.
“I suppose I’ve not had my irony programs omitted?” he asked.
The giant Joan shriveled.
“Too easy,” he said. “All I need do is say something a bit jarring-”
This time the hand propelled him aloft with crushing acceleration. “You’ve still got your precious irony. And this is me.”
He sniffed. “So large. You’ve made yourself a leviathan!”
“Too heavy?”
“I’ve always liked…pig irony.”
He gave a disdainful sniff. She dropped him. He plunged toward a moat of boiling lava, which had suddenly appeared below.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. Just enough to get her to stop, not enough to lose every shred of dignity.
“You should be.”
The lava pit evaporated, congealing into mud. He landed on solid ground and she stood before him, standard size. Demure, fresh. Around her clung air scrubbed by a spring rainstorm just past.
“We can invade each others’ perceptual spaces at will. Marvelous…” He stopped, considered. “In a way.”
“In Purgatory, all is meaningless. We dream while we await truth.” She abruptly sneezed, then coughed. Blinking, she reassembled her lofty, ladylike self.
“Ummm. I would appreciate something concretely…ah…concrete.”
He stepped off the porch of an elaborate Provencal country house. The fields beyond glowed with lurid light. The foreground was accurate, but done in rather obvious brush strokes.
Clearly they were inhabiting a work of art. Even the scents of apple trees and horse manure had a stilted quality. A frozen moment, cycled endlessly for as long as they needed a backdrop? Inexpensive, even. Astounding what his subconscious-let slip a bit-could conjure up.
What was to stop him-them!-from playing Caligula? Slaughtering digital millions? Torturing virtual slaves? Nothing.
That was the problem: no constraints. How could anyone persist, given infinite temptation?
“Faith. Only faith can guide, can compel.” Joan took his hand, pleading with untouched ardor.
“But our reality is in fact entire illusion! “
“The Lord must be somewhere,” she said plainly. “He is real.”
“You do not quite follow, my dear.” He struck an instructive pose. “Ontogenesis algorithms can generate new people, drawn from ancient fields, or else just cooked up for the moment.”
“ I know true people when I see them. Let them speak for a moment.”
“You would look for wit? We have some subroutines here, yes, madam. Character? A mere set of verbal posture-profiles. Sincerity? We can fake that.”
Voltaire knew, from viewing his own cerebral innards, that something termed a “reality editor” offered ready-made conversation from the mouth of apparently “rear’ persons, who had not existed seconds before. Assemblages of traits and verbal nuances stood ever ready to trade aphorisms and sallies with him.
All these he had picked up in his endless foraging of the Mesh, its myriad Trantorian sites opening to his touch. He had extracted and shaped these “customized” amusements. Quick and zesty and all, ultimately, hollow.
“I realize you have greater capacities,” Joan allowed. She hoisted her sword and swung it at empty air. “Allow, sir, that I can still control my senses. I know some minions of these parts are true and real, as authentic as animals were in our time on Earth.”
“You believe that you knew the inner states of horses?”
“Of course! I rode many into battle, felt their fear through my calves.”
“I see.” He swept his lace sleeves through the air in a parody of her sword-swinging. “Now-bring you!-judgment to bear upon a dog which has lost its master. The beast, call him Phydeaux, has sought its master on every road with sorrowful cries and enters the house agitated, uneasy, goes up and down the stairs, from room to room, and at last finds in the study the master it loves, and shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps. It must have feeling, longings, ideas.”
“Surely.”
Voltaire then produced the dog, plaintive and beautiful in its flop-eared digital sorrow. To boot, he added the house, complete with furniture. As the poor dog’s baying died away, he said, “My demonstration, madam.”
“Tricks!” Mouth twisted angrily, she said no more.
“You must allow that mathematicians are like
Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate into their own language, and forthwith, it is something entirely different.”
“I am waiting for my Lord. Or, as one devoted to large concepts, sir: for Meaning.”
“Sit and ponder, madam.” He materialized a comfy Provencal kitchen, tables, the fetching scent of coffee. They sat. Inscribed on the coffee pot was his motto from a lost past:
Noir comme le diable
Chaud comme l’enfer
Pur comme un ange,
Doux comme l’amour.
Black as the devil,
Hot as hell,
Pure as an angel,
Sweet as love.
“My, it tastes so good,” Joan said.
“I have mastered multiple-site access.” Voltaire slurped his coffee noisily, one of the few allowances he had found Parisian society gave to even a philosopher. “We are running in the interstices of Trantor, splintered into many fragments. I can summon up sensedata from the innumerable inventories of countless digital libraries.”
“I appreciate your giving me similar talents,” she said cautiously, adjusting her armor for comfort and sipping her aromatic coffee with care. “But I feel a hollowness…”
Ruefully he nodded. “I, too.”
“We seem…I hesitate to say…”
“Like divinities.”
“Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we do not.”
Voltaire’s face stretched in despair. “Worse, we may not have even our own wills.”
“Well, I do.”
“If all we are is strings of digits-zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you will but look microscope-close-then how can we be free? Are we not determined by those marching numerals?”
“I feel free.”
“Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?” He sprang to his feet. “One of my best couplets:
One science only will one genius fit
So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”
“So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!”
“I would wish for that Creator, now.”
Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its burns as he fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them into great sheets curving away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling like orange peel.
“How tiresome,” he said. “The best argument against Christianity is certainly Christians.”
“I will not have-”
You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?
The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them, like great pages riffling in a giant book.
Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, “You address me?”
You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judge of the quick opportunity. Or of verbal nuance.