The Maid ignored the raving masses at her enormous feet. She regarded Voltaire with bemused, affectionate doubt. She yielded the floor. Voltaire had a lust for the last word.
He began to speak of his hero, Newton.
“No, no,” she interrupted. “That isn’t what the formulas are at all!”
“Must you embarrass me in front of the largest audience I’ve ever known?” Voltaire whispered. “Let us not squabble over algebra, when we must—” he narrowed his eyes significantly “—calculate.” Sulking, he yielded the floor to her.
“Calculus,” she corrected. But softly, so that only he could hear. “It’s not the same thing at all.”
To her own astonishment and the rising hysteria of the crowd, she found herself explaining the philosophy of the digital Self—all with a fiery passion she’d not known since spurring her horse into sacred battle. In the beseeching sea of wide eyes below her, shefelt the need of this place and time, for ardor and conviction.
“Incredible.” Voltaire clicked his tongue. “That you of all people should have a talent for mathematics.”
“The Host gave it unto me,” she replied, above the raucous fray.
Ignoring shouts, the Maid noticed again the figure so somehow like Garçon in the crowd. She could barely make him out from such a distance, despite her immense height. Yet she felt he was watching her the way she’d watched Bishop Cauchon, the most vile and relentless of her oppressors. (A cool, sublime truth intruded: the good bishop, at the end, must have been touched by divinity’s grace and Christ’s merciful compassion, for she recalled no harm coming to her as a result of her trial….)
Her attention snapped back to the howling masses, the dis-tant…man. This figure was not human in essence, she felt. It looked like a man, but her sensitive programs told her otherwise.
But what could he—it—be?
Suddenly a great light blared before her eyes. All three of her voices spoke, clear and hammering, even above the din. She listened, nodded.
“It is true,” she addressed the crowd, trusting the voices to speak through her, “that only the Almighty can make souls! But just so Christ, out of his infinite love and compassion, could not deny a soul to clockwork beings. To all.” She had to shout her final words over the roaring crowd. “Even wigmakers!”
“Heretic!” someone yelled.
“You’re muddying the question!”
“Traitor!”
Another cried out, “The original sentence was right! She ought to be burned at the stake again!”
“Again?” the Maid echoed. She turned to Voltaire. “What do they mean, again?”
Voltaire casually brushed a speck of lint from his embroidered satin waistcoat. “I haven’t the slightest idea. You know how fanciful and perverse human beings are.” With a sly wink, he added, “Not to mention, irrational.”
His words calmed her, but she had lost sight of the strange man.
21.
“I cheated?” Marq shouted to Sybyl. The coliseum crowd seethed. “Joan of Arc explaining computational metaphysics? I cheated?”
“You started it!” Sybyl said. “You think I don’t know when my office has been rigged? You think you’re dealing with an amateur?”
“Well, I—”
“—and I don’t know a character-constraint matrix when I find one glued into my Joan sim?”
“No, I—”
“You think I’m not as bright?”
“This is scandalous!” said Monsieur Boker. “What did you do? It’s enough to make me believe in witchcraft!”
“You mean to say you don’t?” Marq’s client said, ever the Skeptic. He and Boker began to argue, adding to the indignant shouts of the crowd, now waxing hysterical.
The president of Artifice Associates, rubbing his temples, mur mured, “Ruined. We’re ruined. We’ll never be able to explain.”
Sybyl’s attention was diverted. The mechman she had noticed earlier, holding his honey-haired, human companion’s hand, rushed down the aisle toward the screen. As it passed by, one of its three free hands happened to brush her skirt. “Pardon,” it said, pausing just long enough for Sybyl to read the mechstamp on its chest.
“Did that thing dare to touch you?” Monsieur Boker asked. His face swelled with rage.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Sybyl said. The mechman, pulling his human companion with him, fled toward the screen.
“Do you know it?” Marq asked.
“In a way,” Sybyl replied. In the café/sim she had modeled the Garçon 213-ADM interactive character after it. Laziness, perhaps, had led her to simply holo-copy the physical appearance of a standard tiktok-form. Like all artists, sim-programmers borrowed from life; they didn’t create it.
She watched as the tiktok—she thought of it as Garçon, now—elbowed his way down the jammed aisle, past screaming, cheering, jeering people—toward the screen.
Their progress did not go unnoticed. Overcome with disgust—to see a mechman holding hands with an attractive, honey-haired young girl!—Preservers shouted insults and epithets as they rushed by.
“Throw it out!” someone howled.
Sybyl saw the tiktok go rigid, as though bristling at the use of the objective pronoun. Tiktoks had no personal names, but to be referred to as an “it” seemed to affect the thing. Or was she project ing? she wondered.
“What’s that doing in here?” a man of ruddy complexion yelled.
“We’ve got laws against that!”
“Mechmuck!”
“Grab it!”
“Kick it out!”
“Don’t let it get away!”
The girl responded by gripping Garçon’s upper left hand even more tightly and flinging her free arm around his neck.
When they reached the platform, the tiktok’s undercarriage screeched, laboring at the irregular surfaces. All four of its arms waved off a hail of zot-corn and drugdrink containers, catching them with expert grace, as if it had been engineered for that specific task.
The girl shouted something to the tiktok which Sybyl could not hear. The tiktok prostrated itself at the feet of the towering holo grams.
Voltaire peered down. “Get up! Except for purposes of lovemak ing, I can’t stand to see anyone on his knees.”
Voltaire then dropped to his own knees at the feet of the towering Maid. Behind Garçon and the woman, the crowd surrendered what was left of its restraint. Bedlam broke out.