Memories flooded her. His lean, quick self. Surely a saint and an archangel would forgive her if she took advantage of their sacred bickering to grant Voltaire’s request that his “data” be received, if she surrendered—just this once—to impulses compelling her from within.
Shuddering, she yielded.
2.
Voltaire snapped, “I’ve waited less long for Friedrich of Prussia and Catherine the Great!”
“I am adrift,” Joan said airily. “Occupied.”
“And you’re a peasant, a swineherd, not even a bourgeoise. These moods of yours! These personae your subconscious layers created! They grow tiresome in the extreme.”
He hung in air above the lapping dark waters. Quite a striking effect, he thought.
“In such haunting rivers I must converse with like minds.”
He waved away her point with a silk-sleeved arm. “I’ve tried to make allowances—everyone knows saints aren’t fit for civilized society! Perfume cannot conceal the stink of sanctity.”
“Surely here in Limbo—”
“This is not a theological waiting room! Your tedious taste for solitude plays out in theaters of computation.”
“Arithmetic is not holy, sir.”
“Umm, perhaps—though I suspect Newton could prove other wise.”
He slow-stepped the scene, watching individual event-waves wash through. To his view, the somber river gurgled an increment for ward and Joan’s eyebrow inched up, then paused for the calculation to be refreshed. He accelerated her internal states, though, allowing a decent interval for La Pucelle, the Chaste Maid, to ponder a reply. He had the advantage, for he commanded more memory space.
He breached the slow-stepped, slumbering river sim. He had thought this best—images of womblike wet reassur ance, to offset her fire phobia.
The Maid gaped but did not answer. He checked, and found that he did not now have the resources to bring her to full running speed. A complex in the Battisvedanta Sector had sucked up com puting space. He would have to wait until his ferret-programs found him some more unoccupied room.
He fumed—not a good use of running time, but somehow itfelt right. If you had the computational space. He felt another distant suck on his resources. An emergency tiktok shutdown. Computer backups shifted to cover. His sensory theater dwindled, his body fell away.
Miserable wretches, they were draining him! He thought she spoke, her voice faint, far away. He fiddled in a frenzy to give her running time.
“Monsieur neglects me!”
Voltaire felt a spike of joy. He did love her—a mere response could buoy him up above this snaky river.
“We are in grave danger,” he said. “An epidemic has erupted in the matter world. Confusion reigns. Respectable people exploit widespread panic by preying on each other. They lie, cheat, and steal.”
“No!”
He could not resist. “In other words, things are exactly as they’ve always been.”
“Is this why you have come?” she asked. “To laugh at me? A once-chaste maid you ruined?”
“I merely helped you to become a woman.”
“Exactement,” she said. “But I don’t want to be a woman. I want to be a warrior for Charles of France.”
“Patriotic twaddle. Heed my warning! You must answer no calls, except mine, without first clearing them through me. You are to entertain no one, speak with no one, travel nowhere, do nothing without my prior consent.”
“Monsieur mistakes me for his wife.”
“Marriage is the only adventure open to the manifestly cowardly. I did not attempt it, nor shall I.”
She seemed distracted. “This threat, it is serious?”
“Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”
She snapped back to attention; data resources had returned. “Then, sir—”
“But this is not life. It is a mathist dance.”
She smiled. “I do not hear music.”
“Had I digital wealth, I would whistle. Our lives—such as they are—are in grave danger.”
La Pucelle did not answer at once, though he had given her the running time. Was she conferring with her idiotic voices of con science? (Quite obviously, the internalizations of ignorant village priests.)
“I am a peasant,” she said, “but not a slave. Who are you to order me?”
Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide network, he was now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of 0s and 1s. He ran on processor clusters, a vagrant thief. Amid Trantor’s myriad personal computers and mountainous Imperial processors, he lurked and pilfered.
The image he had given Joan, of swimming in an inky river, was a reasonable vision of the truth. They swam in the Mesh of a city so large he could barely sense it as a whole. As constraints of eco nomics and computational speed required, he moved himself and Joan to new processors, fleeing the inspection of dull-witted but persistent memory-space police.
And what were they?
Philosophy was not so much answers as good questions. This riddle stumped him. His universe wrapped around itself, Worm Ouroboros, a solipsistic wet dream of a world. To conserve com putations, he could shrink into a Solipsist Selfhood, with all inputs reduced to a “Hume suite” of minimal sense data, a minimum energy state.
As he often had to. They were rats in the walls of a castle they could not comprehend.
Joan sensed this only dimly. He did not dare reveal the rickety way he had saved them, when the minions of Artifice Associates had tried to assassinate them both. She was still rickety from her fire fears. And from the wrenching, eerie nature of this (as she preferred to see it) Limbo.
He shook off his mood. He was running 3.86 times faster than Joan, a philosopher’s margin for reflection. He responded to her with a single ironic shrug.
“I’ll comply with your wishes on one condition.”
A flower of pungent light burst in him. This was a modification of his own, not a sim of a human reaction: more like a fragrant fireworks in the mind. He had created the response to blossom whenever he was about to get his way. A small vice, surely.
“If you arrange for all of us to meet at Deux Magots again,” Joan said, “I promise to respond to no requests save yours.”