PART 6
ANCIENT FOGS
GALACTIC PREHISTORY—…the destruction of all earlier records during the expansion of humanity through the Galaxy, with the attendant eras of warfare, leaves in shadow the entire problem of human origins. The enormous changes wrought on so many worlds also erased any evidence for much older, alien civilizations. These societies may have existed, though there is no firm evidence for them. Some early historians be lieved that at least one type of remnant might have survived in the Galaxy: the electromagnetic records. These would have to be lodged in plasma streams or the coronal loops of stars, and thus lie beyond the detection of Expansionist technology. Even modern studies have found no such sentient structures. However, the virulent radiation levels at the Galactic core—where energy densities might promise an hospitable abode for magnetically based forms—make such investigations difficult and ambiguous. Another theory holds that cultures might have “written” themselves into pre-Empire computer codes, and thus now reside undetected in some banks of an cient data. Such speculations met with no proof and were discounted. Thus the entire problem of why the Galaxy was empty of advanced life when humanity ventured into it has no resolution….
—ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
1.
Voltaire scowled, vexed.
Had she in fact yielded to him, given herself up? Or was this a particularly fine simulation? True Joan, art this thou?
Certainly this fit one of his favorites: a romping play in prickly dry hay, up in the topmost loft of a big old barn, on a hot August day in long-lost Bordeaux.
Twit-wheee called a bird. Insects chirped, warm breezes blew woody scents. Her hair trailed over him as she mounted. He felt her adroit twists, delivered with an erotic precision that made him tremble with the need for release.
But…
The instant he doubted, it all contracted, dwindled, fell away into blackness. This was merely an exotic onanism, a self-love de lusion 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 jar ring—”
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. Mar velous…” He stopped, considered. “In a way.”
“In Purgatory, all is meaningless. We dream while we await truth.” She abruptly sneezed, then coughed. Blinking, she reas sembled her lofty, ladylike self.
“Ummm. I would appreciate something concretely…ah…con-crete.”
He stepped off the porch of an elaborate Provençal 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 mo ment, cycled endlessly for as long as they needed a backdrop? In expensive, 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 mo ment.”
“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 “real” 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.”