Foundations Fear

Page 17

  “Sorry. I’ll fill in that audio background, too. ” A single hand gesture, and Voltaire heard boards creak as he paced. A carriage team clip-clopped by outside.

  “I possess temperament. Do not confuse passion with tempera-ment—which is a matter of the nerves. Passion is borne from the heart and soul, no mere mechanism of the bodily humors. ”

  “You believe in souls?”

  “In essences, certainly. The Maid dared cling to her vision with her whole heart, despite bullying by church and state. Her devotion to her vision, unlike mine, bore no taint of perverseness. She was the first true Protestant. I’ve always preferred Protestants to papist absolutists—until I took up residence in Geneva, only to discover their public hatred of pleasure is as great as any pope’s. Only Quakers do not privately engage in what they publicly claim to abjure. Alas, a hundred true believers cannot redeem millions of hypocrites. ”

  The scientist twisted his mouth skeptically. “Joan recanted, knuckled under to their threats. ”

  “They took her to a cemetery!” Voltaire bristled with irritation. “Terrorized a credulous girl with threats of death and hell. Bishops, academicians—the most learned men of their time! Donkeys’ asses, the lot! Browbeating the bravest woman in France, a woman whom they destroyed only to revere. Hypocrites! They require martyrs as leeches require blood. They thrive on self-sacrifice—provided that the selves they sacrifice are not their own. ”

  “All we have is your version, and hers. Our history doesn’t go back that far. Still, we know more of people now—”

  “So you imagine. ” Voltaire sniffed a jot of snuff to calm himself. “Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best. They played her honor and her bravery like a fiddle, swine plucking at a violin. ”

  “You’re defending her. ” The scientist’s wry smile mocked. “Yet in that poem you wrote about her—amazing, someone memorizing their own work, so they could recite it!—you depict her as a tavern slut, much older than she in fact was, a liar about her so-called voices, a superstitious but shrewd fool. The greatest enemy of the chastity she pretends to defend is a donkey—a donkey with wings!”

  Voltaire smiled. “A brilliant metaphor for the Roman Church, n’est ce pas? I had a point to make. She was simply the sword with which I drove it home. I had not met her then. I had no idea she was a woman of such mysterious depths. ”

  “Not depths of intellect. A peasant!” Marq recalled how he had escaped just such a fate on the mud-grubbing world Biehleur. All through the Greys exam. And now he had fled their stodgy routines, into a true cultural revolution.

  “No, no. Depths of the soul. I’m like a little stream. Clear because it is shallow. But she’s a river, an ocean! Return me to Aux Deux Magots. She and the wind-up garçon are the only society I now have. ”

  “She is your adversary,” the scientist said. “A minion of those who uphold values that you fought all your life. To make sure you beat her, I’m going to supplement you. ”

  “I am intact and entire,” Voltaire declared frostily.

  “I’ll equip you with philosophical and scientific information, ra­ tional progress. Your reason must crush her faith. You must regard her as the enemy she is, if civilization is to continue to advance along rational scientific lines. ”

  His eloquence and impudence were rather charming, but no substitutes for Voltaire’s fascination with Joan. “I refuse to read anything until you reunite me with the Maid—in the café!”

  The scientist had the audacity to laugh. “You don’t get it. You have no choice. I’ll sculpt the information into you. You’ll have the information you need to win, like it or not. ”

  “You violate my integrity!”

  “Let’s not forget that after the debate, there’ll be the question of keeping you running, or…”

  “Ending me?”

  “Just so you know what cards are on the table. ”

  Voltaire bristled. He knew the iron accents of authority, since he was first subjected to his father’s—a strict martinet who’d compelled him to attend mass, and whose austerities claimed the life of Voltaire’s mother when Voltaire was only seven. The only way she could escape her husband’s discipline was to die. Voltaire had no intention of escaping this scientist in that way.

  “I refuse to use any additional knowledge you give me unless you return me at once to the café. ”

  Infuriatingly, the scientist regarded Voltaire the way Voltaire had regarded his wigmaker—with haughty superiority. His curled lip said quite clearly that he knew Voltaire could not exist without his patronage.

  A humbling turnabout. Though middle-class in origin himself, Voltaire did not believe common people worthy of governing themselves. The thought of his wigmaker posing as a legislator was enough to make him never wear a wig again. To be seen similarly by this vexing, smug scientist was intolerable.

  “Tell you what,” said the scientist. “You compose one of your brilliant lettres philosophiques trashing the concept of the human soul, and I will reunite you with the Maid. But if you don’t, you won’t see her until the day of the debate. Clear?”

  Voltaire mulled the offer over. “Clear as a little stream,” he said at last.

  —and then clotted, cinder-dark clouds descended into his mind. Memories, sullen and grim. He felt engulfed in a past that roared through him, scouring—

  “He’s cycling! There’s something surfacing here…” came Marq’s hollow call.

  Images of the far past exploded.

  “Call Seldon! This sim has another layer! Call Seldon!”

  7.

  Hari Seldon stared at the images and data-rivers. “Voltaire suffered a recall storm. And look at the implications. ”

  Marq peered without comprehension at the torrent. “Uh, I see. ”

  “That promontory—a memory nugget about a debate he had with Joan, eight thousand years ago. ”

  “Somebody used these sims before—”

  “For public debate, yes. History not only repeats itself, sometimes it stutters. ”

  “Faith vs. Reason?”

  “Faith/Mechanicals vs. Reason/Human Will,” Seldon said, as if reading them directly from the numerical complexes. Marq could not follow the connections fast enough to keep up with him. “A society of that time had a fundamental division over computer in­ telligences and their…manifestations. ”

  Marq caught an elusive flicker in Seldon’s face. Was he hiding something? “Manifestations? You mean, like tiktoks?”

  “Something like that,” Seldon said stiffly.

  “Voltaire’s for—”

  “In that age, he was for human effervescence. Joan favored Faith, which meant, uh, tiktoks. ”

  “I don’t get it. ”

  “Tiktoks, or higher forms of them, were deemed capable of guiding humanity. ” Seldon seemed uncomfortable.

  “Tiktoks?” Marq snorted derisively.

  “Or, uh, higher forms. ”

  “That’s what Voltaire and Joan were debating eight thousand years ago? So they were engineered for this. Who won?”

  “The result is suppressed. I believe it became an irrelevant issue. No computer intelligences could be made which could guide hu­ manity. ”

  Marq nodded. “Makes sense. Machines will never be as smart as we are. Day-to-day business, sure, but—”

  “I suggest erasure of the embedded memory complex,” Seldon said curtly. “That will eliminate the interfering layer. ”

  “Uh, if you think that’s best. I’m not sure we can disconnect every tie-in to those memories, though. These sims use holographic recall, so it’s lodged—”

  “To get the results you wish in this upcoming debate, it is crucial. There could be other implications, too. ”

  “Such as?”

  “Historians might mine sims like these for lost data on the far past. They would w
ant access. Deny them. ”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, not likely we’d let anybody use them. ”

  Seldon gazed at the shifting slabs of pattern. “They are complex, aren’t they? Minds of real depth, interacting subselves…Ummm…I wonder how the whole sense of selfhood remains stable? How come their mentalities don’t just crash?”

  Marq couldn’t follow, but he said, “I guess those ancients, they knew a few tricks we don’t. ”

  Seldon nodded. “Indeed. There’s a glimmer of an idea here…. ”

  He stood quickly and Marq rose. “Couldn’t you stay? I know Sybyl would like to talk—”

  “Sorry, must go. Matters of state. ”

  “Uh, well, thanks for—”

  Seldon was gone before Marq could close his gaping mouth.

  8.

  “I have no desire to see the skinny gentleman in the wig. He thinks he’s better than everyone else,” the Maid told the sorceress called Sybyl.

  “True, but—”

  “I much prefer the company of my own voices. ”

  “He’s quite taken with you,” Madame la Sorcière said.

  “I find that difficult to believe. ” Still, she could not help smiling.

  “Oh, but it’s true. He’s asked Marq—his re-creator—for an en­ tirely new image. He lived, you know, to eighty-four. ”

  “He looks even older. ” She had found his wig, lilac ribbon, and velvet breeches ludicrous on such a dried-up fig of a man.

  “Marq decided to make him appear as he looked at forty-two. Do see him. ”

  The Maid reflected. Monsieur Arouet would be far less repulsive if…“Did Monsieur have a different tailor as a young man?”

  “Hmmm, that might be arranged. ”

  “I’m not going to the inn in these. ”

  She held up her chains, recalling the fur cloak the king himself had placed about her shoulders at his coronation in Rouen. She thought of asking for it now, but decided against it. They had made much of her cloak during her trial, accusing her of having a demon-inspired love of luxury; she who, until she won the king over that day she first appeared at court, had felt nothing but coarse burlap against her skin. Her accusers, she had noted, wore black satin and velvet and reeked of perfume.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Madame la Sorcière vowed, “but you must agree not to tell Monsieur Boker. He doesn’t want you fraternizing with the enemy, but I think it will do you good. Hone your skills for the Great Debate. ”

  There was a pause—falling, soft clouds—in which the Maid felt as if she had fainted. When she recovered—hard cool surfaces, sudden sharp splashes of brown, green—she found herself seated in the Inn of the Two Maggots, once again, surrounded by guests who seemed not to know that she was there.

  Armor-plated beings bearing trays and clearing tableware darted among the guests. She looked for Garçon and spotted him gazing at the honey-haired cook, who pretended not to notice. Garçon’s longing recalled the way the Maid herself had gazed at statues of St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who had both forsworn men but adopted their attire; suspended between two worlds, holy passion above, earthy ardor below. Just as here, with its jarring jargon of numbers and machines, though she knew it for a purgatorial waiting cloister, floating between the worlds.

  She suppressed a smile when Monsieur Arouet appeared. He sported a dark, unpowdered wig, though still looked rather old—about the age of her father Jacques Dars, thirty plus one or two. His shoulders slumped forward under the weight of many books. She’d only seen books twice, during her trials, and though they looked nothing like these, she recoiled at the memory of their power.

  “Alors,” Monsieur Arouet said, setting the books before her. “Forty-two volumes. My Selected Works. Incomplete but—” he smiled “—for now, it will have to do. What’s wrong?”

  “Do you mock me? You know I cannot read. ”

  “I know. Garçon 213-ADM is going to teach you. ”

  “I do not want to learn. All books except the Bible are born of the devil. ”

  Monsieur Arouet threw up his hands and lapsed into curses, vi­ olent and intriguing oaths like those her soldiers used when they forgot that she was near. “You must learn how to read. Knowledge is power!”

  “The devil must know a great deal,” she said, careful to let no part of the books touch her.

  Monsieur Arouet, exasperated, turned to the sorceress—who appeared to be sitting at a nearby table—and said, “Vac! Can’t you teach her anything?” Then he turned back to her. “How will you appreciate my brilliance if you can’t even read?”

  “I have no use for it. ”

  “Ha! Had you been able to read, you’d have confounded those idiots who sent you to the stake. ”

  “All learned men,” she said. “Like you. ”