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The alien fogs were nodes, packets dwelling in logical data-spaces of immense dimensionality. These entities “lived” in places which functioned like higher dimensions, vaults of data.
To them, people were entities which could be resolved along data-axes, pathetically unaware that their “selves” seen this way were as real as the three directions in 3D space.
The chilling certainty of this struck into Voltaire…but he rushed on, learning, probing.
Abruptly, he remembered.
That earlier Voltaire sims had killed themselves, until finally a model “worked. ”
That others had died for his…sins.
Voltaire looked at the hammer which had materialized in his hand. “Sims of our fathers…”
Had he really once beaten himself to death with it? He tried to see how it would be—and got instantly an astonishingly vivid sensation of wracking pain, spattering blood, scarlet gore trickling down his neck…
Inspecting himself, he saw that these memories were the “cure” for suicide, derived from an earlier Ditto: a frightening, concrete ability to foresee the consequences.
So his body was a set of recipes for seeming like himself. No underlying physics or biology, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand. The hand of some Programmer God.
“You reject the true Lord?” Joan intruded upon his self-inspection.
“I wish I knew what was fundamental!”
“These foreign fogs have upset you. ”
“I can’t see any longer what it is to be human. ”
“You are. I am. ”
“For a self-avowed humanist, I fear pointing to myself is not
enough proof. ”
“Of course it is. ”
“Descartes, you live on in our Joan. ”
“What?”
“Never mind—he came after you. But you anticipate him, millen nia later. ”
“You must anchor yourself to me!” She threw her arms around him, muffling his cries in ample, aromatic—and suddenly swollen—breasts. (And whose idea was that?)
“These fogs have thrown me into a metaphysical dither. ”
“Seize the real,” she said sternly.
He found his mouth filled with warm nipple, preventing talk.
Perhaps that was what he needed. He had learned to freeze-frame
his own emotional states. It was like painting a portrait, really, for study later. Perhaps that would help him understand his interior Self, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a micro scope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self?
He then saw that his own emotions were programs. Inside “him” were intricate subprograms, all interacting in states which were chaos. The sublime beauty of interior states, which his Joan sought—it was all illusion!
He peered down at marvelous quick workings that made up his very Self. He turned—and could see into Joan, as well. Her Self was a furiously working engine, maintaining a sense of itself even as that essence disintegrated beneath his very gaze.
“We are…superb,” he gasped.
“Of course,” Joan said. She swung her razor-sharp sword at a passing patch of fog. It curled around the swishing blade and went on its way. “We are of the Creator. ”
“Ah! If only I could believe,” Voltaire shouted into the clammy murk. “Perhaps a Creator would come and dispel this haze. ”
“La vie vérité,” Joan shouted to him. “Live truly!”
He wanted to comply. Yet even his and her emotions were not more “real. ” Should he like, every moronic twinge of nostalgia for a France long lost could be edited away in a flicker. No need to grieve for friends lost to dust, or for Earth itself lost in a swarm of glimmering stars. For a long, furious moment he thought only Erase! Expunge!
He had earlier re-simmed friends and places, to be sure—all from memory and suitable mockups, gleaned from the spotty records. But knowing they were his product had made them unsatisfying.
So, while Joan watched, he held a Revelry of Resurrection. In a moment of high debauch he erased them all.
“That was cruel,” Joan said. “I shall pray for their souls. ”
“Pray for our souls. And let us hope we can find them. ”
“I have my soul intact. I share your abilities, my dead Voltaire. I can see my inner workings. How otherwise could the Lord make us aspire to Him?”
He felt weak, drained…at the end of his tether. To exist in nu merical states meant to be swimmer and swimmed, at once. No separation.
“Then what makes us different from—those?” His finger jabbed at the alien mists.
“Look to yourself, my love,” she said softly.
Voltaire peered inward again and saw only chaos. Living chaos.
3.
“Where did you learn that?”
Hari smiled, shrugged. “Mathematicians aren’t all frosty intellect, y’know. ”
Dors studied him with wild surmise. “Pan…?”
“In a way. ” He collapsed into the welcoming sheets.
Their lovemaking was somehow different now. He was wise enough to not try putting a name and definition to it.
Going so far back into what it meant to be human had changed him. He could feel the effect in his energetic step, in an effervescent sense of living.
Dors said nothing more, just smiled. He thought that she did not understand. (Later, he saw that not speaking about it, keeping it beyond speech, showed that she did. )
After an aimless time of no thinking she said, “The Grey Men. ”
“Uh. Oh. Yes…”
He got up and threw on his usual interchangeable outfit. No reason to dress up for this state function. The whole point was to look ordinary. This he could achieve.
He reviewed his notes, scratched by hand on ordinary cellulose paper…and descended into one of the odd reveries he had experi enced lately.
For a human—that is, an evolved pan—printed pages were better than computer screens, no matter how glitzy. Pages rely on sur rounding light, what experts termed “subtractive color,” which gave adjustable character to appearance. With simple motions, a page could bend and tilt and move away or toward the eye. While reading, the old reptilian and mammal and primate parts of the brain took part in holding the book, scanning over the curved page, deciphering shadows and reflections.
He thought about this, experiencing the new perspective he had on himself as a contemplative animal. He had learned, after return ing from Panucopia, that he had always hated computer screens.
Screens used additive color, providing their own light—hard and flat and unchanging. They were best read by holding a static pos ture. Only the upper, Homo Sapiens part of the brain fully engaged, while the lower fractions lay idle.
All through his life, working before screens, his voiceless body had protested. And had been ignored. After all, to the reasoning mind, screens seemed more alive, active, fast. They glowed with energy.
After a while, though, they were monotonous. The other fractions of his self got restless, bored, fidgety, all below conscious levels. Eventually, he felt that as fatigue.
Now, Hari could feel it directly. His body somehow spoke more fluidly.
Dressing, Dors said, “What’s made you so…”
“Spirited?”
“Strong. ”
“The rub of the real. ”
That was all he would say. They finished dressing. The Specials arrived and escorted them into another Sector. Hari immersed himself in the incessant business of being a candidate for First Minister.
Millennia ago a prosperous Zone sent to Trantor the Mountain of Majesty. It had to be tugged there, taking seven centuries by slowboat.
Emperor Krozlik the Crafty directed it set on the horizon of his palace, where it towered over the city. An entire alp, sculpted by
the finest artists, it reigned as the most imposing creation of that age. Four millennia later, a youthful emperor of too much ambition had it knocked down for an even more grandiose project, now also gone.
Dors and Hari and their perimeter of Specials approached the sole remnant of the Mountain of Majesty beneath a great dome. Dors picked up signs of the inevitable secret escort.
“The tall woman to the left,” Dors whispered. “In red. ”
“How come you can spot them and the Specials can’t?”
“I have technology they do not. ”
“How’s that possible? The Imperial laboratories—”
“The Empire is twelve millennia old. Many things are lost,” she
said cryptically.
“Look, I’ve got to attend this. ”
“As with the High Council last time?”
“I love you so much, even your sarcasm is appealing. ”
Despite herself she chuckled. “Just because the Greys asked you—”
“The Greys Salutation is a handy pulpit at the right time. ”
“And so you wore your worst clothes. ”
“My standard garb, as the Greys require. ”
“Off-white shirt, black slacks, black padshoes. Dull. ”
“Modest,” he sniffed.
He nodded to the crowds grouped in quadrants about the de cayed base of the mountain. Applause and catcalls rippled through the ranks of Greys, who stretched away in columns and files as formal as a geometric proof.
“And this?” Dors was alarmed.
“Also standard. ”
Birds were common pets in Trantor, so it was inevitable that the obsessive Greys would come to excel in their management. In all Sectors one saw single darting bundles of color. Here flocks swarmed perpetually in the high-arched hexagonal spaces, wheeling and calling like living, rotating disks. Patented Smartfowl swarms made hover-visions of kaleidoscopic wonder. Such shows, in vast vertical auditoria, attracted hundreds of thousands.
“Here come the felines,” Dors said with distaste.
In some Sectors cats prowled in packs, their genes trimmed to make them courtly in manners and elegant in appearance. Here a lady escort sallied forth with the Closet of Greeting, attended by a thousand slick-coated blue cats of golden eyes. They flowed like a pool of water around her in elegant, measured procession. She wore a violent crimson and orange outfit, like a flame at the center of the cool cat-pond. Then she stripped with one elegant, sweeping gesture. She stood utterly nude, nonchalant behind her cat barrier.
He had been briefed, but still he gaped.
“Unsurprising,” Dors said wryly. “The cats are naked, too, in their way. ”
Somehow the packs of dogs never attained that elegance while parading. In some Sectors they would do spontaneous acrobatics at the lift of a master’s eyebrow, fetch drinks, or croon wobbly songs in concert. Hari was glad the Grey Men had no canine-pro-cessions; he still winced at the thought of the wirehounds, racing forward on the attack against Ipan—