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.”

 “I am waiting for my Lord. Or, as one devoted to large concepts, sir: for Meaning.”

 “Sit and ponder, madam.” He materialized a comfy Provençal kitchen, tables, the fetching scent of coffee. They sat. Inscribed on the coffee pot was his motto from a lost past:

 Black as the devil,

 Noir comme le diable

 Hot as hell,

 Chaud comme l’enfer

 Pure as an angel,

 Pur comme un ange,

 Sweet as love. Doux comme l’amour.

 “My, it tastes so good,” Joan said.

 “I have mastered multiple-site access.” Voltaire slurped his coffee noisily, one of the few allowances he had found Parisian society gave to even a philosopher. “We are running in the interstices of Trantor, splintered into many fragments. I can summon up sense­ data from the innumerable inventories of countless digital libraries.”

 “I appreciate your giving me similar talents,” she said cautiously, adjusting her armor for comfort and sipping her aromatic coffee with care. “But I feel a hollowness…”

 Ruefully he nodded. “I, too.”

 “We seem…I hesitate to say…”

 “Like divinities.”

 “Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we

 do not.”

 Voltaire’s face stretched in despair. “Worse, we may not have even our own wills.”

 “Well, I do.”

 “If all we are is strings of digits—zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you will but look microscope-close—then how can we be free? Are we not determined by those marching numerals?”

 “I feel free.”

 “Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?” He sprang to his feet. “One of my best couplets:

 One science only will one genius fit

 So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”

 “So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!”

 “I would wish for that Creator, now.”

 Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its burns as he fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them into great sheets curving away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling like orange peel.

 “How tiresome,” he said. “The best argument against Christianity is certainly Christians.”

 “I will not have—”

 You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?

 The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them, like great pages riffling in a giant book.

 Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, “You address me?” You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judgeof the quick opportunity. Or of verbal nuance.

 Joan drew her sword, but the passing slabs of sound brushed it away.

 You like to think of yourself even in this distant time and place as famous.

 Huge sheets of humming pressure fell upon them, as if a gargan­ tuan deity were calling down from the faceless ashen sky.

 “You challenge me?” Voltaire shouted back. You like, in short, to think of yourself.

 Joan laughed heartily. Voltaire reddened.

 “I defy you, insulterer!”

 As if in reply, their Euclidean plane bulged—

 And he was the landscape. He had a hot volcanic spine murmur­

 ing warmly beneath, while his skin was moisture and grit. Winds beat his skin. Tinkling streams caressed him. Mountains rose from him like bruised carbuncles.

 Joan cried out somewhere. He cast up a ridge line, strata buckling, shards flying. She was a lofty cylindrical spire, snow-crowned and cracking with lava pus.

 Above them roiled pewter clouds. He knew them somehow as alien minds, a fog of connections.

 Hypermind? came the idea. Algorithms summing?

 The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked to that fog: spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated machines which computed subjective moment-jumps. The present was a computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. Rather than living in the present, they per­ sisted more accurately in the post-past of the calculated step forward.

 There was a profound difference, he felt—not saw, butfelt, deep in his analog persuasion—between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. To the fog he was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.

 Then he saw what the fog was.

 He tried to run, but he was a mountain.

 “They are—others,” he called to Joan uselessly.