Foundation's Fear (18 page)

Voltaire
loved
audiences. And he had never appeared before one like this ocean of faces lapping at his feet.

Although tall in his former life, he felt that only now, gazing down at the multitudes from his hundred-meter height, had he achieved the stature he deserved. He patted his powdered wig and fussed with the shiny satin ribbon at his throat. With a gracious flourish of his hands, he made a deep bow to them, as if he’d already given the performance of his life. The crowd murmured like an awakening beast.

He glanced at the Maid, concealed from the audience behind a shimmering partition in the far corner of the screen. She folded her arms, pretending to be unimpressed.

Delay only excited the beast. He let the crowd cheer and stamp, ignoring boos and hisses from approximately half of those present.

At least half of humanity has always been fools,
he reflected. This was his first exposure to the advanced denizens of this colossal Empire. Millennia had made no difference.

He was not one to prematurely cut off adulation he knew was his due. Here he stood for the epitome of the French intellectual tradition, now vanquished but for him.

He gazed again at Joan—who was, after all, the only other surviving member of their time, quite obviously the peak in human civilization. He whispered, “’Tis our destiny to shine; theirs, to applaud.”

When the moderator finally pleaded for silence—a bit too soon; Voltaire would take that up with him later—Voltaire endured Joan’s introduction with what he hoped was a stoic smile. He elaborately insisted that Joan make her points first, only to have the moderator rather rudely tell him that here, they flipped a coin.

Voltaire won. He shrugged, then placed his hand over his heart. He began his recital in the declamatory style so dear to eighteenth-century Parisian hearts: no matter how defined the soul, like a deity, could not be shown to exist; its existence was inferred.

Truth of the inference lay beyond rational proof. Nor was there anything in Nature that required it.

And yet, Voltaire continued to pontificate, there was nothing more obvious in Nature than the work of an intelligence greater than man’s—which man is able, within limits, to decipher. That man can decode Nature’s secrets proved what the Church fathers and all the founders of the world’s great religions had always said: that man’s intelligence is a reflection of that same Divine Intelligence which authored Nature.

Were this not so, natural philosophers could not
discern the laws behind Creation, either because there would be none, or because man would be so alien to them that he could not discern them. The very harmony between natural law, and our ability to discover it, strongly suggested that sages and priests of all persuasions are essentially correct!—in arguing that we are but the creatures of an Almighty Power, whose Power is reflected in us. And this reflection in us of that Power may be justly termed our universal, immortal, yet individual souls.

“You’re praising priests!” the Maid exclaimed. She was swamped by the pandemonium that broke out in the crowd.

“The operation of chance,” Voltaire concluded, “in no way proves that Nature and Man—who is part of Nature and as such a reflection of its Creator—are somehow accidental. Chance is one of the principles through which natural law
works.
That principle may correspond with the traditional religious view that man is free to chart his own course. But this freedom, even when apparently random, obeys statistical laws in a way that man can comprehend.”

The crowd muttered, confused. They needed an aphorism, he saw, to firm them up. Very well. “Uncertainty is certain, my friends. Certainty is uncertain.”

Still they did not quiet, to better hear his words. Very well, again.

He clenched both fists and belted out in a voice of surprising bass power, “Man is, like Nature itself, free and determined both at once—as religious sages have been telling us for centuries though, to be sure, they use a different vocabulary, far less precise than ours. Much mischief and misunderstanding between religion and science stem from that.

“I’ve been greatly misunderstood,” Voltaire resumed. “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize
for distortions resulting because all I said and wrote focused only on errors of faith,
not
on its intuited truths. But I lived during an era in which errors of faith were rife, while reason’s voice had to fight to be heard. Now, the opposite appears to be true. Reason mocks faith. Reason shouts while faith whispers. As the execution of France’s greatest and most faithful heroine proved—” a grand, sweeping gesture to Joan “—faith without reason is blind. But, as the superficiality and vanity of much of my life and work prove, reason without faith is lame.”

Some who had booed and hissed now blinked, mouths agape—and then cheered…while, he noticed, those who had applauded, now booed and hissed. Voltaire stole a look at the Maid.

Far below in the rowdy crowd, Nim turned to Marq.
“What?”

Marq was ashen. “Damned if I know.”

“Yeah,” Nim said, “maybe literally.”

“Divinity won’t be mocked!” Monsieur Boker cried out. “Faith shall prevail!”

Voltaire was relinquishing the podium to his rival, to the amazed delight of the Preservers. Their shouts were equaled by the horrified disbelief of Skeptics.

Marq recalled the words he had spoken at the meeting. He muttered, “Voltaire, divested of his anger at authority, is and is not Voltaire.” He turned to Monsieur Boker. “My Lord!—you may be right.”

“No,
my
Lord!” snapped Monsieur Boker. “He is never wrong.”

The Maid surveyed the masses of this Limbo from her high angle. Strange small vessels for souls they were, swaying below like wheat in a summer storm.

“Monsieur is absolutely right!” she thundered across the stadium. “Nothing in nature is more obvious than that both nature and man do indeed possess a soul!”

Skeptics hooted. Preservers cheered. Others—who equated the belief that nature has a soul with paganism, she saw in a flash—scowled, suspecting a trap.

“Anyone who has seen the countryside near my home village, Domremy, or the great marbled church at Rouen will testify that nature, the creation of an awesome power, and man, the creator of marvels—such as this place, of magical works—
both
possess intense consciousness, a soul!”

She waved a gentle hand at him while the mass—did the size of them betray how tiny were their souls?—calmed themselves.

“But what my brilliant friend has
not
addressed is how the
fact
of the soul relates to the question at hand: whether clockwork intelligences, such as his own, possess a soul.”

The crowd stamped, booed, cheered, hissed, and roared. Objects the Maid could not identify sailed through the air. Police officers appeared to pull some men and women, who appeared to be having fits, or else sudden divine visitations, from the crowd.

“The soul of man is divine!” she cried out.

Screams of approval, shouts of denial.

“It is immortal!”

The din was so great people covered their ears with their hands to muffle the noise, of which they themselves were the source.

“And unique,” Voltaire whispered. “
I
certainly am. And you.”

“It is unique!” she shouted, eyes ablaze.

Voltaire shot to his feet beside her. “I agree!”

The congregation frothed over, like a pot left to boil, she observed.

The Maid ignored the raving masses at her enormous feet. She regarded Voltaire with bemused, affectionate doubt. She yielded the floor. Voltaire had a lust for the last word.

He began to speak of his hero, Newton.

“No, no,” she interrupted. “That isn’t what the formulas are at all!”

“Must you embarrass me in front of the largest audience I’ve ever known?” Voltaire whispered. “Let us not squabble over algebra, when we must—” he narrowed his eyes significantly “—calculate.” Sulking, he yielded the floor to her.

“Calculus,” she corrected. But softly, so that only he could hear. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

To her own astonishment and the rising hysteria of the crowd, she found herself explaining the philosophy of the digital Self—all with a fiery passion she’d not known since spurring her horse into sacred battle. In the beseeching sea of wide eyes below her, she
felt
the need of this place and time, for
ardor
and conviction.

“Incredible.” Voltaire clicked his tongue. “That you of all people should have a talent for mathematics.”

“The Host gave it unto me,” she replied, above the raucous fray.

Ignoring shouts, the Maid noticed again the figure so
somehow
like Garçon in the crowd. She could barely make him out from such a distance, despite her immense height. Yet she felt he was watching her the way she’d watched Bishop Cauchon, the most vile and relentless of her
oppressors. (A cool, sublime truth intruded: the good bishop, at the end, must have been touched by divinity’s grace and Christ’s merciful compassion, for she recalled no harm coming to her as a result of her trial….)

Her attention snapped back to the howling masses, the distant…man. This figure was not human in essence, she felt. It
looked
like a man, but her sensitive programs told her otherwise.

But what could he—
it
—be?

Suddenly a great light blared before her eyes. All three of her voices spoke, clear and hammering, even above the din. She listened, nodded.

“It is true,” she addressed the crowd, trusting the voices to speak through her, “that only the Almighty can make souls! But just so Christ, out of his infinite love and compassion, could not deny a soul to clockwork beings. To all.” She had to shout her final words over the roaring crowd. “Even wigmakers!”

“Heretic!” someone yelled.

“You’re muddying the question!”

“Traitor!”

Another cried out, “The original sentence was right! She ought to be burned at the stake again!”

“Again?” the Maid echoed. She turned to Voltaire. “What do they mean, again?”

Voltaire casually brushed a speck of lint from his embroidered satin waistcoat. “I haven’t the slightest idea. You know how fanciful and perverse human beings are.” With a sly wink, he added, “Not to mention, irrational.”

His words calmed her, but she had lost sight of the strange man.

“
I
cheated?” Marq shouted to Sybyl. The coliseum crowd seethed. “Joan of Arc explaining computational metaphysics?
I
cheated?”

“You started it!” Sybyl said. “You think I don’t know when my office has been rigged? You think you’re dealing with an amateur?”

“Well, I—”

“—and I don’t know a character-constraint matrix when I find one glued into my Joan sim?”

“No, I—”

“You think I’m not as bright?”

“This is scandalous!” said Monsieur Boker. “What did you
do
? It’s enough to make me believe in witchcraft!”

“You mean to say you
don’t
?” Marq’s client said, ever the Skeptic. He and Boker began to argue, adding to the indignant shouts of the crowd, now waxing hysterical.

The president of Artifice Associates, rubbing his temples, murmured, “Ruined. We’re ruined. We’ll never be able to explain.”

Sybyl’s attention was diverted. The mechman she had noticed earlier, holding his honey-haired, human companion’s hand, rushed down the aisle toward the screen. As it passed by, one of its three free hands happened to brush her skirt. “Pardon,” it said, pausing just long enough for Sybyl to read the mechstamp on its chest.

“Did that thing dare to touch you?” Monsieur Boker asked. His face swelled with rage.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Sybyl said. The mechman, pulling his human companion with him, fled toward the screen.

“Do you know it?” Marq asked.

“In a way,” Sybyl replied. In the café/sim she had modeled the Garçon 213-ADM interactive character after it. Laziness, perhaps, had led her to simply holo-copy the physical appearance of a standard tiktok-form. Like all artists, sim-programmers borrowed from life; they didn’t create it.

She watched as the tiktok—she thought of it as
Garçon,
now—elbowed his way down the jammed aisle, past screaming, cheering, jeering people—toward the screen.

Their progress did not go unnoticed. Overcome with disgust—to see a mechman holding hands with an attractive, honey-haired young girl!—Preservers shouted insults and epithets as they rushed by.

“Throw it out!” someone howled.

Sybyl saw the tiktok go rigid, as though bristling at the use of the objective pronoun. Tiktoks had no personal names, but to be referred to as an “it” seemed to affect the thing. Or was she projecting? she wondered.

“What’s that doing in here?” a man of ruddy complexion yelled.

“We’ve got laws against that!”

“Mechmuck!”

“Grab it!”

“Kick it out!”

“Don’t let it get away!”

The girl responded by gripping Garçon’s upper left hand even more tightly and flinging her free arm around his neck.

When they reached the platform, the tiktok’s undercarriage screeched, laboring at the irregular surfaces. All four of its arms waved off a hail of zot-corn and drugdrink containers, catching them with expert grace, as if it had been engineered for that specific task.

The girl shouted something to the tiktok which Sybyl could not hear. The tiktok prostrated itself at the feet of the towering holograms.

Voltaire peered down. “Get up! Except for purposes of lovemaking, I can’t stand to see anyone on his knees.”

Voltaire then dropped to his own knees at the feet of the towering Maid. Behind Garçon and the woman, the crowd surrendered what was left of its restraint. Bedlam broke out.

Joan gazed down and smiled—a slow, sensuous curve Sybyl had never seen before. She held her breath with excited foreboding.