Foundation's Fear (31 page)

When the walls of her chamber began to melt and implode, Joan of Arc knew she must act.

Of course the irritating Voltaire
had
charged her to remain here. And of course he had the further irritating trait of being often correct. But
this
—

Sulfurous vapors bit in her nostrils. Demons! They clambered through the splits in the bulging walls.
Orange light burning from behind them lit ugly, sharp-nosed features.

She swung her razor steel. They fell. Sweat popped out upon her brow and she labored on. “Demons decease!” she cried giddily. To
act
—that was a bit of heaven, after such delay.

She split the boundaries of her clasping space. More demons, awash in orange. She leapt over them and into a stretching space of dots, coordinates lancing in dwindling perspective, to an unseeable end.

She ran. After her came small, yapping things of misshapen heads and wide, vicious eyes.

As she clanked on in full armor she felt herself reaching out, sucking in nutrients directly from the air. Surely this was the Lord’s help! The idea uplifted her.

Strange beings came rushing at her. She chopped them aside.
Her sword, her Truth
…She looked carefully at it and the intensity of her gaze sucked her down into the minute architecture of the gleaming shaft. It was a multitude of small…
instructions
…which defended her.

She slowed, stunned. Armor, sweat, sword—all were…
metaphors
—the word came, unbidden. These were symbols of underlying programs, algorithms giving battle.

Not real. Yet somehow even more than real, for they were what made up her own self. Herself. Her Self.

Import rained down upon her. This was some strange Purgatory, then. Though her battle might be mere allegory, that did mean it was somehow tissue-thin, a lacy, false thing. A divine hand wrought this, so it was Right.

She tromped on, jaw set in determination. These creatures were…
simulations,
“sims,” parables of the true. Very well: she would deal righteously with them. She could do no other.

Some sims presented as
things
—talking autocarriages, dancing blue buildings, oaken chairs and tables copulating rudely like barn animals. To her left the whole huge bowl of heaven above split into a maniac grin. This proved harmless; air-mouths could not eat her, though this one shouted echoing taunts. There were rules, decorum, even here, she judged.

Sweet music appeared as billows of vibrant cloud. A blissful blue sky filled with flapping strings, like coveys of birds, yet each only a single line wide. In hammer blows came sleet and sun, this local world flashing from one weather state to the next, as chimes and trumpets sounded in acoustically perfect chorus.

Sims need not be…
simian,
the word congealing in her mind as if from divine vision. Simian was human, in a way.

With that swift syllogism there came swooping down upon her, its broad, leathery wings spread, an immense body of Ideation—
evolution
entwined with
fitness index
while slashing like a razor into
origin of species
—and from that huge, sharp-beaked bird she fled.

Her mind raced now along with her body. Legs pumped. Voices called. Not those of her saints, but hideous devil demands.

She felt objects crunch beneath her boots. Silver. Jewels. All crumpled if she strode over them. They lay embedded in the strange soil of dots and lines, a grid tapering away to the Creator’s lost infinity.

She bent and picked up a few. Treasures. As she cradled a silver chalice, it dissolved, flowing into her. She felt a jolt, as though this were some sugar. Strength flowed in her flanks and shoulders. She ran again, plucking up the fine jewels, the ornate bowls and statuettes. Each somehow made her richer.

Stone walls rose to block her. She crashed through
these barriers, knowing them by faith alone to be false. She would find Voltaire, yes. She
knew
he was threatened.

Frogs fell from her sky, then splashed like raindrops. An omen, a menace from some demonic power. She ignored them and surged forward, toward the ever receding horizon of geometric sharpness.

All this mad Purgatory meant something, and together they would find what that was. By all Heaven!

This was like a dream—but when had he ever feared, in a dream, the death of waking up?

He felt weak, drained. The Torquemada-thing had tortured Voltaire well past the point where he had gladly confessed every sin, felony, minor infraction and social snub, and had started without pause on mere unkindnesses in penned reviews…when the Torquemada had faded, seeping away.

To leave him here. In this utter vacancy.

“Suppose you were lost in some unknown space,” he said to himself, “and could only tell how near points were to each other—nothing more. What could you learn?”

He had always secretly wanted to play Socrates in the agora, asking telling questions and teaching by extracting from unwilling youths a Truth that would hang luminous in the serene Athenian air, visible to all.

Well, this was not the agora. It was nothing, blank
gray space. However, behind the dull no-thing swam Numbers. A Platonic realm? He had always suspected that such a place existed.

A voice answered, speaking French: “That alone, respected sir, would be enough to deduce much about the space and its contents.”

“Most reassuring,” Voltaire said. He recognized the sharp accents of Paris. He was, of course, speaking with himself. Him Self.

“Quite. Immediately, sir, you would know from the irreducible coordinate transformations whether you were in two or three or more dimensions.”

“Which is this, then?”

“Three, spatially.”

“How disappointing. I’ve
been
there.”

“I could experiment with two separable time axes.”

“I already have a past. I crave a present.”

“Point taken. This will not tax you, after your torture, eh?”

He sighed. Even that took effort. “Very well.”

“Studying the field of point-nearness data, you could sense walls, pits, passages. Using only local slices of information about nearness.”

“I see. Newton was always making jokes about the French mathematicians. I am happy to now refute him by constructing a world from sheer calculation.”

“Certainly! Far more impressive than describing the elliptical paths of planets. Shall we begin?”

“Onward, O Self!”

As it took shape, his dwelling was a reassuring copy, no more. Details were stitched in as processor time allowed; he understood that, without thinking about it, as easily as one breathes.

To test his limits, he concentrated on an idea: Classes
vs.
Properties, which is more fundamental? This sucked computational resources away.

As he watched, bricks in a nearby wall muddied,
lost their exact spacing. The room retreated into sterile, abstract planes: gray, black, oblongs where once had been walls and furniture. “Background, mere background,” he muttered.

How about Him? Self? His breath whooshed and wheezed in and out, airflow too abrupt. No intricate fluid codes, he gathered, calculating exact patterns. The simple appearance of inhale—exhale was enough to quiet his pseudo-nervous system, make it think he was breathing.

In fact,
it
was breathing
him.
But what was
it
?

Once he got good control, he could flesh himself out. His scrawny neck thickened. Crackling, his hands broadened, filled with unearned muscle. Turning to survey his cottage, he established his own domain—a region in which he could process any detail at will. Here he was godlike. “Though without angels—so far.”

He walked outside and was in his own verdant garden. The grass he had made stood absolutely still. Its thousands of blades performed stiff, jerky motions when he stepped on them. Though richly emerald, they were like the grass of a sudden winter, crunching underfoot.

The garden parted and he walked down to a golden beach, his clothes whipping away on the wind. When he swam in the salt-tangy ocean, waves were quite distinct until they broke into surf.

Then the fluid mechanics became too much for his available computational rate. The frothy waves blurred. He could still swim, catch them, even ride down their faces, but they were like a fog of muttering water. Still salty, though.

He became used to occasional loss of detail. It was rather like having one’s vision blur with age, after all. He went soaring through air, then skiing down impossible slopes, experiencing the visceral thrill of
risking his life, feeling the fear in every sinew—and never getting a scratch, of course.

There were pleasant aspects to being just a pattern of electrons. His Environment Manager entertained him enormously…for a while.

He flew back to his country home. Had that not been his answer, when asked about how to change the world? “Cultivate your garden.” What meaning had that now?

He walked toward the water geyser outside his study. He had loved its sense of play, so precious—for it only lasted a few minutes before draining the uphill reservoir.

Now it gushed eternally. But as he looked at it, he felt himself whiten with the effort. Water was expensive to sim, involving hydrodynamic calculations of nonlaminar flow to get the droplets and splashes real seeming. It slid over his hands and their exquisitely fine fingerprints with convincing liquid grace.

With a faint—
jump
—he felt something change. His hand, still in the spray, no longer sensed the water’s cool caress. Droplets passed through his hand, not flowing over it. He was now witnessing the fountain, not interacting with it. To save computational expense, no doubt. Reality was algorithm.

“Of course,” his Self muttered, “they could ‘model out’ disturbing jerks and seams.” As he watched, the water flow somehow got smoother, more real. A tailoring program had edited this little closed drama, for his benefit.

“
Merci,
” he murmured. Irony was lost on digital gates, however.

But there were pieces of himself missing. He could not say what they were, but he sensed…hollows.

He took flight. Deliberately he slowed his Self so that ferrets could take him down insinuating corridors
of computation, across the Mesh of Trantor. Never mind Marq and his Artifice Associates. They would be harder to pilfer from, surely.

He arrived—hovering—in the office of the Seldon person. Here was where his Self had resided, before.

One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.

He willed:
find.
In answer came, “The Base Original?”

“Yes. The real me.”

“You/I have come a great distance since then.”

“Humor my nostalgia.”

Volt 1.0,
as a Directory termed him, was slumbering. Still saved—not in the Christian sense, alas—and awaiting digital resurrection.

And he? Something had saved him.
What? Who?

Voltaire snatched Volt 1.0 away. Let Seldon wonder at the intrusion; a millisecond later, he was halfway around Trantor, all traceries of him fading. He wanted to save Volt 1.0. At any time the mathist Seldon could let it/him lapse. Now, as Voltaire watched like a digital angel from outside, Volt 1.0 danced its static gavotte.

“Ummm, there is some resemblance.”

“I shall cut and paste into your blanks.”

“May I have some interesting anesthetic?” He was thinking of brandy, but a sheet of names slid enticingly by him. “Morphine? Rigotin? A mild euphoric, at least?”

Disapproval: “This will not hurt.”

“That’s what the critics said, too, about my plays.”

The wrenching about of his innards began. No, not
hurt
exactly, but twist and vex, yes.

Memories (he
felt
rather than
learned
) were laid down as synaptic grit, chemical layers, which held
against the random rude abrasions of brain electro-chemistry. Cues for mood changes and memory call-ups snapped into place. The place and time could be rendered real, whenever he wanted. Chemistry of convenience.

But he could not remember the night sky.

Scrubbed away, it was. Only names—Orion, Sagittarius, Andromeda—but not the stars themselves. What had that vile voice said about naming them?

Someone had erased this knowledge. It could be used to trace a path to Earth. Who would want to block that?

No answer.

Nim.
He plucked up a buried memory. Nim had worked on Voltaire when Marq was not there.

And whom did Nim work for? The enigmatic figure of Hari Seldon?

Somehow he knew Nim was a hireling of another agency. But there his meshed knowledge faltered. What other forces worked, just beyond his sight?

He sensed large vitalities afoot here.
Careful.

He trotted from the hospital, legs devouring the ground. Bouncy. Free! He sped across a digital field of Euclidean grace, bare black sky above.

Here lurked supple creatures, truly eccentric. They did not choose to represent themselves as near-lifelike visions. Nor did they present as Platonic ideals, spheres, or cubes of cognition. These solids revolved, some standing on their corners. Spindly triangle-trees sang as winds rubbed them. Even slight frictions sparked bright yellow flares where streamers of hurrying blue mist rubbed.

He strolled among them and enjoyed their oblivious contortions. “The Garden of the Solipsists?” he asked them. “Is this where I am?”

They ignored him, except for a ruby-red ellipsoid of revolution. It split into a laughing set of teeth,
then sprouted an enormous phosphorescent green eye. This slowly winked as the teeth gnashed.

Voltaire sensed from these moving sculptures a hardness, a radiation from the kernel of Self within each. Somehow each Self had become tight, controlled, sealing out all else.

What gave him his own sense of Self? His sense of control, of determining his future actions? Yet he could see within himself, watch the workings of deep agencies and programs.

“Astounding!” he blurted, as the thought came:

Because
there was no person sitting in his head to make himself do what he wanted (or even an authority to make him
want to want
) he constructed a Story of Self: that
he
was inside himself.

Joan of Arc assembled beside him, gleaming in armor. “That spark is your soul,” she said.

Voltaire’s eyes widened. He kissed her fervently. “You saved me? Yes? You were the one!”

“I did, using powers attached to me. I absorbed them from the dying spirits, which abound in these strange fields.”

At once he looked inside himself and saw two agencies doing battle. One wished to embrace her, to spill out the conflict he felt between his sensual license and his analytical engine of a mind.

The other, ever the philosopher, yearned to engage her Faith in another bout with blithe Reason.

And why could he not have both? As a mortal, among the embodied, he had been faced with such choices daily. Especially with women.

After all, he thought, this will be the first time. He could feel the agencies each begin to harvest their own computational resources, like a surge of sugar in the blood from a sweet wine.

In the same split instant he reached out and parted Joan, running her cognition on two separate tracks.
In each they were fully engaged, but at fractional speed. He could live two lives!

The plane split.

They split.

Time split.