Foundation's Fear ( Second Foundation Trilogy #1)

Foundation's Fear ( Second Foundation Trilogy #1) Page 41

 Newton himself assembled on the cobblestones, lean face clotted with blue-black anger. “I labored over experiments, over mathematics, differentials, ray tracings—”

 “And I have all that—” Voltaire laughed happily, awed by the presence of such an intellect “—running on background!”

 Newton bowed elaborately—and vanished.

 Voltaire realized that his eyes had no need to be better than real eyes. Same for his hearing—simmed eardrums responding to calcu­ lated acoustic wave propagation. His was a remorselessly econom­ ical Self.

 Newton appeared again (a subagent, manifesting as a visual aid?). He appeared puzzled. “How does it feel to be a mathematical construction?”

 “However I want it to feel.”

 “Such liberties are unearned.” Newton cluck-clucked his tongue.

 “Quite so. So is the Lord’s mercy.”

 “These are not deities.”

 “To the likes of you and me, are they not?”

 Newton sniffed. “Frenchman! You could learn a bit of humility.”

 “I shall have to subscribe to a higher university for that.”

 A Puritan scowl. “You could do with a lecture and a lashing.”

 “Do not tempt me with foreplay, sir.”

 His throat squeezed with anxiety. A sudden dread wrapped him.

 A snap, a lurch, blurred objects speeding by him as if he were plunging in a carriage down a precipice—

 And he was trembling like a schoolboy, anticipating pleasures made more exquisite for having been delayed.

 Madame la Scientiste! Here!

 To think was to have: her office materialized about him.

 He had harbored a passing lust for this rational creature, dancer of elegant gavottes amid abstruse numerics…and all about him was firm and rich, intensely felt.

 How could she, an embodied person, appear in simulation? He wondered at this, but only for a thin, shaved second. He inhaled her musky essence. Clammy palms grasped her hair, rubbing its lustrous strands between anxious fingers. “At last,” he breathed into the warm shell of her ear. He began thinking hard on abstract matters, so as to delay his own pleasure (the one sure sign of a gentleman) and await hers—

 “I faint!” she cried.

 “Not yet, please.” Did scientists hasten so?

 “To lose yourself, that is what you seek?” she asked.

 “Ah, yes, in carefully selected acts of passion, but, but—”

 “You are of the kind who crawl in mud and seethe with murder,

 then?”

 “What? Madam, keep to the subject!”

 “And how do you find the names of stars?” she said coldly.

 The inadvisability of selflessness was demonstrated on the spot—for, as he trembled deliciously on the verge of the most in­ tense pleasure sensuous beings can know, a blur of fast translation snatched it all away—

 —and perversely replaced bliss with woe.

 Beneath him the warm sinuosities of Madam’s flesh gave way to the raw rungs of a ladder that bit deep into his back. His ankles and wrists chafed from cords binding him to the ladder.

 Over him hovered a gnarled man whose bird-boned frame was lost in the folds of a monk’s coarse robe. The curve of his nose re­ inforced his hawk’s face, as did his fingernails, so long and curled that they resembled claws. They held some bits of wood…and were poking them up Voltaire’s nostrils.

 Voltaire tried to avert his head. It was squeezed inside an iron clasp. He tried to speak—to interest his inquisitor in more rational methods of inquiry—but his mouth, forced open by an iron ring, could only gargle.

 The fine linen cloth stuffed in his mouth brought home to him far more than wood shoved up his nose, the gravity of his plight. Voltaire without his words was like Samson without his locks, Al­ exander without his sword, Plato without Ideas, Don Quixote without his fantasy, Don Juan without women…and Fray Tomás de Torquemada without heretics, without apostates, without unbe­ lievers like Voltaire.

 For this was Torquemada. And he was in Hell.

 7.

 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 cor­ rect. 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 fea­ tures.

 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 unsee­ able 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…meta-phors—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 withfitness 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!

 8.

 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 oth-er—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 near­ ness.”

 “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. Prop­ erties, which is more fundamental? This sucked computational re­ sources away.