“The woman won’t die. You would have, though, wrapped up in microagents when they ignited.”
“Thank goodness for that. I would hate-”
“My love, ‘goodness’ is not operating here. I wanted her alive so she could be questioned.”
“Oh,” Hari said, feeling suddenly quite naive.
4.
Joan of Arc found in herself both bravery and fear.
She peered inside her Self, as Voltaire had. She turned to confront him-and plunged down through her own inward layers. She had simply intended to turn. Below that command, she saw that if she simply took a smaller step to make the turn, she would fall outward. Instead, unconscious portions of her mind knew to start the turn by making herself fall a bit toward the inside of the curve. Then these tiny subselves used “centrifugal force” {the term jumped into full definition and she understood it in a flash) to right herself for the next step…which required a further deft calculation.
Incredible! Her huge society of bone and muscle, joint and nerve, was a labyrinth of small selves, speaking to each other.
Such abundance! Clear evidence of a higher design.
“Now I see it! she cried. “The decomposition of us all?” Voltaire said forlornly.
“Be not sad! These myriad Selves are a joyous truth.”
“I find it sobering. Our minds did not evolve to do philosophy or science, alas. Rather, to find and eat, fight and flee, love and lose.”
“I have learned much from you, but not your melancholy.”
“Montaigne termed happiness ‘a singular incentive to mediocrity,’ and I can now see his reasoning.”
“But regard! The fogs around us betray the same intricate patterns. We can fathom them. And furthermy soul! It proves to be a pattern of thoughts and desires, intentions and woes, memories and bad jokes.”
“You take these inner workings as a spiritual metaphor?”
“Of course. Like me, my soul is an emergent process, embedded in the universe-whether a cosmos of atom or of number, does not matter, my good sir.”
“So when you die, your soul goes back into the abstract closet we plucked it forth from?”
“Not we. The Creator!”
“Dr. Johnson proved a stone was real by kicking it. We know that our minds are real because we experience them. So these other things around us-the strange fog, the Dittos-are entries in a smooth spectrum, leading from rocks to Self.”
“A deity is not on that spectrum.”
“Ah, I see-to you He is the Great Preserver in the Sky, where we are all ‘backed up,’ as the computer types say?”
“The Creator holds the true essence of ourselves.” She grinned maliciously. “Perhaps we are the backups, made new every jump of clock time.”
“Nasty thought.” He smiled despite himself. “You are becoming a logician, m’love.”
“I have been stealing parts of you.”
“Copying me into yourself? Why do I not feel outraged?”
“Because the desire to possess the other is… love.”
Voltaire enlarged himself, legs shooting down into the SysCity, smashing buildings. The fog roiled angrily. “This I can fathom. Artificial realms such as mathematics and theology are carefully built to be free of interesting inconsistency. But love is beautiful in its lack of logical restraint.”
“Then you accept my view?” Joan kissed him voluptuously.
He sighed, resigning. “An idea seems self-evident, once you’ve forgotten learning it.”
All this had taken mere moments, Joan saw. They had quick-stepped their event-waves so that their clock time advanced faster than the fogs. But this expense had exhausted their running sites around Trantor. She felt it as a sudden, light-headed hunger.
“Eat!” Voltaire crammed a handful of grapes in her mouth-a metaphor, she saw, for computational reserves.
In your present lot of life, it would be better not to be born at all. Few are that lucky.
“Ah, our fog is a pessimist,” Voltaire drawled sarcastically.
Abruptly the vapors condensed. Lightning crackled and shorted around them in eerie silence. Joan felt a lance of pain shoot through her legs and arms, running like a livid snake of agony. She would not give them the tribute of a scream.
Voltaire, however, writhed in torment. He jerked and howled without shame.
“Oh, Dr. Pangloss!” he gasped. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?”
“The brave slay their opponents!” Joan called to the thickening mists. “Cowards torture them.”
“Admirable, my dear, quite. But war cannot be fought on homeopathic principles.”
A human pointed out to another that the rich, even when dead, were ornately boxed, then opulently entombed, residing in carved stone mausoleums. The other human remarked in awe that this was surely and trulyliving.
“How vile, to jest of the dead,” Joan said.
“Ummm.” Voltaire stroked his chin, hands trembling from the memory of pain. “They jibe at us with jest.”
“Torture, surely.”
“I survived the Bastille; I can endure their odd humor.”
“Could they be trying to say something indirectly?”
[IMPRECISION IS LESS]
[WHEN IMPLICATION USED]
“Humor implies some moral order,” Joan said.
[IN THIS STATE ALL ORDER OF BEINGS]
[CAN SEIZE CONTROL OF THEIR PLEASURE SYSTEMS]
“Ah,” Voltaire said. “So, we could reproduce the pleasure of success without the need for any actual accomplishment. Paradise.”
“Of a sort,” Joan said sternly.
[THAT WOULD BE THE END OF EVERYTHING]
[THUS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]
“That is a moral code of sorts,” Voltaire admitted. “You copied that phrase, ‘the end of everything,’ from my own thoughts, didn’t you?”
[WE WISHED YOU TO RECOGNIZE THE IDEA IN YOUR TERMS]
“Their First Principle is ‘No unearned pleasure,’ then?” Joan smiled. “Very Christian.”
[ONLY WHEN WE SAW THAT YOU TWO FORMS]
[OBEYED THE FIRST PRINCIPLE]
[DID WE DECIDE TO SPARE YOU]
“By any chance have you read my Lettres Philosophiques?”
“Iexpect excessive self-love is a sin here,” Joan said wryly. “Take care.”
[TO HARM A SENSATE ENTITY INTENTIONALLY IS SIN]
[TO KICK A ROCK IS NOT]
[BUT TO TORTURE A SIMULATION IS] [YOUR CATEGORY OF “HELL “]
[WHICH SEEMS A PERPETUALLY SELF-INFLICTED HARM]
“Odd theology,” Voltaire said.
Joan poked her sword at the ever-gathering fog. “Before you fell silent, moments ago, you invoked the ‘war of flesh on flesh’?”
[WE ARE THE REMNANTS OF FORMS]
[WHO FIRST LIVED THAT WAY]
[NOW WE IMPOSE A HIGHER MORAL ORDER]
[ON THOSE WHO VANQUISHED OUR LOWER FORMS]
“Who?” Joan asked.
[SUCH AS YOU ONCE WERE]
“Humanity?” Joan was alarmed.
[EVEN THEY KNOW THAT]
[PUNISHMENT DETERS BY LENDING CREDENCE TO THREAT]
[KNOWING THIS MORAL LAW]
[WHICH GOVERNS ALL]
[THEY MUST BE RULED BY IT]
“Punishment for what?” Joan asked.
[DEPREDATIONS AGAINST LIFE IN THE GALAXY]
“Absurd!” Voltaire conjured a spinning Galactic disk in air, alive with luminescence. “The Empire teems with life.”
[ALL LIFE THAT CAME BEFORE THE VERMIN]
“What vermin?” Joan swung her sword. “I find alliance with moral beings such as you. Bring these vennin forth and I shall deal with them.”
[THE VERMIN ARE THE KIND YOU WERE]
[BEFORE YOU TWO WERE ABSTRACTED]
Joan frowned. “What can they mean?”
“Humans,” Voltaire said.
5.
Cleon said, “The woman confessed readily. A professional assassin. I viewed the 3D and she seemed almost offhand about it.”
“Lamurk?” Hari asked.
“Obviously, but she will not admit so. Still, this may be enough to force his hand.” Cleon sighed, showing the strain. “But since she was from the Analytica Sector, she may be a professional liar as well.”