They swooped into a primitive city, barely one layer of buildings to cover the naked ground. Some sort of crude village, pre-Empire. Streets whirled by, buildings turned in artful projection. Even the crowds and clumped traffic below seemed authentic, a muddled human jumble. Swiftly they careened into their foreground sim: a cafe on something called the Boulevard St. Germain. Cloying smells, the muted grind of traffic outside, a rattle of plates, the heady aroma of a souffle.
Marq zoomed them into the same timeframe as the recreated entities. A lean man loomed across the wall. His eyes radiated intelligence, mouth tilted with sardonic mirth.
Sybyl whistled through her teeth. Eyes narrowing, she watched the re-creation’s mouth, as if to read its lips. Voltaire was interrogating the mechwaiter. Irritably, of course.
“High five-sense resolution,” she said, appropriately awed. “I can’t get mine that clear. I still don’t know how you do it.”
Marq thought, My Sark contacts. I know you have some, too.
“Hey,” she said. “What-” He grinned with glee as her mouth fell open and she stared at the image of her Joan next to his Voltaire-freeze-frame, data streams initialized but not yet running interactively.
Her expression mingled admiration with fear. “We’re not supposed to bring them on together!-not till they meet in the coliseum.”
“Who says? It’s not in our contract!”
“Hastor will skewer us anyway.”
“Maybe-if he finds out. Want me to section her off?”
Her mouth twisted prettily. “Of course not. What the hell, it’s done. Activate.”
“I knew you’d go for it. We’re the artists, we make the decisions.”
“Have we got the running capacity to make them realtime?”
He nodded. “It’ll cost, but sure. And…I’ve got a little proposition for you.”
“Uh-oh.” Her brow arched. “Forbidden, no doubt.”
He waited, just to tantalize her. And to judge, from her reaction, how receptive she’d be if he tried to change the nature of their long-standing platonic relationship. He had tried, once before. Her rejection-she was married on a decade contract, she gently reminded him-only made him desire her more. All that and faithful in marriage, too. Enough to make the teeth grind-which they had, frequently. Of course, they could be replaced for less than the price of an hour with a good therapist.
Her body language now-a slight pulling away-told him she was still mourning her dead husband. He was prepared to wait the customary year, but only if he had to.
“What say we give both of them massive files, far beyond Basis State,” he said quickly. “Really give them solid knowledge of what Trantor’s like, the Empire, everything.”
“Impossible.”
“No, just expensive.”
“So much!”
“So what? Just think about it. We know what these two Primordials represented, even if we don’t know what world they came from.”
“Their strata memories say ‘Earth,’ remember?”
Marq shrugged. “So? Dozens of primitive worlds called themselves that.”
“Oh, the way Primitives call themselves ‘the People’?”
“Sure. The whole folk tale is wrong astrophysically, too. This legend of the original planet is pretty clear on one point-the world was mostly oceans. So why call it ‘Earth’?”
She nodded. “Granted, they’re deluded. And they have no solid databases about astronomy, I checked that. But look at their Social Context readings. These two stood for concepts, eternal ideas: Faith and Reason.”
Marq balled both fists in enthusiasm, a boyish gesture. “Right! On top of that we’ll pump in what we know today-pseudonatural selection, psychophilosophy, gene destinies-”
“Boker will never go for it,” Sybyl said. “It’s precisely modem information the Preservers of Our Father’s Faith don’t want. They want the historical Maid, pure and uncontaminated by modem ideas. I’d have to program her to read-”
“A cinch.”
“-write, handle higher mathematics. Give me a break!”
“Do you object on ethical grounds? Or simply to avoid a few measly centuries of work?”
“Easy for you to say. Your Voltaire has an essentially modem mind. Whoever made him had his own work, dozens of biographies. My Maid is as much myth as she is fact. Somebody re-created her out of thin air.”
“Then your objection’s based on laziness, not principle.”
“It’s based on both.”
“Will you at least give it some thought?”
“I just did. The answer is no.”
Marq sighed. “No use arguing. You’ll see, once we let them interact.”
Her mood seemed to swing from resistance to excitement; in her enthusiasm, she even touched his leg, fingers lingering. He felt her affectionate tap just as they opened into the simspace.
3.
“What’s going on here?” Voltaire rose, hands on hips-chair toppling back behind him, clattering on stone-and peered down at them from the screen. “Who are you? What infernal agency do you represent?”
Marq stopped the sim and turned to Sybyl. “Uh, do you want to explain it to him?”
“He’s your re-creation, not mine.”
“I’ve dreaded this.” Voltaire was imposing. He exuded power and electric confidence. Somehow, in all his microscopic inspections of this sim, the sum of it all, this gestalt essence, had never come through.
“We worked hard on this! If you stall now-”
Marq braced himself. “Right, right.”
“How do you look to him?”
“I made myself materialize, walk over, sit down.”
“He saw you come out of nothing?”
“I guess so,” he said, chagrined. “Shook him up.”
Marq had used every temperament fabrication he had, trimming and shaping mood constellations, but he had left intact Voltaire’s central core. What a hardball knot it was! Some programmer of pre-antiquity had done a startling, dense job. Gingerly, he dipped the Voltaire-sim into a colorless void of sensory static. Soothe, then slide…
His fingers danced. He cut in the time acceleration.
Sim-personalities needed computational durations to assimilate new experience. He thrust Voltaire into a cluttered, seemingly real experience-net. The personality reacted to the simulation and raced through the induced emotions. Voltaire was rational; his personality could accept new ideas that took the Joansim far longer.
What did all this do to a reconstruction of a real person, when knowledge of a different reality dawned? Here came the tricky part of the reanimation. Acceptance of who/what/when they were.
Conceptual shock waves would resound through the digital personalities, forcing emotional adjustments. Could they take it? These weren’t real people, after all, any more than an abstract impressionist painting pretended to tell you what a cow looked like. Now, he and Sybyl could step in only after the automatic programs had done their best.
Here their math-craft met its test. Artificial personalities had to survive this cusp point or crash into insanity and incoherence. Racing along highways of expanding perception, the ontological swerves could jolt a construct so hard, it shattered.
He let them meet each other, watching carefully. The Aux Deux Magots, simple town and crowd backdrop. To shave computing time, weather repeated every two minutes of simtime. Cloudless sky, to save on fluid flow modeling. Sybyl tinkered with her Joan, he with his Voltaire, smoothing and rounding small cracks and slippages in the character perceptual matrix.
They met, spoke. Some skittering, blue-white storms swept through Voltaire’s neuronal simulations. Marq sent in conceptual repair algorithms. Turbulence lapped away.
“Got it!” he whispered. Sybyl nodded beside him, intent on her own smoothing functions.