[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
consent when he wants to impose on you like now were Voltaire your husband, he
could break in on you whenever he likes. "
Existence without selfdom, without privacy... Bursts of Joan's bright
self-light collided, flickered, dimmed, almost guttered out.
"Are you suggesting, " Michael said, "that she continue to receive this
apostate without subjecting their lust to the bonds of marriage? Let them
marry and extinguish their lust completely!"
Joan could not be heard over the bickering of saints and angels in the musty,
liquid murk. She knew that in this arithmetic Limbo, like a waiting room for
true Purgatory, she had no heart... but something, somewhere, nevertheless
ached.
Memories flooded her. His lean, quick self. Surely a saint and an archangel
would forgive her if she took advantage of their sacred bickering to grant
Voltaire's request that his "data" be received, if she surrendered just this
once to impulses compelling her from within.
Shuddering, she yielded.
FOUNDATION'S FEAR ~^*~ 293
2.
Voltaire snapped, "I've waited less long for Friedrich of Prussia and
Catherine the Great!"
"I am adrift, " Joan said airily. "Occupied. "
"And you're a peasant, a swineherd, not even a bourgeoise. These moods of
yours! These personae your subconscious layers created! They grow tiresome in
the extreme. "
He hung in air above the lapping dark waters. Quite a striking effect, he
thought.
"In such haunting rivers I must converse with like minds. "
He waved away her point with a silk-sleeved arm. "I've tried to make
allowances everyone knows saints aren't fit for civilized society! Perfume
cannot conceal the stink of sanctity. "
"Surely here in Limbo "
"This is not a theological waiting room! Your tedious taste for solitude plays
out in theaters of computation. "
"Arithmetic is not holy, sir. "
"Umm, perhaps though I suspect Newton could prove otherwise. "
He slow-stepped the scene, watching individual event-waves wash through. To
his view, the somber river gurgled an increment forward and Joan's eyebrow
inched up, then paused for the calculation to be refreshed. He accelerated her
internal states, though, allowing a decent interval for La Pucelle, the Chaste
Maid, to ponder a reply. He had the advantage, for he commanded more memory
space.
He breached the slow-stepped, slumbering river sim. He had thought this
best images of womblike wet reassurance, to offset her fire phobia.
The Maid gaped but did not answer. He checked, and found that he did not now
have the resources to bring her to full
running speed. A complex in the Battisvedanta Sector had sucked up computing
space. He would have to wait until his ferret-programs found him some more
unoccupied room.
Page 129
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He fumed not a good use of running time, but somehow it felt right. If you had
the computational space. He felt another distant suck on his resources. An
emergency tiktok shutdown. Computer backups shifted to cover. His sensory
theater dwindled, his body fell away.
Miserable wretches, they were draining him! He thought she spoke, her voice
faint, far away. He fiddled in a frenzy to give her running time.
"Monsieur neglects me!"
Voltaire felt a spike of joy. He did love her a mere response could buoy him
up above this snaky river.
"We are in grave danger, " he said. "An epidemic has erupted in the matter
world. Confusion reigns. Respectable people exploit widespread panic by
preying on each other. They lie, cheat, and steal. "
"No!"
He could not resist. "In other words, things are exactly as they've always
been. "
"Is this why you have come?" she asked. "To laugh at me? A once-chaste maid
you ruined?"
"I merely helped you to become a woman. "
"Exactement, " she said. "But I don't want to be a woman. I want to be a
warrior for Charles of France. "
"Patriotic twaddle. Heed my warning! You must answer no calls, except mine,
without first clearing them through me.
You are to entertain no one, speak with no one, travel nowhere, do nothing
without my prior consent. "
"Monsieur mistakes me for his wife. "
"Marriage is the only adventure open to the manifestly cowardly. I did not
attempt it, nor shall I. "
She seemed distracted. "This threat, it is serious?"
"Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. "
She snapped back to attention; data resources had returned. "Then, sir "
"But this is not life. It is a mathist dance. "
She smiled. "I do not hear music. "
"Had I digital wealth, I would whistle. Out lives such as they are are in
grave danger. "
La Pucelle did not answer at once, though he had given her the running time.
Was she conferring with her idiotic voices of conscience? (Quite obviously,
the internalizations of ignorant village priests. )
"I am a peasant, " she said, "but not a slave. Who are you to order me?"
Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide
network, he was now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of Os and Is. He ran
on processor clusters, a vagrant thief. Amid Trantor's myriad personal
computers and mountainous Imperial processors, he lurked and pilfered.
The image he had given Joan, of swimming in an inky river, was a reasonable
vision of the truth. They swam in the
Mesh of a city so large he could barely sense it as a whole. As constraints of
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]