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of Self: that he was inside himself.
loan of Arc assembled beside him, gleaming in armor. That spark is your soul,
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" 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.
He stood wigless, bedraggled, his satin vest bloodstained, his velvet breeches
soaked.
"Forgive me, chere madam, for appearing before you in this disheveled state. I
intend no disrespect to either of us. "
He looked around, nervously licked his lips. "I am... unskilled. Machinery was
never my forte. "
Joan felt moved to tenderness by the gap between his appearance and his
courtliness. Compassion, she thought, is
most important in this Purgatory, for who knows which shall be selected?
She was quite sure she would fare better than this infuriating yet appealing
man.
Yet even he might be saved. He was, unlike the objects she continued to ignore
on the plain about them, a Frenchman.
His gratitude to her did not deflect him from a choice argument, especially
since he had fresh evidence. "You believe in that ineffable essence, the
soul?"
She smiled with pity. "Can you not?"
"Tell me, then, do these tortured geometries possess souls?" His arm made a
grand sweep, taking in the self-involved figures.
She frowned. "They must. "
"Then they must be able to learn, yes? Otherwise, souls can live for endless
time and yet not use that time to learn, to change. "
She stiffened. "I do not... "
"That which cannot change cannot grow. Such a destiny of stasis is no
different from death. "
"No, death leads to heaven or hell. "
"What worse hell than
"My love of pleasure and the pleasure, of loving you, cannot make up for what
I endured in the Truth Chamber on the rack of my pain. "
He paused, dabbed at his eyes with a soiled linen cloth.
Joan curled a lip in distaste. Where was his beautiful lace cloth? His sense
of taste had occasionally made up for his views.
"A thousand little deaths in life hint at the foal dissolution of even
exquisite selves like mate. " Here he looked up.
"And yours, madam, and yours. "
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The flames, she thought. But now the images did not strike profoundly into
her. Instead, her inner vision felt cool, serene. Her "Self-programming" which
she thought of as a species of prayer had worked wonders.
"I cannot surrender to the rule of the senses, sir. "
"We must decide. I cannot find the spaces to, ah, "run background' for an
ending in a permanence incapable of any alteration, and hence, devoid of
intellect?"
"Sophist! I just saved your life and you riddle me with "
"Witness these fabricated Selves, " he interrupted, kicking a rhomboid. The
thunk of his petite shoe provoked a brown stain, which then dissolved back to
the original eggshell blue. "The value of a human Self lies not in some small,
precious kernel, but in the vast, constructed crust. "
Joan frowned. "There must be a center. "
"No, we are dispersed, do you see? The fiction of the soul is a bad story,
told to make us think we're unable to improve ourselves. "
He kicked a pyramid that was spinning about its apex. It fell over and
struggled to get back up. Joan knelt, pushed up, righted the grateful figure.
"Be kind!" she barked at him.
"To a closed loop of a both philosophy and sensuality. I cannot fold myself
into the solipsism " his hand swept in the creatures on the
Euclidean plane " of these. You too, madam, must now decide whether the taste
of a grape means more to you than joining me in this this "
"Poor sir, " Joan said.
" in this sterile but timeless world. " He looked up, paused for effect. "I'll
not join you in yours. "
A great sob burst from him.
being? Folly! These are defeated Selves, my love. Inside, they are no doubt
smugly certain of what they will do, of every possible future event. My kick
was a liberation!"
She touched the pyramid, now painfully spinning itself up with a long, thin
whine. "Truly? Who would want to so predict?"
Voltaire blinked. "That fellow Hari Seldon. He is why we are making such
cerebral expeditions. All this is in aid of his understanding... eventually.
Odd, the connections one makes. "
9.
She winked out of the sim-space, away from him, confused.
Somehow she had experienced two conversations at once. Hers and Voltaire's the
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