She nodded. “Me too.”

Was she trying to coax an admission from him? They had both had to go through scanning as part of getting their Master Class ratings in the meritocracy. Marq had thriftily kept his scan. Better than a back-alley brain map, for sure. He was no genius, but the basics of Voltaire’s underpinnings weren’t the important part, after all. Exactly how the sim ran the hindbrain functions-basic maintenance, housekeeping circuitry-certainly couldn’t matter, could it?

“Let’s have a look at our creations,” Marq said brightly, to get off the subject.

Sybyl shook her head. “Mine is stable. But look-we don’t really know what to expect. These fully integrated Personalities are still isolated.”

“Nature of the beast.” Marq shrugged, playing the jaded pro. Now that his hands caressed the board, though, a tingling excitement seized him.

“Let’s do it today,” she said, words rushing out.

“What? I-I’d like to slap some more patches over the gaps, maybe install a rolling buffer as insurance against character shifts, spy into”

“Details! Look, these sims have been running on internals for weeks of sim-time, self-integrating. Let’s interact.”

Marq thought of the glider pilot, up there amid treacherous winds. He had never done anything so risky; he wasn’t the type. His kind of peril lay on the digital playing field. Here, he was master.

But he had not gotten this far by being foolish. Letting these simulations come into contact with the present might induce hallucinations in them, fear, even panic.

“Just think! Talking to pre-antiquity.”

He realized that he was the one feeling fear. Think like a pilot! he admonished himself.

“Would you want anyone else to do it?” Sybyl asked.

He was keenly aware of the fleeting warmth of her thigh as it accidentally brushed his.

“No one else could,” he admitted.

“And it’ll put us ahead of any competition.”

“That guy Seldon, he could’ve, once he got them from those Sark ‘New Renaissance’ jokers. Using us, well-I guess he needs to get some distance from a dicey proposition like this.”

“Political distance,” she agreed. “Deniability.”

“He didn’t seem that savvy to me-politically, I mean.”

“Maybe he wants us to think that. How’d he charm Cleon?”

“Beats me. Not that I wouldn’t want one of our guys running things. A mathist minister-who’d imagine that?”

So Artifice Associates was out on its own here. With their Sark contacts, the company had already displaced Digitfac and Axiom Alliance in the sale and design of holographic intelligences. Competition was rough in several product lines, though. With a pipeline to truly ancient Personalities, they could sweep the board clean. At the knife edge of change, Marq thought happily. Danger and money, the two great aphrodisiacs.

He had spent yesterday eavesdropping on Voltaire and was sure Sybyl had done the same with the Maid. Everything had gone well. “Face filters for us, though.”

“Don’t trust yourself to not give away your feelings?” Sybyl gave him a womanly, throaty chuckle. “Think you’re too easy to read?”

“Am I?” Ball back in her court.

“Let’s say your intentions are, at least.”

Her sly wink made his nostrils flare-which reminded Marq of why he needed the filters. He thumbed in an amiable expression he had carefully fashioned for dealing by phone with clients. He had learned early in this business that the world was packed with irritable people. Especially Trantor.

“Better put a body language refiner on, too,” she said flatly, all business now. That was what never ceased to intrigue him: artful ambiguity.

She popped up her own filters, imported instantly from her board halfway across the building. “Want a vocabulary box?”

He shrugged. “Anything they can’t understand, we’ll credit to language problems.”

“What is that stuff they speak?”

“Dead language, unknown parent world.” His hands were a blur, setting up the transition.

“It has a, well, a liquid feel.”

“One thing.”

Sybyl’s breasts swelled as she drew in her breath, held it, then slowly eased it out. “I just hope my client doesn’t find out about Seldon. The company’s taking an awful chance, not telling either one of them about the other.”

“So what?” He enjoyed giving a carefree shrug. A flutter-glide would petrify him, but power games-those he loved. Artifice Associates had taken major accounts from the two deadly rivals in this whole affair.

“If both sides of the argument find out we’re handling both accounts, they’ll leave. Refuse to pay beyond the retainer-and you know how much we’ve overspent beyond that.”

“Leave?” His turn to chuckle. “Not if they want to win. We’re the best.” Marq gave her his cocky smile. “You and me, in case you were wondering. Just wait till you see this.”

He downed the lights, started the run, and leaned back in his clasp chair, legs stretched out on the table before him. He wanted to impress her. That wasn’t all he wanted. But since her husband had been crushed in an accident, beyond repair by even the best medicos, he’d decided to wait a decent interval before he made his move. What a team they would make! Open a firm-say, Marq-Sybyl, Limited-skim off the best A2customers, make a name.

No names. Let’s be fair.

Sybyl’s voice trembled in the gloom. “To meet ancients…”

Down, down, down-into the replicated world, its seamless blue complexity swelling across the entire facing wall. Vibrotactile feedback from inductance dermotabs perfected the illusion.

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.