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.

“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.

“He’s running regular now,” Marq said, feeling better about the startup mistake. “I’ll keep my manifestation sitting, right? No disappearances or anything.”

“Joan’s cleared up.” Sybyl pointed at brown striations in the matrix representation that floated in 3D before her. “Some emotional tectonics, but they’ll take time.”

“I say- go.”

She smiled. “Let’s.”

The moment came. Marq sucked Voltaire and Joan back into realtime.

Within a minute he knew that Voltaire was still intact, functional, integrated. So was Joan, though she had retreated into her pensive withdrawal mode, an aspect well documented; her internal weather.

Voltaire, though, was irked. He swelled life-sized before them. The hologram scowled, swore, and loudly demanded the right to initiate communication whenever he liked.

“You think I want to be at your mercy whenever I’ve something to say? You’re talking to a man who was exiled, censored, jailed, suppressed-who lived in constant fear of church and state authorities-”

“Fire,” the Maid whispered with eerie sensuality.

“Calm down,” Marq ordered Voltaire, “or I’ll shut you off.” He froze action and turned to Sybyl. “What do you think? Should we comply?”

“Why not?” she said. “It’s not fair for them to be forever at our beck and call.”.

“Fair? This is a sim!”

“Theyhave notions of fairness. If we violate those-”

“Okay, okay.” He started action again. “The next question is how.”

“I don’t care how you do it,” the hologram said. “Just do it-at once!”

“Hold off,” Marq said. “We’ll let you have running time, to integrate your perception space.”

“What does that mean?” Voltaire asked. “Artful expression is one thing, jargon another.”

“To work out your kinks,” Marq replied dryly.

“So that we can converse?”

“Yes,” Sybyl said. “At your initiation, not just ours. Don’t go for a walk at the same time, though-that requires too much data-shuffling.”

“We’re trying to hold costs down here,” Marq said, leaning back so he could get a better view of Sybyl’s legs.

“Well, hurry up,” the Voltaire image said. “Patience is for martyrs and saints, not for men of belles lettres.”

The translator rendered all this in present language, inserting the audio of ancient, lost words. Knowledge fetchers found the translation and overlaid it for Marq and Sybyl. Still, Marq had left in the slippery, natural acoustics for atmosphere-the tenor of the unimaginably distant past.