“All the better,” Marq said, though his stomach was feeling like he had suddenly gone into free fall. Living in a real cultural renaissance was risky. Maybe his hollow feeling was the stim, though.

“I mean, Seldon and that guy who follows him around like a dog, Amaryl-you think they’ve booted this to you because it’s a snap?”

Marq took a bit of the stim before answering. “No, it’s because I’m the best.”

“And you’re a long way down from them on the status ladder. You are, my friend, expendable.”

Marq nodded soberly. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”

Was he repeating himself? Must be the stim.

Marq did not give Nim’s counsel any thought until two days later. He overheard someone in the executive lounge praising Sybyl’s work to Hastor, the leader of Artifice Associates. He skipped lunch and went back to his floor. As he passed Sybyl’s office on his way back to his own, his intention, he told himself, was to relay the compliment. But when he found her door unlocked, her office empty, an impulse seized him.

Half an hour later, he jumped slightly when she said “Marq! “ from the open doorway. Her hand smoothed her hair in what he took to be unconscious primping, betraying a desire to please. “Can I help you?”

He’d just finished the software cross-matting to link her office, so that he’d be able to monitor her interviews with her client, Boker. She shared with Marq the substance of these interviews, as far as he knew.

He reasoned that his suggestions as to how she should handle the sometimes difficult Boker would be improved if he were exposed to Boker directly. But that would compromise the client relationship, ordinarily a strict rule. This, though, was special…

He shrugged. “Just waiting for you.”

“I’ve gotten her much better structured. Her mood flutters are below zero point two.”

“Great. Can I see?”

Did her smile seem warmer than usual? He was still wondering about that when he reached his own office, after an hour of intuning on Joan. Sybyl had certainly done good work. Thorough, intricately matted in with the ancient personality topography.

All since yesterday? He thought not.

Time to do a little sniffing around in simspace.

Voltaire loomed-brows furrowed, scowling, hands on skinny hips. He rose from the richly embroidered chair in his study at Cirey, the chateau of his long-term mistress, the Marquise du Chatelet.

The place he had called home for fifteen years depressed him, now that she was gone. And now the marquis, without the decency to wait until his wife’s body was cold, had informed him that he must leave.

“Get me out of here!” Voltaire demanded of the scientist who finally answered his call. Scientist-a fresh word, one no doubt derived from the Latin root, to know. But this fellow looked as though he knew little. “I want to go to the cafe. I need to see the Maid.”

The scientist leaned over the control board Voltaire was already beginning to resent, and smiled with transparent pleasure at his power. “I didn’t think she was your type. You showed a strong preference all your life-remember, I’ve scanned your memories, you have no secrets-for brainy women. Like your niece and the Madame du Chatelet.”

“So? Who truly can abide the company of stupid women? The only thing that can be said on their behalf is that they can be trusted, as they’re too stupid to practice deceit.”

“Unlike Madame du Chatelet?”

Voltaire drummed his fingers impatiently on the beautifully wrought walnut desk-a gift from Madame du Chatelet, he recalled. How had it gotten to this rude place? Could it indeed have been assembled from his memory alone? “True, she betrayed me. She paid dearly for it, too.”

The scientist arched a brow. “With that young officer, you mean? The one who made her pregnant?”

“At forty-three, a married woman with three grown children has no business becoming pregnant!”

“You hit the roof when she told you-understandable but not very enlightened. Yet you didn’t break off with her. You were with her throughout the birth.”

Voltaire fumed. Memory dark, memory flowing like black waters in a subterranean river. He’d worried himself sick about the birth, which had proved amazingly easy. Yet nine days later, the most extraordinary woman he had ever known was dead. Of childbed fever. No one-not even his niece and housekeeper and former paramour, Madame Denis, who took care of him thereafter-had ever been able to take her place. He had mourned her until, until-he approached the thought, veered away -till he died….

He puffed out his cheeks and spat back rapidly, “She persuaded me that it would be unreasonable to break with a ‘woman of exceptional breeding and talent’ merely for exercising the same rights that I enjoyed. Especially since I hadn’t made love to her for months. The rights of man, she said, belonged to women, too-provided they were of the aristocracy. I allowed her gentle reasonableness to persuade me.”

“Ah,” the scientist said enigmatically. Voltaire rubbed his forehead, heavy with brooding remembrance. “She was an exception to every rule. She understood Newton and Locke. She understood every word that I wrote. She understood me.”

“Why weren’t you making love to her? Too busy going to orgies?”

“My dear sir, my participation in such festivities has been greatly exaggerated. It’s true, I accepted an invitation to one such celebration of erotic pleasure in my youth. I acquitted myself so well, I was invited to return.”

“Did you?”

“Certainly not. Once, a philosopher. Twice, a pervert.”

“What I don’t understand is why a man of your worldliness should be so intent on another meeting with the Maid.”

“Her passion,” Voltaire said, an image of the robust Maid rising clearly in his mind’s eye. “Her courage and devotion to what she believed.”

“You possessed that trait as well.”

Voltaire stomped his foot, but the floor made no sound. “Why do you speak of me in the past tense?”

“Sorry. I’ll fill in that audio background, too.” A single hand gesture, and Voltaire heard boards creak as he paced. A carriage team clip-clopped by outside.

“I possess temperament. Do not confuse passion with temperament-which is a matter of the nerves. Passion is borne from the heart and soul, no mere mechanism of the bodily humors.”

“You believe in souls?”

“In essences, certainly. The Maid dared cling to her vision with her whole heart, despite bullying by church and state. Her devotion to her vision, unlike mine, bore no taint of perverseness. She was the first true Protestant. I’ve always preferred Protestants to papist absolutists-until I took up residence in Geneva, only to discover their public hatred of pleasure is as great as any pope’s. Only Quakers do not privately engage in what they publicly claim to abjure. Alas, a hundred true believers cannot redeem millions of hypocrites.”

The scientist twisted his mouth skeptically. “Joan recanted, knuckled under to their threats.”

“They took her to a cemetery!” Voltaire bristled with irritation. “Terrorized a credulous girl with threats of death and hell. Bishops, academicians-the most learned men of their time! Donkeys’ asses, the lot! Browbeating the bravest woman in France, a woman whom they destroyed only to revere. Hypocrites! They require martyrs as leeches require blood. They thrive on self-sacrifice-provided that the selves they sacrifice are not their own.”

“All we have is your version, and hers. Our history doesn’t go back that far. Still, we know more of people now-”

“So you imagine.” Voltaire sniffed a jot of snuff to calm himself. “Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best. They played her honor and her bravery like a fiddle, swine plucking at a violin.”