Since Marq had once suggested the very course Sybyl now proposed, she assumed his accord. So she was stunned when he said, “I’m against it. Both sides want a verbal duel between intuitive faith and inductive/deductive reason. Update the Maid, and all we will succeed in doing is muddying the issue.”

“Marq!” Sybyl cried out.

Heated discussion followed. Marq fired one objection after another at everyone who favored the idea. Except Sybyl, whose gaze he carefully avoided. When it became apparent no consensus would be reached, the president made the decision in Sybyl’s favor.

Sybyl pressed her advantage. “I’d also like permission to delete from the Maid’s programming her memory of being burned alive at the stake. Her fear that she’ll be sentenced to a similar fate again makes it impossible for her to present the case for Faith as freely as she could if that memory didn’t darken her thoughts.”

“I object,” Marq said. “Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability. The Maid who did not suffer martyrdom for her beliefs isn’t the Maid of prehistory at all.”

Sybyl shot back, “But we don’t know that history! These sims are from the Dark Ages. Her trauma-”

“To delete her memory of that experience would be like-well, think of some of the prehistory legends.” Marq spread his hands. “Even their religions! It would be like re-creating Christ-their ancient deity-without his crucifixion.”

Sybyl glared at him, but Marq addressed the president, as if she did not exist. “Intact, that’s how our clients want-”

“I’m willing to let Voltaire be deleted of all he suffered at the hands of authority, too,” she countered.

“I’m not,” said Marq. “Voltaire without defiance of authority would not be Voltaire.”

Sybyl let the other committee members argue the point, nonplused by the incomprehensible change in Marq. It all passed by like a dream. Finally, she accepted her superiors’ final decision-a compromise, because she had no choice. The Maid’s information bank would be updated, but she would not be allowed to forget her fiery death. Nor would Voltaire be allowed to forget the constant fear of reprisals from church and state, in that ancient, murky era.

The president said, “I remind you that we’re skating on thin e-field here. Sims like this are taboo. Junin Sector elements offered us a big bonus to even attempt this-and we’ve succeeded. But we’re taking risks. Big ones.”

As they left the conference room Sybyl whispered to Marq, “You’re up to something.”

He looked distracted. “Research. Y’know, that’s when you’re working hard, but you don’t know where you’re going.”

He walked on, obliviously, while she stood with her mouth open. How could she read this man?

Unresponsive to the presence of Madame la Sorciere, the Maid sat upright in her cell, eyes closed. Warring voices pealed inside her head.

The noise was like the din of battle, chaotic and fierce. But if she listened intently, refusing to allow her immortal spirit to be ripped from her mortal flesh-then, then, a divinely orchestrated polyphony would show her the rightful course.

The Archangel Michael, and St. Catherine, and St. Margaret-from whose mouths her voices often spoke-were reacting fiercely to her involuntary mastery of Monsieur Arouet’s Complete Works. Particularly offensive to Michael was the Elements de Newton, whose philosophy Michael perceived to be incompatible with that of the Church-indeed, with his own existence.

The Maid herself was not so sure. She found, to her surprise, a poetry and harmony in the equations that proved-as if proof were required-the unsurpassed reality of the Creator, whose physical laws might be fathomable but whose purposes were not.

How she knew these beauties was rather mysterious. She saw into the calculus of force and motion, the whirl of worlds. Like the lords and ladies at court, inert matter made its divinely orchestrated gavotte. These things she sensed with her whole self, directly, as if penetrated by divine insight. Beauties arrived, out of pale air. How could she discount sublime perceptions?

Such divine invasion must be holy. That it came to her as a flood of memory, skills, associations, only proved further that it was heaven sent. La Sorciere murmured something about computer files and sub-Agents, but those were incantations, not truths.

Far more offensive to her than this new wisdom, far more, was that its author was an Englishman.

“La Henriade,”she told Michael, citing another of Monsieur Arouet’s works, “is more repulsive than Les Elements. How dare Monsieur Arouet, who arrogantly calls himself by the false name Voltaire, maintain that in England reason is free, while in our own beloved France, it’s shackled to the dark imaginings of absolutist priests! Was it not Jesuit priests who first taught this inquisitor how to reason?”

But what enraged the Maid most of all and made her thrash and strain at her chains-until, fearing for her safety, La Sorciere freed her chafed ankles and wrists-was his illegally printed, scurrilous poem about her. Villainous verse!

As soon as she was sure her voices had withdrawn, she waved a copy of’ La Puce/le’ at the sorceress, incensed that the chaste Saints Catherine or Margaret-who had momentarily vanished, but would surely return-might be forcibly exposed to its lewdness. Both saints had already reproached her for her silly, girlish speculations about how attractive Monsieur Arouet might be-what was she thinking?-if he removed his ridiculous wig and lilac ribbons.

“How dare Monsieur Arouet represent me this way?” she railed, knowing full well that her stubborn refusal to call him Voltaire irked him no end. “He adds nine years to my age, dismisses my voices as outright lies. And slanders Baudricourt, who first enabled me to put before my king my vision for both him and France. A writer of preachy plays and irreverent slanders against the faithful, like Candide, he well may be-but that insufferable know-it-all calls himself a historian! If his other historical accounts are no more reliable than the one he gives of me, they and not my body deserve the fire.”

The woman La Sorciere paled before this onslaught. These people-if people they were at all, here in a byzantine, cloudy Purgatory-backed away from the true ferocity of divine Purpose. Joan towered over the woman, with some relish.

“Newton’s clockwork wisdom is an intriguing vision of Creation’s laws,” Joan thundered, “but Voltaire’s history is a work of his imagination!-made up of three parts bile, two spleen.”

She raised her right arm in the same gesture she’d used to lead her soldiers and the knights of France into battle against the English king and his minions-of whom, she now saw clearly, Monsieur Arouet de Voltaire was one. A warrior femme inspiratrice with an intense aversion to the kill, she now vowed all-out war against this, this-she gasped in exasperation, “This nouveau riche bourgeois upstart darling of the aristocratic class, who’s never known real want or need, and thinks horses are bred with carriages behind them.”

“Get him!” La Sorciere, ablaze with the Maid’s fire, raged. “That’s what we want!”

“Where is he?” demanded the Maid. “Where is this shallow little pissoir stream?-that I may drown him in the depths of all I have suffered! “

Oddly, La Sorciere seemed pleased by all this, as if it fit some design of her own.