Especially she could not resist when their spirit-speech thundered with one voice-as now.

“Ignore him,” Catherine said, the instant Voltaire’s request for audience arrived. She hovered on great white wings.

Voltaire’s manifestation here was a dove of peace, brilliant white, winging toward her from the sullen liquid. Blithe bird!

Catherine’s no-nonsense voice cut crisply, as stiff as the black-and-white habit of a meticulous nun. “You sinfully surrendered to his lust, but that does not mean that he owns you. You don’t belong to a man! You belong to your Creator.”

The bird chirped, “I must send you a freight of data.”

“I, I…” Joan’s small voice echoed, as if she were in a vast cavern, not a vortex river at all. If she could only see-

Catherine’s great wings batted angrily. “He will go away. He has no choice. He cannot reach you, cannot make you sin-unless you consent.”

Joan’s cheeks burned as the memory of her lewdness with Voltaire rushed in.

“Catherine is right,” a deep voice thundered-Michael, King of the Angel Hosts of Heaven. “Lust has nothing to do with bodies, as you and the man proved. His body stank and rotted long ago.”

“It would be good to see him again,” Joan whispered longingly. Here, thoughts were somehow actions. She had but to raise a hand and Voltaire’s numerics would transfix her.

“He offers defiling data!” Catherine cried. “Deflect his intrusion at once.”

“If you cannot resist him, marry him,” Michael ordered stiffly.

“Marry?” St. Catherine’s voice sputtered with contempt.

In bodily life, she had affected male attire, cropped her hair, and refused to have anything to do with men, thus demonstrating her holiness and good sense. Joan had prayed to St. Catherine often. “Males! Even here,” the saint scolded Michael, “you stick together to wage war and ruin women.”

“My counsel is entirely spiritual,” said Michael loftily. “I’m an angel and thus prefer neither sex.”

Catherine sputtered with contempt. “Then why aren’t you the Queen of Legions of Angels and not the King? Why don’t you command heavenly hostesses and not heavenly hosts? Why aren’t you an archangela instead of an archangel? And why isn’t your name Michelle?”

Please,Joan said. Please. The thought of marriage struck as much terror in her soul as in St. Catherine’s, even if marriage was one of the blessed sacraments. But then so was extreme unction, and that one almost always meant certain death.

… .flames….the priest’s leer as he administered the rites…

crackling horror, terrible cutting, licking flames…. She shook herself -assembled her Self,came a whisper-and focused on her saintly host. Oh yes, marriage…Voltaire…

She was not sure what marriage meant, besides bearing children in Christ and in agony, for Holy Mother Church. The act of getting children, begetting, aroused in her a thumping heart, weak legs, images of the lean, clever man…

“It means being owned,” Catherine said. “It means instead of needing your consent when he wants to impose on you-like now-were Voltaire your husband, he could break in on you whenever he likes.”

Existence without selfdom, without privacy… Bursts of Joan’s bright self-light collided, flickered, dimmed, almost guttered out.

“Are you suggesting,” Michael said, “that she continue to receive this apostate without subjecting their lust to the bonds of marriage? Let them marry and extinguish their lust completely!”

Joan could not be heard over the bickering of saints and angels in the musty, liquid murk. She knew that in this arithmetic Limbo, like a waiting room for true Purgatory, she had no heart…but something, somewhere, nevertheless ached.

Memories flooded her. His lean, quick self. Surely a saint and an archangel would forgive her if she took advantage of their sacred bickering to grant Voltaire’s request that his “data” be received, if she surrendered-just this once-to impulses compelling her from within.

Shuddering, she yielded.

Voltaire snapped, “I’ve waited less long for Friedrich of Prussia and Catherine the Great!”

“I am adrift,” Joan said airily. “Occupied.”

“And you’re a peasant, a swineherd, not even a bourgeoise. These moods of yours! These personae your subconscious layers created! They grow tiresome in the extreme.”

He hung in air above the lapping dark waters. Quite a striking effect, he thought.

“In such haunting rivers I must converse with like minds.”

He waved away her point with a silk-sleeved arm. “I’ve tried to make allowances-everyone knows saints aren’t fit for civilized society! Perfume cannot conceal the stink of sanctity.”

“Surely here in Limbo-”

“This is not a theological waiting room! Your tedious taste for solitude plays out in theaters of computation.”

“Arithmetic is not holy, sir.”

“Umm, perhaps-though I suspect Newton could prove otherwise.”

He slow-stepped the scene, watching individual event-waves wash through. To his view, the somber river gurgled an increment forward and Joan’s eyebrow inched up, then paused for the calculation to be refreshed. He accelerated her internal states, though, allowing a decent interval for La Pucelle, the Chaste Maid, to ponder a reply. He had the advantage, for he commanded more memory space.

He breached the slow-stepped, slumbering river sim. He had thought this best-images of womblike wet reassurance, to offset her fire phobia.

The Maid gaped but did not answer. He checked, and found that he did not now have the resources to bring her to full running speed. A complex in the Battisvedanta Sector had sucked up computing space. He would have to wait until his ferret-programs found him some more unoccupied room.

He fumed-not a good use of running time, but somehow it felt right. If you had the computational space. He felt another distant suck on his resources. An emergency tiktok shutdown. Computer backups shifted to cover. His sensory theater dwindled, his body fell away.

Miserable wretches, they were draining him! He thought she spoke, her voice faint, far away. He fiddled in a frenzy to give her running time.

“Monsieur neglects me!”

Voltaire felt a spike of joy. He did love her-a mere response could buoy him up above this snaky river.

“We are in grave danger,” he said. “An epidemic has erupted in the matter world. Confusion reigns. Respectable people exploit widespread panic by preying on each other. They lie, cheat, and steal.”

“No!”

He could not resist. “In other words, things are exactly as they’ve always been.”

“Is this why you have come?” she asked. “To laugh at me? A once-chaste maid you ruined?”

“I merely helped you to become a woman.”

“ Exactement,”she said. “But I don’t want to be a woman. I want to be a warrior for Charles of France.”

“Patriotic twaddle. Heed my warning! You must answer no calls, except mine, without first clearing them through me. You are to entertain no one, speak with no one, travel nowhere, do nothing without my prior consent.”

“Monsieur mistakes me for his wife.”

“Marriage is the only adventure open to the manifestly cowardly. I did not attempt it, nor shall I.”

She seemed distracted. “This threat, it is serious?”

“Not one shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

She snapped back to attention; data resources had returned. “Then, sir-”

“But this is not life. It is a mathist dance.” She smiled. “I do not hear music.”

“Had I digital wealth, I would whistle. Our lives-such as they are-are in grave danger.”

La Pucelledid not answer at once, though he had given her the running time. Was she conferring with her idiotic voices of conscience? (Quite obviously, the internalizations of ignorant village priests.)