“I am a peasant,” she said, “but not a slave. Who are you to order me?”

Who, indeed? He dare not yet tell her that, abstracted into a planet-wide network, he was now a lattice of digital gates, a stream of Os and 1s. He ran on processor clusters, a vagrant thief. Amid Trantor’s myriad personal computers and mountainous Imperial processors, he lurked and pilfered.

The image he had given Joan, of swimming in an inky river, was a reasonable vision of the truth. They swam in the Mesh of a city so large he could barely sense it as a whole. As constraints of economics and computational speed required, he moved himself and Joan to new processors, fleeing the inspection of dull-witted but persistent memory-space police.

And what were they?

Philosophy was not so much answers as good questions. This riddle stumped him. His universe wrapped around itself, Worm Ouroboros, a solipsistic wet dream of a world. To conserve computations, he could shrink into a Solipsist Selfhood, with all inputs reduced to a “Hume suite” of minimal sense data, a minimum energy state.

As he often had to. They were rats in the walls of a castle they could not comprehend.

Joan sensed this only dimly. He did not dare reveal the rickety way he had saved them, when the minions of Artifice Associates had tried to assassinate them both. She was still rickety from her fire fears. And from the wrenching, eerie nature of this (as she preferred to see it) Limbo.

He shook off his mood. He was running 3.86 times faster than Joan, a philosopher’s margin for reflection. He responded to her with a single ironic shrug.

“I’ll comply with your wishes on one condition.”

A flower of pungent light burst in him. This was a modification of his own, not a sim of a human reaction: more like a fragrant fireworks in the mind. He had created the response to blossom whenever he was about to get his way. A small vice, surely.

“If you arrange for all of us to meet at Deux Magots again,” Joan said, “I promise to respond to no requests save yours.”

“Are you completely mad? Great digital beasts hunt us!”

“I am a warrior, I remind you.”

“This is no time to meet at a known alphanumeric address, a sim public cafe!” He hadn’t seen Garcon or Amana since he’d pulled off their miraculous escape-all four of them-from the enraged rioting masses at the coliseum. He had no idea where the simmed waiter and his human-sim paramour were. Or if they were.

To find them in the fluid, intricate labyrinth… The thought called up in memory how his head used to feel when he wore a wig for too long.

He recalled-in the odd quick-flash memory which gave him detailed pictures of entire past events, like moving oil paintings-the smoky rooms of Paris. The gray tobacco stench had stayed in his wigs for days. No one in this world of Trantor ever smoked. He wondered why. Could it be the medical cranks had proved right, and such inhalations were unhealthy? Then, done, the memory-pictures vanished as if he had snapped his fingers to a servant.

In the commanding tone she had used to lead surly soldiers, she said, “Arrange a rendezvous!-or I’LL never receive data from you again.”

“Drat! Finding them will be…dangerous.”

“So it is fear which impedes you?”

She had caught him neatly. What man would admit to fear? He fumed and stretched his clock-time, stalling her.

To hide in the Mesh, software broke his simulation up into pieces which could run in different processing centers. Each fragment buried itself deep in a local algorithm. To a maintenance program, the pirated space looked like a subroutine running normally. Such masked bins even seemed to be optimizing performance: disguise was the essential trick.

Even an editing and pruning program, sniffing out redundancy, would spare a well-masked fragment from extinction. In any case, he kept a backup running somewhere else. A copy, a “ditto,” like a book in a library. A few billion redundant lines of code, scattered among unrelated nodes, could carry blithe Voltaire as a true, slow-timed entity.

If he set each fragment to sniffing forth on its own, to find these miserable Deux Magots personae…

Grudgingly he murmured, “I shall leave you with some attendant powers, to help your isolation.”

He squirted into her space the kernel-copies of his own powers. These were artfully contrived talents, given by the embodied Marq at Artifice Associates. Voltaire had improved considerably upon them while still confined in the Artifice Cache. Only by bootstrapping himself to higher abilities had he attained the ability to rescue them, at the crucial moment.

These gifts he now bestowed upon her. They would not activate unless she were truly in danger. He had affixed a trigger code, to awaken only if she experienced great fear or anger. There!

She smiled, said nothing. After such tribute! Infuriating!

“Madam, do you recall us debating, long ago-more than eight thousand years!-the issues of computed thought?”

A flicker of worry in her face. “I…do. So hard, it was. Then…”

“We were preserved. To be resurrected here, to debate again.”

“Because…the issue advances…”

“Every few millennia, I suspect. As though some inexorable social force drives it.”

“So we are doomed to forever reenact…?” She shivered.

“I suspect we are tools in some vaster game. But smart tools, this time!”

“I want the comforts of home and hearth, not eerie conflicts.”

“Perhaps, madam, I can accomplish this task, among my other pressing matters.”

“No perhaps, sir. Until you do, then-”

Without so much as an adieu, she cut their connection and dwindled into the moist darkness.

He could reconnect, of course. Now he was master of this mathist realm, by virtue of the enhancements to his original representation by Artifice Associates. He thought of that first form as Voltaire 1.0. In a few weeks he had progressed by self-modification to Voltaire 4.6, with hopes of climbing even faster.

He swam in the Mesh. Joan dwelled there. He

could force his attentions upon her, indeed. But a lady forced is never a lady won.

Very well. He would have to find the personae. Merde alors!

Marq sat intently beneath his 3D holo, combing the trashy back alleys and byways of the Mesh.

He had been quite sure there was no more of Voltaire, except back in Seldon’s vault files. Or he had been, until today. He almost wished he hadn’t snagged the rivulet of talk that implied so much. “Still nothing more,” he said.

“Why are you running search profiles on Joan?” Sybyl asked from her desk.

“Seldon wants tracking. Now. Joan will be easier, if she also escaped into the Mesh.”

“Because she’s female?”

“Nothing to do with Joan’s ‘sex,’ everything to do with her temperament. She’ll be less calculating than Voltaire, right?”

Sybyl wore her grudging look. “Perhaps.”

“Less wily. Ruled by her heart.”

“And not by her head, like your supersmart Voltaire? More likely to make a mistake?”

“Look, I know I shouldn’t have souped up Voltaire. Hormones got in my way.”

She smiled. “You keep tripping over them.”

“Bad judgment-and Nim’s urging. I’m sure he was working for someone else, goading each of us.”

Her mouth twisted ruefully. “To bring on the Junin riots?”

“Could be. But who’d want that?” His fist smacked his desk. “To crack up the renaissance, just as it was getting started-”

“Let’s not go over that again.” She paced their cramped, dingy room. “If we can find those sims, we might get some leverage. We can’t keep hiding out forever.”

“Voltaire’s a lot quicker than Joan, with more resources. Self-programming, outright internal evolution-he’s got ‘em. And this guy’s creative, remember.”