“This is the genius we’re going to catch? Ha!”

Her taunt irked him. Several times he’d felt he was close, very close. Always, just as his ferrets found a thread of Voltaire’s distinctive configuration-logic, it would slip away, thwart his effort. His holo would inexplicably black out. He’d lose hours of carefully aggregated data in a microsecond. And he’d have to begin again.

Marq leaned back and rotated his neck to get the cricks out. “I may be onto something,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He pointed to his carbon cube. “Modified my array-spaces and used them to earn a few creds in the protein markets. I caught another Voltaire scent, too.”

She sighed and collapsed into a chair that deftly shaped itself to catch her. “Why hustle the cred when we can’t use it to get anything to eat?”

“Find Joan, we’ll get fat.”

“Look, those tiktok failures, what’s the evidence they’re due to our sims?”

He shrugged. “The Imperial Scientific Consortium thinks there’s a connection with the Junin mess. Nonsense, of course, but it keeps people jazzed. They say they have secret sources, they don’t explain. Got it?”

“My my, touchy. So they’re still looking for us.”

“Going through the motions, I’d guess. Trantor has much bigger headaches now.”

“Think we’ll all go on rations?”

“‘Fraid so. Rumor says not until next week.” Her frown made him add, “Rations are mostly a precaution. You and I can both afford to lose a little of this.” He squeezed a roll of flesh above his belt-not bad for his age, but bad enough-and hoped his apprehension had not leaked into his voice.

“ I don’t need an involuntary diet.” She slid a sideways glance at him. “They caught a family eating wall rats.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Why, ‘secret sources,’ of course. I can be mysterious, too.”

Tiktok disorders had spread quickly among the major food supply axes. The Junin conflagration had not set them off; something else had, weeks later. In just a matter of days breakdowns had affected all food factoria on Trantor. Imports were rising, but there was a limit to how much anyone could push through the fourteen wormhole mouths nearby, or haul in clumsy hyperships.

Marq’s stomach rumbled in sympathetic anger. She smiled. “Ummm, greedy, aren’t we?”

“Look at this,” Marq said testily, thumbing up lines on his holo.

To be sensuous is to be mortal. Suffering and pain are the dark twins of joy and pleasure; death the identical dark twin of life.

My present state is bloodless; therefore I cannot bleed. The sweats of passion are beyond me; my ardors never cool. I can be copied and remade; even deletion need pose no threat to my immortality. How can I not prefer my fate to the ultimate fate of all sensuous beings, drenched in time as the fish is drenched in the sea it swims?

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

“Just a drab I snagged while a data-spike was being whisked away. It registers as part of a conversation between two widely separated Mesh sites.”

“It does sound like him…”

“I checked in the popoff files we kept. Y’know, all that linear text running alongside his sim? This stuff is from there. Ancient texts. That guy was always happiest when quoting himself.”

“So he is out there.”

“Yeah, and I’m outta here.” Marq grabbed a pastejacket and made for the door.

“Where to?”

“Dark market-I need food.”

Sybyl hurried after him. Marq knew the alleyway purveyors of sweetmeats and snacks. He led her out of a dingy stack of low-rent cubes and into warrens cramped and thick with the musty smell of millennia. He made his buy in a dank hole beside a fountain commemorating a battle which Sybyl could not even pronounce, much less remember.

Automatically she kept watch for snooper eyes, but they were rarer here than real police. The heat on them might be less-their data-skills had built a solid-seeming info-shell around them-but a cop could still eyeball them and blow the whole thing.

Marq shared with her and the food tasted sharp, intense, wonderful. They fell into a meditative silence as they crested a long-rise lift-stair and looked out over slum Zones, trash-littered halls, chaotic tentrises stuck between majestic buildings, miscarriages of architecture of every stripe and shape.

With his belly comfortable, if not full, Marq could savor Trantor in the large. It was majestic in its injustice, undeserved sufferings, inequities, iniquities. All of its blemishes and blights got folded together by distance, like broken eggs dissolved into the cream-smooth, as long as you did not admire too closely.

They were idly strolling when without warning a six-armed tiktok came whirring down their lane. It pursued a four-armed tiktok with a polished carapace-a tiktok boss-class. They met and began to slug it out while churning along at full speed, like a fistfight carried out at a dead run. Their metal bodies clanged as they careened along.

“Don’t move,” Marq said. The two sped by in furious combat. “Cops’ll be here. Let’s skip.”

He and Sybyl went the other way, running out into a large square. He whistled through his teeth at what he saw.

All around, six-armed laborer tiktoks had folded all arms, refusing to work, deaf to human protests. They formed a protective barrier between the women supervising their building project and the walls under construction.

Several six-armers raised baskets reverentially into the air. One paid no attention and continued welding a cross-girder, until another fell on him, swinging a long coring tool.

Clangs rolled across the square. Panicked people ran everywhere. No one could stop the tiktok protest. When a four-armer tried to intervene, six-armers attacked it.

“Y’know, office work seems pretty desirable right now,” Marq said. “If this keeps up, we’ll have to do all our own grunt work.”

“What’s happening?” Sybyl backed away, alarmed. “It’s as though tiktoks had a madness-and it’s spreading.”

“Ummm .A virus?”

“But where did they catch it?”

“Exactly.”

“What?!” Voltaire exclaimed as he snapped into the context-frame.

“Welcome,” Joan said, voice thin. She had never initiated contact with him before. And he had yet to find the Magots actors. “I may have to reconsider my position on miracles,” he said.

She lowered her eyes. For just an instant he suspected this was just so she could raise them: to look up at him without lifting her lovely head. Did she know how this captivated him? Her bosom rose and fell in a way his sensors found maddening since he could do nothing about it.

Voltaire reached out for madam’s hand and raised it to his lips. He felt, however, nothing-and peevishly let it drop. “This is unbearable,” he said. “To long for union and feel nothing when it is achieved.”

“You feel nothing when we meet?”

“ Ma chere Maquine,sensors do not a sensuous being make. Don’t confuse sensoring with sensuality.”

“And how is it…Before…” Joan spoke with apparent difficulty, as if afraid she might be wounded by the answer.

“I cannot manage the, uh, ‘programming’ here. We had the use of myriad capabilities, when we were trapped zoo animals of Artifice Associates. Here in the digital wild, my talents-though growing!-do not match that level. Yet.”

“I thought perhaps it was a holy deprivation. A help, truly, to rightful behavior.”

“Much more in history may be explained by incompetence than by ill will.”

Joan looked away. “Sir, I summoned you because… since we last met, despite the warnings of my voices… I answered a call.”

“I told you not to do that!” Voltaire shouted.

“I had no choice,” she said. “I had to answer. It was…urgent.” Fear crept into her voice. “I cannot quite explain, but I know that the moment I did so, I hovered on the verge of absolute extinction.”