Voltaire hid his concern behind a mask of levity. “No way for a saint to talk. You’re not supposed to admit the possibility of absolute extinction. Your canonization could be reversed.”

Joan’s voice wavered, a candle flame stirred by dark winds of doubt. “I know only that I hovered on the brink of a great void, a chasm of darkness. I glimpsed, not eternity, but nothingness. Even my voices fell silent, humbled by the spectacle of…of…”

“Of what?”

“Nonbeing,” Joan said. “Disappearing, never to reappear again. I was about to be…erased.”

“ Deletion. The ferrets and their hounds.” Prickly gooseflesh fear invaded him. “How did you escape?”

“I didn’t,” the Maid said, awe undercutting fear. “That was eerier still. Whoever-whatever-it was let me go without injury. I stood before It, vulnerable, exposed. And It…released me.”

He felt a cold dread. He, too, had sensed unseeable entities just over his shoulder, watching, judging. There was something blankly alien about these visitations. He pulled himself back from the chilly memories. “From now on answer no calls whatever.”

The Maid’s face clouded with doubt. “I had no choice.”

“I’ll find a better hiding place for you,” Voltaire assured her. “Make you invulnerable to involuntary appearances. Give you power-”

“You do not understand. This…Thing…could have snuffed me out like two fingers pinching a tiny flame. It will return, I know it. Meanwhile, I have but one wish.”

“Anything,” Voltaire said. “Anything in my power…”

“Restore us and our friends to the cafe.”

“ Aux Deux Magots?I am searching, but I don’t even know if it still exists!”

“Re-create it with the sorcery you have learned. If I am to tumble headlong into the void, let it not be before I spend one evening reunited with you and our dear friends. Breaking bread, sipping wine in the company of those I love…I ask nothing more before I am-erased.”

“You’re not going to be erased,” Voltaire assured her with far more conviction than he felt. “I’m going to transport you to a place no one will ever think to look. You’ll be unable to respond to any calls-not even if you think they are from me. But you will transmit to me often, do you understand?”

“I shall send my spiritual fraction, as well.”

“I believe they are giving me an itch already.” He did indeed feel a restless, edgy scratching at the edge of perception, like insects crawling in his brain. He shook himself. Why did a perfidious mathists’ logic rob him of his sensuality, and torture him with rasping irritations?

But her defiance had only begun. “You have taken my virginity, sir, yet you speak only slightingly of marriage. And of love.”

“ Bien sur,love between married couples may be possible-though I myself have never seen an instance of it-yet it is unnatural. Like being born with two fused toes. It happens, but only by mistake. One can, naturellement, live happily with any woman, provided one doesn’t love her.”

She gave him an imperious glance. “I have become immune to your rogue ways.”

He shook his head sadly. “A dog is better off in this respect than I am in my present state.”

He trailed his sim-finger lightly across her throat. Her head lolled back, her eyes closed, her lips parted. But he, alas, felt nothing. “Find a way,” he whispered. “Find a way.”

He had been neglecting his work. His lack of interactive senses was thus his own fault.

That, and the itching. He must learn to…somehow…scratch himself-inside himself.

In this damnable digital abode.

“One can scarcely blame a deity for His absence from such a place as this,” Voltaire said into the infinite recessional coordinate system which surrounded him. He flew through black spaces gridded out in exact rectangular reaches, lattice corridors extending away to infinity.

“How different!” he shouted into the deep indifference. “I swim into sims of others, inhabit realms far from-”

He had been about to say from my origins- butthat meant:

A France

B Reason

GSark

He was of all three. On Sark, the self-proud programmers who had…resurrected…him, had spoken of their New Renaissance. He was to be an ornament to their fresh flowering. Somewhere on that planet, editions of Volt 1.0 ran.

His brothers? Younger Dittos, yes. He would have to inspect the implications of such beings, in a future rational discourse. For now

The trick was close scrutiny, he realized. If he slowed events-a trick he had learned early-then he could devote data-crunchers to the task of understanding…himself.

First, this inky vault through which he flew. Windless, without warmth or the rub of the real.

He delved down into the working mathematics of himself. It was a byzantine welter of detail, but in outline surprisingly familiar: the Cartesian world. Events were modeled with axes in rectangular space, x, y, z, so that motion was then merely sets of numbers on each axis. All dynamics shrank to arithmetic. Descartes would have been amused by the dizzying heights to which his minor method had spun.

He rejected the outside and delved into his own slowed reaches.

Now he could feel his preconscious reading the incoming sights, sounds, and flitting thoughts of the moment. To his inner gaze, they all carried bright red tags-sometimes simple caricatures, often complex packets.

From somewhere an idea-packet arrived, educating him: these were Fourier transforms. Somehow this helped to understand. And the mere wafting sense of a fellow Frenchman’s name made him feel better.

An Associator-big, blue, bulbous-hovered over this data-field, plucking at the tags. It reached with yellow streamers over a far, purple-rimmed horizon, to the Field of Memory. From there it brought any item stored-packages of mottled gray, containing sights, sounds, smells, ideas-which matched the incoming tags.

Job done, the Associator handed all the matchings to a towering monolith: the Discriminator. A perpetual wind sucked the red tags up, into the yawning surfaces of the coal-black Discriminator mountain. Merciless filters there matched the tags with the stored memories.

If they fitted-geometric shapes sliding together, mock sex, notches fitting snugly into protruding struts-they stayed. But fits were few. Most tags failed to find a host memory which made sense. No fit. These the Discriminator ate. The tags and connections vanished, swept away to clear fresh space for the next flood of sensation.

He loomed over this interior landscape and felt its hailstorm power. His whole creative life, the marvel of continents, had come from here. Tiny thoughts, snatches of conversations, melodies-all would pop into his mind, a tornado of chaos-images, crowding, jostling for his attention. The memory-packets which shared some sturdy link to a tag endured.

But who decided what was rugged enough? He watched rods slide into slots and saw the intricate details of how those memories and tags were shaped. So the answer lay at least one step further back, in the geometry of memory.

Which meant that he had determined matters, by the laying down of memories. Memory-clumps, married to tag-streams, made a portion of his Self, plucked forth from the torrent, the river of possibilities.

And he had done it long ago, when the memories were stored-all without realizing how they could fit with tags to come. So where was any predictable Voltaire to lurk? In sheer intricacy, deep detail, shifting associations in the flow.

No rock-hard Self at all.

And his imagination? The author of all his plays and essays? It must lie in the weather of the tag-memory torrents. The twist, warp and sudden marriages. Jigsaw associations, rising up from the preconscious. Order from chaos.