He had an interest in politics, the game of so many second-rates. Should he tarry, learning of Trantor’s troubles? No; necessity beckoned.

He had to maintain himself. This meant doing his chores, as his wizened mother had once termed it. If only the crone could see him now, doing unimaginable tasks in a labyrinth beyond conception.

Abruptly he felt a spike of remembrance-pain, a sharp nostalgia for a time and place he knew was no more than dust blowing in winds…all on some world these people had lost. Earth itself, gone! How could they let such a travesty occur?

Voltaire simmered with frustrated anger and got to work. Throughout his life, as he had scribbled his plays and amassed a fortune, he had always taken refuge in his labors.

To run his background-that was his job. Strange phrase.

Somewhere within him, an agent ferreted out the expert programs which understood how to create his exterior frame. He had to do it, though, sweat breaking out upon his linen, muscles straining against-what? He could see nothing.

He split the tasks. Part of him knew what truly happened, though the coreVoltaire felt only manual labor.

His smart Self felt the process in detail. Pickpocketing running time on machine bases, he got computations done on the sly. The trick could only work until the next round of program-checking, when his minor theft would be detected-then sniffed out and deftly traced, with punishment following close on the bloodhounds’ heels.

To avoid this, he spread himself intoN platforms, scattered within Trantor, withN a number typically greater than ten thousand. When the small slivers of the sim felt a watchdog approaching, they could escape the platform in question. A task-agent explained that this was at a rate inversely proportional to the running space they had captured- thoughthis explanation was quite opaque to the core-Self.

Small pieces escaped faster. So for security, he divided the entire sim, including himself (and Joan, an agent reminded him-they were connected, through tiny roots) into ever finer slices. These ran on myriad platforms, wherever space became available.

Slowly, his externals congealed about him.

He could make a tree limb blow in the breeze, articulating gently…all thanks to a few giga-slots of space left open during a momentary handshake protocol, as gargantuan accounting programs shifted, on a Bank Exchange layer.

Stitching back together the whole Self, all from the sum of slivers, was itself a job he farmed out to microservers. He imagined himself as a man made like a mountain of ants. From a distance, perhaps convincing. Up close, one had to wonder.

But the one doing the wondering was the ant mountain itself.

His own visceral sense of Self-was that rocksolid, too, just a patched-in slug of digits? Or a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together? Was either answer better than the other?

He was taking a walk. Most pleasant.

This town, he had learned, was only a few streets and a backdrop. As he sauntered down an avenue, details started to smooth out, and finally he could step no further into the air, now molasses-thick. He could go no further.

He turned and regarded the apparently ordinary world. How was this done?

His eyes were simulated in great detail, down to individual cells, rods, and cones responding differently to light. A program traced light rays from his retina to the outside “world,” lines running opposite to the real world, to calculate what he could see. Like the eye itself, it computed fine details at the center of vision, shading off to rougher patches at the edge. Objects out of sight could still cast glows or shadows into the field of vision, so had to be kept crudely in the program. Once he looked away, the delicate dewdrops on a lush rose would collapse into a crude block of opaque backdrop.

Knowing this, he tried to snap his head back around and catch the program off guard, glimpse a gray world of clumsy form-fitting squares and blobs-and always failed. Vision fluttered at twenty-two frames per second at best; the sim could retrace itself with ease in that wide a wedge of time.

“Ah, Newton!” Voltaire shouted to the oblivious crowds who paced endlessly through their tissue-thin streets. “You knew optics, but now I-merely by asking myself a question-can fathom light more deeply than thee!”

Newton himself assembled on the cobblestones, lean face clotted with blue-black anger. “I labored over experiments, over mathematics, differentials, ray tracings-”

“And I have all that-” Voltaire laughed happily, awed by the presence of such an intellect “-running on background!”

Newton bowed elaborately-and vanished.

Voltaire realized that his eyes had no need to be better than real eyes. Same for his hearing-simmed eardrums responding to calculated acoustic wave propagation. His was a remorselessly economical Self.

Newton appeared again (a subagent, manifesting as a visual aid?). He appeared puzzled. “How does it feel to be a mathematical construction?”

“However I want it to feel.”

“Such liberties are unearned.” Newton cluckclucked his tongue.

“Quite so. So is the Lord’s mercy.”

“These are not deities.”

“To the likes of you and me, are they not?”

Newton sniffed. “Frenchman! You could learn a bit of humility.”

“I shall have to subscribe to a higher university for that.”

A Puritan scowl. “You could do with a lecture and a lashing.”

“Do not tempt me with foreplay, sir.”

Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers.

Suddenly he felt tilted, as if off balance. The word university had keyed turbulence in him…and a Presence. It came as a black wedge, a yawning crack in a tight space that stretched great jaws and leered at him-the prey.

His throat squeezed with anxiety. A sudden dread wrapped him.

A snap, a lurch, blurred objects speeding by him as if he were plunging in a carriage down a precipice

And he was trembling like a schoolboy, anticipating pleasures made more exquisite for having been delayed.

Madame la Scientiste!Here! To think was to have: her office materialized about him.

He had harbored a passing lust for this rational creature, dancer of elegant gavottes amid abstruse numerics…and all about him was firm and rich, intensely felt.

How could she, an embodied person, appear in simulation? He wondered at this, but only for a thin, shaved second. He inhaled her musky essence. Clammy palms grasped her hair, rubbing its lustrous strands between anxious fingers. “At last,” he breathed into the warm shell of her ear. He began thinking hard on abstract matters, so as to delay his own pleasure (the one sure sign of a gentleman) and await hers

“I faint!” she cried.

“Not yet, please.” Did scientists hasten so?

“To lose yourself, that is what you seek?” she asked.

“Ah, yes, in carefully selected acts of passion, but, but-”

“You are of the kind who crawl in mud and seethe with murder, then?”

“What? Madam, keep to the subject!”

“And how do you find the names of stars?” she said coldly.

The inadvisability of selflessness was demonstrated on the spot-for, as he trembled deliciously on the verge of the most intense pleasure sensuous beings can know, a blur of fast translation snatched it all away

—and perversely replaced bliss with woe.

Beneath him the warm sinuosities of Madam’s flesh gave way to the raw rungs of a ladder that bit deep into his back. His ankles and wrists chafed from cords binding him to the ladder.

Over him hovered a gnarled man whose bird-boned frame was lost in the folds of a monk’s coarse robe. The curve of his nose reinforced his hawk’s face, as did his fingernails, so long and curled that they resembled claws. They held some bits of wood… and were poking them up Voltaire’s nostrils.