“ Youdid this?”

“Ipan.”

“I never would have believed a pan could, could…”

“I doubt anyone’s been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just-well, it came out.”

He picked up Vaddo’s weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Vaddo had not wanted to awaken the rest of the station. That was promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the station personnel lived.

“Wait, what about Vaddo?”

“I’m going to wake up a doctor.”

They did-but Hari took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man Vaddo’s body.

The doctor got angry about that, but Hari had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He didn’t say anything, just gestured with the gun.

He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn’t talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.

And in any case, Vaddo had been dead for some time.

Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.

Alarms were ringing. He got an instant headache. The security officer showed up. He could see from her reaction that she had not been in on the plot. Can’t connect it to the Academic Potentate, then, he thought abstractly.

But how much did that prove? Imperial politics were subtle…Dors looked at him oddly the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought about helping Vaddo first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he knew deeply but could not explain.

But he understood immediately when Dors wanted to go to the station wall and call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the far wild darkness.

Voltaire scowled, vexed.

Had she in fact yielded to him, given herself up? Or was this a particularly fine simulation? True Joan, art this thou?

Certainly this fit one of his favorites: a romping play in prickly dry hay, up in the topmost loft of a big old barn, on a hot August day in long-lost Bordeaux.

Twit-wheeecalled a bird. Insects chirped, warm breezes blew woody scents. Her hair trailed over him as she mounted. He felt her adroit twists, delivered with an erotic precision that made him tremble with the need for release.

But…

The instant he doubted, it all contracted, dwindled, fell away into blackness. This was merely an exotic onanism, a self-love delusion requiring his commitment to its truth. Contrived well, but fake.

So when he felt himself picked up in a giant feminine hand, soft palm cradling him aloft into sunny air, he wondered if this were real, too. A hot breeze brushed him as she exhaled.

Joan towered fifty times his height, murmuring to him. Fleshy huge lips kissed his whole body in one lingering moment, her tongue licking him like a colossus savoring a lollipop.

“I suppose I’ve not had my irony programs omitted?” he asked.

The giant Joan shriveled.

“Too easy,” he said. “All I need do is say something a bit jarring-”

This time the hand propelled him aloft with crushing acceleration. “You’ve still got your precious irony. And this is me.”

He sniffed. “So large. You’ve made yourself a leviathan!”

“Too heavy?”

“I’ve always liked…pig irony.”

He gave a disdainful sniff. She dropped him. He plunged toward a moat of boiling lava, which had suddenly appeared below.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. Just enough to get her to stop, not enough to lose every shred of dignity.

“You should be.”

The lava pit evaporated, congealing into mud. He landed on solid ground and she stood before him, standard size. Demure, fresh. Around her clung air scrubbed by a spring rainstorm just past.

“We can invade each others’ perceptual spaces at will. Marvelous…” He stopped, considered. “In a way.”

“In Purgatory, all is meaningless. We dream while we await truth.” She abruptly sneezed, then coughed. Blinking, she reassembled her lofty, ladylike self.

“Ummm. I would appreciate something concretely…ah…concrete.”

He stepped off the porch of an elaborate Provencal country house. The fields beyond glowed with lurid light. The foreground was accurate, but done in rather obvious brush strokes.

Clearly they were inhabiting a work of art. Even the scents of apple trees and horse manure had a stilted quality. A frozen moment, cycled endlessly for as long as they needed a backdrop? Inexpensive, even. Astounding what his subconscious-let slip a bit-could conjure up.

What was to stop him-them!-from playing Caligula? Slaughtering digital millions? Torturing virtual slaves? Nothing.

That was the problem: no constraints. How could anyone persist, given infinite temptation?

“Faith. Only faith can guide, can compel.” Joan took his hand, pleading with untouched ardor.

“But our reality is in fact entire illusion! “

“The Lord must be somewhere,” she said plainly. “He is real.”

“You do not quite follow, my dear.” He struck an instructive pose. “Ontogenesis algorithms can generate new people, drawn from ancient fields, or else just cooked up for the moment.”

“ I know true people when I see them. Let them speak for a moment.”

“You would look for wit? We have some subroutines here, yes, madam. Character? A mere set of verbal posture-profiles. Sincerity? We can fake that.”

Voltaire knew, from viewing his own cerebral innards, that something termed a “reality editor” offered ready-made conversation from the mouth of apparently “rear’ persons, who had not existed seconds before. Assemblages of traits and verbal nuances stood ever ready to trade aphorisms and sallies with him.

All these he had picked up in his endless foraging of the Mesh, its myriad Trantorian sites opening to his touch. He had extracted and shaped these “customized” amusements. Quick and zesty and all, ultimately, hollow.

“I realize you have greater capacities,” Joan allowed. She hoisted her sword and swung it at empty air. “Allow, sir, that I can still control my senses. I know some minions of these parts are true and real, as authentic as animals were in our time on Earth.”

“You believe that you knew the inner states of horses?”