“Of course! I rode many into battle, felt their fear through my calves.”

“I see.” He swept his lace sleeves through the air in a parody of her sword-swinging. “Now-bring you!-judgment to bear upon a dog which has lost its master. The beast, call him Phydeaux, has sought its master on every road with sorrowful cries and enters the house agitated, uneasy, goes up and down the stairs, from room to room, and at last finds in the study the master it loves, and shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps. It must have feeling, longings, ideas.”

“Surely.”

Voltaire then produced the dog, plaintive and beautiful in its flop-eared digital sorrow. To boot, he added the house, complete with furniture. As the poor dog’s baying died away, he said, “My demonstration, madam.”

“Tricks!” Mouth twisted angrily, she said no more.

“You must allow that mathematicians are like

Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate into their own language, and forthwith, it is something entirely different.”

“I am waiting for my Lord. Or, as one devoted to large concepts, sir: for Meaning.”

“Sit and ponder, madam.” He materialized a comfy Provencal kitchen, tables, the fetching scent of coffee. They sat. Inscribed on the coffee pot was his motto from a lost past:

Noir comme le diable

Chaud comme l’enfer

Pur comme un ange,

Doux comme l’amour.

Black as the devil,

Hot as hell,

Pure as an angel,

Sweet as love.

“My, it tastes so good,” Joan said.

“I have mastered multiple-site access.” Voltaire slurped his coffee noisily, one of the few allowances he had found Parisian society gave to even a philosopher. “We are running in the interstices of Trantor, splintered into many fragments. I can summon up sensedata from the innumerable inventories of countless digital libraries.”

“I appreciate your giving me similar talents,” she said cautiously, adjusting her armor for comfort and sipping her aromatic coffee with care. “But I feel a hollowness…”

Ruefully he nodded. “I, too.”

“We seem…I hesitate to say…”

“Like divinities.”

“Blasphemy, but true. Though the Creator has wisdom and we do not.”

Voltaire’s face stretched in despair. “Worse, we may not have even our own wills.”

“Well, I do.”

“If all we are is strings of digits-zeros and ones, actually, no more, if you will but look microscope-close-then how can we be free? Are we not determined by those marching numerals?”

“I feel free.”

“Ah, but then, we would make it so in any case, yes?” He sprang to his feet. “One of my best couplets:

One science only will one genius fit

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”

“So we cannot know we are free? The Creator makes us so!”

“I would wish for that Creator, now.”

Joan kicked over the table, spattering him with coffee. He edited out its burns as he fell. She swung her sword at the kitchen walls and sliced them into great sheets curving away into a gray Euclidean space, reality curling like orange peel.

“How tiresome,” he said. “The best argument against Christianity is certainly Christians.”

“I will not have-”

You like to think of yourself as a philosopher?

The words somehow filled space. Acoustic walls swelled and blew past them, like great pages riffling in a giant book.

Voltaire took a deep breath and bellowed, “You address me?”

You also like to think of yourself as a shrewd judge of the quick opportunity. Or of verbal nuance.

Joan drew her sword, but the passing slabs of sound brushed it away.

You like to think of yourself even in this distant time and place as famous.

Huge sheets of humming pressure fell upon them, as if a gargantuan deity were calling down from the faceless ashen sky.

“You challenge me?” Voltaire shouted back.

You like, in short, to think of yourself.

Joan laughed heartily. Voltaire reddened.

“I defy you, insulterer!”

As if in reply, their Euclidean plane bulged-

And he was the landscape. He had a hot volcanic spine murmuring warmly beneath, while his skin was moisture and grit. Winds beat his skin. Tinkling streams caressed him. Mountains rose from him like bruised carbuncles.

Joan cried out somewhere. He cast up a ridge line, strata buckling, shards flying. She was a lofty cylindrical spire, snow-crowned and cracking with lava pus.

Above them roiled pewter clouds. He knew them somehow as alien minds, a fog of connections.

Hypermind?came the idea. Algorithms summing?

The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked to that fog: spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated machines which computed subjective moment-jumps. The present was a computational slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors. Rather than living in the present, they persisted more accurately in the post-past of the calculated step forward.

There was a profound difference, he felt-not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion-between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. To the fog he was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.

Then he saw what the fog was.

He tried to run, but he was a mountain.

“They are-others,” he called to Joan uselessly.

“How can they be more different than we?” she replied forlornly.

“We, at least, were conjured up from human stock. These are alien.”

They had escaped, somehow.

One moment the alien fog had enveloped the mountain ranges. The next, Voltaire had extricated himself and Joan. But he kept saying, as they fled across a barren sea of stinking liquid corpses, that they had to…to give birth.

“We make ourselves into children?” she called to him, avoiding the sight of twisted, bloated bodies below. Somehow the alien fog manifested its loathsome self by reminding them of human mortality. Thus it dogged them.

“Bad metaphor. We must manufacture and hide some copies of ourselves.”

He raised a hand and shot her a bolt of knowing:

Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates, or Copies, all such hold a tenuous existence. Society has decisively rejected what antiquity called the Copy Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward into immortality.

“We must do so to be sure we survive, when the fog catches us? I will slay them, instead!”

Voltaire laughed. “Your sword-they can control it, if they like. They captured your defense programming, and mine-though, as they implied, I rely mostly upon wit.”

“Dittos…? I fail to understand.”

“Refuting the Copy Fallacy is straightforward, an exercise in the calculus of logic. A simple exercise makes the point. Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that, insurance of a sort. Then imagine that, well, perhaps it would not be started right away, but sometime in future… .we promise.As that date recedes, people’s enthusiasm for paying for Self Copies dims-demonstrating that it was the hope of continuity they unconsciously relished.”

“I see.” She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike reserve. The stench of the bloated corpses was penetrating.

“In the end, Copies benefited themselves, not the dead. Thus on Trantor, and throughout the Empire, it is illegal.” Voltaire sighed. “Moralists! They never understand. To ban something makes it enticing. That is why such entities inhabit this Mesh.”

“They are all illegal?”