Gregory Benford - Foundation’s Fear

She popped up her own filters, imported instantly from her board halfway across the building. “Want a vocabulary box?”

He shrugged. “Anything they can’t understand, we’ll credit to language problems.”

“What is that stuff they speak?”

“Dead language, unknown parent world.” His hands were a blur, setting up the transition.

“It has a, well, a liquid feel.”

“One thing.”

Sybyl’s breasts swelled as she drew in her breath, held it, then slowly eased it out. “I just hope my client doesn’t find out about Seldon. The company’s taking an awful chance, not telling either one of them about the other.”

“So what?” He enjoyed giving a carefree shrug. A flutter-glide would petrify him, but power games-those he loved. Artifice Associates had taken major accounts from the two deadly rivals in this whole affair.

“If both sides of the argument find out we’re handling both accounts, they’ll leave. Refuse to pay beyond the retainer-and you know how much we’ve overspent beyond that.”

“Leave?” His turn to chuckle. “Not if they want to win. We’re the best.” Marq gave her his cocky smile. “You and me, in case you were wondering. Just wait till you see this.”

He downed the lights, started the run, and leaned back in his clasp chair, legs stretched out on the table before him. He wanted to impress her. That wasn’t all he wanted. But since her husband had been crushed in an accident, beyond repair by even the best medicos, he’d decided to wait a decent interval before he made his move. What a team they would make! Open a firm-say, Marq-Sybyl, Limited-skim off the best A2customers, make a name.

No names. Let’s be fair.

Sybyl’s voice trembled in the gloom. “To meet ancients…”

Down, down, down-into the replicated world, its seamless blue complexity swelling across the entire facing wall. Vibrotactile feedback from inductance dermotabs perfected the illusion.

They swooped into a primitive city, barely one layer of buildings to cover the naked ground. Some sort of crude village, pre-Empire. Streets whirled by, buildings turned in artful projection. Even the crowds and clumped traffic below seemed authentic, a muddled human jumble. Swiftly they careened into their foreground sim: a cafe on something called the Boulevard St. Germain. Cloying smells, the muted grind of traffic outside, a rattle of plates, the heady aroma of a souffle.

Marq zoomed them into the same timeframe as the recreated entities. A lean man loomed across the wall. His eyes radiated intelligence, mouth tilted with sardonic mirth.

Sybyl whistled through her teeth. Eyes narrowing, she watched the re-creation’s mouth, as if to read its lips. Voltaire was interrogating the mechwaiter. Irritably, of course.

“High five-sense resolution,” she said, appropriately awed. “I can’t get mine that clear. I still don’t know how you do it.”

Marq thought, My Sark contacts. I know you have some, too.

“Hey,” she said. “What-” He grinned with glee as her mouth fell open and she stared at the image of her Joan next to his Voltaire-freeze-frame, data streams initialized but not yet running interactively.

Her expression mingled admiration with fear. “We’re not supposed to bring them on together!-not till they meet in the coliseum.”

“Who says? It’s not in our contract!”

“Hastor will skewer us anyway.”

“Maybe-if he finds out. Want me to section her off?”

Her mouth twisted prettily. “Of course not. What the hell, it’s done. Activate.”

“I knew you’d go for it. We’re the artists, we make the decisions.”

“Have we got the running capacity to make them realtime?”

He nodded. “It’ll cost, but sure. And…I’ve got a little proposition for you.”

“Uh-oh.” Her brow arched. “Forbidden, no doubt.”

He waited, just to tantalize her. And to judge, from her reaction, how receptive she’d be if he tried to change the nature of their long-standing platonic relationship. He had tried, once before. Her rejection-she was married on a decade contract, she gently reminded him-only made him desire her more. All that and faithful in marriage, too. Enough to make the teeth grind-which they had, frequently. Of course, they could be replaced for less than the price of an hour with a good therapist.

Her body language now-a slight pulling away-told him she was still mourning her dead husband. He was prepared to wait the customary year, but only if he had to.

“What say we give both of them massive files, far beyond Basis State,” he said quickly. “Really give them solid knowledge of what Trantor’s like, the Empire, everything.”

“Impossible.”

“No, just expensive.”

“So much!”

“So what? Just think about it. We know what these two Primordials represented, even if we don’t know what world they came from.”

“Their strata memories say ‘Earth,’ remember?”

Marq shrugged. “So? Dozens of primitive worlds called themselves that.”

“Oh, the way Primitives call themselves ‘the People’?”

“Sure. The whole folk tale is wrong astrophysically, too. This legend of the original planet is pretty clear on one point-the world was mostly oceans. So why call it ‘Earth’?”

She nodded. “Granted, they’re deluded. And they have no solid databases about astronomy, I checked that. But look at their Social Context readings. These two stood for concepts, eternal ideas: Faith and Reason.”

Marq balled both fists in enthusiasm, a boyish gesture. “Right! On top of that we’ll pump in what we know today-pseudonatural selection, psychophilosophy, gene destinies-”

“Boker will never go for it,” Sybyl said. “It’s precisely modem information the Preservers of Our Father’s Faith don’t want. They want the historical Maid, pure and uncontaminated by modem ideas. I’d have to program her to read-”

“A cinch.”

“-write, handle higher mathematics. Give me a break!”

“Do you object on ethical grounds? Or simply to avoid a few measly centuries of work?”

“Easy for you to say. Your Voltaire has an essentially modem mind. Whoever made him had his own work, dozens of biographies. My Maid is as much myth as she is fact. Somebody re-created her out of thin air.”

“Then your objection’s based on laziness, not principle.”

“It’s based on both.”

“Will you at least give it some thought?”

“I just did. The answer is no.”

Marq sighed. “No use arguing. You’ll see, once we let them interact.”

Her mood seemed to swing from resistance to excitement; in her enthusiasm, she even touched his leg, fingers lingering. He felt her affectionate tap just as they opened into the simspace.

“What’s going on here?” Voltaire rose, hands on hips-chair toppling back behind him, clattering on stone-and peered down at them from the screen. “Who are you? What infernal agency do you represent?”

Marq stopped the sim and turned to Sybyl. “Uh, do you want to explain it to him?”

“He’s your re-creation, not mine.”

“I’ve dreaded this.” Voltaire was imposing. He exuded power and electric confidence. Somehow, in all his microscopic inspections of this sim, the sum of it all, this gestalt essence, had never come through.

“We worked hard on this! If you stall now-”

Marq braced himself. “Right, right.”

“How do you look to him?”

“I made myself materialize, walk over, sit down.”

“He saw you come out of nothing?”

“I guess so,” he said, chagrined. “Shook him up.”

Marq had used every temperament fabrication he had, trimming and shaping mood constellations, but he had left intact Voltaire’s central core. What a hardball knot it was! Some programmer of pre-antiquity had done a startling, dense job. Gingerly, he dipped the Voltaire-sim into a colorless void of sensory static. Soothe, then slide…