“Sorry. I’ll fill in that audio background, too.” A single hand gesture, and Voltaire heard boards creak as he paced. A carriage team clip-clopped by outside.
“I possess temperament. Do not confuse passion with tempera-ment—which is a matter of the nerves. Passion is borne from the heart and soul, no mere mechanism of the bodily humors.”
“You believe in souls?”
“In essences, certainly. The Maid dared cling to her vision with her whole heart, despite bullying by church and state. Her devotion to her vision, unlike mine, bore no taint of perverseness. She was the first true Protestant. I’ve always preferred Protestants to papist absolutists—until I took up residence in Geneva, only to discover their public hatred of pleasure is as great as any pope’s. Only Quakers do not privately engage in what they publicly claim to abjure. Alas, a hundred true believers cannot redeem millions of hypocrites.”
The scientist twisted his mouth skeptically. “Joan recanted, knuckled under to their threats.”
“They took her to a cemetery!” Voltaire bristled with irritation. “Terrorized a credulous girl with threats of death and hell. Bishops, academicians—the most learned men of their time! Donkeys’ asses, the lot! Browbeating the bravest woman in France, a woman whom they destroyed only to revere. Hypocrites! They require martyrs as leeches require blood. They thrive on self-sacrifice—provided that the selves they sacrifice are not their own.”
“All we have is your version, and hers. Our history doesn’t go back that far. Still, we know more of people now—”
“So you imagine.” Voltaire sniffed a jot of snuff to calm himself. “Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best. They played her honor and her bravery like a fiddle, swine plucking at a violin.”
“You’re defending her.” The scientist’s wry smile mocked. “Yet in that poem you wrote about her—amazing, someone memorizing their own work, so they could recite it!—you depict her as a tavern slut, much older than she in fact was, a liar about her so-called voices, a superstitious but shrewd fool. The greatest enemy of the chastity she pretends to defend is a donkey—a donkey with wings!”
Voltaire smiled. “A brilliant metaphor for the Roman Church, n’est ce pas? I had a point to make. She was simply the sword with which I drove it home. I had not met her then. I had no idea she was a woman of such mysterious depths.”
“Not depths of intellect. A peasant!” Marq recalled how he had escaped just such a fate on the mud-grubbing world Biehleur. All through the Greys exam. And now he had fled their stodgy routines, into a true cultural revolution.
“No, no. Depths of the soul. I’m like a little stream. Clear because it is shallow. But she’s a river, an ocean! Return me to Aux Deux Magots. She and the wind-up garçon are the only society I now have.”
“She is your adversary,” the scientist said. “A minion of those who uphold values that you fought all your life. To make sure you beat her, I’m going to supplement you.”
“I am intact and entire,” Voltaire declared frostily.
“I’ll equip you with philosophical and scientific information, ra tional progress. Your reason must crush her faith. You must regard her as the enemy she is, if civilization is to continue to advance along rational scientific lines.”
His eloquence and impudence were rather charming, but no substitutes for Voltaire’s fascination with Joan. “I refuse to read anything until you reunite me with the Maid—in the café!”
The scientist had the audacity to laugh. “You don’t get it. You have no choice. I’ll sculpt the information into you. You’ll have the information you need to win, like it or not.”
“You violate my integrity!”
“Let’s not forget that after the debate, there’ll be the question of keeping you running, or…”
“Ending me?”
“Just so you know what cards are on the table.”
Voltaire bristled. He knew the iron accents of authority, since he was first subjected to his father’s—a strict martinet who’d compelled him to attend mass, and whose austerities claimed the life of Voltaire’s mother when Voltaire was only seven. The only way she could escape her husband’s discipline was to die. Voltaire had no intention of escaping this scientist in that way.
“I refuse to use any additional knowledge you give me unless you return me at once to the café.”
Infuriatingly, the scientist regarded Voltaire the way Voltaire had regarded his wigmaker—with haughty superiority. His curled lip said quite clearly that he knew Voltaire could not exist without his patronage.
A humbling turnabout. Though middle-class in origin himself, Voltaire did not believe common people worthy of governing themselves. The thought of his wigmaker posing as a legislator was enough to make him never wear a wig again. To be seen similarly by this vexing, smug scientist was intolerable.
“Tell you what,” said the scientist. “You compose one of your brilliant lettres philosophiques trashing the concept of the human soul, and I will reunite you with the Maid. But if you don’t, you won’t see her until the day of the debate. Clear?”
Voltaire mulled the offer over. “Clear as a little stream,” he said at last.
—and then clotted, cinder-dark clouds descended into his mind. Memories, sullen and grim. He felt engulfed in a past that roared through him, scouring—
“He’s cycling! There’s something surfacing here…” came Marq’s hollow call.
Images of the far past exploded.
“Call Seldon! This sim has another layer! Call Seldon!”
7.
Hari Seldon stared at the images and data-rivers. “Voltaire suffered a recall storm. And look at the implications.”
Marq peered without comprehension at the torrent. “Uh, I see.”
“That promontory—a memory nugget about a debate he had with Joan, eight thousand years ago.”
“Somebody used these sims before—”
“For public debate, yes. History not only repeats itself, sometimes it stutters.”
“Faith vs. Reason?”
“Faith/Mechanicals vs. Reason/Human Will,” Seldon said, as if reading them directly from the numerical complexes. Marq could not follow the connections fast enough to keep up with him. “A society of that time had a fundamental division over computer in telligences and their…manifestations.”
Marq caught an elusive flicker in Seldon’s face. Was he hiding something? “Manifestations? You mean, like tiktoks?”
“Something like that,” Seldon said stiffly.
“Voltaire’s for—”
“In that age, he was for human effervescence. Joan favored Faith, which meant, uh, tiktoks.”
“I don’t get it.”