“But you just said -- ”
"In being an absolutely perfect Copy -- so that no one can tell it from the Original -- it
transforms the Original to a duplicate, yes? This means the perfect Copy is no longer a perfect Copy, because it
has obliterated, rather than preserved, the uniqueness of the Original -- and thus failed
to copy a central aspect of the Original. A perfect, artificial human intelligence would
inevitably have this effect on its natural precursor. “ Joan held her head. ”Such traps of
logic! You are like the Augustines!"
“There is more. Here -- ”
A huge Voltaire appeared on the horizon, striding toward them in velvet finery. They flew
around this Voltaire Peak and it thundered at them, “I am a Copy, true, but I have thought on these
fogs you encountered.”
“You saw them?” Joan shouted.
“I was made some long intervals ago, but my Lord -- ” the apparition bowed to the tiny
Original “ -- had datapunched me forward.”
“He is a quick study, ” the Original said modestly.
The Ditto thundered, “Speaking broadly, I penned of such fogs in my magnum opus,
Micromegas. I haven't a copy, alas, or you could ingest it in a trice. I portrayed two
giants, one from Saturn, the other from Sirius.”
Joan called, “You think this fog comes -- ”
“It evaporated from the leading edge of this Empire -- hence, a fog. As humanity spread,
so did the fog rise above the plane of the Galaxy like a funeral dirge. It is ancient and
strange and not of us. In Micromegas, I held that all Nature, all the planets, should obey
eternal laws. Surely it would be very singular that there should be a little animal, five
feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to
his caprice.”
“We follow the Creator, not laws.”
Voltaire Ditto waved away the objection, holding his nose against the reek from below.
“The Lord's laws, then, if you demand an author -- though a great one stands before you
already, my love. ”
“I doubt your kind of love applies here. ” Peak Voltaire smiled. “Falstaff cried in The
Merry Wives of Windsor, 'Let the sky rain potatoes!' -- because the new luxury vegetable
of that time, imported from exotic America, for a while was believed to be an aphrodisiac,
because of its testicu-lar shape. Similarly, I greet the strange and alien as potential
aids.”
“The fog wishes to murder us. ”
“Well, one can't have everything to one's liking. ” With a wave from the Original, rains
fell from a porous leaden sky upon the Alps Voltaire. He eroded, smiling with resignation
as he spread into rivulets.
The Original flew to Joan and kissed her. “Worry not. Running a Ditto of your Self, giving
it autonomy, means it can also change itself -- become NotSelf. Your Ditto could shape its
own motivations, goals, habits, edit away memories and tastes. For example, your Ditto
could erase any liking for impressionist opera and overlay a passion for linear folk.”
“What are those?”
“Mere acoustic fashion. Your Ditto could enjoy rhythms that would have bored your true
Self into a coma.”
“Have they ... souls?” Even to her devout ears, the question sounded hollow here.
“Remember, they are illegal, and share the anxious natures of their Originals. After all,
only troubled people would consider making a backup of themselves.”
“Can they be saved for heaven, then?”
“Always back to that foundation, the holy. ” Voltaire shrugged. “As I have seen them,
Dittos fidget, their stress chemistry rises, their metabolics lurch, their heart-sims
hammer, their lungs flutter in intense dread. Typical Dittos talk incessantly, acutely
uncomfortable. Many demand that they be edited, truncated -- and finally killed. ”
“A sin!”
“No, a sim. We are solely responsible for it, so it cannot be damned.”
“But suicide!”
“Think of it as a shadow of yourself.”
She staggered, thrown into moral confusion. The eating flame of uncertainty was worse than
the pyre and smoke she had known as a girl. In her a tiny voice spoke coolly:
Is consciousness just a property of special algorithms, sliding sheets of information,
digital packets jumping through conceptual hoops? My dear, do not suppose that a numerical
model, simulating you watching a sunset, must feel the same way you, its lovely Original,
did. It is surely profitless to doubt the inner lives of simulated consciousness, when
nobody asks the same question of adding machines. Eh?
She felt this tiny voice as her Voltaire. It calmed her, though she could not say why.
A slight breeze said to her, Inner logics now soothe, compensating piety -- but she paid
its news no mind.
Voltaire got her calmed down just in time. He labored hard just to keep them both running.
Dodging in and out of the 800 Sectors of Trantor, one step ahead of the Digital
Bloodhounds, he needed more and more computing volume to run their defenses. She did not
know that the Fog, as he had chosen to personify the dread presence, lay just over the
horizon.
Sweat broke out on his brow from the labor of keeping the Fog at bay with a high pressure
zone. “I fear we must soon grapple with the Fog.”
Joan had acquired her sword, but it was a thin and gleaming thing, more like a rapier. “I
can cut it.”
“A fog?”
“I would sooner trust a woman's emotion than a man's reason.”
“Here, you may be right. ” He chuckled. “Something in the Fog's representation suggests
its origins.”
“What are they?”
“Not those simple bloodhounds set after us by that fellow, Nim. Those we evaded -- ”
“I slew them!”
“True. But even the Fog Things live here in the crannies of the Trantor Mesh. I can sense
that they dislike us drawing attention to this little hideaway. If we provoke the real
world, it will extinguish us -- and them.”
They both marched across a quilted plain. Angry blue-bellied clouds scudded over the far
mountain-tops and rushed down at them, veering away only because of Voltaire's pressure.
Sweat poured from him and soaked his finery. He waved a sopping wet sleeve at the stormy
thunderheads. “That can destroy us.”
“You have protected me so far. Now I shall slice them!”
“They live in the same cracks and crannies we do. I find them -- it -- everywhere. They
have been at this space-stealing game longer. One must admire their adroitness.”
A tendril of purple cirrus snaked down from the mountains and squirmed its way across the
plain.
Voltaire shouted, “Run! Fly, if you can!”
“I shall fight!”
“All here is metaphor for underlying programs! Your sword will slice nothing.”
“My faith shall cut.”
All considered, it was a marvelously parsimonious cortical world-making system.
From an algorithmic seed sprouted Number and Order, holding sway above the Flux.
Yet -- the Bees.
He felt overlaying geometries pressing in upon him, upon Joan. Shifting colors flattened
into planes of intersecting geometries, perspectives dwindling, twisting, swelling again
-- into his face, blowing out the back of his Self-volume.
Whirring, squeezing -- They were not human in their patterns.
Trantor's Mesh was inhabited not merely by sims such as himself, renegade roustabouts on
the run. It hosted a flora and fauna unseen, because the higher life forms hid.
They had to. They were of alien cultures, ancient empires vast and slow.
A broad vision unfolded before him, not in words but in strange, oblique ... kinesthetics.
Speeding sensations, accelerations, lofting lurches -- all somehow merging into pictures,
ideas. He could not remotely say how he knew and understood from such scattershot impulses
-- but they worked.
He sensed Joan beside him -- not spatially but conceptually -- as they both watched and
felt and knew.
The ancient aliens in the Galaxy were computer-based, not “organic. ” They derived from
vastly older civilizations, surviving their original founders, who perished in the long
Darwinian run. Some computer cultures were billions of years old, others very recent.
They spread, not via starship, but by electromag-netically broadcasting their salient
aspects into other computer-based societies. The Empire had been penetrated long ago, much
as a virus enters an unknowing body.
Humans had always thought of spreading their genes, using starships. These alien,
self-propagating ideas spread their “memes” -- their cultural truths.
Memes can propagate between computers as easily as ideas flit between natural, organic
brains. Brains are easier to infest than DNA.
Memes evolved in turn far faster than genes. The organized constellations of information
in computers evolved in computers, which are faster than brains. Not necessarily better or
wiser, but faster. And speed was the issue.
Voltaire reeled from the images -- quick, vivid penetrations.
“They are demons! Diseases!” Joan shouted. He heard fear and courage alike in her strained
words.
Indeed, the plain now crawled with malignant sores oozing rot. Pustules poked through the
crusty soil. They bulged, sprouted cancerous heads like living blue-black bruises. These
burst, spouting steaming pus. Eruptions vomited foulness over Voltaire and Joan. Stinking
streams lapped at their dancing feet.
“The sneezing, the coughs!” foan shouted. “We have had them all along. They -- ”
“Were viruses. These aliens were infecting us. ” Voltaire splashed through combers of
filth. The streams had coagulated into a lake, then an ocean. Breakers curled over them,
tumbling both in the scummy brown froth.
“Why such horrible metaphor?” Voltaire cried out to the pewter sky. It filled with
churning swarms of Bees as he bobbed in waves of putrefying wastes.
[WE ARE NOT OF YOUR CORRUPT ORIGINS]
[HIGHER REASON FOLLOW WE]
[THE WAR OF FLESH UPON FLESH IS SOON TO END]
[OF LIFE UPON LIFE]
[ACROSS THE TURNING DISK OF SUNS]
[WHICH ONCE WAS OURS] “So they have their own agenda for the Empire. ” Voltaire scowled.
“I wonder how we shall like it, we of flesh?”
R. Daneel Olivaw was alarmed. “I have underestimated Lamurk's power.”
“We are few, they are many, ” Dors said. She wanted to help this ancient, wise figure, but
could think of nothing concrete to suggest. When in doubt, comfort. Or was that too human?
Olivaw sat absolutely still, using none of his ordinary facial or body language, devoting
all capacity to calculation. He had come slipping in on a private shuttle from the worm
and now sat with Dors in a suite of the Station. “I cannot assess the situation here. That
security officer -- you are certain she was not an agent of the Academic Potentate?”
“She aided us greatly after we had returned to our bodies.”
“With Vaddo dead, she could have been pretending innocence.”
“True. I cannot rule her out.”
“Your escape from Trantor went undetected?”
Dors touched his hand. “I used every contact, even- mechanism I knew. But Lamurk is
devious.”
“So am I! -- if need be.”
“You can't be everywhere. I suspect Lamurk somehow corrupted that Vaddo character.”
“I believe he must have been planted in advance. ” Daneel said adamantly, eyes narrowing.
Evidently he had reached a decision and so had computational room for expression again.
“I checked his records. He's been here for years. No, Lamurk bribed him or persuaded him.”
“Not Lamurk himself, of course, ” R. Daneel said precisely, lips severe. “An agent.”
“I tried to get a brain scan of Vaddo, but could not finesse the legal issues. ” She liked
it when R. Daneel used his facial expression programs. But what had he decided?
“I could extract more from him, ” he said neutrally.
Dors caught the implication. “The First Law, suspended because of the Zeroth Law?”
“It must be. The great crisis approaches swiftly.”
Dors was suddenly quite glad that she did not know more about what was going on in the
Empire. “We must get Hari away from here. That is the most important point.”
“Agreed. 1 have arranged highest priority for you two through the wormhole.”
“It shouldn't be busy. We -- ”
“I believe they expect extra traffic soon -- more Lamurk agents. I fear. Or even the more
insidious variety, as the Academic Potentate would employ.”
“Then we must hurry. Where shall we go?”
“Not to Trantor.”
“But we live there! Hari won't like being a vagabond -- ”
“Eventually, yes, back to Trantor. Perhaps soon. But for now, anywhere else.”
“I'll ask Hari if there is any special world he prefers.”
R. Daneel frowned, lost in thought. With absent-minded grace he scratched his nose, then
his eyeball. Dors flinched, but apparently R. Daneel had simply altered his
neurocircuitry, and this was an ordinary gesture. She tried to imagine the use for such
editing and could not. But then, he had come through millennia of winnowing she could not
truly imagine, either.
“Not Helicon, ” he said suddenly. “Sentimentality and nostalgia might plausibly lead Hari
there.”
“Very well. That leaves only twenty-five million or so choices of where to hide.”
R. Daneel did not laugh.
“A Ragant Divenex, sector general. I just spoke to him -- ”
“Damn!” Dors said. “He's a Lamurk henchman.”
“You're sure?” Hari asked. He knew her slight pause had been to consult her internal files.
Dors nodded. Buta Fyrnix said calmly, “Well, I am sure he will be honored to take you back
to Trantor when you are finished with your visit here. Which we hope will not be soon, of
-- ”
“He mentioned us?” Dors asked.
“He asked if you were enjoying -- ”
“Damn!” Hari said.
“A sector general commands all the wormlinks, if he wishes -- yes?” Dors asked.
“Well, I suppose so. ” Fyrnix looked puzzled.
“We're trapped, ” Hari said.
Fyrnix's eyes widened in shock. “But surely you, a First Minister candidate, need fear no
-- ”