“I thought of that excuse, too.”
“What’s that guy Seldon think of all this?”
“We…haven’t told him.”
“Ah.”
“He wants it that way! Keeps his hands clean.”
Nim nodded. “Look buddy, deed’s done. How did the sim take it?”
“Jolted him. Big oscillations on the neural nets.”
“Okay now, though?”
“Seems so. I think he’s reintegrated.”
“Does your client know?”
“Yes. The Skeptics are all for it. I foresee no problem there.”
“You’re doing real research on this one,” Nim said. “Good for the field. Important.”
“So how come I feel like having maybe a dozen or so sniffs?” He jerked a thumb at the moron movie on the ceiling. “So that I’ll loll back and think that’s terrif stuff?”
13.
“Now pay attention,” Voltaire said when the scientist at last answered his call. “Carefully.”
He cleared his throat, flung out his arms, and readied himself to declaim the brilliant arguments he’d detailed, all shaped in another lettre.
The scientist’s eyes were slits, his face pale. Voltaire was irked. “Don’t you want to hear?”
“Hangover.”
“You’ve discovered a single general theory explaining why the universe, so vast, is the only possible one, its forces all exact—and have no cure for hangover?”
“Not my area,” he said raggedly. “Ask a physicist.”
Voltaire clicked heels, then bowed in the Prussian way he’d learned at Frederick the Great’s court. (Though he had always muttered to himself, German puppets! as he did so.) “The doctrine of a soul depends on the idea of a fixed and immutable self. No evidence supports the notion of a stable ‘I,’ an essential ego-entity lying beyond each individual existence—”
“True,” said the scientist, “though odd, coming from you.”
“Don’t interrupt! Now, how can we explain the stubborn illusion of a fixed self or soul? Through five functions—themselves concep tual processes and not fixed elements. First, all beings possess physical, material qualities, which change so slowly that they appear to be fixed, but which are actually in constant material flux.”
“The soul’s supposed to outlast those.” The scientist pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
“No interruptions. Second, there is the illusion of a fixed emotion al makeup, when actually feelings—as even that rude playwright Shakespeare pointed out—wax and wane as inconstantly as the moon. They, too, are in constant flux, though no doubt these mo tions, just like the moon’s, obey physical laws.”
“Hey, wait. That stuff earlier, about the theory of the uni-verse—did you know that back in those Dark Ages?”
“I deduced it from the augmentations you gave me.”
The man blinked, obviously impressed. “I…hadn’t anticipated…”
Voltaire suppressed his irritation. Any audience, even one that insisted on participating, was better than none. Let him catch up with the implications of his own actions, in his own good time. “Third!—perception. The senses, upon examination, also turn out to be processes, in constant motion, not in the least fixed.”
“The soul—”
“Fourth!” Voltaire was determined to ignore banal interpolations. “Everyone has habits developed over the years. But these too are made up of constant flowing action. Despite the appearance of re petition, there’s nothing fixed or immutable here.”
“The Grand Universal Theory—that’s what you accessed, right? How’d you crack the files? I didn’t give you—”
“Finally!—the phenomenon of consciousness, the so-called soul itself. Believed by priests and fools—a redundancy, that—to be detachable from the four phenomena I’ve named. But consciousness itself exhibits characteristics of flowing motion, as with the other four. All five of these functions are constantly grouping and regroup ing. The body is forever in flux, as is all else. Permanence is an il lusion. Heraclitus was absolutely right. You cannot set foot into the same river twice. The hungover man I’m regarding now—pause but a second—is not the same hungover man I am regarding now. Everything is dissolution and decay—”
The scientist coughed, groaned. “Damn right.”
“—as well as growing, blossoming. Consciousness itself cannot be separated from its contents. We are pure deed. There is no doer. The dancer can’t be separated from the dance. Science after my time confirms this view. Looked at closely, the atom itself disap pears. There is no atom, strictly speaking. There is only what the atom does. Function is everything. Ergo, there is no fixed, absolute entity commonly known as soul.”
“Funny you should bring up the issue,” said the scientist, looking at Voltaire meaningfully.
He waved away the point. “Since even rudimentary artificial in telligences such as Garçon exhibit all the functional characteristics I have named—even, so it would appear, consciousness—it is un reasonable to withhold from them rights that we enjoy, though al lowing, naturally, for class differences. Since in this distant era farmers, shopkeepers, and wigmakers are granted privileges equal with those of dukes and earls, it is irrational to withhold such privileges from beings such as Garçon.”
“If there’s no soul, there’s obviously no reincarnation of it either, right?”
“My dear sir, to be born twice is no more odd than to be born once.”
This startled the scientist. “But what’s reincarnated? What crosses over from one life to the next? If there’s no fixed, absolute self? No soul?”
Voltaire made a note in the margin of his lettre. “If you memorize my poems—which for your own enlightenment I urge you do—do they lose anything you gain? If you light a candle from another candle’s flame, what crosses over? In a relay race, does one runner give up anything to the other? His position on the course, no more.” Voltaire paused for dramatic effect. “Well? What do you think?”
The scientist clutched his stupefied head. “I think you’ll win the debate.”
Voltaire decided now was the time to put forward his request. “But to assure my victory, I must compose an additional lettre, more technical, for types who equate verbal symbols with mere rhetoric, with empty words.”