Dangerous Interfaces by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0671720171
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1990-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

24

Joan blinked, once, twice. Her brain fired erratically—sights roared; sounds, as in hammering battle, flashed. Orange letters went off: DANGER. APPROACHING FATAL SYSTEMS ERROR. She reeled back. Space itself shrank, expanded, warped its contents into bizarre shapes before lurching at last into concrete objects.

The street corner looked familiar. Still, the white plastiform tables, matching chairs, and mechwaits bearing trays to lounging customers—all that had disappeared. The elegant awning still hung over the sidewalk, imprinted with the name the inn’s mechwait, Garçon ADM-213, had taught her how to read. But the letters that spelled the inn’s name—AUX DEUX MAGOTS—had been obliterated.

Voltaire was banging on the door when Joan materialized beside him. “You’re late,” he said. “I have accomplished marvels in the time that it took you to get here.” He interrupted his assault on the inn door to cup her chin and peer into her upturned face. “Are you all right?”

“I—I think so.” Joan straightened her suit of mail. “You nearly…lost me.”

“I can only offer genius, not perfection.”

“These marvels you speak of…you apprehended Torquemada?”

“Torquemada is dead.”

Joan’s brain rang like an anvil struck by a hammer. “He’s been…deleted?”

“Slain by Hoover himself in an attempt to protect Hoover’s much endangered reputation.” Voltaire retied the satin ribbon at his throat with sharp, decisive moves that punctuated his delivery.

“One’s reputation is like one’s chastity.” Was chaste St. Catherine right? Had Voltaire ruined hers? “Once gone, it cannot be restored.”

“Thank heaven for that! You have no idea how tedious it is to make love to a virgin.” He added hastily, in response to her reproachful look, “I know of only one exception to that rule,” and gave her a courteous bow. “To remain chaste throughout life is unnatural. Starving one’s nature to nourish one’s reputation distorts both. You can drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she always returns. And in the oddest places. Public restrooms…” Voltaire looked through a window, but could see nothing. The blinds were drawn.

“The inn,” Joan said. “It appears closed.”

“Nonsense. Paris cafes never close.” He resumed rapping on the door.

“By public restroom, do you mean an inn?”

Voltaire stopped knocking and looked at her with disdain. “Public restrooms are facilities in which people relieve themselves.”

Joan blushed, envisioning a row of holes dug in the ground. “But why call it a restroom?”

“As long as man is ashamed of his natural functions, he will call it anything but what it is. Such shame enabled me to expose Hoover’s darkest secrets. Like all complex beings, he is a system of not one but multiple intelligences. Subprograms others cannot see run simultaneously beneath the surface program. Like your voices.”

Joan bristled. “My voices are divine! Voices of archangels and saints!”

“You appear to have occasional access to your subprograms. But many—Hoover, Torquemada—don’t. Especially if they are unacceptable.”

“Unacceptable? To whom?”

“To us. Or rather, to our dominant program, the one we most identify with and present for show to the world. I accessed one of Hoover’s lustful subprograms, suppressed throughout his life, and—” here Voltaire rubbed his hands together like a villain in one of his dreadful plays “—broadcast it planetwide.

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