simulator. For the first time since I had satisfied myself about them when I was quite small, I bent over (at some cost to my head) and read the almost obliterated stampings on his main cabinet. There was only the name of a cybernetics company on Earth and, in French as I had always supposed, his name: M. Million— “Monsieur” or “Mister” Million. Then, as startling as a blow from behind to a man musing in a comfortable chair, I remembered that a dot was employed in some algebras for multiplication. He saw my change of expression at once. “A thousand-million-word core capacity,” he said. “An English billion or a French milliard, the
“You are an unbound simulator. What is a bound simulator, and whom are you simulating—my father?”
“No.” The face in the screen, Mr. Million’s face as I had always thought of it, shook its head. “Call me, call the person simulated, at least, your great-grandfather. He—I—am dead. In order to achieve simulation, it is necessary to examine the cells of the brain, layer by layer, with a beam of accelerated particles so that the neural patterns can be reproduced, we say ‘core imaged,’ in the computer. The process is fatal.”
I asked after a moment, “And a bound simulator?”
“If the simulation is to have a body that looks human the mechanical body must be linked—‘bound’—to a remote core, since the smallest billion-word core cannot be made even approximately as small as a human brain.” He paused again, and for an instant his face dissolved into myriad sparkling dots, swirling like dust motes in a sunbeam. “I am sorry. For once you wish to listen, but I do not wish to lecture. I was told, a very long time ago, just before the operation, that my simulation—this—would be capable of emotion in certain circumstances. Until today I had always thought they lied.” I would have stopped him if I could, but he rolled out of the room before I could recover from my surprise.
For a long time, I suppose an hour or more, I sat listening to the drumming of the rain and thinking about Phaedria and about what Mr. Million had said, all of it confused with my father’s questions of the night before, questions which had seemed to steal their answers from me so that I was empty, and dreams had come to flicker in the emptiness, dreams of fences and walls and the concealing ditches called ha-has, that contain a barrier you do not see until you are about to tumble on it. Once I had dreamed of standing in a paved court fenced with Corinthian pillars so close set that I could not force my body between them, although in the dream I was only a child of three or four. After trying various places for a long time, I had noticed that each column was carved with a word—the only one that I could remember was
This dream pursued me even when I tried to think of Phaedria, and when a maid brought me hot water—for I now shaved twice a week—I found that I was already holding my razor in my hand, and had in fact cut myself with it so that the blood had streaked my nightclothes and run down onto the sheets.
The next time I saw Phaedria, which was four or five days afterward, she was engrossed by a new project in which she enlisted both David and me. This was nothing less than a theatrical company, composed mostly of girls her own age, which was to present plays during the summer in a natural amphitheater in the park. Since the company, as I have said, consisted principally of girls, male actors were at a premium, and David and I soon found ourselves deeply embroiled. The play had been written by a committee of the cast, and—inevitably—revolved about the loss of political power by the original French-speaking colonists. Phaedria, whose ankle would not be mended in time for our performance, would play the crippled daughter of the French governor; David, her lover (a dashing captain of chasseurs); and I, the governor himself—a part I accepted readily because it was a much better one than David’s, and offered scope for a great deal of fatherly affection toward Phaedria.
The night of our performance, which was early in June, I recall vividly for two reasons. My aunt, whom I had not seen since she had closed the door behind Dr. Marsch, notified me at the last moment that she wished to attend and that I was to escort her. And we players had grown so afraid of having an empty house that I had asked my father if it would be possible for him to send some of his girls—who would thus lose only the earliest part of the evening, when there was seldom much business in any event. To my great surprise (I suppose because he felt it would be good advertising) he consented, stipulating only that they should return at the end of the third act if he sent a messenger saying they were needed.
Because I would have to arrive at least an hour early to make up, it was no more than late afternoon when I called for my aunt. She showed me in herself, and immediately asked my help for her maid, who was trying to wrestle some heavy object from the upper shelf of a closet. It proved to be a folding wheelchair, and under my aunt’s direction we set it up. When we had finished she said abruptly, “Give me a hand in, you two,” and taking our arms lowered herself into the seat. Her black skirt, lying emptily against the leg boards of the chair like a collapsed tent, showed legs no thicker than my wrists, but also an odd thickening, almost like a saddle, below her hips. Seeing me staring, she snapped, “Won’t be needing that until I come back, I suppose. Lift me up a little. Stand in back and get me under the arms.”
I did so, and her maid reached unceremoniously under my aunt’s skirt and drew out a little leather padded device on which she had been resting. “Shall we go?” my aunt sniffed. “You’ll be late.”
I wheeled her into the corridor, her maid holding the door for us. Somehow, learning that my aunt’s ability to hang in the air like smoke was physically, indeed mechanically, derived made it more disturbing than ever. When she asked why I was so quiet, I told her and added that I had been under the impression that no one had yet succeeded in producing working antigravity.
“And you think I have? Then why wouldn’t I use it to get to your play?”
“I suppose because you don’t want it to be seen.”
“Nonsense. It’s a regular prosthetic device. You buy them at the surgical stores.” She twisted around in her seat until she could look up at me, her face so like my father’s, and her lifeless legs like the sticks David and I used as little boys when, doing parlor magic, we wished Mr. Million to believe us lying prone when we were in fact crouched beneath our own supposed figures. “Puts out a super-conducting field, then induces eddy currents in the reinforcing rods in the floors. The flux of the induced currents opposes the machine’s own flux and I float, more or less. Lean forward to go forward; straighten up to stop. You look relieved.”
“I am. I suppose antigravity frightened me.”
“I used the iron banister when I went down the stairs with you once; it has a very convenient coil shape.”
Our play went smoothly enough, with predictable cheers from members of the audience who were, or at least wished to be thought, descended from the old French aristocracy. The audience, in fact, was better than we had dared hope, five hundred or so besides the inevitable sprinkling of pickpockets, police, and street-walkers. The incident I most vividly recall came toward the latter half of the first act, when for ten minutes or so I sat with few lines at a desk, listening to my fellow actors. Our stage faced the west, and the setting sun had left the sky a welter of lurid color: purple-reds striped gold and flame and black. Against this violent ground, which might have been the massed banners of Hell, there began to appear, in ones and twos, like the elongate shadows of fantastic grenadiers
