The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I hope you’re right,” Tanner said.

  “You’ll see.”

  For a long moment Tanner stared in silence at the holotank, where the image of Pizarro had been.

  “Okay,” said Tanner finally. “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m sounding like the ignoramus layman that I am. I’ll take it on faith that you’ll be able to keep your phantoms in their boxes.”

  “We will,” Richardson said.

  “Let’s hope so. All right,” said Tanner. “So what’s your next move?”

  Richardson looked puzzled. “My next move?”

  “With this project. Where does it go from here?”

  Hesitantly Richardson said, “There’s no formal proposal yet. We thought we’d wait until we had approval from you on the initial phase of the work, and then—”

  “How does this sound?” Tanner asked. “I’d like to see you start in on another simulation right away.”

  “Well—yes, yes, of course—”

  “And when you’ve got him worked up, Lew, would it be feasible for you to put him right there in the tank with Pizarro?”

  Richardson looked startled. “To have a sort of dialog with him, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose we could do that,” Richardson said cautiously. “Should do that. Yes. Yes. A very interesting suggestion, as a matter of fact.” He ventured an uneasy smile. Up till now Tanner had kept in the background of this project, a mere management functionary, an observer, virtually an outsider. This was something new, his interjecting himself into the planning process, and plainly Richardson didn’t know what to make of it. Tanner watched him fidget. After a little pause Richardson said, “Was there anyone particular you had in mind for us to try next?”

  “Is that new parallax thing of yours ready to try?” Tanner asked. “The one that’s supposed to compensate for time distortion and myth contamination?”

  “Just about. But we haven’t tested—”

  “Good,” Tanner said. “Here’s your chance. What about trying for Socrates?”

  * * *

  There was billowing whiteness below him, and on every side, as though all the world were made of fleece. He wondered if it might be snow. That was not something he was really familiar with. It snowed once in a great while in Athens, yes, but usually only a light dusting that melted in the morning sun. Of course he had seen snow aplenty when he had been up north in the war, at Potidaea, in the time of Pericles. But that had been long ago; and that stuff, as best he remembered it, had not been much like this. There was no quality of coldness about the whiteness that surrounded him now. It could just as readily be great banks of clouds.

  But what would clouds be doing below him? Clouds, he thought, are mere vapor, air and water, no substance to them at all. Their natural place was overhead. Clouds that gathered at one’s feet had no true quality of cloudness about them.

  Snow that had no coldness? Clouds that had no buoyancy? Nothing in this place seemed to possess any quality that was proper to itself in this place, including himself. He seemed to be walking, but his feet touched nothing at all. It was more like moving through air. But how could one move in the air? Aristophanes, in that mercilessly mocking play of his, had sent him floating through the clouds suspended in a basket, and made him say things like, “I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.” That was Aristophanes’ way of playing with him, and he had not been seriously upset, though his friends had been very hurt on his behalf. Still, that was only a play.

  This felt real, insofar as it felt like anything at all.

  Perhaps he was dreaming, and the nature of his dream was that he thought he was really doing the things he had done in Aristophanes’ play. What was that lovely line? “I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the same nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven.” Good old Aristophanes! Nothing was sacred to him! Except, of course, those things that were truly sacred, such as wisdom, truth, virtue. “I would have discovered nothing if I had remained on the ground and pondered from below the things that are above: for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It’s the same way with watercress.” And Socrates began to laugh.

  He held his hands before him and studied them, the short sturdy fingers, the thick powerful wrists. His hands, yes. His old plain hands that had stood him in good stead all his life, when he had worked as a stonemason as his father had, when he had fought in his city’s wars, when he had trained at the gymnasium. But now when he touched them to his face he felt nothing. There should be a chin here, a forehead, yes, a blunt stubby nose, thick lips; but there was nothing. He was touching air. He could put his hand right through the place where his face should be. He could put one hand against the other, and press with all his might, and feel nothing.

  This is a very strange place indeed, he thought.

  Perhaps it is that place of pure forms that young Plato liked to speculate about, where everything is perfect and nothing is quite real. Those are ideal clouds all around me, not real ones. This is ideal air upon which I walk. I myself am the ideal Socrates, liberated from my coarse ordinary body. Could it be? Well, maybe so. He stood for a while, considering that possibility. The thought came to him that this might be the life after life, in which case he might meet some of the gods, if there were any gods in the first place, and if he could manage to find them. I would like that, he thought. Perhaps they would be willing to speak with me. Athena would discourse with me on wisdom, or Hermes on speed, or Ares on the nature of courage, or Zeus on—well, whatever Zeus cared to speak on. Of course I would seem to be the merest fool to them, but that would be all right: anyone who expects to hold discourse with the gods as though he were their equal is a fool. I have no such illusion. If there are gods at all, surely they are far superior to me in all respects, for otherwise why would men regard them as gods?

  Of course he had serious doubts that the gods existed at all. But if they did, it was reasonable to think that they might be found in a place such as this.

  He looked up. The sky was radiant with brilliant golden light. He took a deep breath and smiled and set out across the fleecy nothingness of this airy world to see if he could find the gods.

  * * *

  Tanner said, “What do you think now? Still so pessimistic?”

  “It’s too early to say,” said Richardson, looking glum.

  “He looks like Socrates, doesn’t he?”

  “That was the easy part. We’ve got plenty of descriptions of Socrates that came down from people who knew him, the flat wide nose, the bald head, the thick lips, the short neck. A standard Socrates face that everybody recognizes, just as they do Sherlock Holmes, or Don Quixote. So that’s how we made him look. It doesn’t signify anything important. It’s what’s going on inside his head that’ll determine whether we really have Socrates.”

  “He seems calm and good-humored as he wanders around in there. The way a philosopher should.”

  “Pizarro seemed just as much of a philosopher when we turned him loose in the tank.”

  “Pizarro may be just as much of a philosopher,” Tanner said. “Neither man’s the sort who’d be likely to panic if he found himself in some mysterious place.” Richardson’s negativism was beginning to bother him. It was as if the two men had exchanged places: Richardson now uncertain of the range and power of his own program, Tanner pushing the way on and on toward bigger and better things.

  Bleakly Richardson said, “I’m still pretty skeptical. We’ve tried the new parallax filters, yes. But I’m afraid we’re going to run into the same problem the French did with Don Quixote, and that we did with Holmes and Moses and Caesar. There’s too much contamination of the data by myth and fantasy. The Socrates who has come down to us is as much fictional as real, or maybe all fictional. For all we know, Plato made up everything we think we know about him, the same way Conan Doyle made up Holmes. And what we’re going to get, I’m af
raid, will be something second-hand, something lifeless, something lacking in the spark of self-directed intelligence that we’re after.”

  “But the new filters—”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

  Tanner shook his head stubbornly. “Holmes and Don Quixote are fiction through and through. They exist in only one dimension, constructed for us by their authors. You cut through the distortions and fantasies of later readers and commentators and all you find underneath is a made-up character. A lot of Socrates may have been invented by Plato for his own purposes, but a lot wasn’t. He really existed. He took an actual part in civic activities in fifth-century Athens. He figures in books by a lot of other contemporaries of his besides Plato’s dialogues. That gives us the parallax you’re looking for, doesn’t it—the view of him from more than one viewpoint?”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe not. We got nowhere with Moses. Was he fictional?”

  “Who can say? All you had to go by was the Bible. And a ton of Biblical commentary, for whatever that was worth. Not much, apparently.”

  “And Caesar? You’re not going to tell me that Caesar wasn’t real,” said Richardson. “But what we have of him is evidently contaminated with myth. When we synthesized him we got nothing but a caricature, and I don’t have to remind you how fast even that broke down into sheer gibberish.”

  “Not relevant,” Tanner said. “Caesar was early in the project. You know much more about what you’re doing now. I think this is going to work.”

  Richardson’s dogged pessimism, Tanner decided, must be a defense mechanism, designed to insulate himself against the possibility of a new failure. Socrates, after all, hadn’t been Richardson’s own choice. And this was the first time he had used these new enhancement methods, the parallax program that was the latest refinement of the process.

  Tanner looked at him. Richardson remained silent.

  “Go on,” Tanner said. “Bring up Pizarro and let the two of them talk to each other. Then we’ll find out what sort of Socrates you’ve conjured up here.”

  * * *

  Once again there was a disturbance in the distance, a little dark blur on the pearly horizon, a blotch, a flaw in the gleaming whiteness. Another demon is arriving, Pizarro thought. Or perhaps it is the same one as before, the American, the one who liked to show himself only as a face, with short hair and no beard.

  But as this one drew closer Pizarro saw that he was different from the last, short and stocky, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He was nearly bald and his thick beard was coarse and unkempt. He looked old, at least sixty, maybe sixty-five. He looked very ugly, too, with bulging eyes and a flat nose that had wide, flaring nostrils, and a neck so short that his oversized head seemed to sprout straight from his trunk. All he wore was a thin, ragged brown robe. His feet were bare.

  “You, there,” Pizarro called out. “You! Demon! Are you also an American, demon?”

  “Your pardon. An Athenian, did you say?”

  “American is what I said. That’s what the last one was. Is that where you come from too, demon? America?”

  A shrug. “No, I think not. I am of Athens.” There was a curious mocking twinkle in the demon’s eyes.

  “A Greek? This demon is a Greek?”

  “I am of Athens,” the ugly one said again. “My name is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus. I could not tell you what a Greek is, so perhaps I may be one, but I think not, unless a Greek is what you call a man of Athens.” He spoke in a slow, plodding way, like one who was exceedingly stupid. Pizarro had sometimes met men like this before, and in his experience they were generally not as stupid as they wanted to be taken for. He felt caution rising in him. “And I am no demon, but just a plain man: very plain, as you can easily see.”

  Pizarro snorted. “You like to chop words, do you?”

  “It is not the worst of amusements, my friend,” said the other, and put his hands together behind his back in the most casual way, and stood there calmly, smiling, looking off into the distance, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  * * *

  “Well?” Tanner said. “Do we have Socrates or not? I say that’s the genuine article there.”

  Richardson looked up and nodded. He seemed relieved and quizzical both at once. “So far so good, I have to say. He’s coming through real and true.”

  “Yes.”

  “We may actually have worked past the problem of information contamination that ruined some of the earlier simulations. We’re not getting any of the signal degradation we encountered then.”

  “He’s some character, isn’t he?” Tanner said. “I liked the way he just walked right up to Pizarro without the slightest sign of uneasiness. He’s not at all afraid of him.”

  “Why should he be?” Richardson asked.

  “Wouldn’t you? If you were walking along through God knows what kind of unearthly place, not knowing where you were or how you got there, and suddenly you saw a ferocious-looking bastard like Pizarro standing in front of you wearing full armor and carrying a sword—” Tanner shook his head. “Well, maybe not. He’s Socrates, after all, and Socrates wasn’t afraid of anything except boredom.”

  “And Pizarro’s just a simulation. Nothing but software.”

  “So you’ve been telling me all along. But Socrates doesn’t know that.”

  “True,” Richardson said. He seemed lost in thought a moment. “Perhaps there is some risk.”

  “Huh?”

  “If our Socrates is anything like the one in Plato, and he surely ought to be, then he’s capable of making a considerable pest of himself. Pizarro may not care for Socrates’ little verbal games. If he doesn’t feel like playing, I suppose there’s a theoretical possibility that he’ll engage in some sort of aggressive response.”

  That took Tanner by surprise. He swung around and said, “Are you telling me that there’s some way he can harm Socrates?”

  “Who knows?” said Richardson. “In the real world one program can certainly crash another one. Maybe one simulation can be dangerous to another one. This is all new territory for all of us, Harry. Including the people in the tank.”

  * * *

  The tall grizzled-looking man said, scowling, “You tell me you’re an Athenian, but not a Greek. What sense am I supposed to make of that? I could ask Pedro de Candia, I guess, who is a Greek but not an Athenian. But he’s not here. Perhaps you’re just a fool, eh? Or you think I am.”

  “I have no idea what you are. Could it be that you are a god?”

  “A god?”

  “Yes,” Socrates said. He studied the other impassively. His face was harsh, his gaze was cold. “Perhaps you are Ares. You have a fierce warlike look about you, and you wear armor, but not such armor as I have ever seen. This place is so strange that it might well be the abode of the gods, and that could be a god’s armor you wear, I suppose. If you are Ares, then I salute you with the respect that is due you. I am Socrates of Athens, the stonemason’s son.”

  “You talk a lot of nonsense. I don’t know your Ares.”

  “Why, the god of war, of course! Everyone knows that. Except barbarians, that is. Are you a barbarian, then? You sound like one, I must say—but then, I seem to sound like a barbarian myself, and I’ve spoken the tongue of Hellas all my life. There are many mysteries here, indeed.”

  * * *

  “Your language problem again,” Tanner said. “Couldn’t you even get classical Greek to come out right? Or are they both speaking Spanish to each other?”

  “Pizarro thinks they’re speaking Spanish. Socrates thinks they’re speaking Greek. And of course the Greek is off. We don’t know how anything that was spoken before the age of recordings sounded. All we can do is guess.”

  “But can’t you—”

  “Shhh,” Richardson said.

  * * *

  Pizarro said, “I may be a bastard, but I’m no barbarian, fellow, so curb your tongue. And let’s have no more blasphemy out of you either.”

  “If
I blaspheme, forgive me. It is in innocence. Tell me where I trespass, and I will not do it again.”

  “This crazy talk of gods. Of my being a god. I’d expect a heathen to talk like that, but not a Greek. But maybe you’re a heathen kind of Greek, and not to be blamed. It’s heathens who see gods everywhere. Do I look like a god to you? I am Francisco Pizarro, of Trujillo in Estremadura, the son of the famous soldier Gonzalo Pizarro, colonel of infantry, who served in the wars of Gonzalo de Cordova whom men call the Great Captain. I have fought some wars myself.”

  “Then you are not a god but simply a soldier? Good. I too have been a soldier. I am more at ease with soldiers than with gods, as most people are, I would think.”

  “A soldier? You?” Pizarro smiled. This shabby ordinary little man, more bedraggled-looking than any self-respecting groom would be, a soldier? “In which wars?”

  “The wars of Athens. I fought at Potidaea, where the Corinthians were making trouble, and withholding the tribute that was due us. It was very cold there, and the siege was long and bleak, but we did our duty. I fought again some years later at Delium against the Boeotians. Laches was our general then, but it went badly for us, and we did our best fighting in retreat. And then,” Socrates said, “when Brasidas was in Amphipolis, and they sent Cleon to drive him out, I—”

  “Enough,” said Pizarro with an impatient wave of his hand. “These wars are unknown to me.” A private soldier, a man of the ranks, no doubt. “Well, then this is the place where they send dead soldiers, I suppose.”

  “Are we dead, then?”

  “Long ago. There’s an Alfonso who’s king, and a Pius who’s pope, and you wouldn’t believe their numbers. Pius the Sixteenth, I think the demon said. And the American said also that it is the year 2130. The last year that I can remember was 1539. What about you?”

  The one who called himself Socrates shrugged again. “In Athens we use a different reckoning. But let us say, for argument’s sake, that we are dead. I think that is very likely, considering what sort of place this seems to be, and how airy I find my body to be. So we have died, and this is the life after life. I wonder: is this a place where virtuous men are sent, or those who were not virtuous? Or do all men go to the same place after death, whether they were virtuous or not? What would you say?”