The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I haven’t figured that out yet,” said Pizarro.

  “Well, were you virtuous in your life, or not?”

  “Did I sin, you mean?”

  “Yes, we could use that word.”

  “Did I sin, he wants to know,” said Pizarro, amazed. “He asks, Was I a sinner? Did I live a virtuous life? What business is that of his?”

  “Humor me,” said Socrates. “For the sake of the argument, if you will, allow me a few small questions—”

  * * *

  “So it’s starting,” Tanner said. “You see? You really did do it! Socrates is drawing him into a dialog!”

  Richardson’s eyes were glowing. “He is, yes. How marvelous this is, Harry!”

  “Socrates is going to talk rings around him.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Richardson said.

  * * *

  “I gave as good as I got,” said Pizarro. “If I was injured, I gave injury back. There’s no sin in that. It’s only common sense. A man does what is necessary to survive and to protect his place in the world. Sometimes I might forget a fast-day, yes, or use the Lord’s name in vain—those are sins, I suppose, Fray Vicente was always after me for things like that—but does that make me a sinner? I did my penances as soon as I could find time for them. It’s a sinful world and I’m no different from anyone else, so why be harsh on me? Eh? God made me as I am. I’m done in His image. And I have faith in His Son.”

  “So you are a virtuous man, then?”

  “I’m not a sinner, at any rate. As I told you, if ever I sinned I did my contrition, which made it the same as if the sin hadn’t ever happened.”

  “Indeed,” said Socrates. “Then you are a virtuous man and I have come to a good place. But I want to be absolutely sure. Tell me again: is your conscience completely clear?”

  “What are you, a confessor?”

  “Only an ignorant man seeking understanding. Which you can provide, by taking part with me in the exploration. If I have come to the place of virtuous men, then I must have been virtuous myself when I lived. Ease my mind, therefore, and let me know whether there is anything on your soul that you regret having done.”

  Pizarro stirred uneasily. “Well,” he said, “I killed a king.”

  “A wicked one? An enemy of your city?”

  “No. He was wise and kind.”

  “Then you have reason for regret indeed. For surely that is a sin, to kill a wise king.”

  “But he was a heathen.”

  “A what?”

  “He denied God.”

  “He denied his own god?” said Socrates. “Then perhaps it was not so wrong to kill him.”

  “No. He denied mine. He preferred his own. And so he was a heathen. And all his people were heathens, since they followed his way. That could not be. They were at risk of eternal damnation because they followed him. I killed him for the sake of his people’s souls. I killed him out of the love of God.”

  “But would you not say that all gods are the reflection of the one God?”

  Pizarro considered that. “In a way, that’s true, I suppose.”

  “And is the service of God not itself godly?”

  “How could it be anything but godly, Socrates?”

  “And you would say that one who serves his god faithfully according to the teachings of his god is behaving in a godly way?”

  Frowning, Pizarro said, “Well—if you look at at that way, yes—”

  “Then I think the king you killed was a godly man, and by killing him you sinned against God.”

  “Wait a minute!”

  “But think of it: by serving his god he must also have served yours, for any servant of a god is a servant of the true God who encompasses all our imagined gods.”

  “No,” said Pizarro sullenly. “How could he have been a servant of God? He knew nothing of Jesus. He had no understanding of the Trinity. When the priest offered him the Bible, he threw it to the ground in scorn. He was a heathen, Socrates. And so are you. You don’t know anything of these matters at all, if you think that Atahuallpa was godly. Or if you think you’re going to get me to think so.”

  “Indeed I have very little knowledge of anything. But you say he was a wise man, and kind?”

  “In his heathen way.”

  “And a good king to his people?”

  “So it seemed. They were a thriving people when I found them.”

  “Yet he was not godly.”

  “I told you. He had never had the sacraments, and in fact he spurned them right up until the moment of his death, when he accepted baptism. Then he came to be godly. But by then the sentence of death was upon him and it was too late for anything to save him.”

  “Baptism? Tell me what that is, Pizarro.”

  “A sacrament.”

  “And that is?”

  “A holy rite. Done with holy water, by a priest. It admits one to Holy Mother Church, and brings forgiveness from sin both original and actual, and gives the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

  “You must tell me more about these things another time. So you made this good king godly by this baptism? And then you killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he was godly when you killed him. Surely, then, to kill him was a sin.”

  “He had to die, Socrates!”

  “And why was that?” asked the Athenian.

  * * *

  “Socrates is closing in for the kill,” Tanner said. “Watch this!”

  “I’m watching. But there isn’t going to be any kill,” said Richardson. “Their basic assumptions are too far apart.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Will I?”

  * * *

  Pizarro said, “I’ve already told you why he had to die. It was because his people followed him in all things. And so they worshipped the sun, because he said the sun was God. Their souls would have gone to hell if we had allowed them to continue that way.”

  “But if they followed him in all things,” said Socrates, “then surely they would have followed him into baptism, and become godly, and thus done that which was pleasing to you and to your god! Is that not so?”

  “No,” said Pizarro, twisting his fingers in his beard.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because the king agreed to be baptized only after we had sentenced him to death. He was in the way, don’t you see? He was an obstacle to our power! So we had to get rid of him. He would never have led his people to the truth of his own free will. That was why we had to kill him. But we didn’t want to kill his soul as well as his body, so we said to him, Look, Atahuallpa, we’re going to put you to death, but if you let us baptize you we’ll strangle you quickly, and if you don’t we’ll burn you alive and it’ll be very slow. So of course he agreed to be baptized, and we strangled him. What choice was there for anybody? He had to die. He still didn’t believe the true faith, as we all well knew. Inside his head he was as big a heathen as ever. But he died a Christian all the same.”

  “A what?”

  “A Christian! A Christian! One who believes in Jesus Christ the Son of God!”

  “The son of God,” Socrates said, sounding puzzled. “And do Christians believe in God too, or only his son?”

  “What a fool you are!”

  “I would not deny that.”

  “There is God the Father, and God the Son, and then there is the Holy Spirit.”

  “Ah,” said Socrates. “And which one did your Atahuallpa believe in, then, when the strangler came for him?”

  “None of them.”

  “And yet he died a Christian? Without believing in any of your three gods? How is that?”

  “Because of the baptism,” said Pizarro in rising annoyance. “What does it matter what he believed? The priest sprinkled the water on him! The priest said the words! If the rite is properly performed, the soul is saved regardless of what the man understands or believes! How else could you baptize an infant? An infant understands nothing and believes nothing�
��but he becomes a Christian when the water touches him!”

  “Much of this is mysterious to me,” said Socrates. “But I see that you regard the king you killed as godly as well as wise, because he was washed by the water your gods require, and so you killed a good king who now lived in the embrace of your gods because of the baptism. Which seems wicked to me; and so this cannot be the place where the virtuous are sent after death, so it must be that I too was not virtuous, or else that I have misunderstood everything about this place and why we are in it.”

  “Damn you, are you trying to drive me crazy?” Pizarro roared, fumbling at the hilt of his sword. He drew it and waved it around in fury. “If you don’t shut your mouth I’ll cut you in thirds!”

  * * *

  “Uh-oh,” Tanner said. “So much for the dialectical method.”

  * * *

  Socrates said mildly, “It isn’t my intention to cause you any annoyance, my friend. I’m only trying to learn a few things.”

  “You are a fool!”

  “That is certainly true, as I have already acknowledged several times. Well, if you mean to strike me with your sword, go ahead. But I don’t think it’ll accomplish very much.”

  “Damn you,” Pizarro muttered. He stared at his sword and shook his head. “No. No, it won’t do any good, will it? It would go through you like air. But you’d just stand there and let me try to cut you down, and not even blink, right? Right?” He shook his head. “And yet you aren’t stupid. You argue like the shrewdest priest I’ve ever known.”

  “In truth I am stupid,” said Socrates. “I know very little at all. But I strive constantly to attain some understanding of the world, or at least to understand something of myself.”

  Pizarro glared at him. “No,” he said. “I won’t buy this false pride of yours. I have a little understanding of people myself, old man. I’m on to your game.”

  “What game is that, Pizarro?”

  “I can see your arrogance. I see that you believe you’re the wisest man in the world, and that it’s your mission to go around educating poor sword-waving fools like me. And you pose as a fool to disarm your adversaries before you humiliate them.”

  * * *

  “Score one for Pizarro,” Richardson said. “He’s wise to Socrates’ little tricks, all right.”

  “Maybe he’s read some Plato,” Tanner suggested.

  “He was illiterate.”

  “That was then. This is now.”

  “Not guilty,” said Richardson. “He’s operating on peasant shrewdness alone, and you damned well know it.”

  “I wasn’t being serious,” Tanner said. He leaned forward, peering toward the holotank. “God, what an astonishing thing this is, listening to them going at it. They seem absolutely real.”

  “They are,” said Richardson.

  * * *

  “No, Pizarro, I am not wise at all,” Socrates said. “But, stupid as I am, it may be that I am not the least wise man who ever lived.”

  “You think you’re wiser than I am, don’t you?”

  “How can I say? First tell me how wise you are.”

  “Wise enough to begin my life as a bastard tending pigs and finish it as Captain-General of Peru.”

  “Ah, then you must be very wise.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Yet you killed a wise king because he wasn’t wise enough to worship God the way you wished him to. Was that so wise of you, Pizarro? How did his people take it, when they found out that their king had been killed?”

  “They rose in rebellion against us. They destroyed their own temples and palaces, and hid their gold and silver from us, and burned their bridges, and fought us bitterly.”

  “Perhaps you could have made some better use of him by not killing him, do you think?”

  “In the long run we conquered them and made them Christians. It was what we intended to accomplish.”

  “But the same thing might have been accomplished in a wiser way?”

  “Perhaps,” said Pizarro grudgingly. “Still, we accomplished it. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? We did what we set out to do. If there was a better way, so be it. Angels do things perfectly. We were no angels, but we achieved what we came for, and so be it, Socrates. So be it.”

  * * *

  “I’d call that one a draw,” said Tanner.

  “Agreed.”

  “It’s a terrific game they’re playing.”

  “I wonder who we can use to play it next,” said Richardson.

  “I wonder what we can do with this besides using it to play games,” said Tanner.

  * * *

  “Let me tell you a story,” said Socrates. “The oracle at Delphi once said to a friend of mine, ‘There is no man wiser than Socrates,’ but I doubted that very much, and it troubled me to hear the oracle saying something that I knew was so far from the truth. So I decided to look for a man who was obviously wiser than I was. There was a politician in Athens who was famous for his wisdom, and I went to him and questioned him about many things. After I had listened to him for a time, I came to see that though many people, and most of all he himself, thought that he was wise, yet he was not wise. He only imagined that he was wise. So I realized that I must be wiser than he. Neither of us knew anything that was really worthwhile, but he knew nothing and thought that he knew, whereas I neither knew anything nor thought that I did. At least on one point, then, I was wiser than he: I didn’t think that I knew what I didn’t know.”

  “Is this intended to mock me, Socrates?”

  “I feel only the deepest respect for you, friend Pizarro. But let me continue. I went to other wise men, and they too, though sure of their wisdom, could never give me a clear answer to anything. Those whose reputations for wisdom were the highest seemed to have the least of it. I went to the great poets and playwrights. There was wisdom in their works, for the gods had inspired them, but that did not make them wise, though they thought that it had. I went to the stonemasons and potters and other craftsmen. They were wise in their own skills, but most of them seemed to think that that made them wise in everything, which did not appear to be the case. And so it went. I was unable to find anyone who showed true wisdom. So perhaps the oracle was right: that although I am an ignorant man, there is no man wiser than I am. But oracles often are right without there being much value in it, for I think that all she was saying was that no man is wise at all, that wisdom is reserved for the gods. What do you say, Pizarro?”

  “I say that you are a great fool, and very ugly besides.”

  “You speak the truth. So, then, you are wise after all. And honest.”

  “Honest, you say? I won’t lay claim to that. Honesty’s a game for fools. I lied whenever I needed to. I cheated. I went back on my word. I’m not proud of that, mind you. It’s simply what you have to do to get on in the world. You think I wanted to tend pigs all my life? I wanted gold, Socrates! I wanted power over men! I wanted fame!”

  “And did you get those things?”

  “I got them all.”

  “And were they gratifying, Pizarro?”

  Pizarro gave Socrates a long look. Then he pursed his lips and spat.

  “They were worthless.”

  “Were they, do you think?”

  “Worthless, yes. I have no illusions about that. But still it was better to have had them than not. In the long run nothing has any meaning, old man. In the long run we’re all dead, the honest man and the villain, the king and the fool. Life’s a cheat. They tell us to strive, to conquer, to gain—and for what? What? For a few years of strutting around. Then it’s taken away, as if it had never been. A cheat, I say.” Pizarro paused. He stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before. “Did I say all that just now? Did I mean it?” He laughed. “Well, I suppose I did. Still, life is all there is, so you want as much of it as you can. Which means getting gold, and power, and fame.”

  “Which you had. And apparently have no longer. Friend Pizarro, where are we now?”<
br />
  “I wish I knew.”

  “So do I,” said Socrates soberly.

  * * *

  “He’s real,” Richardson said. “They both are. The bugs are out of the system and we’ve got something spectacular here. Not only is this going to be of value to scholars, I think it’s also going to be a tremendous entertainment gimmick, Harry.”

  “It’s going to be much more than that,” said Tanner in a strange voice.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Tanner said. “But I’m definitely on to something big. It just began to hit me a couple of minutes ago, and it hasn’t really taken shape yet. But it’s something that might change the whole goddamned world.”

  Richardson looked amazed and bewildered.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”

  Tanner said, “A new way of settling political disputes, maybe. What would you say to a kind of combat-at-arms between one nation and another? Like a medieval tournament, so to speak. With each side using champions that we simulate for them—the greatest minds of all the past, brought back and placed in competition—” He shook his head. “Something like that. It needs a lot of working out, I know. But it’s got possibilities.”

  “A medieval tournament—combat-at-arms, using simulations? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Verbal combat. Not actual jousts, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t see how—” Richardson began.

  “Neither do I, not yet. I wish I hadn’t even spoken of it.”

  “But—”

  “Later, Lew. Later. Let me think about it a little while more.”

  * * *

  “You don’t have any idea what this place is?” Pizarro said.

  “Not at all. But I certainly think this is no longer the world where we once dwelled. Are we dead, then? How can we say? You look alive to me.”