The break in contact was jolting. Tanner sat rigid, hands trembling, lips tightly clamped. Pizarro, in the holotank, was no more than a distant little streak of color now, no larger than his thumb, gesticulating amid the swirling clouds. The vitality of him, the arrogance, the fierce probing curiosity, the powerful hatreds and jealousies, the strength that had come from vast ventures recklessly conceived and desperately seen through to triumph, all the things that were Francisco Pizarro, all that Tanner had felt an instant before—all that had vanished at the flick of a finger.
After a moment or two Tanner felt the shock beginning to ease. He turned toward Richardson.
“What happened?”
“I had to pull you out of there. I didn’t want you telling him anything about how he died.”
“I don’t know how he died.”
“Well, neither does he, and I didn’t want to chance it that you did. There’s no predicting what sort of psychological impact that kind of knowledge might have on him.”
“You talk about him as though he’s alive.”
“Isn’t he?” Richardson said.
“If I said a thing like that, you’d tell me that I was being ignorant and unscientific.”
Richardson smiled faintly. “You’re right. But somehow I trust myself to know what I’m saying when I say that he’s alive. I know I don’t mean it literally and I’m not sure about you. What did you think of him, anyway?”
“He’s amazing,” Tanner said. “Really amazing. The strength of him—I could feel it pouring out at me in waves. And his mind! So quick, the way he picked up on everything. Guessing that he must be in the future. Wanting to know what number pope was in office. Wanting to see what America looked like. And the cockiness of him! Telling me that he’s not up to the conquest of America, that he might have tried for it instead of Peru a few years earlier, but not now, now he’s a little too old for that. Incredible! Nothing could faze him for long, even when he realized that he must have been dead for a long time. Wanting to know how he died, even!” Tanner frowned. “What age did you make him, anyway, when you put this program together?”
“About sixty. Five or six years after the conquest, and a year or two before he died. At the height of his power, that is.”
“I suppose you couldn’t have let him have any knowledge of his actual death. That way he’d be too much like some kind of a ghost.”
“That’s what we thought. We set the cutoff at a time when he had done everything that he had set out to do, when he was the complete Pizarro. But before the end. He didn’t need to know about that. Nobody does. That’s why I had to yank you, you see? In case you knew. And started to tell him.”
Tanner shook his head. “If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten it. How did it happen?”
“Exactly as he guessed: at the hands of his own comrades.”
“So he saw it coming.”
“At the age we made him, he already knew that a civil war had started in South America, that the conquistadores were quarreling over the division of the spoils. We built that much into him. He knows that his partner Almagro has turned against him and been beaten in battle, and that they’ve executed him. What he doesn’t know, but obviously can expect, is that Almagro’s friends are going to break into his house and try to kill him. He’s got it all figured out pretty much as it’s going to happen. As it did happen, I should say.”
“Incredible. To be that shrewd.”
“He was a son of a bitch, yes. But he was a genius too.”
“Was he, really? Or is it that you made him one when you set up the program for him?”
“All we put in were the objective details of his life, patterns of event and response. Plus an overlay of commentary by others, his contemporaries and later historians familiar with the record, providing an extra dimension of character density. Put in enough of that kind of stuff and apparently they add up to the whole personality. It isn’t my personality or that of anybody else who worked on this project, Harry. When you put in Pizarro’s set of events and responses you wind up getting Pizarro. You get the ruthlessness and you get the brilliance. Put in a different set, you get someone else. And what we’ve finally seen, this time, is that when we do our work right we get something out of the computer that’s bigger than the sum of what we put in.”
“Are you sure?”
Richardson said, “Did you notice that he complained about the Spanish that he thought you were speaking?”
“Yes. He said that it sounded strange, that nobody seemed to know how to speak proper Spanish any more. I didn’t quite follow that. Does the interface you built speak lousy Spanish?”
“Evidently it speaks lousy sixteenth-century Spanish,” Richardson said. “Nobody knows what sixteenth-century Spanish actually sounded like. We can only guess. Apparently we didn’t guess very well.”
“But how would he know? You synthesized him in the first place! If you don’t know how Spanish sounded in his time, how would he? All he should know about Spanish, or about anything, is what you put into him.”
“Exactly,” Richardson said.
“But that doesn’t make any sense, Lew!”
“He also said that the Spanish he heard himself speaking was no good, and that his own voice didn’t sound right to him either. That we had caused him to speak this way, thinking that was how he actually spoke, but we were wrong.”
“How could he possibly know what his voice really sounded like, if all he is is a simulation put together by people who don’t have the slightest notion of what his voice really—”
“I don’t have any idea,” said Richardson quietly. “But he does know.”
“Does he? Or is this just some diabolical Pizarro-like game that he’s playing to unsettle us, because that’s in his character as you devised it?”
“I think he does know,” Richardson said.
“Where’s he finding it out, then?”
“It’s there. We don’t know where, but he does. It’s somewhere in the data that we put through the permutation network, even if we don’t know it and even though we couldn’t find it now if we set out to look for it. He can find it. He can’t manufacture that kind of knowledge by magic, but he can assemble what look to us like seemingly irrelevant bits and come up with new information leading to a conclusion which is meaningful to him. That’s what we mean by artificial intelligence, Harry. We’ve finally got a program that works something like the human brain: by leaps of intuition so sudden and broad that they seem inexplicable and non-quantifiable, even if they really aren’t. We’ve fed in enough stuff so that he can assimilate a whole stew of ostensibly unrelated data and come up with new information. We don’t just have a ventriloquist’s dummy in that tank. We’ve got something that thinks it’s Pizarro and thinks like Pizarro and knows things that Pizarro knew and we don’t. Which means we’ve accomplished the qualitative jump in artificial intelligence capacity that we set out to achieve with this project. It’s awesome. I get shivers down my back when I think about it.”
“I do too,” Tanner said. “But not so much from awe as fear.”
“Fear?”
“Knowing now that he has capabilities beyond those he was programmed for, how can you be so absolutely certain that he can’t commandeer your network somehow and get himself loose?”
“It’s technically impossible. All he is is electromagnetic impulses. I can pull the plug on him any time I like. There’s nothing to panic over here. Believe me, Harry.”
“I’m trying to.”
“I can show you the schematics. We’ve got a phenomenal simulation in that computer, yes. But it’s still only a simulation. It isn’t a vampire, it isn’t a werewolf, it isn’t anything supernatural. It’s just the best damned computer simulation anyone’s ever made.”
“It makes me uneasy. He makes me uneasy.”
“He should. The power of the man, the indomitable nature of him—why do you think I summoned him up, Harry? He’s got something that we don’t understand in
this country any more. I want us to study him. I want us to try to learn what that kind of drive and determination is really like. Now that you’ve talked to him, now that you’ve touched his spirit, of course you’re shaken up by him. He radiates tremendous confidence. He radiates fantastic faith in himself. That kind of man can achieve anything he wants—even conquer the whole Inca empire with a hundred fifty men, or however many it was. But I’m not frightened of what we’ve put together here. And you shouldn’t be either. We should all be damned proud of it. You as well as the people on the technical side. And you will be, too.”
“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 in 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 to
ward 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 afraid, 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?”
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark Page 6