“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 their 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?”
“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 th
at 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.”
“And you to me.”
“Yet I think we are living some other kind of life. Here, give me your hand. Can you feel mine against yours?”
“No. I can’t feel anything.”
“Nor I. Yet I see two hands clasping. Two old men standing on a cloud, clasping hands.” Socrates laughed. “What a great rogue you are, Pizarro!”
“Yes, of course. But do you know something, Socrates? You are too. A windy old rogue. I like you. There were moments when you were driving me crazy with all your chatter, but you amused me too. Were you really a soldier?”
“When my city asked me, yes.”
“For a soldier, you’re damned innocent about the way the world works, I have to say. But I guess I can teach you a thing or too.”
“Will you?”
“Gladly,” said Pizarro.
“I would be in your debt,” Socrates said.
“Take Atahuallpa,” Pizarro said. “How can I make you understand why I had to kill him? There weren’t even two hundred of us, and twenty-four millions of them, and his word was law, and once he was gone they’d have no one to command them. So of course we had to get rid of him if we wanted to conquer them. And so we did, and then they fell.”
“How simple you make it seem.”
“Simple is what it was. Listen, old man, he would have died sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? This way I made his death useful: to God, to the Church, to Spain. And to Francisco Pizarro. Can you understand that?”
“I think so,” said Socrates. “But do you think King Atahuallpa did?”
“Any king would understand such things.”
“Then he should have killed you the moment you set foot in his land.”
“Unless God meant us to conquer him, and allowed him to understand that. Yes. Yes, that must have been what happened.”
“Perhaps he is in this place too, and we could ask him,” said Socrates.
Pizarro’s eyes brightened. “Mother of God, yes! A good idea! And if he didn’t understand, why, I’ll try to explain it to him. Maybe you’ll help me. You know how to talk, how to move words around and around. What do you say? Would you help me?”
“If we meet him, I would like to talk with him,” Socrates said. “I would indeed like to know if he agrees with you on the subject of the usefulness of his being killed by you.”
Grinning, Pizarro said, “Slippery, you are! But I like you. I like you very much. Come. Let’s go look for Atahuallpa.”
TO THE PROMISED LAND
As is true of many of my stories in the past couple of decades, this one was initiated by a request from outside. Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg were editing an anthology of parallel-world stories called What Might Have Been, and invited me to contribute. Each story was supposed to deal with the consequences of altering one major event of world history.
I worked backwards to generate my story idea, first imagining a variant world, then trying to explain what alteration of history had summoned it into being. It was the autumn of 1987. I had been reading in the history of Imperial Rome—no particular reason, just recreational reading. So Rome was on my mind when the request for a story arrived. What if the Roman Empire hadn’t fallen to the barbarians in the fifth century A.D., I asked myself, but had survived and endured into our own era?
All right. A good starting point. But to what cause was I going to attribute the fall of Rome?
To the rise of Christianity, I told myself. Edward Gibbon had made a convincing case for that in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—convincing to me, at any rate. One could put forth all sorts of other reasons for Rome’s fall, such as the tendency to hire mercenary soldiers of barbarian ancestry for the army; but for the sake of the speculation I stuck with the classic Gibbon theory that the socialist practices of early Christianity, spreading upward until they reached the highest levels of the Empire, had so sapped the Imperial virtues of the Romans that they were easy prey to their enemies.
How, in my story, was I going to prevent Christianity from developing and taking over Rome, then?
Well, I could have had Jesus die of measles at the age of five. But that was too obvious and too trivial. Besides, how would I ever communicate that to the reader without simply dragging it in by brute force, heedless of the irrelevance of the death of one small boy to the context of the times? (“Meanwhile, in Nazareth, the carpenter Joseph and his wife Mary were mourning the death of their little boy Jesus…”)
No. Even if Jesus had died in childhood, some other prophet might well have arisen in Palestine and filled his historical niche. I had to take the problem back a stage. If the monotheistic Jews had never reached Palestine in the first place, there’d have been no Jesus or Jesus-surrogate figure in the Middle East to give rise to the troublesome and ultimately destructive new religion. Well, then, should I suppose the Jews had gone somewhere else when they made their Exodus from Egypt? Have them build their Holy Land down in the Congo, say, safely beyond contact with Imperial Rome? Have them sail off to China? Settle in Australia? No, too far-fetched, all of them. The best idea was simply to leave them in Egypt, a backwater province of the Roman Empire. The Exodus must have miscarried, somehow. Pharaoh’s soldiers had caught up with Moses and his people before they reached the Red Sea. So the Philistines had remained in possession of the land that would otherwise have become the Kingdom of Israel, and the Jews would have continued to be an unimportant sect in Egypt, serving as scribes and such.
There it was. No Exodus, no Jewish population in Palestine, no Jesus, no Christianity in Europe. Now come up to the alternative-world equivalent of our twentieth century. The scene is Egypt; the narrator is a Jewish historian; a new Moses has arisen, planning a very modern kind of Exodus. Everything was in place and I had my story. I wrote it in November, 1987 and, since I was allowed to place the story in a magazine before it appeared in the Benford-Greenberg anthology, I sent it to Ellen Datlow, who bought it for Omni for her issue of May, 1989.
But, as I sometimes tend to do, I had got a little carried away doing the background details, and Ellen asked for four or five pages of cuts. I would sooner sell my cats into slavery than let anybody else cut my work without my seeing the result, but I’m perfectly willing to listen to an editor’s suggestions. Ellen, during the course of a very long phone call, pointed out all sorts of places where the story would benefit from a little trimming. Here and there I stuck to my text, but mainly I found myself in agreement with her, and slashed away. I’m glad I did. Eventually, working backward piece by piece from this story over the next fourteen years, I told the entire story of my alternative Roman Empire in my book Roma Eterna, which was published in 2003.
When “To the Promised Land” appeared later in the What Might Have Been anthology, it was illustrated on the book’
s cover by a moody, brooding painting of the twentieth-century Memphis that I had created. The artist’s vision was of something a little like the world of the film Blade Runner, plus sphinxes, Egyptian temples, and a giant pyramid-shaped hotel next to the downtown freeway. A man named Paul Swendsen painted it. I think it’s a marvel.
——————
They came for me at high noon, the hour of Apollo, when only a crazy man would want to go out into the desert. I was hard at work and in no mood to be kidnapped. But to get them to listen to reason was like trying to get the Nile to flow south. They weren’t reasonable men. Their eyes had a wild metallic sheen, and they held their jaws and mouths clamped in that special constipated way that fanatics like to affect. As they swaggered about in my little cluttered study, poking at the tottering stacks of books and pawing through the manuscript of my nearly finished history of the collapse of the Empire, they were like two immense irresistible forces, as remote and terrifying as gods of old Aiguptos come to life. I felt helpless before them.
The older and taller one called himself Eleazar. To me he was Horus, because of his great hawk nose. He looked like an Aiguptian and he was wearing the white linen robe of an Aiguptian. The other, squat and heavily muscled, with a baboon face worthy of Thoth, told me he was Leonardo di Filippo, which is of course a Roman name, and he had an oily Roman look about him. But I knew he was no more Roman than I am. Nor the other, Aiguptian. Both of them spoke in Hebrew, and with an ease that no outsider could ever attain. These were two Israelites, men of my own obscure tribe. Perhaps di Filippo had been born to a father not of the faith, or perhaps he simply liked to pretend that he was one of the world’s masters and not one of God’s forgotten people. I will never know.
Eleazar stared at me, at the photograph of me on the jacket of my account of the Wars of the Reunification, and at me again, as though trying to satisfy himself that I really was Nathan Ben-Simeon. The picture was fifteen years old. My beard had been black then. He tapped the book and pointed questioningly to me, and I nodded. “Good,” he said. He told me to pack a suitcase, fast, as though I were going down to Alexandria for a weekend holiday. “Moshe sent us to get you,” he said. “Moshe wants you. Moshe needs you. He has important work for you.”
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark Page 8