Robert Silverberg - Enter a Soldier. Later - Enter Another

“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.”