“I know. I designed them myself, from the old prints.”
“Do you think he’s seeing us right now? Can he do that?”
“All he is is software, Harry.”
“He seemed to know it when you expanded the image.”
Richardson shrugged. “He’s very good software. I tell you, he’s got autonomy, he’s got volition. He’s got an electronic mind, is what I’m saying. He may have perceived a transient voltage kick. But there are limits to his perceptions, all the same. I don’t think there’s any way that he can see anything that’s outside the holotank unless it’s fed to him in the form of data he can process, which hasn’t been done.”
“You don’t think? You aren’t sure?”
“Harry. Please.”
“This man conquered the entire enormous Incan empire with fifty soldiers, didn’t he?”
“In fact I believe it was more like a hundred and fifty.”
“Fifty, a hundred fifty, what’s the difference? Who knows what you’ve actually got here? What if you did an even better job than you suspect?”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is, I’m uneasy all of a sudden. For a long time I didn’t think this project was going to produce anything at all. Suddenly I’m starting to think that maybe it’s going to produce more than we can handle. I don’t want any of your goddamned simulations walking out of the tank and conquering us.”
Richardson turned to him. His face was flushed, but he was grinning. “Harry, Harry! For God’s sake! Five minutes ago you didn’t think we had anything at all here except a tiny picture that wasn’t even in focus. Now you’ve gone so far the other way that you’re imagining the worst kind of—”
“I see his eyes, Lew. I’m worried that his eyes see me.”
“Those aren’t real eyes you’re looking at. What you see is nothing but a graphics program projected into a holotank. There’s no visual capacity there as you understand the concept. His eyes will see you only if I want them to. Right now they don’t.”
“But you can make them see me?”
“I can make them see anything I want them to see. I created him, Harry.”
“With volition. With autonomy.”
“After all this time you start worrying now about these things?”
“It’s my neck on the line if something that you guys on the technical side make runs amok. This autonomy thing suddenly troubles me.”
“I’m still the one with the data gloves,” Richardson said. “I twitch my fingers and he dances. That’s not really Pizarro down there, remember. And that’s no Frankenstein monster either. It’s just a simulation. It’s just so much data, just a bunch of electromagnetic impulses that I can shut off with one movement of my pinkie.”
“Do it, then.”
“Shut him off? But I haven’t begun to show you—”
“Shut him off, and then turn him on,” Tanner said.
Richardson looked bothered. “If you say so, Harry.”
He moved a finger. The image of Pizarro vanished from the holotank. Swirling gray mists moved in it for a moment, and then all was white wool. Tanner felt a quick jolt of guilt, as though he had just ordered the execution of the man in the medieval armor. Richardson gestured again, and color flashed across the tank, and then Pizarro reappeared.
“I just wanted to see how much autonomy your little guy really has,” said Tanner. “Whether he was quick enough to head you off and escape into some other channel before you could cut his power.”
“You really don’t understand how this works at all, do you, Harry?”
“I just wanted to see,” said Tanner again, sullenly. After a moment’s silence he said, “Do you ever feel like God?”
“Like God?”
“You breathed life in. Life of a sort, anyway. But you breathed free will in, too. That’s what this experiment is all about, isn’t it? All your talk about volition and autonomy? You’re trying to recreate a human mind—which means to create it all over again—a mind that can think in its own special way, and come up with its own unique responses to situations, which will not necessarily be the responses that its programmers might anticipate, in fact almost certainly will not be, and which not might be all that desirable or beneficial, either, and you simply have to allow for that risk, just as God, once he gave free will to mankind, knew that He was likely to see all manner of evil deeds being performed by His creations as they exercised that free will—”
“Please, Harry—”
“Listen, is it possible for me to talk with your Pizarro?”
“Why?”
“By way of finding out what you’ve got there. To get some first-hand knowledge of what the project has accomplished. Or you could say I just want to test the quality of the simulation. Whatever. I’d feel more a part of this thing, more aware of what it’s all about in here, if I could have some direct contact with him. Would it be all right if I did that?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Do I have to talk to him in Spanish?”
“In any language you like. There’s an interface, after all. He’ll think it’s his own language coming in, no matter what, sixteenth-century Spanish. And he’ll answer you in what seems like Spanish to him, but you’ll hear it in English.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“And you don’t mind if I make contact with him?”
“Whatever you like.”
“It won’t upset his calibration, or anything?”
“It won’t do any harm at all, Harry.”
“Fine. Let me talk to him, then.”
There was a disturbance in the air ahead, a shifting, a swirling, like a little whirlwind. Pizarro halted and watched it for a moment, wondering what was coming next. A demon arriving to torment him, maybe. Or an angel. Whatever it was, he was ready for it.
Then a voice out of the whirlwind said, in that same comically exaggerated Castilian Spanish that Pizarro himself had found himself speaking a little while before, “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you, yes. I don’t see you. Where are you?”
“Right in front of you. Wait a second. I’ll show you.” Out of the whirlwind came a strange face that hovered in the middle of nowhere, a face without a body, a lean face, close-shaven, no beard at all, no mustache, the hair cut very short, dark eyes set close together. He had never seen a face like that before.
“What are you?” Pizarro asked. “A demon or an angel?”
“Neither one.” Indeed he didn’t sound very demonic. “A man, just like you.”
“Not much like me, I think. Is a face all there is to you, or do you have a body too?”
“All you see of me is a face?”
“Yes.”
“Wait a second.”
“I will wait as long as I have to. I have plenty of time.”
The face disappeared. Then it returned, attached to the body of a big, wide-shouldered man who was wearing a long loose gray robe, something like a priest’s cassock, but much more ornate, with points of glowing light gleaming on it everywhere. Then the body vanished and Pizarro could see only the face again. He could make no sense out of any of this. He began to understand how the Indians must have felt when the first Spaniards came over the horizon, riding horses, carrying guns, wearing armor.
“You are very strange. Are you an Englishman, maybe?”
“American.”
“Ah,” Pizarro said, as though that made things better. “An American. And what is that?”
The face wavered and blurred for a moment. There was mysterious new agitation in the thick white clouds surrounding it. Then the face grew steady and said, “America is a country north of Peru. A very large country, where many people live.”
“You mean New Spain, which was Mexico, where my kinsman Cortes is Captain-General?”