Project Pope (34 page)

“And a true knowledge?”

“I think that somewhere there must be. I know I'll never know it; I'm not certain you will ever find it.”

“Perhaps,” said His Holiness, “our good robots miscalculated in my construction. Perhaps they failed to instill in me the piety that they felt within themselves. But I am inclined to agree with you. If, however, I make such a decision, Vatican will be torn apart. There'll be contentious arguing for years, and not all of Vatican would follow my decision—which would not do much for the image of the Pope. And whether you may think so or not, the image of the Pope is important to every one of us.”

Neither of the humans answered him.

“You humans feel both love and hate,” said the Pope. “I can feel neither of them. I think that's one up for me and my fellow robots. You have your dreams and I have mine, but my dream cannot be identical with yours. You have the arts—music, painting, literature—and while I am aware of these, while I recognize the function that they serve and the pleasure to be gotten from them, I cannot respond to them.”

“Holiness,” said Jill, “faith itself may be an art.”

“I do not doubt it,” said the Pope. “You may have put your finger on an important consideration. Yet you cannot say that robots are lacking in their faith and their hunger for the faith. It was that hunger which built Vatican and has carried us through a thousand years of searching for a more perfect faith. Could it be that there are many varieties, not of faiths, but of perfect faiths, of truthful and solid faiths?”

“There may appear to be,” said Tennyson, “but in the last analysis, I am certain there will be one faith, one faith alone that thinking creatures can accept. There'll be one true faith as there will be one full truth—a final faith and a final truth. I would not be surprised if the two should prove the same, the faith and the truth.”

“And this is why you believe we should follow truth, that it provides a better and an easier road to faith than to seek for faith alone?”

“I think so,” said Tennyson. “Searching for truth you will have some guidelines. Faith is very short of solid guidelines.”

“I have stowed within me so vast a reservoir of knowledge,” said the Pope, “furnished by the Listeners through the centuries, that at times I scarcely know where to turn. I must seek frantically through my dustbin of knowledge, hunting for that single bit of information that might fit into a puzzle to which I seek solution. There are many puzzles, and simultaneously I must seek the many bits of knowledge that possibly will give form and substance to the many puzzles. Even while I am doing this, I am haunted by the thought that perhaps the required bits of knowledge for which I seek have not as yet been found by the Listeners. They range far and endlessly and yet they have made only the barest scratch upon the knowledge of the universe.”

“Which means,” said Tennyson, “that you must keep the Listeners to their tasks. Tomorrow one of them may find one of those bits of knowledge that you need, or it may require a hundred years to find it, or a thousand, but if the Listeners do not continue going out into the universe, it never will be found.”

“I know,” the Pope said. “I know. And yet there are those who say, with knowing smirks on their metallic faces, that I do not exist in the real world, that in my isolation, imprisoned in the stone of these mountains, I no longer am in touch with reality. I do not think this is true, but I cannot make them understand. I think this real world they talk about is a provincial world, that it is bounded by the areas they know and the peculiar conditions that exist there. What is the real world on End of Nothing and in Vatican would not be the real world on a planet halfway across the galaxy, or even in a planet that was next door to us. Our limited senses, which restrict our understanding and make it limited as well, fences us in against the reality of the universe. I think that I, rather than they, exist in a world much more real than theirs.

“I've outgrown them,” said the Pope. “That's what has happened. I have grown beyond them. But that is what they wanted. When they constructed me, they sought infallibility, like the Pope on Earth. But I've outgrown them and disappointed them. Infallibility on a single planet and in the universe are two different things.”

Chapter Forty-seven

“What was that all about?” asked Jill.

“Vatican's coming apart,” said Tennyson, “and the Pope's the one who knows it.”

“We didn't help him much.”

“We helped him not at all. He's disappointed in us. The robots still hold the infantile notion that their humans are great men of magic, that we can reach down and come up with answers, that when they get stuck, we'll bail them out. The father image—the Old Man can do anything, he can fix it up. The Pope's the same. Maybe he knew we couldn't do anything for him, but he still held the father fantasy. And now he's disappointed in us.”

Tennyson got up and threw a couple of logs on the fire, came back to sit beside Jill.

“It is the Search Program that holds Vatican together,” he said. “Ecuyer said something about it, I remember, when we first Game here. He told me that Vatican was only an excuse to continue the Search Program. I thought he was simply bragging, trying to impress me with his own importance. But there is a great deal of truth in it. I realize that now. With the Search Program, Vatican is a dynamic operation; without it, it will become a fuzzy fumbling after something that no one understands. There'll be endless empty arguments and much vague philosophizing, and heresies will spring up to fight bitterly with ecclesiastical authority. Without the Listeners, Vatican, in its present form, will not last another thousand years. Even if it does, it will be meaningless.”

“But His Holiness told us,” said Jill, “that he has a great backlog of knowledge furnished by the Listeners. I got the idea he is nowhere near caught up with it. Couldn't he continue working with what he has? If that's what he wants to do, and I think it is. With all this backlog—”

“Don't you see?” asked Tennyson. “It would be a dead end. A lot of the information that he has never will be used. He can still continue sifting through it, he can sift through it endlessly, still with the greater part of it not being used. To keep his work viable, to keep it moving forward, that backlog he speaks of must keep growing. Like new wood for a fire. This may not be possible, for if the theologians do take over, in a few years the Listeners will be gone. The present Listeners will die off, and if there are no others recruited to take their place and if the clones aren't trained, then the Search Program will die. And that's the end of it.”

“And once gone, it can't be started up again.”

“That's exactly it,” said Tennyson. “Jill, we are sitting here and facing the death of one of the most ambitious research projects the galaxy has ever known. God knows how much will be lost. No one can estimate what the impact of such a failure will be upon the robots and the humans. I include the humans because what the robots have also belongs to humans. We may think of them as two different races, but they're not. The robots have a human heritage; they are a part of us. They belong to us and we belong to them.”

“Jason, we have to do something about it. You and I must do something. We are the only ones.”

“There is Ecuyer.”

“Yes, sure, there is Ecuyer but he's too much Vatican.”

“I suppose you're right. He is tainted in a lesser degree than other End of Nothing humans, but he is still tainted. He is still Vatican.”

“Jason, we have to do something. What can we do?”

“My darling, I don't know. As of now, I'm fresh out of all ideas. I haven't got a one. If we could get to Heaven.…”

“And bring back proof. We'd have to bring back proof.”

“Yes, of course we would. Without it, no one would believe us. But that's something we don't need to worry about. We're not going there.”

“I just thought of something.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“What if it was really Heaven? What if Mary had been right?”

“Heaven's not a place. It is a state of mind.”

“No, Jason, cut that out. You are mouthing a phrase. No more than flip judgment. I told you about the equation people. I said it might be possible they operated on a variable logic pattern. What if this whole universe operated on a variable logic pattern? Wouldn't that make all our human preconceptions invalid? Could we be as wrong as that?”

“If you're trying to tell me there could be a Heaven …”

“I'm not saying that. I'm asking you if there was, what would you do?”

“You mean would I accept it?”

“Yes, that is what I'm asking. If your nose were rubbed in Heaven—”

“I imagine I would gag a bit.”

“And accept it?”

“I would have to, wouldn't I? But how could I tell if it was Heaven? Not the golden stairs, not angels.…”

“Probably not golden stairs nor angels. Those are old tales, someone trying to make Heaven the sort of place the people of that early day hungered after. A place they'd want to live. A sort of eternal picnic. But I think you would know if it was Heaven.”

“A good fishing stream,” said Tennyson. “Woodland paths to walk. Mountains to look at. Good restaurants where the waiters were your friends—not just servitors, but friends—other friends to talk with, good books to read and think about, and you.…”

“That's your idea of Heaven?”

“Just off the cuff. Give me some time to think about it and I can come up with more.”

“I don't know,” said Jill. “I'm confused by all of it—Vatican and the equation worlds and all the rest of it. I can't help but believe it, and yet there are times when I get angry at myself for believing. His Holiness talked about reality. Living here, I know it's real, but when I get off by myself and think about it, I tell myself it's not reality, it is not the sort of place I could have imagined before I first saw it. It all is so unreal.”

He put his arm around her and she came up against him and he held her close. The fire talked in the chimney throat and a stillness they had not noticed before closed down all about them. They were alone and safe in the darkness of the world.

“Jason, I am happy.”

“So am I. Let us stay that way.”

“You were running from Gutshot when you came here. And I was running too. Not running from anything, not even from myself. Just running. I've been running all my life.”

“But not any longer.”

“No, not any longer. You told His Holiness about the old medieval monasteries. This is our monastery: good work to do, a hiding from the world outside, a happiness and surety in our hearts. Maybe I don't belong here. There were no women in the old monasteries, were there?”

“Well, only now and then. When the monks could sneak them in.”

The firelight glittered on something that floated down in front of the fireplace.

Tennyson sat bolt upright.

“Jill,” he said, “Whisperer is here.”

—Decker, said Whisperer. Decker. Decker. Decker. I have only now found out.

—Come to me, said Jill. Come to me. I will grieve with you.

—Come to both of us, said Tennyson.

He came to both of them and they grieved with him.

Chapter Forty-eight

Enoch Cardinal Theodosius walked the clinic garden. There was no one there, not even the ancient caretaker, John. There were few stars to relieve the blackness of the sky, a dozen at most, but widely separated, and here and there the faint luminosities of distant galaxies, fairy hints of myriad worlds very far away. Above the eastern horizon hung the frosty glitter of the Milky Way, the home galaxy, and the dim shimmering specks that were a few of the globular clusters that hung above the galaxy.

The cardinal's feet crunched on the brick pavement as he paced slowly along the walks, his hands clasped behind his back and his head bowed low in thought.

We can be wrong, he thought. We were wrong about the Old Ones and we can be wrong about other things as well. Simply because we believe a thing is so does not mean it's so.

For years we had thought the Old Ones were fierce carnivores. We thought of them as bloodthirsty lurkers in the forest; to meet one of them was death. Jealous of their forests and their world, keeping watch on us, keeping us penned in. And yet one of them brought in Decker, dead, and Hubert, dead as well—he brought them home to us and laid them on the stone before the basilica and straightened their limbs when he put them down so that they lay there in all decency.

And he spoke, saying the Old Ones were wardens and there could be no senseless killings, warning us against further senseless killings.

Wardens? Theodosius asked himself. Wardens of this world? More than likely, he told himself, wardens of this world. All these years watching us and not interfering, perhaps not interfering because we somehow managed to be decent tenants of this world of theirs.

Watching us, studying us far more closely than we knew, for they know our language. Knowing how to talk, but never talking to us, perhaps because until this moment there had been no need to talk. Talking to us with some effort, perhaps not the way they talk among themselves. Adapting their way to our way because they knew we could not adapt to theirs.

We have lived these thousand years on End of Nothing by their sufferance. They have let us go our way and have made no move against us except for the killing of the humans, which served to reinforce our conception of them as dangerous beasts. But killing the humans only because the humans had set out to kill them. In such a light, their actions can be understood. Humans, even robots, would not hesitate to kill someone who came to them in violence, seeking their death.

There had been stories that the Old Ones could talk in the human tongue, but that had been no more than a part of that myth which had been built around them. Had some human or some robot talked with them? he wondered. He shook his head, doubting it. It was just part of the chimney-corner story that had evolved about them. When a myth is manufactured, there always was the chance that some small part of it might turn out to be true.