Project Pope (38 page)

The rose-red cube had moved up close to the wall, below the indicated mouse hole. The cube began broadening out, spreading itself, squatting down so they could reach its back.

“I'll boost you up,” Tennyson told Jill.

“Okay,” she said. “I hope this won't be as bad as I think it will.”

He boosted her up and she scrambled to the top of the cube.

“It's ishy,” she said. “It's terrible. The thing is like a mound of jelly. I'm afraid I will break through it. And it's slippery as hell.”

Tennyson made a running leap and landed spread-eagled on the quivering surface of the cube. Jill reached down a hand and helped him scramble up beside her. They sat together, clinging to one another to retain their balance. The cube ceased some of its quivering and seemed to harden slightly, offering more support. It began to rise slowly in the air, not really rising, but assuming its normal shape, rising from its squat.

The mouse hole was in front of them and Tennyson made an awkward leap for it. He landed on his hands and knees, swiftly scrabbling around to reach out a hand for Jill, but before he could extend his help, she was there, sprawling beside him.

They rose to their feet and looked about them. The mouse hole was another tunnel, but a short one and there was no door.

At the end of it blazed a brilliant light. The floor was solid underneath their feet and they moved toward the light. Looking over her shoulder, Jill saw that the five equation folk had entered the tunnel behind them, with Whisperer scintillating above the foremost one.

When they reached the other end of the tunnel, they saw that the tunnel floor connected with a broad white road, apparently constructed of the same materials as the walls and towers. It led off into the distance, finally blotted out by the glare of light. It was suspended in midair, with dizzying heights above it and dizzying depths below.

The interior was vast, but its vastness was masked by columnar structures that rose within it, spearing from the depths into the upper reaches, both the depths and the upper reaches being blotted out by sheer distances. The columns basically were of the same white material of which the rest of the structure was made, but little of the white showed through the blinding, crazy flickering of the lights that ran all around them. The lights took no particular pattern and their flickering had no rhythm. They were of every color.

The entire place, Tennyson told himself, was a massive carnival, a riot of dancing color, a gaudily decorated Christmas tree multiplied a million times.

“Look,” said Jill, jogging his arm. “There is one of our friendly worms.”

“Where?”

“Right over there. On one of the columns. Look where I'm pointing.”

He looked but it took a while to see what she pointed at. Finally he made it out. One of the worms was clinging tightly against one of the columns, hanging straight up and down the column. But not using all its feet to maintain its grip, for it was using many of them in a manipulatory way, working on the circuitry or the lights or whatever the column held.

“Maintenance men,” said Jill. “Maintenance worms, that is. Jason, they are the things that keep whatever this is running.”

“It makes sense,” he said.

“Let's get out of here,” said Jill. “All this makes me dizzy.”

They hurried down the whiteness of the road, although the road no longer was entirely white. It shimmered with the many colors of the flashing lights.

Far ahead they glimpsed the opening of another tunnel. When they came up to it, four creatures were waiting for them. The creatures were black cones, dead black, with no highlights in the black, as if the blackness sucked light into it, leaving none to be reflected. They were broad-based and stood five feet high, moving easily but with no hint as to the mechanism that made it possible to move.

At the mouth of the tunnel, just inside it, stood a platform, also black, mounted on wheels.

Three of the cones stood at the back of the platform and, as Jill and Tennyson and the equation folk came up, effectively herded them, without a sound or signal but by some judicious shoving, onto the platform. When Jill would have walked over the platform and back onto the roadway, the fourth cone blocked her doing so, keeping itself in front of her no matter where she turned.

“I guess they want us to stay here,” she said to Tennyson.

When all of them had been herded onto the platform, the cones stationed themselves at each corner, and the platform and the cones began to move down the tunnel, the cones apparently furnishing the motive power.

The platform shot out of the tunnel into another vast space, in which there were no columns. A number of roadways, a three-dimensional roadway system, ran in all directions, crossing over one another, looping around one another. Some of the roadways were for vehicles only, most of them platforms powered by the cones, although now and then other vehicles, some of them beetle-shaped and others shaped like flying open arrows, also shared the roads. Other roads seemed to be for pedestrians only. Along these crawled and hopped and skipped and walked and jumped and shambled an array of life. Looking at them, Tennyson remembered the
Wayfarer
captain and his loathing of all alien forms. Seeing some of those that traveled the pedestrian ways, he could understand something of the captain's loathing. In his time he had come into contact with varied alien life, but never in such horrifying forms as he now was seeing.

In between the roadways, set at every angle, each surrounded by small courtyards, were buildings of every shape and size. These were not formed of the same material as the larger structures, but were of every color. It was, thought Tennyson, as if one were looking at tabletop models of many villages, but with all the tabletops haphazardly slung together with no regard to their relationship to one another.

The platform took a sudden curve, almost throwing them off their feet, changing from one roadway to another and almost at once entering another tunnel. When it emerged from the tunnel, it was in what appeared to be the interior of one of the larger buildings they had been looking at. Gently the platform came to a halt in what could have been a parking lot, for there were many other vehicles there.

Jill and Tennyson stepped off and the equation folk floated off the platform, with the four cones herding them down a path between the cars.

They entered a room. At the farther end of it a bubble sat on a dais ranged against the wall. Other cones were there in groups around the dais, and to one side of it sat a small haystack that had eyes peering from the hay, while an octopuslike creature hopped back and forth before the bubble. Each time it landed on the floor, it made a squishy sound like a large chunk of fresh liver hurled against a solid surface.

The cones herded them forward until they stood before the bubble, then fell back and left them there.

The bubble was more than just a bubble. It had a dimple in the forefront of it, and inside the dimple was what might have been a face—the sort of face that one could not be sure was there. One second you could see it and the next moment it had dissolved into drifting smoke.

Jill gasped. “Jason,” she said, “do you remember that memo—the memo that Theodosius wrote. The one I found in the wastebasket in the secret closet.”

“My God, yes!” said Tennyson. “The bubble is one of the things that the cardinal described. A face like drifting smoke, he said.”

Noise came from the drifting smoke, a grating, scraping noise. The noise went on for some time. In a little while, it became apparent that the noise was the bubble talking to them.

“I can't make out a word of it,” said Jill.

—It is trying to communicate, said Whisperer. That is evident. But unintelligible.

—It sounds as if it might be shouting at us. Is it angry, Whisperer?

—I think not, said Whisperer. It projects no sense of anger.

One of the cones came scurrying up and stood before the bubble. The bubble grated at it, and it turned and scurried off. The bubble fell silent. It was still looking at them, although at times the smoke would obscure the face, but even then they felt it still was looking at them.

—I think, although I can not be entirely sure of this, said Whisperer, that it has summoned someone that may be able to translate the conversation it essays with you.

The bubble stayed silent. The cones were silent, too—if, in fact, they ever made a sound. The only sound was the squishy-liver sound of the octopuslike creature that kept hopping back and forth. The eyes of the haystack creature to one side of the dais watched them unblinkingly.

Silence, except for the liver plopping, held the room. Then there was a new sound—the unmistakable sound of someone walking, of bipedal human walking.

Tennyson turned toward the sound.

Thomas Decker was striding purposefully across the room toward them.

Chapter Fifty-three

“Ecuyer, this time I want you to come clean with me,” said Cardinal Theodosius.

“Your Eminence,” protested Ecuyer, “I've always come clean with you.”

“If by that you mean that you have told me no lies,” said the cardinal, “you may be right. What I'm talking about is that you have not always told me all you know. You've concealed facts from me. For instance, why did you never tell me about Decker's Whisperer?”

“Because the subject of the Whisperer never came up in any conversation with you,” said Ecuyer. “That, combined with the fact that I did not hear of it myself until just a few days ago.”

“But Tennyson knew about it. Well before you did.”

“Yes, that's true. He was a friend of Decker's.”

“How did he get mixed up with the Whisperer?”

“The way he told me was that the Whisperer sought him out.”

“But when he told you it was considerably after the fact.”

“I gather that it was. He had the feeling that he owed it to Decker not to tell me, or anyone. He told me only after Decker had been killed.”

“Except for the matter of the Whisperer, you and Tennyson were very close. By which I mean that he told you everything.”

“That was my impression.”

“Did he happen to tell you that he was going to Heaven?”

Ecuyer jerked upright in his chair. He stared at the cardinal for a moment, trying to read his face—but no one ever read a robot face. Then he slumped back again. “No,” he said, “he didn't. I had no idea.”

“Well, it happens that he has. Gone to Heaven, I mean. He's either on his way or already there.”

“Eminence,” said Ecuyer, “you can't possibly know that.”

“But I can,” said Theodosius. “An Old One told me. I thought about it for a while before I summoned you. We have plans to make.”

“Now, wait a minute,” said Ecuyer. “You say you heard it from an Old One? Where did you find the Old One?”

“I went visiting. I found one in the hills above Decker's cabin.”

“And he told you Tennyson was about to go to Heaven?”

“He said he was already on his way. Tennyson and Jill. The Whisperer, he said, had found a way to take them.”

“We talked about it—”

“You talked about it? And not a word to me?”

“There was no point in saying anything to you. All of us agreed it was impossible.”

“Apparently it was not impossible.”

“It's true that Tennyson has been missing for a day or two, but that doesn't mean—”

“Jill has been missing, too. If not to Heaven, where would they have gone? There's no place on End of Nothing that they would be going.”

“I don't know,” said Ecuyer. “It seems impossible they could have gone to Heaven. For one thing, no one had the least idea of where to look for it. Maybe if we could have found the Mary cubes.…”

“The Old One said the people of the equation world had given them some help.”

“Well, yes, that might have been possible. Both Tennyson and Jill had been to the equation world.”

“There, you see,” said Theodosius, “that's something else that you never told me. Didn't it ever occur to you that I might like to know what is going on?”

“How sure are you that the Old One knows what he is talking about? And how come you went visiting an Old One and—”

“Ecuyer, all these years we have been wrong about the Old Ones. They are not the ravening horrors that the myths have told. That's what is wrong with myths, they so seldom tell the truth. The Old One I talked with was the one that brought Decker home, and Hubert. Standing on the esplanade, he talked with me and Tennyson. We owe them an apology for all we've thought of them. We should have become friends with them very long ago. It would have been to our advantage if we had.”

“Then you're fairly sure about the Heaven visit?”

“I'm sure,” said Theodosius. “The Old One seemed to have no doubt, and I believe he told me true. It was an act of friendship, his telling it to me.”

“Christ, it seems impossible,” said Ecuyer. “Yet, if it was done, Tennyson would be the one to do it. The man is remarkable.”

“When Tennyson and Jill return, we must be ready for the word they bring.”

“You think they will be back?”

“I'm certain that they will. They do this for Vatican. Despite the shortness of their stay with us, they—the two of them—have become one with us. Tennyson told His Holiness the other day something that the Pope passed on to me. He was quite tickled with it. About the monasteries of Old Earth.…”

“What do you propose to do? If they have gone to Heaven, if they really find it, if they do come back—”

“For one thing, I am fairly certain I know now who has been behind all this theological nonsense. John, the gardener in the clinic garden. I have a fairly good idea that he has been working for the Pope, an undercover agent for the Pope, although why the Pope should think he needs an undercover agent is more than I can figure out. But that will make no difference. I'm about to make certain that our friend the gardener becomes a piddling little monk and stays a piddling monk forever. And there are others of them.…”