Project Pope

  —You are a hard man, Tennyson.

  —I am not a fool. I don’t propose to let you use me. It seems to me that in this, somewhere, there should be a bargain struck.

  —A bargain, said Whisperer. Yes, of course, a bargain.

  —So all right. A bargain with the devil.

  —Which one of us is that devil that you speak of? If my understanding of the term is correct, I am not a devil. Neither, I think, are you.

  —Okay, then, no devil.

  —Without your leave, said Whisperer, I dipped briefly in your mind. For which I beg forgiveness.

  —You are forgiven. If it was only for an instant.

  —I tell you true. It was only for a moment. In your mind I snared two worlds. The autumn world and the equation world. Which would you like to visit? Which one would you prefer to go to? Which would you want to see? Not to see, not to stare at, not to wonder over, but to actually go to.

  —You mean that you could take me there? That I could walk those worlds?

  —With me, you could walk those worlds. Perhaps understand them, although I’m not sure of that. But you could see them clearly, lay your hands on them.

  —And the Heaven world?

  —You have not seen the Heaven world.

  —No, I’ve not, said Tennyson.

  —Well, then?

  —You mean go to one of the worlds and then come back?

  —Yes, of course come back. You never go to a place from which you can’t return.

  —You would take me over—

  —No, not take you over. The two of us together.

  Impossible, Tennyson told himself. It could not be done. Either he was dreaming again or he faced the sleekest con …

  —It’s possible, said Whisperer. It can be done. It is not a con. You have pondered on the equation world. You have dreamed of it. It will not let you be.

  —I could never get a good look at it, said Tennyson. It was always hidden. I knew there was much there that I wasn’t seeing.

  —Then go with me and see it.

  —And understand?

  —No, I’m not sure we’ll understand. But, together, better than one of us alone.

  —You tempt me, Whisperer. Should I take a chance on you?

  —No chance, my friend. May I call you friend?

  —Not a friend, Whisperer. A partner. Partners also must have trust and faith. And if you fail.…

  —If I fail?

  —Decker would hear of it. You’d lose your only friend.

  —The threat is unworthy of you, partner.

  —Perhaps it is.

  —But you let it stand?

  —I let it stand, said Tennyson.

  —So let you and I go together to the equation world.

  —We’ll have to view the cube.

  —No need of it. It is fixed within your mind.

  —Yes, said Tennyson, but imperfectly. I do not see it all. Some of it is missing.

  —It all is there. It needs the digging out. You and I, together, as one person, we can dig it out.

  —This togetherness, said Tennyson, is beginning to wear thin on me.

  —Think of it as oneness, then. Not two of us, but one. Now think deeply of the equation world. Remember it as best you can. We’ll essay to enter it.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Enoch Cardinal Theodosius walked into the library and clambered on his stool, looking more like a well-dressed scarecrow than he did a cardinal.

  “I hope,” he said to Jill, “that you don’t mind these visits from a clanking old robot who does not have enough to do to occupy his time.”

  “Eminence, I love your visits,” said Jill. “I look forward to them.”

  “It is strange,” said the cardinal, pulling up his feet to place them on the lower rungs of the stool, shucking up his robe about his middle and crouching forward, hands clasped around himself as if he might have a bellyache. “It is strange that such as we should find so much to talk about. I think that our conversations have good substance to them. Do you not agree?”

  “Yes, Your Eminence, I do.”

  “I have gained great respect for you,” he said. “You work hard and enthusiastically. You have a mousetrap mind. There’s not much escapes you. Your assistants make good reports of you.”

  “You mean that my assistants are spies who make reports to you?”

  He flapped a hand in distress. “You know that’s not my meaning. I have occasion at times to talk with them and your name is mentioned. You have impressed them very much. You think like a robot, so they tell me.”

  “Oh, I hope that’s not the truth.”

  “What’s so bad, milady, about robotic thinking?”

  “Nothing, I suppose. But robotic thinking is wrong for me. I should be thinking human.”

  “Humans are strange folk,” said the cardinal. “That is a conclusion I have reached through long years of watching them. You may not be aware of it, but robots are obsessed by humans. They are one of our favorite conversational subjects; we spend long hours in talking of them. I suppose it is possible for a human and a robot to establish strong relationships. There are myths that describe such closenesses. I have never had such a relationship and I feel, somehow, that for the lack of it, I’ve suffered. I must be frank and say that in my visits here I have detected the beginning of such a relationship to you. I hope you do not mind.”

  “Why, of course not. I am honored.”

  “Up until this time,” said the cardinal, “I’ve had but small contact with humans. Ecuyer is the only man with whom I’ve had contact for any length of time.”

  “Paul Ecuyer is a good man,” said Jill.

  “Good. Yes, I suppose he’s good. A bit stiff-necked, however. He lives for his Listeners.”

  “That’s his job,” said Jill. “He does it well.”

  “That is true, but there are times when he tends to forget for whom he’s doing it. He gets too wrapped up in it. He assumes more than a normal amount of responsibility. His project is a Vatican project. There are times when he acts as if it’s his and his alone.”

  “Your Eminence, what is this all about? Is your nose all out of joint over the Heaven incident?”

  The cardinal lifted his head and stared at her. He grumbled at her. “Miss, sometimes you are too smart for your own good.”

  “Never that,” she said. “Stupid sometimes when I am trying to be smart.”

  “I am concerned,” he said, “over this saint business. I’m not sure we need a saint. A saint might cause us more trouble than it would be worth. What are your thoughts on it?”

  “I haven’t really thought of it. I have heard some talk. That’s all.”

  “Ecuyer is slow in turning over the cube of the Listener Mary’s second trip to Heaven. I have a feeling he’d just as soon not turn it over to us. I don’t know what happened. I’m not sure anyone knows. There have been some ugly rumors.”

  “Probably none of them true.”

  “Yes, that’s more than likely. Often rumors have little truth in them. But why hasn’t Ecuyer given us the cube?”

  “Probably he’s been busy. He is a busy man. Does he always turn the cubes over to Vatican immediately?”

  “No, I guess he doesn’t. He gives them to us when he gets around to it.”

  “There, that’s it,” said Jill. “He simply hasn’t gotten around to it.”

  “I don’t know,” said the cardinal. “Ecuyer is a close friend of Tennyson and Tennyson knows Decker.”

  “Your Eminence, you sound as if the three of them were closing in on you. What have Tennyson and Decker got to do with it? You have nothing to fear from either of them. Ecuyer and Tennyson are Vatican men. Decker never interferes in anything at all.”

  “You could help me with this.”

  “I’m not sure I could,” she said. “What makes you think that I could help you out?”

  “You must know about it. You sleep with Tennyson.”

  “Shame on you, Y
our Eminence,” she said. “I never knew that robots paid attention to such things.”

  “Oh, we don’t,” said the cardinal. “Not in the way you mean. But Tennyson must have talked with you about it.”

  “It’s not Mary being made a saint,” she told him, “that is bothering you. It’s Heaven, isn’t it? If it worries you so much, why don’t you go and find out what it is?”

  “We have no coordinates. We don’t know where to look.”

  “I think you are afraid,” she said. “Your Eminence, even if you had the coordinates, I think you’d be afraid to go. You are afraid of what you’d find.”

  “My fear is not that,” he told her. “My fear is of something greater. It is the present state of Vatican. For many centuries this place ran smoothly. There have been ups and downs, there have been differences of opinion, but never for a moment, until now, have I ever doubted that this institution would stand, solid as the rock in which it’s rooted. But now there’s an undercurrent of—what shall I call it?—perhaps an undercurrent of rebellion that would not hesitate to strike at our structure and the underlying principles on which it is founded. From where it comes I do not know, but I do know that there must be somewhere a very active mischief maker who is bringing it about, who is triggering it and fueling it to keep it going. For a long time, I have been aware that there was someone or something nibbling at our stores of knowledge. Not getting very far, but still nibbling, like a lone mouse, all by itself, nibbling at a ton of cheese. Whether the two of them, the nibbling mouse and the mischief maker, are one and the same, or otherwise connected, I do not know. Nothing must happen to Vatican, nothing must be allowed to interfere with it. We have too much at stake.”

  “Your Eminence,” said Jill, “I think you are unduly worried. You have built too well. Vatican is too strong. There is nothing that could bring it down.”

  “Not Vatican itself,” said the cardinal, “but its purpose. We came here, so long ago, as you must know from your study of our history, to seek a better and a truer faith. There are those who feel that we have abandoned that purpose, that we have gone haring off in pursuit of technological and philosophical knowledge that has nothing to do with our search for faith. In this I am convinced that they are wrong. Faith, I believe, is tied to knowledge, tied, perhaps, to one specific knowledge, but that to reach that knowledge, to arrive at that one answer, we must arrive at many answers. We may run down false trails at times, but perhaps these are trails that we must follow to be certain that they lead nowhere, or that they lead in the wrong direction.”

  “Your views have changed, then,” said Jill. “In the early years the emphasis was on faith and not on knowledge.”

  “Yes, superficially you are right. But at first we did not realize that faith must be based on knowledge, not on blind belief, not on the repetitious mumbling of untruths, over and over again, in a desperate attempt to make them turn into truths. We cannot accept untruths; we must know.”

  He paused and stared at her with his direct, unblinking, upsetting robot stare. He raised an arm and waved it. Instinctively, Jill knew that he was waving at the universe, at all of space and time outside the room in which they sat.

  “Somewhere out there,” he said, “there is someone or something or somewhat that knows all the answers. Among all those answers we can winnow out the one we seek. Or it may be that we’ll need all the answers, every one of them, to point to the one, still unfound, that we seek. Our job is to find that answer—all those answers or that one specific answer, whichever it may be. We cannot retreat into self-delusion for the comfort and the glory it may give us. We must keep on the search that we have started. No matter how long it may take or where it may lead us, we must bend to our task.”

  “And Heaven,” she said, “would form a basis, a strong basis for the self-delusion that you fear.”

  “We can’t take the chance,” he said.

  “You must suspect that it is not Heaven. Not the old Christian Heaven, with the trumpets sounding and the streets of gold and all the angels flying.”

  “Yes, intellectually I’m fairly sure it’s not, but what if it should turn out to be?”

  “Then you’d have your answer.”

  “No, I don’t think we would. We might have an answer, but not the answer. Satisfied with an answer, however, we would no longer seek the answer.”

  “All right, then, go out and prove it isn’t Heaven. Then come back and go on with your work.”

  “We cannot take the chance,” said the cardinal.

  “The chance that it could be Heaven?”

  “Not that alone. Either way, Vatican would lose. It’s what you humans call a no-win situation. If it is not Heaven, then we face the mistaken conviction on the part of many of our people that the Listeners are unreliable. If Mary—don’t you see that if Mary should be proved wrong, then the cry would go up that we can no longer be sure about the Listeners, that many of them are wrong, that most of them are wrong. Ecuyer’s Search Program is the one great tool we have. It cannot be placed in jeopardy. It has taken us centuries to build it to its present point. Were it disrupted, should overwhelming doubt be cast upon it, it would take centuries to reestablish, if indeed it could be reestablished.”

  Jill said, shock in her voice, “You can’t allow that to come about.”

  Said the cardinal, “God forbid it should.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  When he had been there before, the equation world had been quavery, as if he were seeing it through the shimmer of brilliant sunlight off a smooth and glittering lake, but now there was no shimmer and there was solid ground, or at least a solid surface, underneath his feet. The equation diagrams stood out in orderly array, spread out across the plane, smooth surface upon which he stood. There was a horizon, far off, rising much higher than any horizon he had even seen before, with the pea-green carpet of the planetary surface (if it was, in fact, a planet) merging almost imperceptibly with the pale lavender of the shallow bowl of sky.

  —Whisperer! said Tennyson.

  But there was no Whisperer. Only himself. Although, he told himself, that was not entirely true. Whisperer was there, but not as a separate entity. What stood there upon this alien ground was not him alone, but he and Whisperer, melded into one.

  He stood without moving, wondering how he knew this, how he could be so sure of it. And knew, even as he wondered, that it was not he who knew it, not the Tennyson, but the Whisperer who was part of him. Yet, despite this knowing, he was not aware of Whisperer and he wondered if this might not be true, quite in reverse, for Whisperer, who might be aware of himself alone and not at all of Tennyson. There was no answer to his wonderment, no clue from Whisperer that this was the case.

  The funny thing about it all, he told himself, was that he seemed actually to be there in this equation world—not merely seeing it, but there in person. He could feel the solidity of the surface underneath his feet and he was breathing—breathing as easily as he would on an Earth-type planet. Frantically, he ran through his brain the odds against finding an environment in a place such as this that would be compatible to an unprotected human—suitable air to breathe, an acceptable atmospheric density and pressure, a gravity factor that was bearable, ambient temperature that would be kind to a human body. He shuddered at the odds that his quick calculation gave him. The odds, furthermore, he knew, might be much higher than he had calculated, for not only were the life factors bearable; they were comfortable.

  The equation diagrams were in as many, if not more, colors than they had been when he had seen them in the cube, and later in his dreams. Both the cube and dreams, the dreams more so than the cube, had made them somewhat fuzzy, but here the colors were sharper and more brilliant and not fuzzy in the least. There seemed to him to be many more of them than he had seen in either cube or dream, and the equations and the diagrams were more varied and outrageous. Looking more closely at one group of them, he saw that no two of them were alike, in color, equation or dia
gram. Each of them stood out as an individual.

  Since arriving he had stood rooted in one spot, made numb by being there, but standing in a place where one doubting part of him, perhaps the Tennyson, had never for a moment thought that he could come. But now he moved, one slow step and then another, testing out whether he could move, not certain that he should. But the equations were not moving and someone had to move. That is, someone had to move if anything was to be done, any contact made. It would not be right, he thought, to come here, to stand and stare in disbelief, not moving, and then to go away. To do this would have made the venture no better than the cube or dream.

  Slowly, he moved across the surface until he was quite close to one of the equations. He could see that it was about eight feet tall, the top of it somewhat above his head, and twice as long. From where he was standing, since it was broadside to him, he could not estimate its breadth, but by looking at another one standing nearby, he calculated the width to be nine feet or so. They might run in different sizes, he realized, but all of those he saw seemed to be uniform, one with another.

  The equation that he had walked up to was a deep-purple background with the equations and diagrams predominantly in orange, although there were touches here and there of red and green and yellow. He tried to puzzle out the equation (a very lengthy and complicated one) that it carried on its surface, but the signs and symbols were unlike any he had ever seen.

  The cube from which he had calculated the width was a bright and startling pink, with the equations green, and just beyond it was another that was ash gray specked with copper spots, the equations in a lemon yellow and the diagrams in lavender. It was a fancy one, the fanciest of all those in sight.

  There had been no reaction from the cubes when he had walked up to them, and there continued to be none. They all sat there, unchanging.

  Now, for the first time, he realized that there wasn’t any sound. This was a silent place. In all his life, he realized, he had at all times been accustomed to some level of sound. Even at a time of quiet, there always had been some marginal noise—a board creaking in a house, a soft breeze stirring leaves, tiny insects singing. But here there was nothing, absolutely nothing, no noise of any kind.