“But the cardinals can block it, can’t they?” asked Jill. “I’m sure not many of them are for it. I know Theodosius isn’t.”
“I suppose they could,” said Ecuyer, “if they were willing to risk a full-scale rebellion. They could oppose it and probably make it stick, but that would leave Vatican in an uproar. That would be unacceptable. Vatican, you understand, must always be a place of perfect tranquility, reeking of sanctity. No matter what else they may do, the cardinals must hold fast to the odor of sanctity.”
“If the theologians win,” said Tennyson, “and it looks now as if they will, that means the end of the Search Program, and without that.…”
“In face of that,” said Ecuyer, “your cardinals would take the long view. Always the long view. They’d accept a setback for the moment, then work through succeeding centuries to bring Vatican around again to their point of view. Time doesn’t mean a damn thing to a robot. He has all the time there is.”
“You must consider,” said Tennyson, “that the cardinals who look favorably on the Search Program may never get the Vatican turned around. Not in your lifetime, anyhow. You’ve got to win now or you, personally, lose forever.”
“I know that,” said Ecuyer. “I’ve been thinking.…” He turned to Jill and said, “Jason told me something—not much, but something—just a while ago, about this thing called Whisperer and how he went to the equation world. Now I understand you have gone as well. That’s where you were when we were looking for you.”
“I thought it would be all right to tell him,” Tennyson said to Jill. “Decker’s gone now and we no longer have to consider Whisperer his secret.”
“I suppose that’s the way it is,” said Jill. “Probably there never was good reason for it to be his secret.”
“I think he may have had many secrets,” said Ecuyer. “He was a very private man. Since Jason told me, however, I’ve been wondering …”
“If you’ve been thinking Whisperer could take us to Heaven,” said Jill, “I don’t think he could. He took Jason to the equation world because Jason had seen the cube. I’d not seen the cube, but Whisperer could take me because he knew the way, having been there once. Jason showed him the way and he remembered it.”
“But he doesn’t need coordinates.”
“No, that’s right. There were no coordinates for the equation world, but once he saw Jason’s memory of it, he could go there. He must use something other than what we think of as coordinates.”
“Then why not Heaven?”
“Because he has to get into the mind of someone who has seen a cube of the place,” said Tennyson.
“Into the mind—that’s the way he does it?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why couldn’t he get into Mary’s mind? Even if she is in a coma.”
“Because in a coma she would retain no memories. Her mind’s a blank. More than likely, even if she were alert and well, he couldn’t get into her mind.”
“You mean he can’t—”
“Look, Paul, as close as Whisperer was to Decker, he never could get into his mind.”
“But he gets into yours and Jill’s. What makes you so different?”
“I don’t know. I’ve puzzled over that. Most people can’t even see Whisperer. You can’t, I know. Whisperer tried to strike up an acquaintance with you. He showed himself to you and you didn’t even see him.”
“How do you know this?”
“He told me. I have a hunch he tried a lot of people here in End of Nothing, with the same result. He never tried with the robots. They have a different kind of mind, he said, maybe a different kind of senses. He snooped around Vatican a great deal, trying to pick up information. He’s gone on information. His task in life is to gain an understanding of the universe. He picked up some stuff from Vatican, but not a great deal. He worked hard for what he got.”
“Vatican was aware of someone snooping,” said Jill. “Like a mouse nibbling at a ton of cheese. That’s the way Theodosius put it. But they never could find what or who it was. It worried them a lot. Apparently they just caught the edges of it.”
“So there’s not any chance,” said Ecuyer.
“I’m sure there’s not,” said Tennyson.
“Dead in the water,” said Ecuyer. “We just sit here and take it. Christ, when I think of all we had going for us. The entire universe out there and us picking away at it. Now it’s all going to be thrown away because of an imbecilic search for a true religion.”
Tennyson stirred uneasily in his chair. “I wish I could be of some help. I think Jill must wish the same. I have a feeling I’m failing you.”
“Not at all,” said Ecuyer. “This isn’t your problem.”
“But it is,” said Tennyson. “It’s a human concern as well as a Vatican one. Maybe it concerns everyone. I don’t know. All life would benefit if we could get some answers.”
“We may be able to think of some way to go,” said Jill. “I don’t think we should give up. I can talk to my own tame cardinal.”
“A lot of good that will do,” said Ecuyer. “He’ll pooh-pooh your concerns. He will say it’ll all work out—don’t worry about it, child; in the long run, it’ll come out all right.”
Tennyson rose to his feet. “I should have a look at Mary.”
“I’ll go with you,” said Ecuyer. He said to Jill, “Would you like to come along?”
Jill shuddered. “No, I don’t think I would. I’ll whip something up for dinner. Paul, would you like to join us?”
“No, thanks. I’d love to, but there are chores to do.”
Outside he said to Tennyson, “I didn’t want to ask in front of her, but how about her face? What really happened?”
“Someday,” Tennyson promised, “we’ll tell you all about it.”
Chapter Forty-four
“I wish I could tell you,” Jill said to Tennyson, “but my mind’s all cluttered up. So much strange was happening. As I told you, I looked at that insane diagram with the squiggle to one side and I knew the diagram was me and the squiggle was a question mark. He was asking what I was and I was racking my brain about what I could tell him when Whisperer spoke inside my mind and said he would take over.”
“So he did.”
“Yes, and I was there with him. He was inside my mind and we were, really, just one mind and I knew what was going on, but I had no idea what it was. Back, millennia ago, they had this device called a telegraph over which men talked to one another with clicks transmitted over wires; you could stand there and listen to all that clicking and not know what was going on because you did not know the code. Or listening to two aliens talking and hearing all the words, all the clatter and the jabber that they use as words, but completely lost because you know nothing of the language.”
“You said telegraph. Were there clicks?”
“Some clicks, I guess, and a lot of other things, a lot of other sounds, which I suppose that I was making, not knowing how or why I made them and a bunch of funny thoughts running through my brain, as if they were my thoughts, but they must have been Whisperer’s, for they surely weren’t mine. At times I would think that I was catching on to what was going on and then I’d lose the thread of it and would be lost again. Ordinarily such a situation would have bothered me; in another situation I might have gone insane wondering what kind of creature I had turned into. But it didn’t bother me. It wasn’t as if I was in a daze, for I wasn’t. My mind was entirely clear, although considerably flabbergasted. At times it seemed to me I was something else entirely and, at other times, I seemed to be standing off to one side, simply looking on, standing outside myself and watching this other self doing all those strange things. All this time the equation person, with a number of others all grouped about him, was slowly running through a number of equations and some diagrams, very simple basic equations and diagrams, not long strings of equations or complicated diagrams, as if he were talking carefully to a child. Baby talk, like one talks to children. An
d I thought, why, he’s as confused as I am. He doesn’t know any more about what is going on than I do. For the clicks and grunts and treebles and all the other sounds I was making could not have seemed like a language to him, any more than his diagrams and equations looked like a language to me.”
“Whisperer probably was understanding some of it,” said Tennyson. “Whisperer was the one in control. He was a sort of double-jointed interpreter.”
“He didn’t pan out so well as an interpreter for me,” said Jill. “Although I think that may have been the case. He was working both sides of the street. We moved up close—I mean I moved up close to this equation person and watched what was going on and every once in a while, I’d point a finger at an equation or a diagram as if I might be asking a question about it, although it wasn’t me who was asking the question. It was Whisperer, and when that happened, the equation person would go through all of it again, patient, trying to make us understand. Sometimes he had to go through it several times before Whisperer seemed to understand.”
“But you understood none of it?”
“Jason, I think I did—some of it. Not a full understanding, of course, but snatches of it. And some of it I may have marginally understood I plain forgot because I don’t think it was the kind of information that the human mind could be expected to grasp the first time around. Some of it, I know, was outrageous—outrageous by human standards. There seemed to be no logic in it. You know what I think, Jason?”
“No, what do you think?”
“I think the equation world operates on a variable logic pattern. One statement can be logical in one context, but not in the next. It was infuriating. I’d grab a piece of it by the tail, then something would come along to make that one piece I had grasped outlandish. I don’t know. I really do not know. Some of it I’m sure I caught the drift of at the time, but I don’t have it now. Whisperer said he wanted me to go with him because my viewpoint might be different from yours and I guess it must have been. Nothing like this happened to you when you were there—did it?”
“No, it didn’t. I was just confused.”
“The difference,” said Jill, “might not have been with you and me. Come to think of it, I don’t believe it was. The difference was with Whisperer. He’d been there twice, you see. He might have been getting the hang of it. On a second trip you, too, might get the hang of it. And he’d probably been thinking about it all the time since he got back with you.”
“Jill, I’m sorry you had to go through this. There was no reason that you should. I told Whisperer to leave you out of it. He thought he could work with you as he had worked with me, but I told him—”
“Yes, I know. He told me you had told him.”
“Where is Whisperer now?”
“I don’t know. I came back. All of a sudden, I came back. Not here, but to my own suite. That’s where we started out. Whisperer wasn’t with me. He wasn’t in the room and he wasn’t in my mind. I don’t know how I knew this, but I knew he wasn’t.”
“I wonder if he knows that Decker’s dead. That will hit him hard. He and Decker were great pals. Decker tried to pretend that he didn’t care one way or the other, but he did. He thought a lot of Whisperer.”
Jill picked up the coffee pot and filled Tennyson’s cup. “I made a cake,” she said. “Do you want a piece?”
“Later,” he said. “A little later on. That stew you made.…”
“It was good, wasn’t it.”
“Delicious. Filling.”
“Jason, do you think the theologians killed Decker?”
“It all fits together. The cubes gone, Decker dead. They took us out of it. If we could just have held on to the cubes, then Whisperer could have taken us to Heaven. No need for coordinates. He has the ability to follow a very dim trail. Like a dog trailing a fox. If he can take us to the equation world, he could have taken us to Heaven. There’s a lot out there in the universe. Many trails for him to follow.”
“Jason, could we be wrong? You and I and Paul? Could the Vatican theologians be right? Is a true faith more valuable than knowledge of the universe?”
“Jill, I think that involves a judgment of what comes first. Vatican made that decision long ago and now someone is trying to reverse it. The decision that first you must have knowledge before you can arrive at faith. That may have been a wrong decision. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think it was.”
“Maybe we will never know.”
“You and I will never know. Someday someone will.”
“What happens now?”
“There’s no way right now to know.”
“Jason, some bits of it are coming back to me. The bits and pieces I picked up in the equation world.”
“Perhaps as time goes on, more and more of it.”
“There was a sense of being tired, of resting. Does that make any sense?”
“Not much,” said Tennyson. “But take it easy. Your very human mind is trying to translate alien concepts into human terms.”
“There is something else. The idea of games and a great excitement that here was a new game to be played.”
“It probably was something else entirely, but at least it’s a place to start. You picked up far more than I did. Maybe Whisperer, when he shows up, will be able to help out.”
“I think so. Whisperer must have understood far more than I did.”
A knock came at the door. When Tennyson opened it, Theodosius stood outside.
“How good of you to come,” said Tennyson. “Won’t you step in. We are greatly honored.”
The cardinal came in and Tennyson closed the door. “I’ll poke up the fire,” he said, “and we can sit and talk.”
“I would like to do that,” said the cardinal, “but there is no time. His Holiness has summoned the two of you to an audience.”
Jill came around the table. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“His Holiness thinks most highly of you.”
“You will go with us,” said Tennyson.
“I’ll escort you there, but I will not stay. He said the two of you. The two of you alone.”
Chapter Forty-five
Whisperer gamboled. He was giddy and ecstatic. He went skating down a looping bridge of magnetic flux. He danced madly in the midst of a sputtering cloud of ions. He ducked his erratic way through the core of an exploding galaxy. He ran a race with the surging radiation that flared out of a nova. He somersaulted through a field of pulsars.
When it was all done, he hunkered down before a red dwarf and spread out symbolic hands to warm them on the banked fires of the star. The red dwarf, curiously, was the only luminosity in sight. All else was black, although somewhere far away there was the faint hint of high-intensity flickering, as if some great event were taking place beyond the far horizon of deep space. He was penned in by an emptiness and a nothingness and he sensed the loneliness that went with nothingness, although he had no feel for loneliness, for he was a creature of space-time, and in all of space and time, there was no room for loneliness.
He did not know where he was and he gave no thought to it, for wherever he might be, he knew that he was home, although why or how he knew this, he had no inkling and again he gave no thought to it, for it did not matter—he could go anywhere he wished and he still would be at home. Which did not mean, of course, that he’d know where he was.
He crouched before the red-black star and heard the song of foreverness that pulsed in the emptiness in this corner of the universe, wherever it might be. He caught the dim scent of distant life and he thought about the achievements of that life—each achievement peculiar to a certain life form, but all the many achievements of many life forms adding up to a massive reaching out for the incalculable answers that must come about and meld together before the final answer could be known.
This was his heritage, he thought, this the heritage and the task and the striving of his people and perhaps of many other peoples who alone and in the darkness of unknowing clawed
toward the light.
Then the star and the darkness went away and again he was in the center of a circle formed by the equation people and he sought out the rose-red one flanked by all the others. The panel of the rose-red one was blank, but as he watched, an equation flickered on it, pale and faint at first, then hardening and becoming sharper. He drove his mind against it and he wrestled with it and finally it became clear and when that happened, the rose-red blackboard was wiped clean of it and again he drove his mind against it and, hesitantly, another equation began to form and finally formed, as hard and solid as had been the first one. But there was a difference: This time the equation was his own, transmitted to the rose-red equation person and now etched upon its blackboard so that it might be seen by all the others.
I am talking to them, Whisperer told himself and felt a surge of pride sweep through him. I am talking to them in their own language and in their own way.
All around the circle, the same equation was formed on the blank surfaces of all the other people and he sensed their wonder and their satisfaction that finally one had come who could talk with them. Probably it was something they never had expected—in this small segment of space-time they had staked out for themselves, they had made themselves content to be alone, divorced and isolated from all other peoples and all other places, not expecting visitors, anticipating no contact with other forms of life, a community that had told itself it was self-sufficient and had settled, in its hearts and souls, for that.
His equation was wiped out and another began to form, not so slowly this time, not so haltingly.
The rose-red equation person was answering him.
Whisperer settled down for a long talk with his newfound friends.
Chapter Forty-six
The tiny room was barren, a place of four walls carved from the rock, with the metallic plate set into the wall that faced the chairs on which they sat. The face formed slowly on the plate. For a time after it had formed, nothing happened, then the Pope said, “I am pleased that you could come to see me.”