“It pleases us, Your Holiness, to be here,” said Jill.
“I have many advisers,” said the Pope, “and, at times, they give me much conflicting advice, so that often I am somewhat puzzled as to what counsel I should take. Now, if you are agreeable, I’d like to avail myself of somewhat different counsel. Generally, my advisers give me the benefit of robotic thinking. At times, over the years, there have been some humans, but not many of them and too many of them unwilling to freely express their inner thoughts. I now have Ecuyer, of course, and while he is more valuable than many of the others, he has a tendency to think from a single viewpoint. He is so wrapped up in his Search Program.…”
“He is a devoted man,” said Tennyson.
“Yes, there’s that, of course. May I ask you something? As humans, are you outraged by our calling this place Vatican?”
“Not at all,” said Jill.
“Do you happen to be Christians?”
“That is a question we have discussed among ourselves,” said Jill. “We are not certain exactly what we are. The two of us happen to have Christian roots. Which is no more than to say that our culture is not Jewish or Moslem or any other of the many faiths developed by mankind.”
“We are not the Vatican, of course,” said the Pope. “Not even a Vatican. We term ourselves Vatican-17, although the numeral is very seldom used. I suspect that at the time this establishment was built, there may have been sixteen other Vaticans, scattered through as many solar systems settled by humankind, although as to that I cannot be positive. I suspect as well that the Old Earth Vatican is still the premier Vatican, if that is the correct way of saying it, and all the others that now exist are subsidiaries, if, again, that is the correct terminology. The subsidiary Vaticans undoubtedly would have had the right to use the name. We did not even ask. If we were to establish ourselves today, I doubt we’d use the name. If I were constructed today, I am certain I would not be termed a pope. When this Vatican and I were built, the robots were fresh from Earth, still starry-eyed and filled with the wonder of the great religions there, especially impressed by the majesty and the tradition of the Catholic faith. Thus, this place became Vatican and I became a pope. You would get objection to what I’ve told you from many functionaries of this Vatican. There are many who still regard this as a holy place and a holy venture. The terms were used out of the great respect and perhaps even a love of Old Earth Christianity. Despite the fact our founders were denied the privilege of becoming communicants, they still held their love of the ancient faith.”
“We understand all that,” said Tennyson. “We can understand the robots’ reason for the use of the terminology—and sympathize with it.”
“As a pope,” said His Holiness, “I am supposed to be infallible. I am supposed to know all answers. This community looks to me for guidance. As a sophisticated computer, I am equipped to work out long-range answers; on the short range, more often than not, I find myself fumbling. Ask me for an answer that may be valid ten thousand years from now and, given time, I can come up with the good approximation. Ask me for a decision about tomorrow and I am as uncertain as the next one. You can see my problem?”
“Yes, we can,” said Jill.
“The one thing that confuses me the most,” said His Holiness, “is this matter of faith. Throughout this galaxy and, undoubtedly, throughout the universe, many different peoples have developed many types of faith, based on widely varying concepts and various kinds of deities. This may seem to you to be a strange way for a pope to talk.”
“We are listening,” said Tennyson. “Most attentively.”
“It is true, as I have said, that throughout the universe there are many kinds of faiths. For sheer diversity, however, no planet that I know of can exceed Earth in the number of its faiths. How many separate faiths would you say that Earth might have?”
“I have never taken the time to count them up,” said Jill. “Even if I tried, I imagine I’d leave out a number that were purely local. But there are a lot of them.”
“And none agreeing. Each of them arguing, even to the death, that theirs is the one and only faith. There was a time in Earth’s history, continuing for centuries, that men of different faiths slaughtered one another to prove their faith was best. A faith based on the Jetting of blood. Does this seem right to you? To what would you attribute it?”
“To the madness of mankind,” said Tennyson. “In many ways we are a vicious race.”
“And yet one that is deeply loved by robots. Your people created my people. Out of your minds and skills our people sprang. Out of you came us. You created and developed us. For this reason, if for no other, there must be great good in you. There must be in you an overflowing measure of nobility and love.”
“Your Holiness, our philosophers for years have asked the questions you are asking,” said Tennyson. “They are not new to us.”
“Then what about this matter of faith? You know the problem that Vatican is facing. As a derivative of a robot, which is a derivative of a human, I am asking you. I do not promise I will accept your advice; I have many factors to consider, but I do need to know how you think about it. That is why I asked you here, alone, unaccompanied by your friend the cardinal. Come on, speak up. Tell me what’s in your mind. I ask you as two valued friends.”
“We did not come here first as friends,” said Tennyson. “Jill came as a writer who wished to tell your story to the galaxy and you were extremely wroth at that. I came as a man fleeing human justice, and while I was given sanctuary, I was tolerated only as a physician, which you needed since your doctor had been killed.”
“But since then you both have proved to us that you are friends,” said the Pope. “You have become identified with Vatican. There was a time when you resented our implied threat that we would not let you leave; now we would be hard put to drive you off. What have you found in Vatican that brings this change of heart?”
“I am not sure that I can tell you,” said Tennyson.
And yet, he thought, perhaps he could. How, he thought, can I count the ways?
“The quietness of it,” said Jill. “The quiet way of living and the quietness of the dedication. Although I sense now that the quietness of the dedication is beginning to break up. The little clinic garden, the fields of grain, the mountains.…”
“I had the impression,” said Tennyson, “that you did not care for mountains.”
“I do now. I saw them just the other day. I saw them, Jason, as you have been seeing them.”
“Back in the medieval days of Earth,” Tennyson told the Pope, “there were many monasteries. Men withdrew to them, spent their lives in them, living Christian lives under Christian rule. They would have told you, had you asked them, that they did it for the love of Christ, that this was their way of serving Christ. I am inclined to think that, deep down, they used the monasteries as refuges against the brutal times. There they found a world of peace and quiet. Which did not make them any less devout, but, without their realizing it, their devotion had less to do with their being there than they might have thought. I think that’s what you have here, what I’ve found here—a refuge from the turbulence of a contending galaxy.”
“And that,” said the Pope, “is what we wish it to remain. A quiet place in which to go about our work. But the question is: What should be our work?”
“If you are asking me if you should follow faith or knowledge, I’d say knowledge, for it seems to me faith will come out of knowledge, not knowledge out of faith. But that is a personal opinion. Ask a dozen, or a hundred, other humans, not including the indoctrinated humans on End of Nothing, and you would get different answers. Some of them would give my answer, others would plump for faith. Maybe the answer is that there can be no true answer any more than there may be true faith.”
“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,” sa
id 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 phras
e. 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.