Project Pope (11 page)

“But there are all the pilgrims. The pilgrims come and go.”

“The cardinal half-explained that to me. The pilgrims, it seems, don't count. They come from scattered planets, only a few from each one. Apparently they are tied up with screwball cults that have little standing. No one would pay attention to what any cult member said, even to the cult, perhaps, if it was said collectively. Whatever word the pilgrims carry back would be put down as religious ravings.”

“Vatican has a lot to hide,” Tennyson said thoughtfully. “There is Ecuyer's Search Program, which the pilgrims might not know about, might have no inkling of. Maybe it's the Search Program, not Vatican itself, that is important. The searchers are milking knowledge from the universe, from all of space and time—and maybe other places outside of space and time. If there's any such place.”

“Heaven could be. If there's a place like Heaven.”

“The point is that no one else has anything like it. The Search people have miles of files crammed with the information they've pilfered. It's all there. What are they going to do with it?”

“Maybe they really are feeding it to the Pope.”

“Some Pope,” Tennyson remarked. “No, I can't think that's entirely it. Ecuyer said something else. I'm trying to remember exactly what. I think it was that Project Pope had become, over the years, no more than an excuse for keeping on with the Search Program. I think that was it. He suggested that I not mention it to Vatican. Gave the impression that some of the old Vatican crowd might be stuffy.”

“Vatican has its worries,” said Jill. “The cardinal let some of them out. Sort of talking the worries out to me, although I doubt he thought of it that way. He, and possibly some of the other cardinals, think someone is stealing from Vatican. ‘Nibbling away' was the way he put it. What seemed to worry him the most was no one knows who or what it is that is doing the nibbling.”

Chapter Fifteen

Enoch Cardinal Theodosius hunted up his bosom pal, Cecil Cardinal Roberts.

“Eminence,” he said, “it seems to me that you and I should have a talk.”

“You are upset,” said Roberts. “What is going on?”

“These two new arrivals. The human man and woman.”

“What do you know about them?”

“Nothing about the man. Ecuyer has installed him as Vatican physician. I understand he came here fleeing justice.”

“Have you spoken to Ecuyer of it?”

“No, Your Eminence. Of late, Ecuyer has become impossible to talk with.”

“Yes, I know,” said Roberts. “One gains the impression that he believes the Search Program has become our paramount concern. If you ask me, the man has gotten bigger than his britches.”

Theodosius sighed. “Much as we may admire the human race,” he said, “there are some of them one finds very hard to live with.”

“And the woman, Eminence?”

“I talked with her this morning. She is a writer. Imagine that, a writer! She was the one who wrote us all the letters. I told you about them?”

“Yes, I believe you did.”

“She wants to write about us.”

“Write about us?”

“Yes, it was all in the letters. You read them, did you not?”

“Of course I did. And put them quite out of mind. It's impossible, of course. The impudence of it.”

“Exactly,” Theodosius said.

“You told her it was unthinkable.”

“Yes, but she refused to accept the refusal. She is a most persistent human. Finally I offered her a job.”

“You'll pardon me, Your Eminence, but there is no job.…”

“Yes, there is,” said Theodosius. “All these years we have been talking about writing a history of Vatican. We have said how fine it would be to get it down on paper so that all might read and wonder. We have even talked about developing a new species of robot to do the work. We robots, it seems, are not cut out for writing chores. And it would be a vast amount of trouble to develop another strain capable of so limited an ability as writing. But here is one, come to us of her own free will, who can do the writing for us.”

“And, pray, what was her reaction?”

“I gained the impression she was not enchanted with the offer. But that's not entirely what I came to talk about.”

“I thought you said that was what you wished to talk about—the new human man and woman.”

“Well, yes, of course. But not of them alone. There is another factor. There are, in recent years, three disturbing human factors that have come upon us.”

“Three?”

“Decker is the third. He is the third unknown. What do we really know about him?”

“Why, I guess,” said Roberts, “we know very little. We do not know how he got here. He did not come on
Wayfarer
, and I know of no other way that a human could get here. Perhaps you, Your Eminence, know more of him than I do. You have talked with him.”

“Some years ago,” said Theodosius. “Shortly after he showed up. I donned the habit of a monk and went calling on him, in the pretense of extending welcome. A meddlesome, inquisitive, footloose little cleric. I thought that perhaps he would talk to such a monk whereas he might be hesitant of talking with a cardinal. I learned precisely nothing. He told me not a thing. Pleasant enough, but a distant man. And now these two—the woman and the doctor. Will you tell me, Eminence, why we must have a human doctor? We could, in a short time, train one of our robots to be physician to the humans. Fully as knowledgeable, as efficient, as capable, as any human doctor. Perhaps even more so, for we have access to certain new medical knowledge that might be adaptable to humans.”

“Yes,” said Roberts. “I know. We have talked about it often. Periodically we must import an outsider to be physician to the humans. It's not desirable. No outsider is desirable. The old doctor who died, as all humans must, was quite acceptable, although, if you remember, we had doubts concerning him at first. The one who replaced him was impossible. The humans in the town and those in Vatican—except for the Listeners, of whom we do import a few—are old-time residents. They are descendants of people who have been here for centuries. Of them we need have no concern or fear. They are almost one with us. But outsiders have no real ties to us. They are not accustomed to us, nor are we to them.”

“And yet,” said Theodosius, “our own people, descendants of those who have been here for ages, probably would not accept a robotic doctor. This perturbs me. It points to a cultural gap that still exists between the robot and the human. I would have hoped that after all the years the gap would have been closed. Certainly there is a difference between robot and human, but—”

“I think, Your Eminence,” said Roberts, “that in the subconscious human mind, we still may be tainted, that we still smell faintly of machines. They, if charged with it, would piously deny such a thing, and believe their own denial, but it still is there. I am sure of that. On this matter of a robot doctor, it is true, of course, that we could readily supply them one, but I don't think we should. Here on End of Nothing we could have supplied our humans with many luxury services, but we have refrained from doing so because of the fear that it would seem we were taking them over. We must never seem to do that. It would be simpler, naturally, if we could make pets of them, watching closely after them, shielding them from harm, supplying all their needs. But this we must not do. We must not tamper with them. We must let them go their way and preserve their dignity.”

“We face a dilemma,” said Theodosius. “We battle with ourselves. We are continually haunted by the regard, the respect, almost the worship that we feel for humans. It is a response to them, I am certain, that we can't root out. Surely not such as you and I, who were forged by humans. We stand too close to them. Some of the second and third-generation robots, created not by humans but by robots, might be able to root out some of this feeling for the humans. We try to comfort ourselves by saying we are no more than an extension of the human race. I suppose we would like to think so—we must, for we say it often, almost as if by rote. But the bitter truth is that we are a human product.”

“Your Eminence,” said Roberts, speaking kindly, “you are too hard upon yourself, too hard on all of us. Products we may be, but surely our thousand years of effort has raised us above the level of a product. The thing that bothers us, I think, is that our attitude toward humanity smacks too much of worship. But if you think of it correctly, you'll see the fallacy in that. For centuries we have worked to discover a universal principle that would apply to all—not to robots alone, but to every thinking thing, each speck of intelligence. Eminence, we have paid our dues. We have earned the right to be ourselves.”

“Then why am I so concerned with three outsider humans? Am I assuming the attitude of a child toward a father image? A disapproving father who may stand ready to correct me.”

“All of us—not you alone, but all of us—are bowed down under an inferiority complex,” said Roberts. “It is a cross we must bear as best we can. Give us a few more millennia and we will outgrow it.”

“What you say is true,” said Theodosius. “I find within myself, upon close examination, so much tangled guilt that I can barely stand up under it. There are even times—forgive me, Eminence—there are even times when I feel a guilt in our having brought about His Holiness. There is a possibility, I tell myself, that in doing this, we have committed sacrilege, that in fact His Holiness is no more than another one of us—not holy at all, but simply another machine, another exquisitely sophisticated robot, a cybernetic shadow with which we delude ourselves.”

“Your Eminence,” Roberts exclaimed in horror, “I hope you have not repeated such a heresy where others than myself might hear you. As an ancient friend, I can understand the guilt, but …”

“I have not breathed a word of this before,” said Theodosius. “I have kept it bottled up. Only to such as you, old friend, could I have said a word of it. I would not have said it now were it not for so many happenings. This sighting of Heaven by one of the Listeners—”

“Yes, that is bad,” said Roberts. “It has had a greater impact among our brethren than I like. My hope had been that it would blow over soon and be quite forgotten. The Listener, I understand, was very close to death, which would have ended all the foolishness, but this doctor …”

Chapter Sixteen

Mary improved. The fever went down and the breathing difficulty all but disappeared. The blankness left her eyes. She became aware of those around her and was able to sit up.

She became imperious, assumed the attitude of a rather shabby, beat-up old grande dame. She snubbed Tennyson, lorded it over the nursing staff, ignored medical orders with a fine insouciance.

“It's this damned Heaven business,” said Ecuyer. “It has set her apart from all the other Listeners, above everyone, in fact. Over the years she has been a top-notch Listener. She has pulled in a lot of data for us. But nothing so obviously important as this. Some of the other findings were important, of course—all data has potential importance—but nothing dramatic. Nothing like finding Heaven. That, on the face of it, is important. I'm afraid the finding of Heaven will ruin the woman as a Listener. To be a good Listener, you must be devoted and sincere and humble. The task of Listening must be approached with humility. The Listener must subordinate himself, or herself, must cancel out personality, must go out with an empty mind or close to an empty mind. It is a pity that Mary's clones—”

“You mentioned clones before,” said Tennyson. “You mean that you have created other Marys?”

“That is right,” Ecuyer told him. “When we get an extraordinary Listener, we go to cloning. It's only a recent development. I think that, more than likely, the Vatican biological research laboratory has developed more advanced cloning procedures than can be found anywhere in the known galaxy. Foolproof, certain—no aberrations whatsoever. Good Listeners are hard to find. You have no idea how long we search to find a decent one. A decent one, mind you; Mary is superb. We can't lose such a Listener; we must duplicate. We must have more like Mary. We have three clones of her, but they are little more than children. They are still growing up. Even when they are grown, there is no guarantee that any one of them can find her way to Heaven, although we could hope they'd have a better chance than another Listener unrelated to Mary. Superb Listeners, sure, but we can't be sure of Heaven.”

“Then Mary might be your only hope.”

“That's the truth of it,” said Ecuyer. “And she knows it. That's what makes her so suddenly important.”

“Is there anything that can be done about it? Anything to snap her out of it?”

“Leave her alone,” said Ecuyer. “Pay her no attention. The more she gets, the worse she'll be.”

Jill accepted the job of writing the Vatican history.

“What the hell,” she said to Tennyson, walking in the garden. “It'll be five weeks or more before the ship from Gutshot comes again. Five weeks before I can even think of leaving. I'd go crazy just sitting here. Nothing to do. Nothing to see.”

“You could look at the mountains. They keep changing all the time. They change as the light changes. They're never quite the same. I never tire of watching them.”

“You watch them,” she said. “I'm no mountain freak.”

“What if you get hooked on the Vatican history? What if it proves so fascinating you can't tear yourself away from it—if Vatican will allow you to tear yourself away. There might come a time you knew so much, they couldn't let you go.”

“I'll take my chances,” she told him. “This girl has found herself in tight spots before and always has been able to wiggle out of them. And, God, the information that's there. When they said they kept a detailed record, they really meant detailed.”