Project Pope Read online

  The captain is an enigma. He probably could have command of one of the proudest interstellar liners; he has the required status. But here he is, running pilgrims he despises.

  'But making a barrel of money. Told me five more years and he can retire to a planet named Apple Blossom.

  'Yes, he told me that, too. Apparently he tells everyone. I don't know how much to believe.

  'Perhaps all of it, said Tennyson. 'Men do strange things to cash in on their dreams.

  'Jason, said Jill, 'I like you. Do you know why I like you?

  'My honesty and trustworthiness, he said. 'My humanity, my compassion, my integrity…

  'No, none of those. I like you because you can look at me without flinching. You don't pull away. People, to start with, always pull away and flinch. I have come to terms with it myself; I wish other people would.

  'I scarcely notice, he said.

  'You're a cheerful liar. You do notice it. No one could help but notice it.

  'The shock, what initial shock there is, he said, 'comes from the fact that otherwise you are so beautiful. Without the cheek, your features are classic. One side of your face arrestingly appealing, the other side marred.

  'You can even talk about it, she said, 'and make it sound all right. No pity for me. Not even sympathy. As if it were quite normal. And that helps a lot. To be accepted as I am. I tried so hard. I went to so many different clinics. I was examined by so many people. And always the same verdict. Capillary hemangioma. Nothing to be done. One specialist-can you imagine it? — suggested I wear a mask, a half-mask covering the bad side my face. He assured me that one could be molded and fitted —

  'If it's a mask you are looking for, he said, 'you have the best one that there is — your self-acceptance.

  'You really think so, Doctor?

  'Of course I do.

  'The bottle, please, she said. 'Let us drink to that.

  They drank to it, solemnly, in turn.

  'One question, he said. 'Not to change the subject, but a practical question. Once we get to End of Nothing, what kind of accommodations will we find? What kind of place to stay?

  'I have reservations, she said, 'at a place called Human House. I don't know a thing about it except that it's expensive — if that's any criterion.

  'When we arrive, may I take you to dinner that first evening? To take the taste of this ship out of our mouths.

  'Why, thank you, sir, she said. 'That is thoughtful of you.

  Four

  They sat in the control room, sprawled out in the chairs.

  'Don't make the mistake, the captain warned them, 'of thinking of the robots of Project Pope as happy little servitors. They are high-powered electronic contraptions. Some people think they have managed to construct organic brains for themselves, but this I somehow doubt. Such a thought stems from the prejudicial viewpoint of a biological being. There is no reason to believe, once you think of it realistically, that a technological thinking and reasoning apparatus, given the present state of the art, need be one whit inferior to a human brain, or, actually, any kind of brain. These robots, for centuries, have been continually upgrading their capabilities, improving themselves in many different ways, as a human mechanic will keep on dinging up an engine to make it run better.

  'How well are you acquainted with them? Tennyson asked.

  'Normal contacts only, the captain replied. 'The necessary contacts for the conduct of my business. I have no friends among them, if that is what you're asking.

  'I'm sorry if I seemed to question you, said Tennyson. 'I was simply curious. It seems I'm being plopped down into a situation I know nothing about. I'd like to find out as much as I can.

  'I have been told, said Jill, 'that the robots have humans working for them.

  'I don't know if the humans are working for them, the captain told her. 'Maybe they are working together. There are humans, a rather large corps of them. But my contacts never have been with the humans. I see only the robots and then only when they want to see me. Project Pope is a big operation. No one outside Vatican really seems to know what is going on. One story has it that the robots are trying to build an infallible pope — an electronic pope, a computer pope. There appears to be an idea that the project is an outgrowth of Christianity, an Old Earth religion.

  'We know what Christianity is, Jill said. 'There still are a lot of Christians, perhaps more than ever before. True, Christianity no longer looms as important as it did before we began going into space. This, however, is a relative thing. The religion is still as important as ever, but its seeming importance has been diluted by the many other faiths that exist in the galaxy. Isn't it strange that faith is so universal? Even the ugliest aliens appear to have a faith to cling to.

  'Not all of them, said the captain. 'Not all of them by any means. I have run into alien areas, into entire planets, where no one had ever thought of religion or of faith. And, I must say, that they were not the worse for it. Sometimes, I thought better.

  'Constructing a pope, said Tennyson, 'is a strange task to set oneself. I wonder where the robots got the idea and what they expect the end result to be.

  'You never can tell about robots, the captain observed. 'They are a funny lot. Spend enough time in space and you quit worrying or wondering about why anyone is doing something or what they expect from doing what they do. None of these rummy aliens think the way we do. They're a bunch of zany bastards. Compared to most of them, robots are downright human.

  'They should be, said Jill. 'We are the ones who dreamed them up. No other culture did. There are those who will tell you that robots are extensions of ourselves.

  'There may be some truth in that, the captain agreed. 'Screwy as they may be at times, they are still several cuts above any alien I ever met.

  'You don't like aliens, said Tennyson.

  'You aren't just whistling through your teeth. Who does like the scummy bastards?

  'And yet you use them on your ship.

  'Only because I can't pull together a crew of humans. Out here, there aren't many humans.

  'And you haul the aliens out to End of Nothing, then haul them back to Gutshot.

  'Someone has to haul them, said the captain, 'and I get well paid for doing it. I haul them, but nothing says I have to associate with them. It's not only that I dislike them, which I do, but we humans have to stick together. If we don't, they'll overwhelm us.

  Tennyson studied the captain. There was nothing of the look of the fanatical bigot about him, He was of indeterminate age — a young-old man — his profile resembling a hatchet. There was no humor in him; he was all deadly business. A strange man, Tennyson told himself — one of those twisted men found in lonely places. More than likely the captain was lonely. For years he had ferried alien pilgrims between Gutshot and End of Nothing, and all the time, out of his loneliness that cried out for humanness, his contempt and horror of his passengers had grown until it now was tightly woven into the fabric of his life.

  'Tell us about End of Nothing itself, said Jill. 'We've talked about it ever since I came aboard and not once have you told me what kind of planet it is. I have no idea if it's farmland or-

  'It's not farmland, said the captain. 'The project does have some gardens and fields, the robots laboring in them, to grow food for their biological brothers. But other than that, it is all wasteland, the environment untouched, standing as it always has. It has not been exploited; there are not enough people in its economy to exploit it. The only exploiter that I know, is a man by the name of Thomas Decker. Decker is a strange character. He lives alone in a cabin at the outskirts of the settlement.

  'You are a friend of Decker's?

  'Not a friend. We have a small business arrangement. Almost every trip he brings me a small sack of semiprecious stones. You know the kind — garnets, aquamarines, amethyst, topaz. Nothing very rare, seldom really valuable. Low-grade opal now and then. Once a couple of emeralds we did rather well on. No great deal. No possibility of great wealth. I h
ave a feeling he doesn't do it for the money, although I may be wrong about that. A man of mystery. No one knows a single thing about him, although he's been there for years. I think he does his gem hunting for the fun of it. He brings me the gems and I sell them to a contact I have in Gutshot. He pays me a ten-percent fee.

  'Where does he get the stones? asked Tennyson.

  'Somewhere out in the wilds. He goes back into the mountains and picks them out of streambeds, working the gravels.

  'You said you doubt he does it for the money, said Jill. 'What does he do it for, then?

  'I'm not sure, the captain responded. 'Maybe it's just something to do, a hobby to keep him busy. One thing I didn't tell you. He does not bring me all the gems he finds. The better pieces he holds out. Some of them he carves. There is one good-sized piece of jade. All by itself, it would be worth a lot of money. The way he has carved it makes it worth a fortune. But he won't let loose of it. Says that it's not his, that it doesn't belong to him.

  'Who else could it belong to?

  The captain shook his head. 'I wouldn't know. Perhaps no one. It's just his way of talking. Lord knows what he means. You must understand that in many ways he is a strange man — a strangely private person and old-fashioned, as if he'd stepped out of another age, as if he did not quite belong in the present. The funny thing is that I can say this, but I can't tell you why I say it. It's not anything he does or the way he talks; it's just a feeling that I get. I say he's strange and even tell you in what ways he is strange, but I can't cite a single example of behavior that would make me say that.

  'You must be a close friend of his. To know this much about the man, I mean.

  'No, not a close friend. No one is a close friend of his. The man's pleasant enough, in many ways he's charming, but he does not associate with the other humans at End of Nothing. By that, I don't mean he repels them, or even that he avoids them, but he does not seek them out. He never joins the crowd at the bar at Human House; he almost never ventures into town. He's got an old beat-up vehicle, one of those cars that can cover tough terrain. He bought it off someone in the settlement. I don't remember who, if I ever knew. He does some traveling around in that, but always by himself. When he goes back into the wilderness to hunt for gems, he doesn't take it. He walks. It's as if he needs no one, as if he has all he needs back there in the wilderness and in his cabin at the edge of town. I've been at his cabin once — that's when I saw the carvings he had made. I wasn't invited, but I went and he seemed glad enough to see me. He was friendly. We sat in front of the fire and talked, but there were times when I thought he wasn't really there, that he wasn't with me, that he scarcely was aware of me. As if- and this may sound strange — that while he was talking with me and listening to me he also was talking with and listening to someone else as well. Once again, there is absolutely nothing I can put a finger on, but the impression was there. He told me, when I left, how glad he was I'd come, but he didn't ask me back and I've never gone back. I doubt I ever will.

  'You say, said Tennyson, 'he does not join the crowd at the bar at Human House. I suppose mostly humans are there.

  'Yes, of course, the captain said. 'The aliens have places they can go, but Human House is human. No alien would think of going there.

  'How about the humans at Vatican? Do they go to Human House?

  'Well, now that you mention it, I don't think they do. No one sees too much of the Vatican people, either robot or human. They stay pretty much up on their hill. My impression is that they don't mix with the people in the town. I'm not talking about a lot of humans in town. There aren't too many of them, and they're a close-knit group. Most of the humans in the town have jobs of one sort or another that are tied in with Project Pope. I don't mean Vatican stuff, but jobs that have some association with the Vatican. When you come right down to it, End of Nothing is Vatican. It's the only thing that's there. There are some aliens in the town. They cater to the pilgrims. Most of the pilgrims, as you know, are alien. I've never carried a human pilgrim. As a matter of fact, scarcely ever a human of any kind at all. Last trip in, the one before this, I did carry a human, but he wasn't any pilgrim. He was a doctor. It seems to me, of late, that I'm getting a run on doctors.

  'I don't understand, said Tennyson.

  'This one, this other doctor, was going in to join the Vatican staff. His name was Anderson, a young fellow, kind of cocky chap. He sort of grated on me, but I got along with him the best I could. It wasn't as if I would be saddled with him for too long a time. He was going out to replace the Old Doc — name of Easton — who'd been at the Vatican for years, taking care of the human staff, of course. Robots don't need doctors. Or maybe they have their own, I don't know. Anyhow, Easton finally died and Vatican had no doctor. Vatican had been trying to get another one for years, knowing Easton was getting old and wouldn't live forever. I suspect it's hard to attract anyone to End of Nothing, which is not the sort of place a doctor or anyone else would really care to live. Some months after Old Doc died, here was this whippersnapper of a medic showing up at Gutshot. I hauled him out, of course, but I was glad when I could wash my hands of him. He's the only Vatican staff member who ever traveled on my ship. There's not much going back and forth.

  'This matter of only aliens being pilgrims bothers me, said Jill. 'Vatican must be oriented to the human idea of religion. It's run by robots, and robots by and large are surrogate humans. Then the terminology — Vatican and Pope. That's straight Out of Earth. Would it be a sort of bastardized Christianity?

  'That might be the far-back basis for it, the captain said. 'I've never got it straight. It may basically be Christianity, but interwoven with no one knows how many alien beliefs and faiths, all of it twisted out of human recognition by the perversity of robotic thinking.

  'But even so, Jill continued. 'there should be some human pilgrims, some human interest-outside the project itself, I mean.

  'Maybe not, said Tennyson. 'While a lot of the humans who left Old Earth all those millennia ago also left Christianity behind them — or shucked it and probably other Earth religions as well, after a few centuries in space — the average human, almost any human, still would know something about it and have a sort of instinctive feeling for the religion his ancestors had left behind. They could spot a phoney faith and would have nothing to do with it.

  'That may be right, the captain said. 'Aliens, on the other hand, having no background to judge the concept of Christianity- however twisted that concept might be — may find themselves attracted to it. I suppose that it is from the aliens that the project gets its support. Some aliens are fabulously wealthy. That bunch of creeps now occupying my quarters practically stink of money.

  'I asked you about the planet, said Jill, 'and you haven't told me. We got off on something else.

  'It's terrestrial, said the captain, 'with some minor differences. The Vatican colony is the only settlement. All the rest is howling wilderness that's never been properly mapped; a few quick flyovers by a survey ship and that is all. Only one settlement, as you know, is not unique. Many frontier planets boast only a single settlement, near the spaceport — both the planet and the settlement sharing the same name. Thus, Gutshot is the designation of both the planet and the colony surrounding the port, while End of Nothing means both the settlement and planet, as you choose. The thing is that no one except Decker knows anything about the planet farther than a few miles beyond the settlement, and I can't think Decker has traveled any great distance into the mountains. Gutshot, of course, is better known. It's littered with dinky little feudal holdings, but, even so, much of it is still wild and unexplored.

  'As far as End of Nothing is concerned, it is virtually unknown. We suspect there is no intelligent creature native to the planet, although that is an assumption. No one has looked for an intelligence, and there just might be one, or more, tucked away somewhere. There is animal life — herbivores and carnivores that feed on the herbivores. Some of the carnivores, according to what one hears in
the colony, are ferocious brutes. I asked Decker about them once and he shrugged me off. I never asked again. Now, the captain said to Tennyson, quickly changing the subject, 'how much time did you spend on Gutshot?

  'Three years, said Tennyson. 'A little less than three years.

  'You got into trouble there?

  'You might say I did.

  'Captain, said Jill, 'it is unseemly of you to be prying. No one saw him get on the ship. No one knows he did. It's no skin off your ass.

  'If it will ease your conscience any, said Tennyson, 'I can tell you that I committed no crime. I was a suspect. That was all. On Gutshot, being a suspect is enough to get you killed.

  'Dr. Tennyson, said the captain primly, 'when we land at End of Nothing, you can get off the ship with the understanding that I have never talked with you. I would think that might be the best for both of us. As I've said before, we humans stick together.

  Five

  This was the time of day that he liked the best, Decker thought — supper done and the dishes cleared away, a good fire blazing, the world shut outside the door and Whisperer at the table in the corner, working at shaping the piece of topaz they had brought home on the trip of the week before. Decker settled more comfortably in the chair, kicking off his moccasins and putting his stockinged feet on the raised hearthstone. In the fireplace a log burned through and settled on the other logs in a shower of sparks. New tongues of flame leaped up and ran along the burning wood. The chimney throat mumbled and was answered by the moaning wind that nosed along the eaves.

  Shifting in his chair, he looked toward Whisperer's corner, but there was no sign of him. Sometimes you saw Whisperer, sometimes not. Set on one corner of the table was the intricately carved piece of pale green jade. A piece of work, Decker told himself, that was hard to make out. It was confusing because there was too much in it, much of which was unhuman, nuances that had no parallel to the way a human thought or saw; start to follow the lines of it and one soon lost oneself. The line that first manifested itself became something else and the pattern that the viewer thought he'd puzzled out became another pattern and then another and another, each one more confusing than the last. There was no end to it. A man probably could spend the rest of his days sitting in front of it and staring at it, trying to puzzle out and resolve the flowing of it and in the end always getting lost.