Project Pope Read online

  '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.

  She threw herself into the job. There were days on end when Tennyson would not see her. Then she'd show up for dinner and a talk.

  'I can't tell you, she said. 'There is so much to tell. It all is there. Everything they planned or did, everything they thought.

  'You're getting sucked into it, he warned her. 'You'll never leave. You'll become a research person, so involved in tracking down and pinning down that a lifetime's not enough.

  'Somewhere inside of me, she said, 'there still remains Jill Roberts, the demon freelance writer, the galaxy trotter who follows stories to worlds' ends. When the time comes — but let that go. Forget about me. How about you, Jason?

  'I'm getting settled in.

  'And happy?

  'Happy? I don't know. What is happiness? Contentment, yes. Contentment for the moment. Medical chores that I enjoy, but not too many of them. I never was, I guess, one of your dedicated doctors intent upon setting his mark high on the medical roll of honor, never devastated with the thirst to do more than passing well for his fellow humans. There is just enough of it here to make me feel professionally competent and that, again for the moment, is everything I want. I get along with Ecuyer and all the rest of them.

  'How about your Heaven lady?

  'The Heaven lady? Damned if I know. Physically, she is well enough….

  'But?

  'She's taken a strange turn. She preens herself. She has become the Great Lady. The rest of us are dirt beneath her feet. Her mental processes are all screwed up.

  'But you have to understand her, realize what Heaven meant to her. Whether she found Heaven or not, it's still important to her. Maybe the first time in her life that something important really happened to her.

  'Oh, she thinks she found Heaven well enough. She is convinced of it.

  'So is half of Vatican.

  'Half of Vatican? I would have thought all of Vatican.

  'Jason, I'm not sure. People don't tell me, but I hear some talk. Hard to understand. Not all of them are entirely happy with Heaven being found.

  'Why should that be? Heaven! Jesus, I'd think they'd be thrilled out of their skulls.

  'Vatican isn't what it sounds like. Not what we think it is. Because of the terminology — Vatican, Pope, cardinals, all the rest of it — the easy assumption is that it's basically Christian. Well, it's not all Christian. There is much else to it. Just what that much else is I don't know, but you gain the impression that there are an awful lot of things. At one time, it may have been basically Christian; that's all the poor things had when they came out from Earth. But the robots have found so much else, so many hints of so much else, that it's no longer entirely Christian. And there is another factor…

  She hesitated for a moment. Tennyson waited, saying nothing. Then she went on.

  'There are two groups of robots in Vatican, not too well defined. There is the old group, the ones who came from Earth. They are still inclined to be closely identified with humans. To them the humans and the robots are tied together. This is not so true of the younger robots, the ones who were created here, built here, forged here, however you may say it, by robots, not by humans. You can sense in them an underlying resentment, maybe not of humans, but of the attitude the older robots hold toward humans. These youngsters want to cut the ties with humanity. Oh, they still subscribe to the debt that robots owe to humans, but they want to cut away; they want to strengthen their own identities. Mary's Heaven, I think, is under some suspicion because it's human-based. Mary is a human and she found a Christian concept —

  'That doesn't follow, said Tennyson. 'Not all humans are Christians. I think only a small percentage of them are. I'm not sure I'm Christian, nor, I think, are you. Perhaps at one time our ancestors were — although they could as well have been Jewish or Moslem or —

  'But many of us have a Christian heritage, whether we're actually Christians or not. It doesn't make any difference whether we are or not. In many of us, the old way of Christian thinking still hangs on. Look, we still use Christian swear words — hell and Christ and God and Jesus. Those words roll easily and naturally off our tongues.

  Tennyson nodded soberly. 'Yes, I can see how the robots might think we were, in our hearts, still Christian. Not that it's a bad thing being Christian.

  'Of course not, Jason. But when mankind began leaving Earth, they lost a lot, or shed a lot, along the way. A lot of us don't know what we really are.

  They sat silently for a time and then she said, her voice soft and low, 'Jason, you don't notice my face any longer — the stigma, that horrible angry scar. I can tell you don't. I can tell you really don't. You're the first man in my experience who has ever gotten so he didn't notice it.

  'My dear, he said, 'why should I?

  'Because it disfigures me. Because it makes me ugly.

  'There is enough beauty in you, he told her, 'both inside and outside you, that disfigurement doesn't matter. It takes nothing from you. And you're right — I don't see it any longer.

  She leaned toward him and he caught her in his arms.

  'Hold me, she said. 'Hold me. I need it so much, Jason.

  One evening only. Most other evenings he did not see her. She worked long hours digging out the history — extracting it from the records, pulling it together, trying to understand what she was finding, wondering at the fanatical devotion that through the years had driven the robots on their dedicated quest. Not religion, she told herself at times, not entirely religion, then again she would become convinced that it was religion. Although as she worked, the nagging question came in her mind and would not go away:

  What is religion?

  Cardinal Theodosius came at times to visit her at her work, hunched on a stool beside her, muffled and overwhelmed in his purple vestments, looking very much like a wrapped-up mummy.

  'Do you need more help? he'd ask her. 'If so, we could find more aides for you.

  'You've been most kind to me, Your Eminence, she'd say. 'I have all the willing help I need.

  And she had. The two robots working with her seemed as interested as she. The three of them, grouped about the great desk where she worked, put their heads together in an attempt to puzzle out the occasional obscurity in the record, to debate fine points of theology and meaning, trying to make come clear and understandable the faith and thought that had been put down centuries before.

  On one of his visits the cardinal said, without preamble, 'You are becoming one of us, Miss Roberts.

  'Well, hardly, Your Eminence, said Jill Roberts.

  'I did not mean what you apparently thought I meant, said the cardinal. 'I was thinking of your viewpoint, of your evident enthusiasm and devotion to fact.

  'If you're thinking of truth, Eminence, I've always been devoted to the truth.

  'It is not the matter of truth so much, the robot said, 'as it is of understanding. I do believe you may be beginning to understand our purpose here.

  Jill pushed away the papers she had been working on. 'No, Eminence, I do not understand. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

  There are great areas of understanding that are lacking. The principal lack is an explanation of what made you come out here to End of Nothing. What drove you out of Earth? The supposition is that you chafed under the rule that no robot could become a communicant of a churc
h, that you were denied religion. That is what any robot in Vatican will tell you, speaking as if this is an article of faith. But here I find no clear-cut evidence —

  'What came before the fact of our coming here, said the cardinal, 'is not in the record. There was no need to put it in. All of us knew why we came here. It was a part of us, it was understood. There was no reason to record it, for it was well known.

  She said no more; she was hesitant to argue with a cardinal, even a robot cardinal.

  He seemed not to notice she did not pursue the question; possibly he was confident he had explained to her satisfaction. Nor did he push the conversation further. He sat hunched upon his stool for a few minutes longer, then rose and left.

  Tennyson's days were filled. He prowled Vatican, observing, learning, talking with the robots he met. He visited with the Listeners and got to know some of them well. He established a singular rapport with James Henry, the man who had been a trilobite.

  'So you scanned the trilobite cube, Henry said to him. 'Tell me how it struck you.

  'It left me, said Tennyson, 'funny in the gizzard.

  'It left me the same, said Henry. 'I've done no Listening since. Frankly, I'm afraid to. I tell myself that back to the trilobite is as far as I should go. The trilobite must be close to the edge of sentience. Go back another step and a man is apt to wind up a lump of mindless protoplasm, knowing nothing but the urge toward food, the flight from danger. That was almost the case with the trilobite. But it was my own mind intruding that made sense of the trilobite. It just could be that if I went back far enough, I could get stuck forever in a mass of living jelly. That would be a hell of a way for a man to end his days.

  'You could try for something else.

  'You don't understand. Sure I could try for something else. A lot of the Listeners aim for specific areas. Sometimes they make it; a lot of times they don't. You can't quite be sure. Listening is a tricky business. It's not entirely under control. Take Mary, for instance. I suppose she will try for Heaven again, and with a Listener like Mary, she'll probably find her way. But even she can't be sure. You can never be sure. I never really tried to go back along the germ-plasma line. I just happened to.

  'Then why are you reluctant to do any more Listening? You might not-

  'Dr. Tennyson, said Henry, 'as I told you, I don't know why I started on that route in the first place or why I kept on going back. But I do know this — after the first few times, it was as if I were sliding down a well-greased chute. The chute, I'm afraid, is still there and waiting for me. I didn't mind to start with. It was, in fact, a lot of fun. Very interesting. I was several kinds of primitive men and that was to the good. Scared a lot of the time, of course, doing a lot of running for my life. I tell you, mister, those old ancestors of ours didn't cut too grand a figure in the early days. We were not, you might say, high on the totem pole. We were just one hunk of meat among many other hunks of meat. The carnivores didn't give a damn if it was us they ate or something else. Just protein and fat, that was all we were. Half the time I would be running scared. The rest of the time I scrounged for food — carrion left by the big cats and other predators, rodents I could knock over, fruit, roots, insects. It sickens me at times, remembering the kind of food I ate, gulping it down and happy to have it. It didn't bother me at the time. But there are times still when I dream of turning over a rotting log and scooping up a handful of white grubs that are hiding under it. They wriggle and try to get away, but I don't let them. I hold them tight and pop them in my mouth. They feel good going down. They have a sort of sweetish taste. And I wake up and I'm sweating all over and I have a gone feeling in the gut. But aside from that, it wasn't bad. Even when I was running for my life, it wasn't bad. Scared, sure, but there is a lot of exhilaration in being scared, a lot of satisfaction when you get away, thumbing your nose at the big cat that had tried to get you and saying yah, yah, yah at him. Mocking him. Feeling feisty as hell yourself. Nothing to do but fill your gut and find a place in the sun, where it's warm, to sleep. Horny as a hoptoad, chasing down a female.

  'I'll tell you the best thing that I ever was. It wasn't any man, no old human ancestor, or even close to human. I'm not sure some of the old man-things I was were human. This best thing was a sort of lizard. I don't know what it was, nor does anyone else. Ecuyer had a hell's own time trying to figure out what it was. He even sent for some books that he thought might tell him what it was, but they didn't. What it was never bothered me, but it did him. I guess it must have been some sort of missing link, a critter that never left a skeleton for paleontologists to dig up and ponder over. I figure, and so does Ecuyer, that it lived back in the Triassic. I said a lizard, but it probably wasn't any lizard. It wasn't big, but it was fast — it was one of the fastest things that lived at that time. And mean. Christ, was it mean! It hated everything, it fought with everything, it would eat anything that moved. It harried the hell out of everything in sight. I never knew until then how good it made a man feel to be really mean. Bone-chilling mean. A real, low-down bastard. The time I spent as a trilobite was short, but I lived as this lizard for a longtime. I don't know how long, for there was no sense of time. I just lived in the middle of forever. Maybe I stayed with it so long because I was enjoying myself so much. Why don't you ask Ecuyer to dig out that lizard cube for you? You'd enjoy it.

  'Perhaps someday I will, said Tennyson.

  He did not view the lizard cube. There were too many others. Ecuyer had no objection to his seeing them. He gave the robot custodian of the Listening files instructions to show Tennyson any that he wished, suggested a long list that he should see.

  It was puzzling, Tennyson told himself. Here he was, a stranger, and still the files were being opened to him. As if, in all fact, he was a member of the project. And in the Vatican library, the historical record had been made available to Jill. None of it squared with what the cardinal had told Jill when she had her interview with him — that Vatican was adamant in its refusal to allow any public exposure. The answer must be, he told himself, that Vatican was confident it could guard against public exposure by refusing to allow anyone with knowledge of its operations to leave the planet.

  Or it might be that by revealing its operations to Jill and him, both of them would be won over to the case. Vatican was made up of a band of dedicated fanatics isolated from the nearby galaxy — the only part of the galaxy that counted, the only part of it that was close enough to be tempted to move in — and out of this dedication and isolation the fact of Vatican and its purpose would loom larger in their eyes than it really was. Thus Vatican would fall victim to its egocentrism, and the cause would seem so grand, so sacred and so clearly reasonable that no one, adequately informed, could do anything but align himself with it. All that needed to be done was to explain and everyone would fall in line.

  Tennyson shook his head over the puzzle. The line taken by Vatican was illogical. They could, if they had wished, have sent both him and Jill packing when Wayfarer lifted off to return to Gutshot. Certainly both of them would have known something of Vatican, but very little of what was actually going on. Jill could write her article detailing how she had been thrown off the planet. But in the midst of all the causes, all the crusades, all the quarrels, all the problems of the galaxy — such an article would have made no more impression than the slightest ripple occasioned by a thrown stone in a storm-tossed ocean.

  The simplest answer, and the one that he was most reluctant to accept, was that both of them were needed here. Certainly there was need of a doctor to care for the human population; it might be true that Vatican felt a real need for the writing of its history. And it was true, as well, that it was difficult for such an out-of-the-way place to attract outside professionals, so difficult that when a couple of them dropped unannounced onto the planet, Vatican would latch onto them. But, for some reason that he was not able to understand, Tennyson was reluctant to accept such a thesis. He could not, for one thing, accept the thought that Jill and he coul
d be so important to them. Unless, and this he kept coming back to, Vatican had no intention of allowing them to leave.

  One of the cubes he viewed was highly disturbing. Even inside the mind of one of its inhabitants, which he assumed was where he was, it was a sort of place that made no human sense, was entirely incomprehensible. What he saw, although he realized later that it was not really seeing, was a world of diagrams and equations, or what he took to be diagrams and equations, although he saw no conventional signs or symbols even vaguely comparable to human ones. It was as if he existed somewhere inside a huge three-dimensional blackboard, with the signs and symbols, the diagrams and equations grouped about him and, on all sides, receding far into the distance. And it seemed at times, although how he sensed this he did not know, that he himself, or the entity whose mind he shared, was itself an equation.

  He sought vainly for an answer, for an explanation, feebly probing the mind of his host, but getting no reaction. The creature, he thought, more than likely, didn't know he was there. It itself needed no answer or explanation; it understood what it was seeing. Perhaps interpreting what it was seeing, sharing in the experience of its interactions with all the other diagrams and equations. But if so, all this escaped Tennyson. He was lost in a sea of unknowing.

  He did not give up; he stayed in there and fought for some sort of understanding, trying to seize just one thing, one small bit of relevance that he could tuck away as a start toward an understanding.

  That one bit of relevance never came. When the cube came to an end and he found himself back in the human world, he knew as little as he did when popped into that other mind.

  He sat, stricken, in the chair.

  'That was quite something, was it not, sir? asked the custodian, chirping blithely.

  Tennyson rubbed his hand across the face, trying to clear away the fog.

  'Yes, he said. 'What was it?

  'Sir, we do not know.

  'What good, then, he asked, 'of finding it, of seeing it?