Project Pope (10 page)

“I'll have to think on it, Your Eminence.”

“Then think on it here. You'll find our suite far more comfortable.…”

Good Lord, she thought. All the data here, squirreled away in memory cores, waiting for retrievall

“You do not answer,” said the cardinal.

“Your offer is most kind,” she said. “I think I shall accept the hospitality that you offer, since that seems to be your wish. On the other matter, I need some further thought.”

“Take all the time you wish,” said the cardinal. “We shall not press for an early answer. We'll talk about it later. But let me say we do need your services very badly. The history should be written. But it takes a certain kind of talent to do the writing of it—perhaps a human talent, which we have been unable to acquire. Here on End of Nothing it is difficult to obtain the kind of human talent that we need. The planet is too far and lonely to attract humanity. Go out at night and look up and there are few stars. The galaxy itself is a shimmer in the sky and that is all. But there are certain advantages. There is space, there is newness. A freshness that is not found on many planets. And the mountains. To our humans, the mountains are a constant source of great delight.”

“I am sure they are,” said Jill.

Chapter Thirteen

“This,” Ecuyer told Tennyson, “is our repository. Here, stored and filed and cross-indexed and ready, close at hand, are the records of the work we've done in the Search Program.”

The room was large. There were no windows. Pale ceiling lights marched in converging rows into the distance. Ranks of filing cabinets, floor to ceiling, stretched away farther than one could see.

Ecuyer walked slowly down one row of the cabinets, his hand laid flat against their fronts, sliding along the metal. Tennyson trailed along behind him, lost in this cavern of files. He felt the place closing in on him, pressing close, looming over him with a threat of suffocation.

Ahead of him, Ecuyer halted and pulled out a drawer, fumbling, or pretending to fumble, among the many small crystal cubes that lay within the drawer.

“Ah, here,” he said, coming up with one of them. “A cube picked quite at random.”

He held it up for Tennyson to see, a gleaming crystal cube four inches on a side. It was, thought Tennyson, quite unspectacular. Ecuyer closed the drawer. “And now,” he said, “if you are willing, I should like to show you.”

“Show me?”

“Yes, let you experience what is imprinted on the cube—live the experience picked up by the sensitive, the experience that he lived through, what he saw and felt and thought. Put you inside the sensitive.…”

He peered intently at Tennyson. “It will not hurt,” he said. “You will not be uncomfortable. There'll be no pain, no fright.”

“You mean that you want me—that you can connect me somehow to that cube?”

Ecuyer nodded. “Simply done,” he said.

“But why?” asked Tennyson. “Why should you want to do this?”

“Because I could talk about our work for the next three days,” said Ecuyer, “and not be able to give you an understanding of it such as you can gain from a few minutes on this cube.”

“I can see that,” said Tennyson. “But why me, a stranger?”

“A stranger, perhaps,” said Ecuyer, “but I want you very much to stay here and be a member of the team. We need you, Jason. Can't you understand that?”

“As a matter of fact, I have already decided to stay on,” said Tennyson. “I sat on a bench in a beautiful garden this morning and found that I already had made my decision without being aware I had.”

“Well, now, that's fine,” said Ecuyer. “That's splendid. But why did you wait? Why didn't you tell me immediately?”

“Because you still were sneaking up on me,” said Tennyson. “You do it so well that it was fun to watch.”

“I'm properly rebuked,” said Ecuyer, “and I don't seem to mind at all. I can't tell you how happy it makes me. And, now, how about the cube?”

“I'm a bit nervous about it, but if you think I should, I will.”

“I think you should,” Ecuyer told him. “It's important to me and I think to you that you know exactly what we are doing.”

“So I'll understand this Heaven business better?”

“Well, yes, but not entirely that. I can see you're still a skeptic on what you call the Heaven business.”

“Yes, I am. Aren't you?”

“I don't know,” said Ecuyer. “I can't be sure. Every fiber in me cries out against it and yet …”

“All right,” said Tennyson. “Let's get on with the cube.”

“Okay,” said Ecuyer. “This way.”

He led the way out of the stack and into a small room crowded with equipment.

“Sit down in that chair over there,” said Ecuyer. “Take it easy. Relax.”

A helmet arrangement was suspended over the chair. Tennyson regarded it with some suspicion.

“Go on, sit down,” said Ecuyer. “I'll fit the helmet on you and drop the cube into the slot and—”

“All right,” said Tennyson. “I suppose I'll have to trust you.”

“You can trust me,” Ecuyer said. “It won't hurt at all.”

Tennyson lowered himself cautiously into the chair, squirmed around to get comfortable. Ecuyer carefully lowered the helmet on his head, fussing to get it adjusted.

“You all right?” he asked.

“All right. I can't see a thing.”

“You don't need to see. Breathing all right? No trouble breathing?”

“None at all.”

“All right, then. Here we go.”

For a moment there was utter darkness, then there was light, a greenish sort of light, and a wetness. Tennyson gasped and then the gasp cut off, for everything was all right, better than all right.

The water was warm and the mud was soft. His gut was full. For the moment there was no danger. Contentment filled him and he allowed himself to sink deeper into the yielding mud. When the mud no longer yielded, he agitated his legs, trying to sink deeper, but this gained him little, although when he ceased the effort, he could sense the mud beginning to flow over him and it was warm and an added safety factor. He settled as deeply, as compactly as he could, the contentment deepening, a lassitude spreading through him. With the mud spreading over him, in no matter how thin a layer, he was shielded from view. The likelihood was that no prowling predator would detect him, snap him up. It is good, he thought smugly to himself. There was no need to move, no necessity to invite attack by moving. He had everything he needed. He had eaten until food no longer had attraction for him. He was warm and safe. He could remain motionless, exert no effort.

And yet there was, he found, an internal nagging that arose once he was all settled in full enjoyment of contentment. A question that never had come on him before, for up until this instant, there had been no question of any sort at all. Until now he had not been aware there was such a thing as question. He existed, that was all. He had never cared what he might be. The matter of identity had never arisen.

He stirred uneasily, befuddled and upset that the question should arise to so disturb him. And that was not the worst of it. There was something else. It was as if he were not himself, not he who had found the question, the question not internal to him but coming from somewhere outside himself. And there was nothing outside himself—nothing but the warmth of the shallow sea, the softness of the bottom mud and the knowledge that the fearful shadow avid to gulp him down was not present now, could not see him now, that he was safe from the prowling predator that snapped up trilobites.

“My God!” he thought in sudden fear and wonder. “I'm a trilobite!”

With the words, the utter darkness faded and then flickered off, and he was once again sitting in the chair and Ecuyer was standing in front of him, holding the helmet in his hands. Tennyson let out his breath in a gust and stared up at Ecuyer.

“Ecuyer, you said a random cube. That was not a random cube.”

Ecuyer grinned at him. “No, I would think not. You recall the sensitive I told you of.”

“Yes, the man who was a trilobite. But it was so real!”

“Rest assured, my friend,” said Ecuyer. “This was no shadow show. No entertainment stunt. For a while there, you
were
a trilobite.”

Chapter Fourteen

When Tennyson returned to his suite, Jill was sitting in front of the fireplace. He hurried across the room to her. “I've been wondering about you. I was about to track you down.”

“Hubert is fixing dinner,” she said. “I told him I could stay. Is that all right with you?”

He bent to kiss her, then sat down beside her. “That's fine,” he said. “How are things going with you?”

She made a face. “Not well. They won't stand still for a story. They offered me a job instead.”

“And you accepted?”

“No, I didn't. I'm not sure I will. I hear you are staying on.”

“For a time at least. A good place to hunker down.”

She gestured at the single rose in the vase standing on the coffee table. “Where did you get that?”

“A gardener gave it to me. I found the garden this morning. I'd like to show it to you.”

“They offered me a place to stay,” said Jill, “and I moved in this afternoon. Four doors away from you. The robot who moved me told me you were here. You have a drink around?”

“I think there is,” he said. “But first let's look at the garden.”

“Well, all right,” she said.

“You'll like it,” he assured her.

When they reached the garden, she asked, “What's all this uproar about the garden? It's just an ordinary garden. What's going on?”

“It's not the garden,” he told her. “I imagine Hubert, in the kitchen, had his ears stretched out a foot or so. Do anything in this place and in ten minutes everyone has heard about it. I won't bet they can't hear us in the garden, but at least we have a chance. We have things to talk about.”

“It's your Gutshot conditioning,” she said. “The cloak-and-dagger business.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe you're right.”

“You jumped at the chance, apparently, to stay here. So there can't be too much wrong.”

“Maybe nothing wrong,” he said. “But strange. Damn strange. There's a woman here—she's the one Ecuyer came to get me to treat. She claims she has found Heaven.”

“Heaven?”

“That's right. Heaven. You see, they have this program going on. People going out in their minds to other places, bringing back the data to be fed into the Pope. Although I have a feeling it may be for other reasons than the feeding of the Pope. From something Ecuyer said the other night, it sounds if there may be some differences of opinion between the Search Program and Vatican.”

“Heaven?” she asked. “You mean the honest-to-God Bible Heaven with the golden stairs and the trumpets blaring and the angels flying?”

“Something like that.”

“But, Jason, that's impossible.”

“Perhaps, but Mary thinks she's found it. Ecuyer half believes in it.”

“Ecuyer's a fool.”

“No, not a fool,” he said. “Jill, tell me. Did they use muscle on you?”

“Muscle?”

“Yes, muscle. Ecuyer hinted rather broadly I might not be allowed to leave the planet.”

“No. No one mentioned that. I talked with a cardinal. Purple robes and scarlet skullcap. A single candle burning. Now, wait a minute. Is that why you're staying? Because they won't let you leave?”

“No, not that. They might even let us go. But the threat is there. This place is run by Vatican and what Vatican says is law. But I'm staying because I want to—for the moment. I have no place else to go. Besides, it's comfortable. And I might as well confess it—I'm considerably intrigued.”

“So am I,” said Jill. “The cardinal wouldn't listen to my writing articles or a book about this place. He said nothing about not allowing me to leave. As a matter of fact, I thought that he would throw me out. Then he offered me a job.”

“The iron fist in the velvet glove.”

“That could be it. He's a pleasant-enough robot—I almost said a pleasant-enough old man. Pleasant enough, but stubborn. I argued with him and he didn't budge an inch.”

“This job?”

“They want a history of Vatican written. The cardinal claims they have no one who can do it; hinted that a robot could not be trained to do it. Would you believe it—they have a complete record of everything that's happened here, all that's been done here, since the first ship arrived. All stored and waiting for retrieval. I said no, of course. Maybe, come to think of it, I didn't say a flat-out no. Actually, I think I said I'd have to think about it. I probably gave the impression I was going to say no.”

“And are you?”

“Jason, I honestly don't know. Think of it! The story is all there. Waiting for someone to dig it out. It's been there all these years and not been touched by anyone.”

“But what good will it do you if you can't get it out?”

“That's right. No good at all. Jason, do I look like a dirty sneak?”

“Well, yes, now that I think of it.”

“I'd never be able to live with myself,” said Jill, “if I didn't have a shot at it.”

“Jill, it doesn't track. First they refuse to let you write about this place, then they hand the story to you on a silver platter. Unless, of course, they do badly want the history written and are convinced they can keep you here.”

“If so,” she said, “they must be awfully sure of themselves.”

“That's what Ecuyer said the other night. That they are sure of themselves.”

“Jason, we may have been a pair of fools to come here. If Vatican wants nothing to leak out, the one sure way to do it would be to make sure that no one, once they got here, could leave.”