Project Pope (33 page)

“Jason, could we be wrong? You and I and Paul? Could the Vatican theologians be right? Is a true faith more valuable than knowledge of the universe?”

“Jill, I think that involves a judgment of what comes first. Vatican made that decision long ago and now someone is trying to reverse it. The decision that first you must have knowledge before you can arrive at faith. That may have been a wrong decision. I can't be certain, but I don't think it was.”

“Maybe we will never know.”

“You and I will never know. Someday someone will.”

“What happens now?”

“There's no way right now to know.”

“Jason, some bits of it are coming back to me. The bits and pieces I picked up in the equation world.”

“Perhaps as time goes on, more and more of it.”

“There was a sense of being tired, of resting. Does that make any sense?”

“Not much,” said Tennyson. “But take it easy. Your very human mind is trying to translate alien concepts into human terms.”

“There is something else. The idea of games and a great excitement that here was a new game to be played.”

“It probably was something else entirely, but at least it's a place to start. You picked up far more than I did. Maybe Whisperer, when he shows up, will be able to help out.”

“I think so. Whisperer must have understood far more than I did.”

A knock came at the door. When Tennyson opened it, Theodosius stood outside.

“How good of you to come,” said Tennyson. “Won't you step in. We are greatly honored.”

The cardinal came in and Tennyson closed the door. “I'll poke up the fire,” he said, “and we can sit and talk.”

“I would like to do that,” said the cardinal, “but there is no time. His Holiness has summoned the two of you to an audience.”

Jill came around the table. “I don't understand,” she said.

“His Holiness thinks most highly of you.”

“You will go with us,” said Tennyson.

“I'll escort you there, but I will not stay. He said the two of you. The two of you alone.”

Chapter Forty-five

Whisperer gamboled. He was giddy and ecstatic. He went skating down a looping bridge of magnetic flux. He danced madly in the midst of a sputtering cloud of ions. He ducked his erratic way through the core of an exploding galaxy. He ran a race with the surging radiation that flared out of a nova. He somersaulted through a field of pulsars.

When it was all done, he hunkered down before a red dwarf and spread out symbolic hands to warm them on the banked fires of the star. The red dwarf, curiously, was the only luminosity in sight. All else was black, although somewhere far away there was the faint hint of high-intensity flickering, as if some great event were taking place beyond the far horizon of deep space. He was penned in by an emptiness and a nothingness and he sensed the loneliness that went with nothingness, although he had no feel for loneliness, for he was a creature of space-time, and in all of space and time, there was no room for loneliness.

He did not know where he was and he gave no thought to it, for wherever he might be, he knew that he was home, although why or how he knew this, he had no inkling and again he gave no thought to it, for it did not matter—he could go anywhere he wished and he still would be at home. Which did not mean, of course, that he'd know where he was.

He crouched before the red-black star and heard the song of foreverness that pulsed in the emptiness in this corner of the universe, wherever it might be. He caught the dim scent of distant life and he thought about the achievements of that life—each achievement peculiar to a certain life form, but all the many achievements of many life forms adding up to a massive reaching out for the incalculable answers that must come about and meld together before the final answer could be known.

This was his heritage, he thought, this the heritage and the task and the striving of his people and perhaps of many other peoples who alone and in the darkness of unknowing clawed toward the light.

Then the star and the darkness went away and again he was in the center of a circle formed by the equation people and he sought out the rose-red one flanked by all the others. The panel of the rose-red one was blank, but as he watched, an equation flickered on it, pale and faint at first, then hardening and becoming sharper. He drove his mind against it and he wrestled with it and finally it became clear and when that happened, the rose-red blackboard was wiped clean of it and again he drove his mind against it and, hesitantly, another equation began to form and finally formed, as hard and solid as had been the first one. But there was a difference: This time the equation was his own, transmitted to the rose-red equation person and now etched upon its blackboard so that it might be seen by all the others.

I am talking to them, Whisperer told himself and felt a surge of pride sweep through him. I am talking to them in their own language and in their own way.

All around the circle, the same equation was formed on the blank surfaces of all the other people and he sensed their wonder and their satisfaction that finally one had come who could talk with them. Probably it was something they never had expected—in this small segment of space-time they had staked out for themselves, they had made themselves content to be alone, divorced and isolated from all other peoples and all other places, not expecting visitors, anticipating no contact with other forms of life, a community that had told itself it was self-sufficient and had settled, in its hearts and souls, for that.

His equation was wiped out and another began to form, not so slowly this time, not so haltingly.

The rose-red equation person was answering him.

Whisperer settled down for a long talk with his newfound friends.

Chapter Forty-six

The tiny room was barren, a place of four walls carved from the rock, with the metallic plate set into the wall that faced the chairs on which they sat. The face formed slowly on the plate. For a time after it had formed, nothing happened, then the Pope said, “I am pleased that you could come to see me.”

“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.”