Project Pope

Nine

The suite was large and well appointed. The living-area floor was covered by thick carpeting, the furniture stopped just this side of elegance; in a huge fireplace that took up half of one wall a fire burned. Off to one side was a dining area, doors opened into a kitchen and a bedroom; gilded mirrors and tasteful paintings hung upon the wall, intricate carvings of what appeared to be ivory were positioned on the mantel.

'Sit down and take it easy, Ecuyer said to Tennyson. 'Make yourself at home. I can guarantee that chair over there is comfortable. And what are you drinking?

'Would you have some Scotch?

'You have good taste, said Ecuyer. 'How did you run into Scotch? It's virtually unknown. Only a few old human hands…

'The captain on the ship, said Tennyson, 'introduced me to it. An Old Earth drink, he told me.

'Yes, the captain. He keeps us well supplied. Several cases every trip. We have a standing order from a planet called Sundance — a human planet, as you might guess. It is the only place within a thousand light-years that stocks it. The cases always seem to be a little short. The captain pilfers them. We make no comment on it. It is, we figure, a legitimate kickback.

Ecuyer brought the drinks, handed one to Tennyson and settled himself with the other.

'Drink up, he said. 'I think we may have something to drink to.

'I hope so, said Tennyson. 'The patient, even this soon, seems to be responding to the protein. We'll have to keep close watch of her.

'Tell me, Doctor, do you always show this much devotion to your patients? You stayed at Mary's bedside until she showed signs of possible improvement. You must be tired. I will not keep you long. You should get some rest.

'If you have a place for me.

'A place for you? Dr. Tennyson, this is your place. It is yours so long as you stay with us.

'My place? I thought that it was yours.

'Mine? Oh, no. I have a suite much like this. But this one is for guests. For the moment, it is yours. We understand you lost your luggage, and we've arranged to supply you with a wardrobe. It will be here in the morning. I hope you do not mind.

'It was unnecessary, Tennyson said stiffly.

'You persist in not understanding, said Ecuyer. 'There is nothing we can do that would properly repay you.

'You can't be sure of what I've done. Mary still may not make it, even with the protein.

'But there was improvement.

'Yes, the pulse is better. She seems a little stronger. The temperature dropped a bit, but not enough to be significant.

'I have faith in you, said Ecuyer. 'I think you'll pull her through.

'Look, said Tennyson, 'let's start by being honest. You've talked with the captain, or some of your people have talked with him. You know damn well I didn't lose my luggage. I brought along no luggage. I had no time to pack. I was on the run.

'Yes, said Ecuyer smoothly. 'Yes, we know all that. But we were not about to confront you with it. We don't know what happened, and unless you want to tell us, we don't want to know. We have no need to know. I know you are a doctor. I wasn't even absolutely sure of that to start with, but now I know you are. With you there is a chance Mary will live; without you, what would have been her chance?

'Probably no chance at all, said Tennyson. 'Unless that little nurse had decided on her own….

'She wouldn't have, said Ecuyer. 'She had no way to know. And she would not have dared.

'All right, then. Say I saved the patient. Hell, man, that's my business. That's what I'm trained to do. Save all I can; I cannot save them all. You are not in debt to me. A simple fee would be all I ask. Maybe not even that. I left my credentials behind. At the moment, I couldn't prove I am a doctor if my life depended on it. And I'm not sure at all of my legal right to practice here. There are such things as licenses.

Ecuyer waved his hand. 'No need to worry on that score. If you say you are a doctor, then you are a doctor. If we let you practice here, then you have the right to practice.

'Yes, said Tennyson. 'If Vatican says so…

'On End of Nothing, if Vatican says so, then it is so. There is no one to dispute us. Were it not for us, there'd be no End of Nothing. We are End of Nothing.

'All right, said Tennyson. 'All right. I'm not arguing with you. I have no wish to argue. One of your people is sick and I treated her. That's what I'm supposed to do. Let's not build up a case about it.

'By now, Doctor, said Ecuyer, 'you should have grasped the situation. We have no doctor. We very badly need one. We want you to stay on as our resident physician.

'Just like that?

'Just like that, said Ecuyer. 'Can't you see? We're desperate. It would take us months to get another doctor. And then, what kind of doctor?

'You don't know what kind of doctor —

'I know you have devotion to your patients. And you are honest. You are honest about how you happen to be here, and when I asked about your treatment, you'd give no guarantees. I like that kind of honesty.

'Someone may come storming in here with a warrant for my arrest. I don't think it will happen, but…

'They'd play hell serving it, said Ecuyer. 'We protect our own. If you really are in trouble, Doctor, I can guarantee your safety here. Be you right or wrong, I can still guarantee it.

'All right, then. I don't think I'll need protection, but it's nice to know it would be there. But what about this setup? What would I be getting into? You call this place Vatican and I've heard stories about a Project Pope and all of it being headed by a band of robots. Can you tell me what's going on? This old lady, Mary, talked of angels. Is that just an old lady's dream, a somewhat premature death-bed vision?

'No, it's not, said Ecuyer. 'Mary has found Heaven.

'Now, said Tennyson, 'say that slow again. "Mary has found Heaven." You sound as if you mean it.

'Of course I do, said Ecuyer. 'She really has found Heaven. All evidence points to her having found it. We need her further observations to try to pinpoint it. Of course, we have her clones — three of them, growing up. But we can't be certain that the clones-

'Evidence? Clones? What kind of evidence? If I remember rightly, Heaven is not a place. It's a condition. A state of mind, a faith…

'Doctor, listen. This will take some explanation.

'I would suspect it might.

'Let's first try to put the whole thing into perspective, said Ecuyer. 'Vatican-17, this Vatican, began almost a thousand years ago with a band of robots out of Earth. On Earth, the robots had not been members — had not been allowed to be members — of any faith. I think in some places it is different now. Robots can become communicants — not everywhere, but in certain areas, on certain planets. A thousand years ago this was not true; robots were considered beyond the pale of any religion. To be a member of any religious faith, to profess oneself to any faith, one must have a soul, or the equivalent of a soul. Robots had no souls, or were thought to have no souls, so they were barred from participating in any religious experience. How well are you acquainted with robots, Doctor?

'Really not at all, Mr. Ecuyer. In my lifetime I may have spoken to half a dozen of them, seen a few more than that. I did not come from robot country. There were a few in medical college, but humans and robots did not associate there. I've never really known one. I've never felt the urge-

'What you have just said is what ninety-nine out of every hundred humans would say. They're not involved with robots, not concerned with them. Probably they think of them as metal humans, as machines trying to ape humans. I can tell you they are a whole lot more than that. At one time they would not have been, but today, here on End of Nothing, they are more than that. In the last thousand years, the robots here have evolved; they have become creatures that stand apart from men. In the process of evolving, they have never forgotten, however, that they are the creations of men, and they do not resent, as you might think they would, that they are created beings. By and large, they still feel a close relationship to humans. I could talk all night telling you what I think the robots are, what these robots here are. They came here because they had been denied religious experience elsewhere, had been read out of that part of human life that had a strong appeal to them. You have to know a robot well to understand his instinctive drive toward religious experience. It may be no more than an overcompensation — a deep instinct to model himself as closely to the human race as possible. He is denied so many things that a human has; there are so many limitations placed upon him by his very nature. A robot cannot weep; he cannot laugh. He has no sexual drive — although he does create other robots. At least here our robots do create other robots, building them with refinements that the human creators never thought of, probably would not have included in a robot's makeup even if they had thought of them. Here, on End of Nothing, a new race of robots has arisen. But I am getting ahead of myself.

'I can understand a religious drive as an overcompensative impulse, said Tennyson. 'Religion could be a mystery they could share with the human race.

'That is right, Ecuyer told him. 'There is a lot of history I could recite to you — by what thinking and what steps that small band of robots came a millennium ago to End of Nothing and set up their own religion. But we will let that go for the moment. We can discuss that some other time. If you are interested, that is.

'Of course I'm interested. If you can find the time.

'So the robots came out here, said Ecuyer, 'and established their Vatican. They based it upon an Earth religion that had a deep appeal to them — not so much because of its teaching. Rather, I would suspect, because they admired its organization, its hierarchy, its long tradition, its dogma. In this Vatican you'll find much of the liturgy and ritual of Old Earth Vatican, which served as a model, but there was no attempt, I am convinced, to follow slavishly, or even closely, Earth's Catholic faith. The robots have never made any pretense that their religion is an Earth religion transplanted to the rim of the galaxy. If it were given any serious study, which it has not been, it would probably be labeled a synthesis of religions, for the robots have borrowed many aspects of alien faiths, or what passes for alien faiths.

'Actually what they have done, said Tennyson, 'is construct their own faith, borrowing widely from whatever appealed to them?

'Exactly. A robotic faith — which does not make it any less a faith. It all depends on your definition of religion.

'Mr. Ecuyer — or should it be something else than mister?

'Mister is good enough, My first name is Paul. Call me Paul if you wish. I would be pleased if you did. I have no title, really. I'm not a member of the faith.

'I was about to ask you how you fit into all of this.

'I'm the coordinator of what we loosely called the Search Program.

'That I've never heard of.

'It's not much talked about. It's a part of Project Pope. I sometimes think that Project Pope now may have become little more than an excuse for the continuation of the Search Program. I would appreciate it if you did not mention this to the good fathers. Many of them remain quite pious.

'It all sounds confusing to me.

'It's all rather simple, Ecuyer said. 'And logical, in a way. The idea of a pope, of a supreme pontiff to head the faith, had a great appeal to the founders. But where would they find a pope? There was a feeling that to make a robot a pope would be sacrilegious. They could not use a human, even if they could have laid hands on one, which, at the time they came here, they could not. A human would be too short-lived to serve as a pope for a robotic church, the members of which, theoretically, could live forever. With a little proper care, that is. In any case, aside from this severe limitation, a human probably would not have been acceptable. An ideal pope, to their way of thinking, should be immortal and all-knowing — infallible beyond the infallibility of a human pope. So they set out to make a pope —

'To make a pope?

'Yes. A computer pope.

'Oh, my God! said Tennyson.

'Yes, oh, my God, Dr. Tennyson. They are still building him. They build him and improve him year by year. Over the centuries he expands. He is crammed with additional data almost every day, and as the years go by, he becomes more infallible.

'I can't believe it. It is-

'You do not need to believe in it. Nor do I. It is enough that the robots believe it. After all, it is their faith. And if you sit down quietly and think about it quietly, it can begin to make a lot of sense.

'Yes, I suppose it does. Faith is based on instant and authoritative — infallible — answers. Yes, come to think of it, it makes a lot of sense. The data, I suppose, comes from the Search Program.

Ecuyer nodded. 'That is right, he said. 'And just because I have told you all of this matter-of-factly, perhaps even lightly, don't think that I am a total nonbeliever. I may not be a true believer, but there are some things I can believe in.

'I'll reserve my opinion. But the data. How does your Search Program collect the data? You are here; the data, the data you must be after, is out in the universe.

'We use people we call Listeners. Not too good a term, but it serves.

'Sensitives?

'Yes. Special kinds of sensitives. We comb the galaxy for them. We hunt them down. We have recruiters out, working quietly. The robots have developed methods and supports that enhance their abilities. Some of our results are unbelievable.

'All humans?

'All human, so far. We have, at times, tried to use aliens. But it has never worked. Perhaps someday we'll find how to work with them. It is one of the projects we are working on. Aliens probably could provide us data humans never can.

'And this data you get is fed into the pope?

'A good part of it. Of late we have become somewhat selective. We make some value judgments. We just don't feed in all the raw data we get. But we do keep complete files. We have it all down on — I was going to say on tapes, but it's not quite tape. But, anyhow, we have it all. We've built up a library that would astound the galaxy were it known.

'You don't want it known.

'Dr. Tennyson, we don't want the galaxy to come crashing in on us.

'Mary is a Listener. And she thinks she has come on Heaven.

'That is true.

'And you, a part-time believer, what do you think?

'I'm not discounting it. She is one of our most efficient and trustworthy Listeners.

'But Heaven?

'Consider this, said Ecuyer. 'We know we are not dealing in physical space alone. In some instances, we don't know what we're reaching into. Let me give you one rather simple example. We have one Listener who has, for years, been going back through time. And not only through time, not haphazardly through time, but, apparently, following his own ancestry. Why he is taking this direction we do not know, nor does he. Someday we may find out. He seems to be following his ancestry, his remote ancestry, tracing out his blood and bone. Step by step down through millennia. The other day he lived as a trilobite.

'A trilobite?

'An ancient Earth form of life that died out some three hundred million years ago.

'But a human as a trilobite!

'The germ plasma, Doctor. The life force. Go back far enough…

'Yes, I see, said Tennyson.

'It's fascinating, Ecuyer said.

'One thing bothers me, said Tennyson. 'You're telling me all this. Yet you don't want it known. When I leave End of Nothing-

'If you leave End of Nothing.

'What's that?

'We hope you'll stay. We can make you a most attractive offer. We can discuss the details later.

'I may decide not to stay.

'Only one ship ever comes here, said Ecuyer. 'It shuttles between here and Gutshot. Gutshot is the only place it can take you.

'And you're gambling that I don't want to return to Gutshot?

'I had the impression that you might not want to. If you really want to leave, I doubt we'd try to stop you. We could, of course, if we wanted to. One word to the captain and he'd find himself lacking room to take you. But I think it would be safe to let you go. Even if you repeated what I told you tonight, I doubt that anyone would believe you. It would be just another space myth.

'You seem to be sure of yourselves, said Tennyson.

'We are, said Ecuyer.