Project Pope

Fifty

Mary died in the middle of the morning, a frail old woman who appeared in death more frail and unsubstantial than she had appeared in life, as if death had subtracted from her a portion of the physical dimension she had held as a living entity. Tennyson, standing by her bedside, looked down on her, the body making only a small elongated mound beneath the sheet. Again, as he had each time before when he had lost a patient, he felt a smudged sense of guilt, not sharply defined, but a vague wondering if he might not better have fulfilled his obligation as a healer, and a dull feeling of blame in having failed. He had saved her life that first time — he was sure he had; the death blow had been struck on the golden stairs of Heaven when the dark man had harried her down the stairs, shaking a finger at her. After that she had not wanted to live, had not fought to live, and by her own acceptance of death had slipped quietly into it.

The nurse touched his arm. 'I am sorry, Doctor. The nurse, he told himself, understood. 'So am I, he said. 'I had a great deal of admiration for her.

'There was nothing you could have done, said the nurse. 'Nothing anyone could have done. Then she moved away, and after a moment Tennyson turned about and left.

Ecuyer rose from a chair in the waiting room. Tennyson nodded at him. 'It's over.

Ecuyer came up close to him and they stood facing each other. 'She was the best of them, said Ecuyer. 'The best Listener I ever knew. There is a big crowd outside, waiting. I will have to go tell them.

'I'll go with you, said Tennyson.

'It is strange, said Ecuyer. 'Not only was she a good Listener; she was a devoted one. She believed deeply in the program. It was her entire life. And yet she will be the one who will spell its end.

'Have you heard anything? Been given any word?

Ecuyer shook his head. 'It may not happen that way. It all will be smooth and quiet. No big upheaval. Just a steady clamping down. New regulations, quietly inserted into the procedure, a general closing in. One day, without realizing that it has happened, we'll know that we are done, that our work is finished.

'What will you do, Paul?

'I'll stay here. I have no place else to go. I'll be taken care of; Vatican will see to that. That much at least they owe me. So will the Listeners be taken care of. We'll drag out our lives here, and when the last of us are gone, that will be the end of it.

'If I were you, I wouldn't be so certain, Tennyson said. For a moment he debated with himself whether to tell Ecuyer something of what Whisperer had said, holding out to him one last feeble hope.

'Do you know something? asked Ecuyer.

'No, I guess I really don't.

There was no purpose in telling him, thought Tennyson. The hope, at best, was a slight one — almost no hope at all. What Whisperer had proposed seemed impossible. On the surface it seemed far-fetched. It was impossible, he told himself, that the equation people could seek and find, with virtually no data, the place Mary had called Heaven. Heaven could be anyplace. It could be in a distant galaxy. It could be in another universe. Although come to think of it, it might not be so far away. Decker had thought he knew where it was; the implication was that he had been there, or very close to it. Although that, he reminded himself, was poor evidence. Decker had not spelled it out and now he never would.

Ecuyer was at the door, holding it open for him, and he went out. The small plaza in front of the clinic was jammed with waiting people. There had been a number of them there when Tennyson had come in; now there were even more. They were quiet — not even the murmur of low whispering that ordinarily was the case with such a crowd.

Ecuyer walked forward and the crowd watched. They know, Tennyson told himself, what Ecuyer is about to say, but they'll wait on his saying it. Human and robot alike will wait quietly for the word — word that Mary's dead and they finally have a saint.

Ecuyer spoke quietly. He did not raise his voice.

'Mary has gone to her reward, he told the waiting throng. 'Only moments ago. She died peacefully, with a smile upon her lips. There was nothing that could be done to save her.

A sound swept the crowd, a sound like a monstrous in-drawn breath. A sigh of relief? Tennyson wondered. The end of waiting.

Then someone with a foghorn voice — a human rather than a robot voice — broke into formalized prayer, and other voices joined in until the unison of prayer reverberated through all of Vatican. Many knelt to pray, but others remained standing, and a moment later the bells of the basilica began a steady, somber tolling.

Ecuyer came back to Tennyson and together the two of them walked away.

'Shouldn't you be joining in with them? asked Tennyson. 'Don't mind a heathen like myself.

'I'm not- Ecuyer started to say, but did not finish it. He said something else. 'If Mary could only know this, she'd love it. She was a devout person. She went regularly to mass, she spent hours upon her knees, telling the beads. Not for appearance's sake, not for show — she lived her religion.

Which probably accounted, Tennyson thought, for her finding Heaven, but he did not say it.

They walked in silence for a time. Then Ecuyer asked, 'How do you feel?

'Sad, said Tennyson.

'No guilt. You should feel no guilt,

'Yes, guilt. A doctor always feels some guilt. It's a built-in penalty for a doctor, a price you pay for the privilege of being one. It will wear away.

'There is something I must see to. Will you be all right?

'I'll go for a walk, said Tennyson. 'A walk will do me good.

He might as well, he thought. Jill had gone to work, back to the library, saying work would fill her mind and she'd be the better for it. He couldn't go back to the apartment, for without her there, the apartment would be too empty. Anyhow, as he had told Ecuyer, a walk would do him good.

It did him less good than he thought it might. He still felt a vague uneasiness, and the steady, monotonous tolling of the basilica's bells was a disturbing sound.

He walked for fifteen minutes before he realized that he was on the path that led to Decker's cabin. He stopped dead in the path and turned around, began to retrace his steps. He could not go to Decker's cabin, he simply could not go. It might be quite a while before he could visit Decker's cabin.

He took a branching path that led up to a ridge where he often went to sit and watch the eternal shadow show of the looming mountains. The distant tolling of the bells beat at him as he went up the path.

He sat upon the low boulder where he always sat and gazed across the distance to the mountains. The sun was almost at zenith, and the slopes were pale blue with the darker splotches of the forests that climbed them, while the snowy peaks glittered back the brilliance of the sun. They change, he thought — the colors always change and shift. An hour from now they would not be the same as they were now. They change but they endure — in our time reference they endure. But someday they will not be here. Someday they will be worn down to a level plain and the sentient life that still remains here will walk across the plain and never dream there once were mountains here.

Nothing, he thought, ever stays the same.

We grasp for knowledge; panting, we cling desperately to what we snare. We work endlessly to arrive at that final answer, or perhaps many final answers which turn out not to be final answers but lead on to some other fact or factor that may not be final, either. And yet we try, we cannot give up trying, for as an intelligence we are committed to the quest.

He spread his hands before him and looked at them, looking at them with a new perspective, as if they were a part of him he had never seen before. One touch of these fingers, one loving touch, meant as nothing more than a loving touch, and the stigma on Jill's face had gone away. There could be no doubt of it, he told himself; there could be no question. The great, spreading angry scar had been there when he stroked the cheek; when the stroke was ended, the ugly scar was gone. Spontaneous remission? he asked himself. No, it couldn't be, for spontaneous remission did not work that way. Spontaneous remission took at least some little time, and this had taken almost no time at all.

A power, they had said among themselves, perhaps not believing it even as they said it, but needing something to say to one another- a power that had been given him by the equation folk, a gift from one world to another.

He stared at his hands. They seemed to be no different than they ever had been. He searched within himself and could detect no difference there — nowhere within himself.

Could it be possible, he wondered, that through millennia latent talents, or perhaps evolutional talents, had been glowing in the human race against that day when they might be needed? Throughout all of history, there had been tales of healing by the laying on of hands. Many claims of this work had been made, but there was no documentation that would bear out the claims. Too, there was the matter of Whisperer. Until Decker came to End of Nothing, there had been no one able to see Whisperer. Decker could not only see him, but could talk with him as well. Decker, however, had been unable to join Whisperer's mind to his. Yet both Jill and he were able to join Whisperer's mind with theirs. Why this difference between Decker and the two of them? Could it mark varying degrees of formerly latent abilities, now developing, but developing unequally from one human to another? Or having the ability and not knowing one had it, thus never making an effort to make use of it?

Yet in the matter of Jill's stigma, it could not be either of these things. Dozens of times he had put out his hand to stroke that scarred cheek and until he had come back from the equation world, the angry scar had stayed no matter how often he might touch it. The reasoning he had outlined might stand so far as Whisperer was concerned, but it failed to explain Jill's cheek. The particular ability or magic or whatever it might be had to be newly acquired, and there was only one place where he could have acquired it.

He looked at his hands again and they were the same old hands he had used his entire life. There was no sign of a fresh ability or magic in them.

He rose from the boulder and thrust his hands into his jacket pockets to get them from his sight. The bells at the basilica were still tolling. He could continue his walk but the walk had gone sour on him. There was no place he wanted to go.

He would go back to the apartment, he decided. Jill would not be there and it would be lonely, but perhaps he could occupy his time by cooking dinner, although it was a bit early to start dinner. He knew what he'd do — he'd tackle an involved gourmet dish that would take a lot of time and keep him busy, although in the end it probably would prove inedible. No, he told himself, that was not a good idea. He wanted to surprise Jill with dinner on the table, and it would do no good to surprise her with a mess she could not eat. It would seem strange for him to cook — Hubert always cooked, with Jill helping out now and then.

Coming around a sharp bend in the path, he came to a halt, staring at the figure striding up the path toward him. The walker wore a purple, belted robe with the skirt hiked up at the belt to keep it from dragging in the dust. It was Cardinal Theodosius, he saw, wearing a brilliant scarlet skullcap.

Tennyson stepped out of the path to give the robot room. When he came up, the cardinal halted.

'Your Eminence, said Tennyson, 'I did not know you were a walker.

'Nor am I, said Theodosius. 'Although I hear you are.

'Yes, I am. Perhaps sometime we should take a hike together. For me it would be a pleasant experience. I would hope it might be for you. There is so much to see and talk about.

'Beauty? asked the cardinal. 'The beauty of the land?

'That is what I meant. Far off the mountains and close by the flowers that bloom along the way.

'Beauty in your eyes, but not in mine, said the cardinal. 'When your people made us robots, you left out of us certain faculties, and among these is what you call appreciation of beauty. For me there are other kinds of beauty. The beauty of logic, of a magnificent abstraction that one can think upon for hours.

'That's is too bad. You miss so much if you do not have our sense of beauty.

'And you, perhaps, from lacking ours.

'I am sorry, Eminence. I meant no offense.

'It is quite all right, said Theodosius. 'I took no offense. In fact, I am feeling too well to take offense at anything at all. This walk is a great adventure for me. I cannot recall that I ever was this far from Vatican. But this, I can assure you, is not an idle stroll. I'm off to find an Old One.

'An Old One? Why an Old One?

'Because they appear to be good neighbors that we have ignored too long and more than likely slandered in our view of them. I understand that one of them may be found in the hills back of Decker's cabin. Do you know aught of that?

'Decker never spoke of it, said Tennyson. 'Are you sure?

'So it has been said. Through the years. One of the Old Ones keeps watch of us from the hills above Decker's place.

'If the Old Ones have kept watch over you all these thousand years, they must know something of you. Of Vatican, I mean.

'Much more, said the cardinal, 'than we may have suspected. But I must be upon my way. The Old One may be hard to find. Drop in to see me someday soon; we could enjoy a few hours in pleasant conversation.

'Thank you, said Tennyson. 'I'll do that.

He stood in the path and watched the cardinal until he disappeared from view over a low ridge. Then he turned about and went down the path toward Vatican.

Reaching his apartment, he put out his hand to the knob, then pulled it back, shrinking from entering the emptiness and loneliness he would find there. He stood there, with his hand pulled back, raging at himself for his lack of courage. Finally he reached out again, turned the knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

There was no emptiness or loneliness. The fire was blazing brightly and Jill was rising from the couch to greet him. He rushed across the room, seized her in his arms, pulled her tight against him, clinging to her. 'I'm so glad you're here, he told her softly. 'I was afraid you wouldn't be.

Gently she pushed him away. 'I'm not the only one who's here, she said. 'Whisperer has come back.

He looked quickly about the room and saw no sign of him.

'I don't see him.

'He's here inside my mind, she said. 'He wants to be in yours as well. He comes to take us back to the equation world.

'Heaven!

'Yes, Jason. The equation folk have found the way to Heaven. They can take us there.