Rama II

10 THE COSMONAUT AND THE POPE

General O’Toole could not have slept more than two hours alto­gether. The combination of excitement and jet lag had kept his mind active all night long. He had studied the lovely bucolic mural on the wall opposite the bed in his hotel room and counted all the animals twice. Unfortunately, he had remained wide awake after he had finished both counts.

He took a deep breath, hoping that it would help him relax. So why all this nervousness? he thought. He is lust a man like all the rest on Earth. Well., not exactly. O’Toole sat up straight in his chair and smiled. It was ten o’clock in the morning and he was sitting in a small anteroom inside the Vatican. He was about to have a private audience with the Vicar of Christ himself, Pope John-Paul V.

During his childhood, Michael O’Toole had often dreamed of someday becoming the first North American pope. “Pope Michael,” he had called himself during the long Sunday afternoons when he had studied his cate­chism alone. As he had repeated the words of his lessons over and over and committed them to memory, he had imagined himself, maybe fifty years in the future, wearing the cassock and papal ring, celebrating mass for thou­sands in the great churches and stadia of the world. He would inspire the poor, the hopeless, the downtrodden. He would show them how God could lead them to a better life.

As a young man Michael O’Toole had loved all learning, but three sub­jects had especially intrigued him. He could not read enough about religion, history, and physics. Somehow his facile mind found it easy to jump between these different disciplines. It never bothered him that the epistemologies of religion and physics were one hundred and eighty degrees apart. Michael O’Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be an­swered by physics and which ones by religion.

All three of his favorite scholastic subjects merged in the study of creation. It was, after all, the beginning of everything, including religion, history, and physics. How had it happened? Was God present, as the referee perhaps, for the kickoff of the universe eighteen billion years ago? Wasn’t it He who had provided the impetus for the cataclysmic explosion known as the Big Bang that produced all matter out of energy? Hadn’t He foreseen that those original pristine hydrogen atoms would coalesce into giant clouds of gas and then collapse under gravitation to become the stars in which would be manu­factured the basic chemical building blocks of life?

And I have never lost my fascination for creation, O’Toole said to himself as he waited for his papal audience. How did it all happen? What is the significance of the particular sequence of events? He remembered his ques­tions of the priests when he was a teenager. I probably decided not to become a priest because it would have limited my free access to scientific truth. The church has never been as comfortable as lam with the apparent incompatibili­ties between God and Einstein.

An American priest from the Vatican state department had been waiting at his hotel in Rome the previous evening when O’Toole had returned from his day as a tourist. The priest had introduced himself and apologized pro­fusely for not having responded to the letter that General O’Toole had written from Boston in November. It would have “facilitated the process,” the priest had remarked in passing, if the general had pointed out in his letter that he was the General O’Toole, the Newton cosmonaut. Neverthe­less, the priest had continued, the papal schedule had been juggled and the Holy Father would be delighted to see O’Toole the next morning. As the door to the papal office swung open, the American general instinctively stood up. The priest from the night before walked into the room, looking very nervous, and quickly shook O’Toole’s hand. They both glanced toward the doorway, where the pope, wearing his normal white cassock, was concluding a conversation with a member of his staff. John-Paul V came forward into the anteroom, a pleasant smile on his face, and extended his hand toward O’Toole. The cosmonaut automatically dropped to one knee and kissed the papal ring.

“Holy Father,” he murmured, astonished at the excited pounding of his heart, “thank you for seeing me. This is indeed a great honor for me.”

“For me as well,” the pope replied in lightly accented English. “I have been following the activities of you and your colleagues with great interest.”

He gestured toward O’Toole and the American general followed the church leader into a grand office with high ceilings. A very large, dark wood desk stood on one side of the room under a life-size portrait of John-Paul IV, the man who had become pope during the darkest days of The Great Chaos and had provided both the world and the church with twenty years of ener­getic and inspirational leadership. The gifted Venezuelan, a poet and histori­cal scholar in his own right, had demonstrated to the world between 2139 and 2158 how positive a force the organized church could be at a time when virtually every other institution was collapsing and was, therefore, unable to give any succor to the bewildered masses.

The pope sat down on a couch and motioned for O’Toole to sit next to him. The American priest left the room. In front of O’Toole and the pope were great windows that opened onto a balcony overlooking the Vatican gardens some twenty feet below. In the distance O’Toole could see the Vatican museum where he had spent the previous afternoon.

“You wrote in your letter,” the Holy Father said, without referring to any notes, “that there were some theological issues that you would like to discuss with me. I assume these are in some way related to your mission.”

O’Toole looked at the seventy-year-old Spaniard who was the spiritual leader of a billion Catholics. The pope’s skin was olive, his features sharp, his thick black hair now mostly gray. His brown eyes were soft and clear. He certainly doesn’t waste any time, O’Toole thought, recalling an article in Catholic magazine in which one of the leading cardinals in the Vatican administration had praised John-Paul V for his management efficiency.

“Yes, Holy Father,” O’Toole said. “As you know, I am about to embark on a journey of the utmost significance for humankind. As a Catholic, I have some questions that I thought it might be helpful for me to discuss with you.” He paused for a moment. “I certainly don’t expect you to have all the answers. But maybe you can guide me a little with your accumulated wis­dom.”

The pope nodded and waited for O’Toole to continue. The cosmonaut took a deep breath, “The issue of redemption is one that’s bothering me, even though I guess it’s just a part of a bigger concern that I have in reconciling the Ramans with our faith.”

The pope’s brow furrowed and O’Toole could tell that he was not commu­nicating very well. “I have no trouble whatsoever,” the general added as an explanation, “with the concept of God creating the Ramans — that’s easy to comprehend. But did the Ramans follow a similar pattern of spiritual evolu­tion and therefore need to be redeemed, at some point in their history, like human beings on Earth? And if so, did God send Jesus, or perhaps his Raman equivalent, to save them from their sins? Do we humans thus repre­sent an evolutionary paradigm that has been repeated over and over through­out the universe?”

The pope’s smile broadened almost into a grin. “Goodness, General!” he said with humor, “you have romped over a vast intellectual territory very quickly. You must know that I do not have fast answers to such profound questions. The church has had its scholars addressing the issues raised by Rama for almost seventy years and, as you would expect, our research has recently intensified because of the discovery of the second spacecraft.”

“But what do you personally believe, Your Holiness?” O’Toole persisted. “Did the creatures who made these two incredible space vehicles commit some original sin and also need a savior sometime in their history? Is the story of Jesus unique for us here on Earth, or is it just one small chapter in a book of nearly infinite length that covers all sentient beings and a general requirement for redemption to achieve salvation?”

“I’m not certain,” the Holy Father replied after several seconds. “Some­times it is nearly impossible for me to fathom the existence of other intelli­gence in any form out there in the rest of the universe. Then, as soon as I acknowledge that it certainly wouldn’t look like us, I struggle with images and pictures that sidetrack my thinking from the kinds of theological ques­tions that you have raised this morning.” He paused for a moment, reflect­ing. “But most of the time I imagine that the Ramans too had lessons to learn in the beginning, that God did not create them perfect either, and that at some time in their development He must have sent them Jesus—”

The pope interrupted himself and looked intently at General O’Toole. “Yes,” he continued softly, “I said Jesus. You asked me what I believed personally. To me Jesus is both the true savior and the only son of God. It would be He who would be sent to the Ramans also, albeit in a different guise.”

O’Toole’s face had brightened at the end of the pontiff’s remarks. “I agree with you, Holy Father,” he said excitedly. “And therefore all intelligence is united, everywhere throughout the universe, by a similar spiritual experience. In a very very real sense, assuming that the Ramans have also been saved, we are all brothers. After all, we are made from the same basic chemicals. That means that Heaven will not be limited just to humans but will encompass all beings everywhere who have understood His message.”

“I can see where you might come to that conclusion,” John-Paul replied. “But it is certainly not one that is universally accepted. Even within the church there are those who have an altogether different view of the Ramans.”

“You mean the homocentric group that uses quotations from St. Michael of Siena for support?”

The pope nodded.

“For myself,” General O’Toole said, “I 6nd their narrow interpretation of St. Michael’s sermon on the Ramans much too confining. In saying that the extraterrestrial spacecraft might have been a herald, like Elijah or even Isaiah, foretelling the second coming of Christ, Michael was not restricting the Ramans to having only that particular role in our history and no other function or existence. He was simply explaining one possible view of the event from a human spiritual perspective.”

Again the pontiff was smiling, “I can tell that you have spent considerable time and energy thinking about all this. My advance information about you was only partially correct. Your devotion to God, the church, and your family were all cited in your dossier. But there is little mention of your active intellectual interest in theology.”

“I consider this mission to be by far the most important assignment of my life. I want to make certain that I properly serve both God and mankind. So I am trying to prepare myself in every possible way, including discovering whether or not the Ramans may have a spiritual component. It could affect my actions on the mission.”

O’Toole paused a few seconds before continuing. “By the way, your holi­ness, have your researchers found any evidence of possible Raman spiritual­ity, based on their analysis of the first rendezvous?”

John-Paul V shook his head. “Not really, However, one of my most devout archbishops, a man whose religious zeal sometimes overshadows his logic, insists that the structural order inside the first Raman craft — you know, the symmetries, geometric patterns, even the repetitive redundant designs based on the number three — is suggestive of a temple. He could be right. We just don’t know. We don’t see any evidence either way about the spiritual nature of the beings who created that first spaceship.”

“Amazing!” said General O’Toole. “I had never thought of that before.

Imagine if it really was created as some kind of a temple. That would stagger David Brown.” The general laughed. “Dr. Brown insists,” he said in explana­tion, “that we poor ignorant human beings would not have any chance of ever determining the purpose of such a spaceship, for the technology of its builders is so far advanced beyond our comprehension that it would be impossible for us ever to understand any of it. And, according to him, of course there could be no Raman religion. In his opinion they would have left all the superstitious mumbo jumbo behind eons before they developed the capability to construct such a fabulous interstellar spacecraft.”

“Dr. Brown is an atheist, isn’t he?” the pope asked.

O’Toole nodded. “An outspoken one. He believes that all religious think­ing impairs the proper functioning of the brain. He regards anyone who doesn’t agree with his point of view as an absolute idiot.”

“And the rest of the crew? Are they as strongly opinionated on the subject as Dr. Brown?”

“He is the most vocal atheist, although I suspect Wakefield, Tabori, and Turgenyev all share his basic attitudes. Strangely enough, my intuitive sense tells me that Commander Borzov has a soft spot in his heart for religion. That’s true of most of the survivors of The Chaos. Anyway, Valeriy seems to enjoy asking me questions about my faith.”

General O’Toole stopped for a moment as he mentally completed his survey of the religious beliefs of the Newton crew. “The European women des Jardins and Sabatini are nominally Catholic, although they would not be considered devout by any stretch of the imagination. Admiral Heilmann is a Lutheran on Easter and Christmas, Takagishi meditates and studies Zen. I don’t know about the other two,”

The pontiff stood up and walked to the window. “Somewhere out there a strange and wonderful space vehicle, created by beings from another star, is headed toward us. We are sending a crew of a dozen to rendezvous with it” He turned toward General O’Toole. “This spaceship may be a messenger from God, but probably only you will be able to recognize it as such.”

O’Toole did not reply. The pope stared out the window again and was quiet for almost a minute. “No, my son,” he finally said softly, as much to himself as to General O’Toole. “I do not have the answers to your questions. Only God has them. You must pray that He will provide the answers when you need them.” He faced the general. “I must tell you that I am delighted to find you so concerned with these issues. I am confident that God also has purposely selected you for this mission.”

General O’Toole could tell that the audience was coming to an end.

“Holy Father,” he said, “thank you again for seeing me and sharing this time. I feel deeply honored.”

John-Paul V smiled and walked over to his guest. He embraced him in the European manner and escorted General O’Toole out of his office.