Project Pope

by Clifford Simak

  'I've never asked him. I thought it was none of my business. And he's never told me. I thought at one time that perhaps he would, but he never has. Maybe it's too complicated to tell. I've done some speculating, of course, but I doubt I've ever gotten close.

  'So you have no objection if I let him into my mind? If I tell him to stay out, I'm sure he will stay out.

  'No objection, said Decker. 'I think you should let him in, if you have no objection, if you're not too queasy about it. Maybe he'll tell you things when he's inside your mind that both of us should know. He's been on this planet for a long time. He must have been here even before Vatican. Maybe he can shed some light on Vatican. I know he's interested; he's forever poking around over there. I have the impression, though, that he doesn't find out much.

  He got out of his chair. 'Would you have a drink with me if I can find a jug?

  'Yes, of course I would.

  'You stay here, then. I'll go up to the shack and get it. It's too nice a day to be sitting in a house.

  'It is that, said Tennyson.

  After Decker left, Tennyson sat quietly in his chair. Before him stretched the garden patch and a small open wood. Far off, the mountains reared into the blueness. Over all lay a sense of peace and quiet. Far off, a bird made half-hearted song, and at times a tiny breeze made a small, whispering rustle in the leaves. Even the sunshine was a quiet sunshine.

  Off to the left he could see the gray and white of Vatican, the buildings blending into the background unobtrusive, almost apologetic for intruding on the world. A quiet institution in a quiet world, thought Tennyson; no bad place to be. Over there, Jill was working in the library. He tried to separate the buildings in order to distinguish the library, but was unable to tell one building from another. At this distance, they made up a single huddle.

  Jill worked too hard, he told himself; she was spending too many hours going through the records. The whole business had become an obsession with her. No longer did she mention leaving End of Nothing. Sitting there, he called her up in mind again — the intense face in the lamplight, telling him what she'd found that day, talking it out with him, trying out ideas on him — and all the time that ugly scarlet slash across one side of her face, a stigma that he scarcely ever noticed now, but it was, he thought, a pity just the same.

  So deep was he in his thoughts of Jill that he was startled when Decker returned to thump down a bottle and two glasses on the table.

  'Drink up, he said. 'This is the last of the bottle that you brought me, but Charley is due in another day or two. He'll bring me more.

  'You don't have to depend on Charley, said Tennyson. 'I'll fetch you a couple or three bottles. Ecuyer has a cache of it. More than the two of us possibly can use.

  Decker grunted. 'I said Charley would be showing up in a day or two and I got no flicker of interest out of you. Does that mean you're not going to try to arrange a deal to go back with him?

  'It's too soon, said Tennyson. 'Gutshot will still remember me. There might be someone hanging around on the watch for me. Even if that weren't so, I don't think I want to leave. Not quite yet, anyhow.

  'How about Jill?

  'She'll probably stay on for a while as well. She's all caught up in her history project.

  'Both of you, said Decker, 'are learning what I learned. End of Nothing is a fairly tolerable planet. Good climate. Productive land. No one pushing other people around. That's the best of it. There is no pushing around.

  'That's why you stayed?

  'That's part of it. The other part of it is that I am a couple of hundred years out of my time. I'll tell you the whole story someday, when the time comes and you have a lot of leisure to listen. But the gist of it is that I had to abandon ship. My crew ran off and left me, but somehow, in panic and by oversight, perhaps, they left one lifeboat. Not for me, not intentionally for me, I am sure; they probably just overlooked it in their mad rush to escape. I got into it and went into suspended animation. The ship got me here safe and sound, sniffing out a planet that would support me, but by the time it got me here a couple of centuries had passed. I am an anachronism, a man two centuries out of his world. I can't go back to the galaxy again; I'd be out of my depth. Here it doesn't matter. Most of the humans here are more outdated than I am. And the robots, God knows. In a lot of ways, they haven't advanced an inch beyond the time they came here a millennium ago. In other ways, they may be a million years ahead. They're brain-picking the galaxy, perhaps the universe.

  'You have any idea what they really have?

  'No inkling at all. Whatever they have, they keep it bottled up.

  'And yet they are afraid. Jill found a memo one of the cardinals wrote. Undated, so there's no telling when it was written. It tells of a bunch of aliens, riding in bubble ships, that came here. On a survey, more than likely. They stayed only a short time, less than an hour. But this cardinal was scared pink with purple spots.

  'There's a legend of the visit, Decker said. 'It must have happened years ago. The Day the Bubbles Came. It has all the markings of an ancient folktale, but the memo probably means that it has some historic basis.

  'Why should the robots be so upset about it? The visiting aliens offered no harm; they didn't hang around.

  'You must realize, said Decker, 'that the robot never is an adventurer. He always plays the averages. He never takes a chance. He is always cautious. That's the true measure between a robot and a human. Men take chances, plunge ahead, go for broke. A robot never does. It may be a reflection of his inferiority complex. He talks big, acts big at times, but he's never really big. He hunkers down a lot. He jumps at his own shadow. Vatican robots have been fairly successful here; there's not much here to spook them.

  Thirty

  John, the gardener, went down the many long flights of stone stairs beneath Vatican and finally came to Pope country. He went along a corridor until he reached a small door. From a compartment in his waist, he took out a key and opened the door that led into a tiny room with only one chair in it. The lock snicked when he pushed the door closed behind him. On the wall facing the chair a metallic plate was set into the solid stone.

  The gardener sat in the chair. 'Your Holiness, he said. 'John is here to make a report.

  The cross-hatched face appeared slowly, deliberately on the plate.

  'It is good to see you, John, said His Holiness. 'What brings you here this time?

  'I am here, Your Holiness, said John, 'to tell you some of the facts of life. I hope this time that you pay attention to me. I'm not out there playing the fool for nothing, putting on my act as a silly gardener mumbling to his roses. I am doing your work, your personal work that you can't trust to your stupid cardinals. I'm out there spying for you, listening for you, gathering information for you, starting rumors for you. The least you can do, Your Holiness, is listen.

  'I always listen, John.

  'Not always, John said grumpily.

  'I'll listen this time, John.

  'There is a rumor, said John. 'No more than a rumor, but a good strong rumor, that the Listener Mary went back to Heaven for the second time and was thrown out.

  'I haven't heard that, said the Pope.

  'No, of course you haven't. The cardinals wouldn't tell you. They'd pussyfoot around-

  'In time, said His Holiness, 'they would have gotten around to telling me.

  'In time, yes. After they had stumbled around a lot and talked it over among themselves, viewing it from all angles and trying to figure out how best to break it to you, to tell you so it went down easy.

  'They are good and faithful servants. They only do what they do out of their thoughtfulness for me.

  'They do what they do, said the gardener, 'to twist your direction and your purpose. When Vatican first was established, Your Holiness, its aim was to seek out a true religion. Unlike the humans of Earth, we had the honesty to admit we were hunting for a better faith than the one we had known on Earth. Do you still, Your Holiness, seek a true religion?<
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  'I believe I do, said the Pope. 'Among other things.

  'That's the gist of it — among other things. There have been too many other things. Technological systems. Philosophical trends that have little to do with our primary purpose…

  'But philosophy, John, does have much to do with what you call our primary purpose. I take it that you would cancel all else but a mad, frantic search for a faith we felt, at one time, we would find.

  'Do you think so no longer, Your Holiness?

  'You're asking me if I still believe in the logic and necessity for the search. The answer is that of course I do. But what seemed simple a thousand years ago appears not so simple now. It is not a matter of faith alone, not only the matter finding the right deity, if deity is the term we want, but a matter of untangling the many survival and evolutionary systems that have been developed by the people that our Listeners are discovering. It is only by the study of such systems and the thinking of the beings residing in those patterns, I am now convinced, that we can find the answers that will lead us to what you call a true religion.

  'Your Holiness, you mock me!

  I would not mock you, John. We have worked too long together for me ever to do that. But I do think that our viewpoints, through the years, have grown very far apart.

  'You have changed more than I have, Your Holiness. I am still the simple robot that came out here from Earth. My viewpoint is closer to our original plan than is yours. I helped plan and fabricate you and we tried to build a greatness and a deep wisdom in you, a love of holiness. You are not — you will pardon me for saying this — but you are not that same pontiff that we fabricated.

  The Pope made a noise that sounded like a chuckle. 'No, certainly I am not. Would you expect me to be? Did you think that you could cast my pattern and that it would not deviate? That in the light of new fact and new thought, the pattern still would persist as the image of what you and your fellows thought a thousand years ago? You are right; I am no longer pure robot; I have lost much of the humanity that you put into me. I have grown — well, let us say more alien, as the centuries have crept along. I have so much alienness fed into me — some of it, in part, pure garbage — that I have become, in some aspects, alien. This could have been expected even by you, John. It was necessary. I had to develop certain alien faculties to handle all the alien concepts that are dumped into me. I have changed. Certainly I have changed. I am no longer the instrument that you robots made. I am amazed that you are not aware of that. I have a backlog of data that is catalogued and waiting to be fitted into whatever matrix that conceivably could make use of it. I can tell you from sad experience that my trillions of little jigsaw pieces often do not fit, even when they appear to be a perfect fit, but have to be taken out and put back on the shelf until another pattern shows up where one or two, or a dozen, or a hundred of them, might appear to be of value. I don't mind telling you that I am crammed with half-finished puzzles, some of which may need only a few more pieces to make them come together, but others, many others, that may never come together, that will never come to anything at all. That's the trouble with you robots. You want answers and I haven't any answers. As I told you, the universe is not so simple as it once appeared. I am a long-range project and you people are expecting short-range results from me….

  'Your Holiness, a thousand years is not short-range.

  The Pope made the chuckling noise again. 'In my kind of business, it is. If I last a million years-

  'You will last a million years. We will see you do.

  'Well, then, said the Pope, 'there is some hope that we will attain your goal.

  'My goal. Your Holiness, you speak as if it isn't yours.

  'Oh, it's mine, all right. But the other aspects of our research cannot be ignored. There is no way of knowing in what direction any segment of research will lead — many times in unsuspected directions.

  'Your Holiness, you have allowed Vatican to become sidetracked, you have encouraged it to go baying off in all these other directions that you speak of. The cardinals are grabbing for power-

  'I do not deny, said His Holiness, 'that some of my cardinals have turned out to be a poor lot, but they're not entirely bad. Administratively, some of them are sound. For example, the pilgrim program has been handled rather neatly.

  'I am amazed you're so cynical, Your Holiness, as to mention the pilgrim program. We keep it going only for the revenue it brings. We feed these poor pilgrims a sordid mish-mash of religious concepts that they cannot understand, but that have a pleasant sound, although very little truth and less sincerity. The worst of it is that because they cannot understand the concepts, they believe in them.

  'Very little truth, you say. I could ask you what is truth, but I won't, for you'd try to answer and confuse me all the more. I'm not sure but that I agree with you about the pilgrims, but the program does bring in a handsome revenue of which we stand in need and it furnishes us an excellent cover as a crackpot cult — in case anyone ever thinks of us, which I doubt they do.

  'I deplore that attitude, said the gardener. 'In the pilgrim program we are only going through the motions and we should do more than that, we could do more than that. We should touch every soul we can.

  'That's what I like so much about you, John. Your concern with soul even when you must know you do not have a soul.

  'I do not know I have no soul. I rather think I have. It makes sense to say that every intelligence has a soul.

  'Whatever a soul may be, said the Pope.

  'Yes, whatever a soul may be.

  'No one else could say such things to me, said His Holiness, 'nor I such things to them. That is why you're so valuable to me, so much a friend, although the way we talk does not seem to indicate we're friends. There was one time I thought of you as a cardinal, but you were of infinitely greater help as a gardener. Would you like to be a cardinal?

  The gardener made an obscene sound.

  'I suppose it's just as well, said the Pope. 'You are dangerous as a gardener; you'd be even more dangerous as a cardinal. Tell me now and don't stammer to give you time to make up a lie. You were the one, were you not, who set off this business of canonizing Mary?

  'Yes, I was. I do not apologize for it. The people need a saint — the devout robots in Vatican and the humans in the village. Their faith grows weak; it needs some reinforcement. There must be something soon to reaffirm the purpose that we held when we first came here. But if Mary was booted out of Heaven…

  'John, do you know that as a fact?

  'No, I don't. I told you it was but a rumor. Mary did go somewhere and was traumatized — how, I am not sure. Ecuyer has dug in his heels and refused to turn the crystal over to Vatican. That prissy little doctor of ours evades my questions. He knows whatever Ecuyer knows. The two of them are buddies.

  'I'm not comfortable with the procedure of hauling forth a saint, said the Pope. 'It's a throwback to the Christianity of Earth. Not that Christianity was a bad thing — it was not — but it was far from what it pretended to be. I use the past tense, knowing full well Christianity still survives, but speaking in the past because I have no idea how it has developed, if it has developed.

  'You can be sure, said John with some bitterness, 'that it has changed. Not necessarily developed, but changed.

  'Back to the saint idea. Your proposal that Mary be made a saint is somewhat tainted now if the rumor you mention should be true. We cannot make a saint out of a woman who has been kicked out of Heaven.

  'That's exactly what I am trying to explain to you, said the gardener. 'We need a saint or some other symbol that will serve to anchor our faith into the foreseeable future. I have watched and waited for a saint but none showed up — not even a marginal saint. Mary is the first one, and we must not allow her to slip through our fingers. Vatican must get hold of the Heaven cube — this last Heaven cube — and either destroy or suppress it. We must deny with all our strength and authority that she was booted out of Heaven —

  '
First of all, said the Pope, 'you must know that it isn't Heaven.

  'Of course it's not, said John.

  'But you are willing to allow the lesser breeds to believe it is.

  'Your Holiness, we need a saint. We need a Heaven.

  'We talked a while ago about our search for a more honest religion and now-

  'But, Your Holiness-

  'If it's a saint we need, said His Holiness, 'I can suggest a better candidate than Mary — an intelligent, deeply ambitious robot so selfless in his love of his people and his hope for their salvation that he gave up his chance to a high post in Vatican to work as a humble gardener communing with his roses…

  The gardener made a disrespectful sound.

  Thirty-one

  The Old Ones of the Woods talked among themselves, the comfortable, neighborly talk of little consequence — from all around the planet they talked to one another, filled with respect for one another, easy with their relationships.

  — There was a time, said one of them who dwelled on a verdant plain that stretched for hundreds of miles on the other side of the mountain range that towered over Vatican, there was a time when I was much concerned with the metal race that settled on our surface. I feared they would expand, reaching for our soil and trees, for our mineral treasures, wasting our water and our land. I was even more concerned when we learned that the metal race was the creation of an organic folk who designed them as their servants. But after long years of keeping watch, there appears to be no danger.

  — They are decent folk, said the Old One who lived in the hills above Decker's cabin, from which point he kept close watch on Vatican. They use our resources, but they use them wisely, taking only as they need, careful to preserve the fertility of the soil.

  — In the beginning, said another who dwelled among the high peaks to the west of Vatican, I was disturbed by their extensive use of trees. In the beginning, and even now, they have the need of vast amounts of wood. But they harvest wisely, they are not wasteful and they never overcut. At times they plant young saplings to replace the trees they've taken.