Project Pope

'I'll tell you the best thing that I ever was. It wasn't any man, no old human ancestor, or even close to human. I'm not sure some of the old man-things I was were human. This best thing was a sort of lizard. I don't know what it was, nor does anyone else. Ecuyer had a hell's own time trying to figure out what it was. He even sent for some books that he thought might tell him what it was, but they didn't. What it was never bothered me, but it did him. I guess it must have been some sort of missing link, a critter that never left a skeleton for paleontologists to dig up and ponder over. I figure, and so does Ecuyer, that it lived back in the Triassic. I said a lizard, but it probably wasn't any lizard. It wasn't big, but it was fast — it was one of the fastest things that lived at that time. And mean. Christ, was it mean! It hated everything, it fought with everything, it would eat anything that moved. It harried the hell out of everything in sight. I never knew until then how good it made a man feel to be really mean. Bone-chilling mean. A real, low-down bastard. The time I spent as a trilobite was short, but I lived as this lizard for a longtime. I don't know how long, for there was no sense of time. I just lived in the middle of forever. Maybe I stayed with it so long because I was enjoying myself so much. Why don't you ask Ecuyer to dig out that lizard cube for you? You'd enjoy it.

'Perhaps someday I will, said Te

He did not view the lizard cube. There were too many others. Ecuyer had no objection to his seeing them. He gave the robot custodian of the Listening files instructions to show Te

It was puzzling, Te

Or it might be that by revealing its operations to Jill and him, both of them would be won over to the case. Vatican was made up of a band of dedicated fanatics isolated from the nearby galaxy — the only part of the galaxy that counted, the only part of it that was close enough to be tempted to move in — and out of this dedication and isolation the fact of Vatican and its purpose would loom larger in their eyes than it really was. Thus Vatican would fall victim to its egocentrism, and the cause would seem so grand, so sacred and so clearly reasonable that no one, adequately informed, could do anything but align himself with it. All that needed to be done was to explain and everyone would fall in line.

Te

The simplest answer, and the one that he was most reluctant to accept, was that both of them were needed here. Certainly there was need of a doctor to care for the human population; it might be true that Vatican felt a real need for the writing of its history. And it was true, as well, that it was difficult for such an out-of-the-way place to attract outside professionals, so difficult that when a couple of them dropped una

One of the cubes he viewed was highly disturbing. Even inside the mind of one of its inhabitants, which he assumed was where he was, it was a sort of place that made no human sense, was entirely incomprehensible. What he saw, although he realized later that it was not really seeing, was a world of diagrams and equations, or what he took to be diagrams and equations, although he saw no conventional signs or symbols even vaguely comparable to human ones. It was as if he existed somewhere inside a huge three-dimensional blackboard, with the signs and symbols, the diagrams and equations grouped about him and, on all sides, receding far into the distance. And it seemed at times, although how he sensed this he did not know, that he himself, or the entity whose mind he shared, was itself an equation.

He sought vainly for an answer, for an explanation, feebly probing the mind of his host, but getting no reaction. The creature, he thought, more than likely, didn't know he was there. It itself needed no answer or explanation; it understood what it was seeing. Perhaps interpreting what it was seeing, sharing in the experience of its interactions with all the other diagrams and equations. But if so, all this escaped Te

He did not give up; he stayed in there and fought for some sort of understanding, trying to seize just one thing, one small bit of relevance that he could tuck away as a start toward an understanding.

That one bit of relevance never came. When the cube came to an end and he found himself back in the human world, he knew as little as he did when popped into that other mind.

He sat, stricken, in the chair.

'That was quite something, was it not, sir? asked the custodian, chirping blithely.

Te

'Yes, he said. 'What was it?

'Sir, we do not know.

'What good, then, he asked, 'of finding it, of seeing it?

'Vatican may know, said the custodian. 'Vatican has ways of knowing.

'Well, I sincerely hope so, said Te

'Certainly, sir. Tomorrow. Any time you wish.

Tomorrow turned out to be the autumn land.

It was really nothing; it was just a place. This time, he was sure, he did not exist inside an intelligence. He was simply there. Thinking back on it, he could not be sure he had been anyplace at all, although certainly he had had a sense of being in an actual place. He could swear that he had heard the crackle and rustle of fallen autumn leaves beneath his feet, that he had breathed a sharp, crisp, wine-like air redolent of leaf bonfires, of ripened apples hanging on a laden bough, the faint scent of late-blooming flowers and a touch of frost on withering vegetation. He had heard, or thought he heard, the rustle of a field-dried patch of corn, the patter of hickory nuts falling from a tree, the sudden, far-off whir of partridge wings, the soft, liquid singing of a placid brook carrying on its surface a freight of fallen autumn leaves. And there had been color, he was sure of that — the coin-golden color of a walnut tree, the purple of an ash, the shouting sun-bright yellow of an aspen, the bright-blood of a sugar maple, and rich red and brown of oak. And over and above it all that bittersweet feel of autumn, the glory of the dying year when work was done and a quiet season of rest had been proclaimed.