Project Pope

Neither of the humans answered him.

'You humans feel both love and hate, said the Pope. 'I can feel neither of them. I think that's one up for me and my fellow robots. You have your dreams and I have mine, but my dream ca

'Holiness, said Jill, 'faith itself may be an art.

'I do not doubt it, said the Pope. 'You may have put your finger on an important consideration. Yet you ca

'There may appear to be, said Te

'And this is why you believe we should follow truth, that it provides a better and an easier road to faith than to seek for faith alone?

'I think so, said Te

'I have stowed within me so vast a reservoir of knowledge, said the Pope, 'furnished by the Listeners through the centuries, that at times I scarcely know where to turn. I must seek frantically through my dustbin of knowledge, hunting for that single bit of information that might fit into a puzzle to which I seek solution. There are many puzzles, and simultaneously I must seek the many bits of knowledge that possibly will give form and substance to the many puzzles. Even while I am doing this, I am haunted by the thought that perhaps the required bits of knowledge for which I seek have not as yet been found by the Listeners. They range far and endlessly and yet they have made only the barest scratch upon the knowledge of the universe.

'Which means' said Te

'I know, the Pope said. 'I know. And yet there are those who say, with knowing smirks on their metallic faces, that I do not exist in the real world, that in my isolation, imprisoned in the stone of these mountains, I no longer am in touch with reality. I do not think this is true, but I ca

'I've outgrown them, said the Pope. 'That's what has happened. I have grown beyond them. But that is what they wanted. When they constructed me, they sought infallibility, like the Pope on Earth. But I've outgrown them and disappointed them. Infallibility on a single planet and in the universe are two different things.

Forty-seven

'What was that all about? asked Jill.

'Vatican's coming apart, said Te

'We didn't help him much.

'We helped him not at all. He's disappointed in us. The robots still hold the infantile notion that their humans are great men of magic, that we can reach down and come up with answers, that when they get stuck, we'll bail them out. The father image — the Old Man can do anything, he can fix it up. The Pope's the same. Maybe he knew we couldn't do anything for him, but he still held the father fantasy. And now he's disappointed in us.

Te

'It is the Search Program that holds Vatican together, he said.

'Ecuyer said something about it, I remember, when we first came here. He told me that Vatican was only an excuse to continue the Search Program. I thought he was simply bragging, trying to impress me with his own importance. But there is a great deal of truth in it. I realize that now. With the Search Program, Vatican is a dynamic operation; without it, it will become a fuzzy fumbling after something that no one understands. There'll be endless empty arguments and much vague philosophizing, and heresies will spring up to fight bitterly with ecclesiastical authority. Without the Listeners, Vatican, in its present form, will not last another thousand years. Even if it does, it will be meaningless.

'But His Holiness told us, said Jill, 'that he has a great backlog of knowledge furnished by the Listeners. I got the idea he is nowhere near caught up with it. Couldn't he continue working with what he has? If that's what he wants to do, and I think it is. With all this backlog-

'Don't you see? asked Te

'And once gone, it can't be started up again.

'That's exactly it, said Te

'Jason, we have to do something about it. You and I must do something. We are the only ones.

'There is Ecuyer.

'Yes, sure, there is Ecuyer but he's too much Vatican.

'I suppose you re right. He is tainted in a lesser degree than other End of Nothing humans, but he is still tainted. He is still Vatican.

'Jason, we have to do something. What can we do?

'My darling, I don't know. As of now, I'm fresh out of all ideas. I haven't got a one. If we could get to Heaven…

'And bring back proof. We'd have to bring back proof.

'Yes, of course we would. Without it, no one would believe us. But that's something we don't need to worry about. We're not going there.

'I just thought of something.

'Yes, what is it?

'What if it was really Heaven? What if Mary had been right?

'Heaven's not a place. It is a state of mind.

'No, Jason, cut that out. You are mouthing a phrase. No more than flip judgment. I told you about the equation people. I said it might be possible they operated on a variable logic pattern. What if this whole universe operated on a variable logic pattern? Wouldn't that make all our human preconceptions invalid? Could we be as wrong as that?