Project Pope

'You say, said Te

'Yes, of course, the captain said. 'The aliens have places they can go, but Human House is human. No alien would think of going there.

'How about the humans at Vatican? Do they go to Human House?

'Well, now that you mention it, I don't think they do. No one sees too much of the Vatican people, either robot or human. They stay pretty much up on their hill. My impression is that they don't mix with the people in the town. I'm not talking about a lot of humans in town. There aren't too many of them, and they're a close-knit group. Most of the humans in the town have jobs of one sort or another that are tied in with Project Pope. I don't mean Vatican stuff, but jobs that have some association with the Vatican. When you come right down to it, End of Nothing is Vatican. It's the only thing that's there. There are some aliens in the town. They cater to the pilgrims. Most of the pilgrims, as you know, are alien. I've never carried a human pilgrim. As a matter of fact, scarcely ever a human of any kind at all. Last trip in, the one before this, I did carry a human, but he wasn't any pilgrim. He was a doctor. It seems to me, of late, that I'm getting a run on doctors.

'I don't understand, said Te

'This one, this other doctor, was going in to join the Vatican staff. His name was Anderson, a young fellow, kind of cocky chap. He sort of grated on me, but I got along with him the best I could. It wasn't as if I would be saddled with him for too long a time. He was going out to replace the Old Doc — name of Easton — who'd been at the Vatican for years, taking care of the human staff, of course. Robots don't need doctors. Or maybe they have their own, I don't know. Anyhow, Easton finally died and Vatican had no doctor. Vatican had been trying to get another one for years, knowing Easton was getting old and wouldn't live forever. I suspect it's hard to attract anyone to End of Nothing, which is not the sort of place a doctor or anyone else would really care to live. Some months after Old Doc died, here was this whippersnapper of a medic showing up at Gutshot. I hauled him out, of course, but I was glad when I could wash my hands of him. He's the only Vatican staff member who ever traveled on my ship. There's not much going back and forth.

'This matter of only aliens being pilgrims bothers me, said Jill. 'Vatican must be oriented to the human idea of religion. It's run by robots, and robots by and large are surrogate humans. Then the terminology — Vatican and Pope. That's straight Out of Earth. Would it be a sort of bastardized Christianity?

'That might be the far-back basis for it, the captain said. 'I've never got it straight. It may basically be Christianity, but interwoven with no one knows how many alien beliefs and faiths, all of it twisted out of human recognition by the perversity of robotic thinking.

'But even so, Jill continued. 'there should be some human pilgrims, some human interest-outside the project itself, I mean.

'Maybe not, said Te

'That may be right, the captain said. 'Aliens, on the other hand, having no background to judge the concept of Christianity- however twisted that concept might be — may find themselves attracted to it. I suppose that it is from the aliens that the project gets its support. Some aliens are fabulously wealthy. That bunch of creeps now occupying my quarters practically stink of money.

'I asked you about the planet, said Jill, 'and you haven't told me. We got off on something else.

'It's terrestrial, said the captain, 'with some minor differences. The Vatican colony is the only settlement. All the rest is howling wilderness that's never been properly mapped; a few quick flyovers by a survey ship and that is all. Only one settlement, as you know, is not unique. Many frontier planets boast only a single settlement, near the spaceport — both the planet and the settlement sharing the same name. Thus, Gutshot is the designation of both the planet and the colony surrounding the port, while End of Nothing means both the settlement and planet, as you choose. The thing is that no one except Decker knows anything about the planet farther than a few miles beyond the settlement, and I can't think Decker has traveled any great distance into the mountains. Gutshot, of course, is better known. It's littered with dinky little feudal holdings, but, even so, much of it is still wild and unexplored.

'As far as End of Nothing is concerned, it is virtually unknown. We suspect there is no intelligent creature native to the planet, although that is an assumption. No one has looked for an intelligence, and there just might be one, or more, tucked away somewhere. There is animal life — herbivores and carnivores that feed on the herbivores. Some of the carnivores, according to what one hears in the colony, are ferocious brutes. I asked Decker about them once and he shrugged me off. I never asked again. Now, the captain said to Te

'Three years, said Te

'You got into trouble there?

'You might say I did.

'Captain, said Jill, 'it is unseemly of you to be prying. No one saw him get on the ship. No one knows he did. It's no skin off your ass.

'If it will ease your conscience any, said Te

'Dr. Te

Five

This was the time of day that he liked the best, Decker thought — supper done and the dishes cleared away, a good fire blazing, the world shut outside the door and Whisperer at the table in the corner, working at shaping the piece of topaz they had brought home on the trip of the week before. Decker settled more comfortably in the chair, kicking off his moccasins and putting his stockinged feet on the raised hearthstone. In the fireplace a log burned through and settled on the other logs in a shower of sparks. New tongues of flame leaped up and ran along the burning wood. The chimney throat mumbled and was answered by the moaning wind that nosed along the eaves.

Shifting in his chair, he looked toward Whisperer's corner, but there was no sign of him. Sometimes you saw Whisperer, sometimes not. Set on one corner of the table was the intricately carved piece of pale green jade. A piece of work, Decker told himself, that was hard to make out. It was confusing because there was too much in it, much of which was unhuman, nuances that had no parallel to the way a human thought or saw; start to follow the lines of it and one soon lost oneself. The line that first manifested itself became something else and the pattern that the viewer thought he'd puzzled out became another pattern and then another and another, each one more confusing than the last. There was no end to it. A man probably could spend the rest of his days sitting in front of it and staring at it, trying to puzzle out and resolve the flowing of it and in the end always getting lost.