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“Oh, I understand well enough.”
“Very well. You need only make me one promise and you may use the courtyard.”
“What promise?”
“Simply that you won’t advise anyone to go to a “mercy camp.” Limit yourself to diagnosis. If you find hopeless radiation cases, tell them what the law forces you to tell them, be as consoling as you wish, but don’t tell them to go kill themselves.”
The doctor hesitated. “I think it would be proper to make such a promise with respect to patients who belong to your Faith.”
Abbot Zerchi lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said finally, “but that’s not enough.”
“Why? Others are not bound by your principles. If a man is not of your religion, why should you refuse to allow—” He choked off angrily.
“Do you want an explanation?”
“Yes.”
“Because if a man is ignorant of the fact that something is wrong, and acts in ignorance, he incurs no guilt, provided natural reason was not enough to show him that it was wrong. But while ignorance may excuse the man, it does not excuse the act, which is wrong in itself. If I permitted the act simply because the man is ignorant that it is wrong, then I would incur guilt, because I do know it to be wrong. It is really that painfully simple.”
“Listen, Father. They sit there and they look at you. Some scream. Some cry. Some just sit there. All of them say, “Doctor, what can I do?’ And what am I supposed to answer? Say nothing? Say, ‘You can die, that’s all.’ What would you say?”
“ ‘Pray.’ “
“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you? Listen, pain is the only evil I know about. It’s the only one I can fight.”
“Then God help you.”
“Antibiotics help me more.”
Abbot Zerchi groped for a sharp reply, found one, but swiftly swallowed it. He searched for a blank piece of paper and a pen and pushed them across the desk. “Just write: ‘I will not recommend euthanasia to any patient while at this abbey,’ and sign it. Then you can use the courtyard.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I suppose they’ll have to drag themselves two miles down the road.”
“Of all the merciless—”
“On the contrary. I’ve offered you an opportunity to do your work as required by the law you recognize, without overstepping the law I recognize. Whether they go down the road or not is up to you.”
The doctor stared at the blank page. “What is so magic about putting it in writing?”
“I prefer it that way.”
He bent silently over the desk and wrote. He looked at what he had written, then slashed his signature under it and straightened. “All right, there’s your promise. Do you think it’s worth any more than my spoken word?”
“No. No indeed.” The abbot folded the note and tucked it into his coat. “But it’s here in my pocket, and you know it’s here in my pocket, and I can look at it occasionally, that’s all. Do you keep promises, by the way, Doctor Cors?”
The medic stared at him for a moment. “I’ll keep it.” He grunted, then turned on his heel and stalked out.
“Brother Pat!” Abbot Zerchi called weakly. “Brother Pat, are you there?”
His secretary came to stand in the doorway. “Yes, Reverend Father?”
“You heard?”
“I heard some of it. The door was open, and I couldn’t help hearing. You didn’t have the silencer—”
“You heard him say it? ‘Pain’s the only evil I know about.’ You heard that?”
The monk nodded solemnly.
“And that society is the only thing which determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?”
“Yes.”
“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.’ Brother Pat, you’d better get out of here, or I’ll start raving.”
“Domne, I—”
“What’s keeping you? What’s that, a letter? All right, give it here.”
The monk handed it to him and went out. Zerchi left it unopened and glanced at the doctor’s pledge again. Worthless, perhaps. But still the man was sincere. And dedicated. He’d have to be dedicated to work for the kind of salary the Green Star paid. He had looked underslept and overworked. He’d probably been living on benzedrine and doughnuts since the shot that killed the city. Seeing misery everywhere and detesting it, and sincere in wanting to do something about it. Sincere — that was the hell of it. From a distance, one’s adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one’s own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.
He opened the letter and read it. The letter informed him that Brother Joshua and the others had departed from New Rome for an unspecified destination in the West. The letter also advised him that information about Quo pererinatur had leaked to the ZDI, who had sent investigators to the Vatican to ask questions about the rumored launching of an unauthorized starship…Evidently the starship was not yet in space.
They’d learn soon enough about Quo peregrinatur, but with the help of Heaven, they’d find out too late. What then? he wondered.
The legal situation was tangled. The law forbade starship departures without commission approval. Approval was hard to get and slow in coming. Zerchi was certain that the ZDI and the commission would consider the Church was breaking the law. But a State-Church concordat had existed for a century and a half now; it clearly exempted the Church from licensing procedures, and it guaranteed to the Church the right to send missions to “whatever space installations and/or planetary outposts shall not have been declared by the aforesaid Commission to be ecologically critical or closed to unregulated enterprise.” Every installation in the solar system was “ecologically critical” and “closed” at the time of the concordat, but the concordat further asserted the Church’s right to “own space vessels and travel unrestricted to open installations or outposts.” The concordat was very old. It had been signed in the days when the Berkstrun starship drive was only a dream in the wide imagination of some who thought that interstellar travel would open up the universe to an unrestricted, outflow of population.
Things had turned out otherwise. When the first starship was born as an engineering drawing, it became plain that no institution except government had the means or the funds to build them; that no profit was to be derived from transporting colonies to extrasolar planets for purposes of “interstellar mercantilism.” Nevertheless, the Asian rulers had sent the first colony ship. Then in the West the cry was heard: “Are we to let the ‘inferior’ races inherit the stars?” There had been a brief flurry of starship launchings as colonies of black people, brown, white, and yellow people were hurled into the sky toward the Centaur, in the name of racism. Afterwards, geneticists had wryly demonstrated that — since each racial group was so small that unless their descendants intermarried, each would undergo deteriorative genetic drift due to inbreeding on the colony planet — the racists had made cross-breeding necessary to survival.
The only interest the Church had taken in space had been concern for the colonists who were sons of the Church, cut off from the flock by interstellar distances. And yet she had not taken advantage of that provision of the concordat which permitted the sending of missions. Certain contradictions existed between the concordat and the laws of the State which empowered the commission, at least as the latter law might in theory affect the sending of missions. The contradiction had never been adjudicated by the courts, since there had never been cause for litigation. But now, if the ZDI intercepted Brother Joshua’s group in the act of launching a starship without a commission permit or charter, there would be cause. Zerchi prayed that the group would get away without a test in the courts, which might take weeks or months. Of course there would be a scandal afterwards. Many would charge not only that the Church had violated Commission rulings but charity too, by sending ecclesiastical dignitaries and a bunch of rascal monks, when she might have used the ship as refuge for poor colonists, hungry for land. The conflict of Martha and Mary always recurred.