Clifford Simak - Project Pope

'Whisperer probably was understanding some of it, said Tennyson. 'Whisperer was the one in control. He was a sort of double-jointed interpreter.

'He didn't pan out so well as an interpreter for me, said Jill. 'Although I think that may have been the case. He was working both sides of the street. We moved up close — I mean I moved up close to this equation person and watched what was going on and every once in a while, I'd point a finger at an equation or a diagram as if I might be asking a question about it, although it wasn't me who was asking the question. It was Whisperer, and when that happened, the equation person would go through all of it again, patient, trying to make us understand. Sometimes he had to go through it several times before Whisperer seemed to understand.

'But you understood none of it?

'Jason, I think I did — some of it. Not a full understanding, of course, but snatches of it. And some of it I may have marginally understood I plain forgot because I don't think it was the kind of information that the human mind could be expected to grasp the first time around. Some of it, I know, was outrageous — outrageous by human standards. There seemed to be no logic in it. You know what I think, Jason? — 'No, what do you think?

'I think the equation world operates on a variable logic pattern. One statement can be logical in one context, but not in the next. It was infuriating. I'd grab a piece of it by the tail, then something would come along to make that one piece I had grasped outlandish. I don't know. I really do not know. Some of it I'm sure I caught the drift of at the time, but I don't have it now. Whisperer said he wanted me to go with him because my viewpoint might be different from yours and I guess it must have been. Nothing like this happened to you when you were there — did it?

'No, it didn't. I was just confused.

'The difference, said Jill, 'might not have been with you and me. Come to think of it, I don't believe it was. The difference was with Whisperer. He'd been there twice, you see. He might have been getting the hang of it. On a second trip you, too, might get the hang of it. And he'd probably been thinking about it all the time since he got back with you.

'Jill, I'm sorry you had to go through this. There was no reason that you should. I told Whisperer to leave you out of it. He thought he could work with you as he had worked with me, but I told him-

'Yes, I know. He told me you had told him.

'Where is Whisperer now?

'I don't know. I came back. All of a sudden, I came back. Not here, but to my own suite. That's where we started out. Whisperer wasn't with me. He wasn't in the room and he wasn't in my mind. I don't know how I knew this, but I knew he wasn't.

'I wonder if he knows that Decker's dead. That will hit him hard. He and Decker were great pals. Decker tried to pretend that he didn't care one way or the other, but he did. He thought a lot of Whisperer.

Jill picked up the coffee pot and filled Tennyson's cup. 'I made a cake, she said. 'Do you want a piece?

'Later, he said. 'A little later on. That stew you made….

'It was good, wasn't it.

'Delicious. Filling.

'Jason, do you think the theologians killed Decker?

'It all fits together. The cubes gone, Decker dead. They took us out of it. If we could just have held on to the cubes, then Whisperer could have taken us to Heaven. No need for coordinates. He has the ability to follow a very dim trail. Like a dog trailing a fox. If he can take us to the equation world, he could have taken us to Heaven. There's a lot out there in the universe. Many trails for him to follow.

'Jason, could we be wrong? You and I and Paul? Could the Vatican theologians be right? Is a true faith more valuable than knowledge of the universe?

'Jill, I think that involves a judgment of what comes first. Vatican made that decision long ago and now someone is trying to reverse it. The decision that first you must have knowledge before you can arrive at faith. That may have been a wrong decision. I can't be certain, but I don't think it was.

'Maybe we will never know.

'You and I will never know. Someday someone will.

'What happens now?

'There's no way right now to know.

'Jason, some bits of it are coming back to me. The bits and pieces I picked up in the equation world.

'Perhaps as time goes on, more and more of it.

'There was a sense of being tired, of resting. Does that make any sense?

'Not much, said Tennyson. 'But take it easy. Your very human mind is trying to translate alien concepts into human terms.

'There is something else. The idea of games and a great excitement that here was a new game to be played.

'It probably was something else entirely, but at least it's a place to start. You picked up far more than I did. Maybe Whisperer, when he shows up, will be able to help out.

'I think so. Whisperer must have understood far more than I did.

A knock came at the door. When Tennyson opened it, Theodosius stood outside.

'How good of you to come, said Tennyson. 'Won't you step in. We are greatly honored.

The cardinal came in and Tennyson closed the door. 'I'll poke up the fire, he said, 'and we can sit and talk.

'I would like to do that, said the cardinal, 'but there is no time. His Holiness has summoned the two of you to an audience.

Jill came around the table. 'I don't understand, she said.

'His Holiness thinks most highly of you.

'You will go with us, said Tennyson.

'I'll escort you there, but I will not stay. He said the two of you. The two of you alone.

Whisperer gamboled. He was giddy and ecstatic. He went skating down a looping bridge of magnetic flux. He danced madly in the midst of a sputtering cloud of ions. He ducked his erratic way through the core of an exploding galaxy. He ran a race with the surging radiation that flared out of a nova. He somersaulted through a field of pulsars.

When it was all done, he hunkered down before a red dwarf and spread out symbolic hands to warm them on the banked fires of the star. The red dwarf, curiously, was the only luminosity in sight. All else was black, although somewhere far away there was the faint hint of high-intensity flickering, as if some great event were taking place beyond the far horizon of deep space. He was penned in by an emptiness and a nothingness and he sensed the loneliness that went with nothingness, although he had no feel for loneliness, for he was a creature of space-time, and in all of space and time, there was no room for loneliness.

He did not know where he was and he gave no thought to it, for wherever he might be, he knew that he was home, although why or how he knew this, he had no inkling and again he gave no thought to it, for it did not matter — he could go anywhere he wished and he still would be at home. Which did not mean, of course, that he'd know where lie was.

He crouched before the red-black star and heard the song of foreverness that pulsed in the emptiness in this corner of the universe, wherever it might be. He caught the dim scent of distant life and he thought about the achievements of that life — each achievement peculiar to a certain life form, but all the many achievements of many life forms adding up to a massive reaching out for the incalculable answers that must come about and meld together before the final answer could be known.

This was his heritage, he thought, this the heritage and the task and the striving of his people and perhaps of many other peoples who alone and in the darkness of unknowing clawed toward the light.

Then the star and the darkness went away and again he was in the center of a circle formed by the equation people and he sought out the rose-red one flanked by all the others. The panel of the rose-red one was blank, but as he watched, an equation flickered on it, pale and faint at first, then hardening and becoming sharper. He drove his mind against it and he wrestled with it and finally it became clear and when that happened, the rose-red blackboard was wiped clean of it and again he drove his mind against it and, hesitantly, another equation began to form and finally formed, as hard and solid as had been the first one. But there was a difference: