Clifford Simak - Project Pope

'I had the impression, said Tennyson, 'that you did not care for mountains.

'I do now. I saw them just the other day. I saw them, Jason, as you have been seeing them.

'Back in the medieval days of Earth, Tennyson told the Pope, 'there were many monasteries. Men withdrew to them, spent their lives in them, living Christian lives under Christian rule. They would have told you, had you asked them, that they did it for the love of Christ, that this was their way of serving Christ. I am inclined to think that, deep down, they used the monasteries as refuges against the brutal times. There they found a world of peace and quiet. Which did not make them any less devout, but, without their realizing it, their devotion had less to do with their being there than they might have thought. I think that's what you have here, what I've found here — a refuge from the turbulence of a contending galaxy.

'And that, said the Pope, 'is what we wish it to remain. A quiet place in which to go about our work. But the question is: What should be our work?

'If you are asking me if you should follow faith or knowledge, I'd say knowledge, for it seems to me faith will come out of knowledge, not knowledge out of faith. But that is personal opinion. Ask a dozen, or a hundred, other humans, not including the indoctrinated humans on End of Nothing, and you would get different answers. Some of them would give my answer, others would plump for faith. Maybe the answer is that there can be no true answer any more than there may be true faith.

'And a true knowledge?

'I think that somewhere there must be. I know I'll never know it; I'm not certain you will ever find it.

'Perhaps, said His Holiness, 'our good robots miscalculated in my construction. Perhaps they failed to instill in me the piety that they felt within themselves. But I am inclined to agree with you. If, however, I make such a decision, Vatican will be torn apart. There'll be contentious arguing for years, and not all of Vatican would follow my decision — which would not do much for the image of the Pope. And whether you may think so or not, the image of the Pope is important to every one of us.

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 cannot be identical with yours. You have the arts — music, painting, literature — and while I am aware of these, while I recognize the function that they serve and the pleasure to be gotten from them, I cannot respond to them.

'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 cannot say that robots are lacking in their faith and their hunger for the faith. It was that hunger which built Vatican and has carried us through a thousand years of searching for a more perfect faith. Could it be that there are many varieties, not of faiths, but of perfect faiths, of truthful and solid faiths?

'There may appear to be, said Tennyson, 'but in the last analysis, I am certain there will be one faith, one faith alone that thinking creatures can accept. There'll be one true faith as there will be one full truth — a final faith and a final truth. I would not be surprised if the two should prove the same, the faith and the truth.

'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 Tennyson. 'Searching for truth you will have some guidelines. Faith is very short of solid guidelines.

'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 Tennyson 'that you must keep the Listeners to their tasks. Tomorrow one of them may find one of those bits of knowledge that you need, or it may require a hundred years to find it, or a thousand, but if the Listeners do not continue going out into the universe, it never will be found.

'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 cannot make them understand. I think this real world they talk about is a provincial world, that it is bounded by the areas they know and the peculiar conditions that exist there. What is the real world on End of Nothing and in Vatican would not be the real world on a planet halfway across the galaxy, or even in a planet that was next door to us. Our limited senses, which restrict our understanding and make it limited as well, fence us in against the reality of the universe. I think that I, rather than they, exist in a world much more real than theirs.

'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.

'What was that all about? asked Jill.

'Vatican's coming apart, said Tennyson, 'and the Pope's the one who knows it.

'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.

Tennyson got up and threw a couple of logs on the fire, came back to sit beside Jill.

'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 Tennyson. 'It would be a dead end. A lot of the information that he has never will be used. He can still continue sifting through it, he can sift through it endlessly, still with the greater part of it not being used. To keep his work viable, to keep it moving forward, that backlog he speaks of must keep growing. Like new wood for a fire. This may not be possible, for if the theologians do take over, in a few years the Listeners will be gone. The present Listeners will die off, and if there are no others recruited to take their place and if the clones aren't trained, then the Search Program will die. And that's the end of it.