Дэймон Найт - Orbit 6

“How could I?”

“Your former husband is confined in the federal penitentiary at Ossining, New York. In the letters you have exchanged both of you have stated an intention to remarry upon his release. Were those letters sincere, Miss Bushnan?”

“I don’t see what my personal life has to do with this.”

“I merely wish to use your own case as an example — one which will strike home, so to speak. It will be at least five years before your former husband will be released under the present system; but if the motion passes it will be possible for you to lease — ah—” The American delegate paused, looking at some paper on his desk.

“Brad,” Miss Bushnan said.

“Yes, Brad. You could lease Brad from the government for those five years. You would have him, he would have you, and your government would be twenty-five thousand dollars to the better as the direct result of your happiness. What’s the matter with that, eh? In fact, in your case I think I could promise that your husband would be one of the first prisoners to be made available for the plan, and that he would be, so to speak, reserved. There would be no danger of someone else leasing him, if that’s worrying you. Of course you would be expected to supervise him.”

Miss Bushnan nodded slowly. “I understand.”

“May I ask then if you intend to support the measure?”

“I hesitate to tell you. I know you’re going to misunderstand me.”

“Oh?” The American delegate leaned forward until his face filled the small screen. “In what way?”

“You think that this is going to help Brad and me, and that because of that I’m going to consent to your selling the Americans you don’t want, selling them to die in somebody’s mines. You are wrong. This is going to ruin whatever may be left between Brad and me, and I know it. I know how Brad is going to feel when his wife is also his keeper. It will strip away whatever manhood he has left, and before the five years are out he’ll hate me — just as he will if I don’t buy him when he knows I could. But you are going to do this thing whether the organization I represent favors it or not, and to save that organization — for the good it does now and the good it will do among the slaves when you have them — I am going to vote for the motion.”

“You will support the motion?” His eyes seemed to bore into her.

“I will support the motion. Yes.”

“Fine.”

The American delegate’s hand was moving toward the “Off’ switch of his console, but Miss Bushnan called, “Wait. What about the other observer? The Pope?”

“He can be taken care of, I feel sure. His church is almost entirely dependent today on the goodwill of the Italian government.”

“He hasn’t agreed yet?”

“Don’t worry,” the American delegate said, “the Italians will be contacting him.” His hand touched the switch and his image vanished.

“So you gave in,” the Pope said.

“And you wouldn’t?” Miss Bushnan asked. “Even if you knew you’d be running your church from an empty store the day after you voted no?”

“I might abstain,” the Pope admitted slowly, “but I could never bring myself to give a favorable vote.”

“How about lying to them, if that were the only way you could get to vote?”

The Pope looked at her in surprise, then his eyes smiled.

Miss Bushnan continued, “Could you tell them you were going to vote yes when you were really going to vote against them, Your Holiness?”

“I don’t suppose I could. It would be a matter of my position, if you understand me, as well as my conscience.”

“Fortunately,” Miss Bushnan said, “I don’t feel that way. Hasn’t it occurred to you that this business of asking for our votes must be predicated on the idea that they’ll be favorable? It hasn’t been announced, has it?”

The Pope nodded. “I see what you mean. If the decision had been made public they couldn’t change it; but as it is, if they don’t like what they hear from us—”

“But they’ll have every news agency in the world there when the vote is actually taken.”

“You are a clever girl.” The Pope shook his head. “It is a lesson to me to think of how very much I have underestimated you, sitting in the gallery there beside me all these days, and even this evening when I came here. But that is good; God wants me to learn humility, and He has chosen a child to teach it, as He so often does. I hope you understand that after the council I will be giving you all the support I can. I’ll publish an encyclical—”

“If you feel you can’t lie to them,” Miss Bushnan interposed practically, “we’ll need some excuse for your being absent from the vote.”

“I have one,” the Pope said. “I don’t”— he paused—”suppose you’ve heard of Mary Catherine Bryan?”

“I don’t think so. Who is she?”

“She is — or at least she was — a nun. She was the last nun, actually, for the past three years. Ever since Sister Carmela Rose died. I received a call this morning telling me Mary Catherine passed away last night, and her rites are to be this coming Tuesday. The government still lets us use St. Peter’s sometimes for that sort of thing.”

“So you won’t be here.” Miss Bushnan smiled. “But a nun sounds so interesting. Tell me about her.”

“There isn’t a great deal to tell. She was a woman of my mother’s generation, and for the last four years she lived in an apartment on the Via del Fori. Alone, after Sister Carmela Rose died. They never got along too well, actually, being from different orders, but Mary Catherine cried for weeks, I remember, after Sister Carmela Rose was gone.”

“Did she wear those wonderful flowing robes you see in pictures?”

“Oh, no,” the Pope said. “You see, nuns no longer have to—” he stopped in the middle of the sentence, and the animation left his face, making him at once a very old man. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, “I had forgotten. I should have said that for the last seventy years or so of their existence nuns no longer wore those things. They abandoned them, actually, just a few years before we priests dropped our Roman collars. You have to understand that from time to time I have tried to persuade someone to. .”

“Yes?”

“Well, the old phrase was ‘take the veil.’ It would have kept the tradition alive and would have been so nice for Mary Catherine and Sister Carmela Rose. I always told the girls all the things they wouldn’t have to give up, and they always said they’d think about it, but none of them ever came back.”

“I’m sorry your friend is dead,” Miss Bushnan said simply. To her surprise she found she really was.

“It’s the end of something that had lived almost as long as the Church itself — oh, I suppose it will be revived in fifty or a hundred years when the spirit of the world turns another corner, but a revival is never really the same thing. As though we tried to put the Kyrie back into the mass now.”

Miss Bushnan, who did not know what he was talking about, said, “I suppose so, but—”

“But what has it to do with the matter at hand? Not a great deal, I’m afraid. But while they are voting that is where I shall be. And afterward perhaps we can do something.” He stood up, adjusting his clothing, and from somewhere in the back of the apartment Sal came rolling out with his hat positioned on her writing shelf. It was red, Miss Bushnan noticed, but the feather in the band was black instead of green. As he put it on he said, “We started among slaves, more or less, you know. Practically all the early Christians who weren’t Jews were either slaves or freedmen. I’ll be going now to say the funeral mass of the last nun. Perhaps I’ll also live to administer the vows of the first.”