‘Yes,’ said Tennyson. ‘If Vatican says so. . .’
‘On End of Nothing, if Vatican says so, then it is so. There is no one to dispute us. Were it not for us, there’d be no End of Nothing. We are End of Nothing.’
‘All right,’ said Tennyson. ‘All right. I’m not arguing with you. I have no wish to argue. One of your people is sick and I treated her. That’s what I’m supposed to do. Let’s not build up a case about it.’
‘By now, Doctor,’ said Ecuyer, ‘you should have grasped the situation. We have no doctor. We very badly need one. We want you to stay on as our resident physician.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that,’ said Ecuyer. ‘Can’t you see? We’re desperate. It would take us months to get another doctor. And then, what kind of doctor?’
‘You don’t know what kind of doctor -‘
‘I know you have devotion to your patients. And you are honest. You are honest about how you happen to be here, and when I asked about your treatment, you’d give no guarantees. I like that kind of honesty.’
‘Someone may come storming in here with a warrant for my arrest. I don’t think it will happen, but…’
‘They’d play hell serving it,’ said Ecuyer. ‘We protect our own. If you really are in trouble, Doctor, I can guarantee your safety here. Be you right or wrong, I can still guarantee it.’
‘All right, then. I don’t think I’ll need protection, but it’s nice to know it would be there. But what about this setup? What would I be getting into? You call this place Vatican and I’ve heard stories about a Project Pope and all of it being headed by a band of robots. Can you tell me what’s going on? This old lady, Mary, talked of angels. Is that just an old lady’s dream, a somewhat premature death-bed vision?’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Ecuyer. ‘Mary has found Heaven.’
‘Now,’ said Tennyson, ‘say that slow again. “Mary has found Heaven.” You sound as if you mean it.’
‘Of course I do,’ said Ecuyer. ‘She really has found Heaven. All evidence points to her having found it. We need her further observations to try to pinpoint it. Of course, we have her clones – three of them, growing up. But we can’t be certain that the clones-‘
‘Evidence? Clones? What kind of evidence? If I remember rightly, Heaven is not a place. It’s a condition. A state of mind, a faith…’
‘Doctor, listen. This will take some explanation.’
‘I would suspect it might.’
‘Let’s first try to put the whole thing into perspective,’ said Ecuyer. ‘Vatican-17, this Vatican, began almost a thousand years ago with a band of robots out of Earth. On Earth, the robots had not been members – had not been allowed to be members – of any faith. I think in some places it is different now. Robots can become communicants – not everywhere, but in certain areas, on certain planets. A thousand years ago this was not true; robots were considered beyond the pale of any religion. To be a member of any religious faith, to profess oneself to any faith, one must have a soul, or the equivalent of a soul. Robots had no souls, or were thought to have no souls, so they were barred from participating in any religious experience. How well are you acquainted with robots, Doctor?’
‘Really not at all, Mr. Ecuyer. In my lifetime I may have spoken to half a dozen of them, seen a few more than that. I did not come from robot country. There were a few in medical college, but humans and robots did not associate there. I’ve never really known one. I’ve never felt the urge-‘
‘What you have just said is what ninety-nine out of every hundred humans would say. They’re not involved with robots, not concerned with them. Probably they think of them as metal humans, as machines trying to ape humans. I can tell you they are a whole lot more than that. At one time they would not have been, but today, here on End of Nothing, they are more than that. In the last thousand years, the robots here have evolved; they have become creatures that stand apart from men. In the process of evolving, they have never forgotten, however, that they are the creations of men, and they do not resent, as you might think they would, that they are created beings. By and large, they still feel a close relationship to humans. I could talk all night telling you what I think the robots are, what these robots here are. They came here because they had been denied religious experience elsewhere, had been read out of that part of human life that had a strong appeal to them. You have to know a robot well to understand his instinctive drive toward religious experience. It may be no more than an overcompensation – a deep instinct to model himself as closely to the human race as possible. He is denied so many things that a human has; there are so many limitations placed upon him by his very nature. A robot cannot weep; he cannot laugh. He has no sexual drive – although he does create other robots. At least here our robots do create other robots, building them with refinements that the human creators never thought of, probably would not have included in a robot’s makeup even if they had thought of them. Here, on End of Nothing, a new race of robots has arisen. But I am getting ahead of myself.’
‘I can understand a religious drive as an overcompensative impulse,’ said Tennyson. ‘Religion could be a mystery they could share with the human race.’
‘That is right,’ Ecuyer told him. ‘There is a lot of history I could recite to you – by what thinking and what steps that small band of robots came a millennium ago to End of Nothing and set up their own religion. But we will let that go for the moment. We can discuss that some other time. If you are interested, that is.’
‘Of course I’m interested. If you can find the time.’
‘So the robots came out here,’ said Ecuyer, ‘and established their Vatican. They based it upon an Earth religion that had a deep appeal to them – not so much because of its teaching. Rather, I would suspect, because they admired its organization, its hierarchy, its long tradition, its dogma. In this Vatican you’ll find much of the liturgy and ritual of Old Earth Vatican, which served as a model, but there was no attempt, I am convinced, to follow slavishly, or even closely, Earth’s Catholic faith. The robots have never made any pretense that their religion is an Earth religion transplanted to the rim of the galaxy. If it were given any serious study, which it has not been, it would probably be labeled a synthesis of religions, for the robots have borrowed many aspects of alien faiths, or what passes for alien faiths.’
‘Actually what they have done,’ said Tennyson, ‘is construct their own faith, borrowing widely from whatever appealed to them?’
‘Exactly. A robotic faith – which does not make it any less a faith. It all depends on your definition of religion.’
‘Mr. Ecuyer – or should it be something else than mister?’
‘Mister is good enough, My first name is Paul. Call me Paul if you wish. I would be pleased if you did. I have no title, really. I’m not a member of the faith.’
‘I was about to ask you how you fit into all of this.’
‘I’m the coordinator of what we loosely called the Search Program.’
‘That I’ve never heard of.’
‘It’s not much talked about. It’s a part of Project Pope. I sometimes think that Project Pope now may have become little more than an excuse for the continuation of the Search Program. I would appreciate it if you did not mention this to the good fathers. Many of them remain quite pious.’
‘It all sounds confusing to me.’
‘It’s all rather simple,’ Ecuyer said. ‘And logical, in a way. The idea of a pope, of a supreme pontiff to head the faith, had a great appeal to the founders. But where would they find a pope? There was a feeling that to make a robot a pope would be sacrilegious. They could not use a human, even if they could have laid hands on one, which, at the time they came here, they could not. A human would be too short-lived to serve as a pope for a robotic church, the members of which, theoretically, could live forever. With a little proper care, that is. In any case, aside from this severe limitation, a human probably would not have been acceptable. An ideal pope, to their way of thinking, should be immortal and all-knowing – infallible beyond the infallibility of a human pope. So they set out to make a pope -‘