‘And Heaven,’ she said, ‘would form a basis, a strong basis for the self-delusion that you fear.’
‘We can’t take the chance,’ he said.
‘You must suspect that it is not Heaven. Not the old Christian Heaven, with the trumpets sounding and the streets of gold and all the angels flying.’
‘Yes, intellectually I’m fairly sure it’s not, but what if it should turn out to be?’
‘Then you’d have your answer.’
‘No, I don’t think we would. We might have an answer, but not the answer. Satisfied with an answer, however, we would no longer seek the answer.’
‘All right, then, go out and prove it isn’t Heaven. Then come back and go on with your work.’
‘We cannot take the chance,’ said the cardinal.
‘The chance that it could be Heaven?’
‘Not that alone. Either way, Vatican would lose. It’s what you humans call a no-win situation. If it is not Heaven, then we face the mistaken conviction on the part of many of our people that the Listeners are unreliable. If Mary – don’t you see that if Mary should be proved wrong, then the cry would go up that we can no longer be sure about the Listeners, that many of them are wrong, that most of them are wrong. Ecuyer’s Search Program is the one great tool we have. It cannot be placed in jeopardy. It has taken us centuries to build it to its present point. Were it disrupted, should overwhelming doubt be cast upon it, it would take centuries to reestablish, if indeed it could be reestablished.’
Jill said, shock in her voice, ‘You can’t allow that to come about.’
Said the cardinal, ‘God forbid it should.’
Thirty-four
When he had been there before, the equation world had been quavery, as if he were seeing it through the shimmer of brilliant sunlight off a smooth and glittering lake, but now there was no shimmer and there was solid ground, or at least a solid surface, underneath his feet. The equation diagrams stood out in orderly array, spread out across the plane, smooth surface upon which he stood. There was a horizon, far off, rising much higher than any horizon he had even seen before, with the pea-green carpet of the planetary surface (if it was, in fact, a planet) merging almost imperceptibly with the pale lavender of the shallow bowl of sky.
– Whisperer! said Tennyson.
But there was no Whisperer. Only himself. Although, he told himself, that was not entirely true. Whisperer was there, but not as a separate entity. What stood there upon this alien ground was not him alone, but he and Whisperer, melded into one.
He stood without moving, wondering how he knew this, how he could be so sure of it. And knew, even as he wondered, that it was not he who knew it, not the Tennyson, but the Whisperer who was part of him. Yet, despite this knowing, he was not aware of Whisperer and he wondered if this might not be true, quite in reverse, for Whisperer, who might be aware of himself alone and not at all of Tennyson. There was no answer to his wonderment, no clue from Whisperer that this was the case.
The funny thing about it all, he told himself, was that he seemed actually to be there in this equation world – not merely seeing it, but there in person. He could feel the solidity of the surface underneath his feet and he was breathing – breathing as easily as he would on an Earth-type planet. Frantically, he ran through his brain the odds against finding an environment in a place such as this that would be compatible to an unprotected human – suitable air to breathe, an acceptable atmospheric density and pressure, a gravity factor that was bearable, ambient temperature that would be kind to a human body. He shuddered at the odds that his quick calculation gave him. The odds, furthermore, he knew, might be much higher than he had calculated, for not only were the life factors bearable; they were comfortable.
The equation diagrams were in as many, if not more, colors than they had been when he had seen them in the cube, and later in his dreams. Both the cube and dreams, the dreams more so than the cube, had made them somewhat fuzzy, but here the colors were sharper and more brilliant and not fuzzy in the least. There seemed to him to be many more of them than he had seen in either cube or dream, and the equations and the diagrams were more varied and outrageous. Looking more closely at one group of them, he saw that no two of them were alike, in color, equation or diagram. Each of them stood out as an individual.
Since arriving he had stood rooted in one spot, made numb by being there, but standing in a place where one doubting part of him, perhaps the Tennyson, had never for a moment thought that he could come. But now he moved, one slow step and then another, testing out whether he could move, not certain that he should. But the equations were not moving and someone had to move. That is, someone had to move if anything was to be done, any contact made. It would not be right, he thought, to come here, to stand and stare in disbelief, not moving, and then to go away. To do this would have made the venture no better than the cube or dream.
Slowly, he moved across the surface until he was quite close to one of the equations. He could see that it was about eight feet tall, the top of it somewhat above his head, and twice as long. From where he was standing, since it was broadside to him, he could not estimate its breadth, but by looking at another one standing nearby, he calculated the width to be nine feet or so. They might run in different sizes, he realized, but all of those he saw seemed to be uniform, one with another.
The equation that he had walked up to was a deep-purple background with the equations and diagrams predominantly in orange, although there were touches here and there of red and green and yellow. He tried to puzzle out the equation (a very lengthy and complicated one) that it carried on its surface, but the signs and symbols were unlike any one had ever seen.
The cube from which he had calculated the width was a bright and startling pink, with the equations green, and just beyond, it was another that was ash gray specked with copper spots, the equations in a lemon yellow and the diagrams in lavender. It was a fancy one, the fanciest of all those in sight.
There had been no reaction from the cubes when he had walked up to them, and there continued to be none. They all sat there, unchanging.
Now, for the first time, he realized that there wasn’t any sound. This was a silent place. In all his life, he realized, he had at all times been accustomed to some level of sound. Even at a time of quiet, there always had been some marginal noise – a board creaking in a house, a soft breeze stirring leaves, tiny insects singing. But here there was nothing, absolutely nothing, no noise of any kind.
He shuffled closer to the equation cube and noted with some interest that his walking made no sound. Hesitantly, he reached out a hand and touched the cube with an index finger, ready to snatch it away at an instant’s notice. The cube was soft to the touch, not hard and rigid as he had expected it might be, and neither warm nor cold. It made no indication of reaction to his touch, so he laid his hand upon it. With his palm flat against its surface, it seemed even softer than it had before. He pressed lightly upon it and felt the quiver underneath his palm, as if he had placed his hand upon a plate of jelly.
On the surface of the cube something moved and, startled, he stepped away. The equations, he saw, were changing and shifting about, and the diagrams were changing, too. The changing and the shifting at first was slow, deliberate, but quickly they became faster. They ran in a fascinating fluid motion, dissolving and running and combining into something else and then the something else was gone and there was something new. It is talking to me, he told himself, trying to communicate, attempting to bridge the gap that lies between the two of us. He watched hypnotically, and every now and then it seemed that he might be arriving at some understanding, but then the equations and the diagrams would change and he’d lose what had seemed, for a moment, to be some feeble inkling of the meaning that was being written on the blackboard surface of the cube.