‘I’ll go with you,’ said Tennyson.
‘It is strange,’ said Ecuyer. ‘Not only was she a good Listener; she was a devoted one. She believed deeply in the program. It was her entire life. And yet she will be the one who will spell its end.’
‘Have you heard anything? Been given any word?’
Ecuyer shook his head. ‘It may not happen that way. It all will be smooth and quiet. No big upheaval. Just a steady clamping down. New regulations, quietly inserted into the procedure, a general closing in. One day, without realizing that it has happened, we’ll know that we are done, that our work is finished.’
‘What will you do, Paul?’
‘I’ll stay here. I have no place else to go. I’ll be taken care of; Vatican will see to that. That much at least they owe me. So will the Listeners be taken care of. We’ll drag out our lives here, and when the last of us are gone, that will be the end of it.’
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t be so certain,’ Tennyson said. For a moment he debated with himself whether to tell Ecuyer something of what Whisperer had said, holding out to him one last feeble hope.
‘Do you know something?’ asked Ecuyer.
‘No, I guess I really don’t.’
There was no purpose in telling him, thought Tennyson. The hope, at best, was a slight one – almost no hope at all. What Whisperer had proposed seemed impossible. On the surface it seemed far-fetched. It was impossible, he told himself, that the equation people could seek and find, with virtually no data, the place Mary had called Heaven. Heaven could be anyplace. It could be in a distant galaxy. It could be in another universe. Although come to think of it, it might not be so far away. Decker had thought he knew where it was; the implication was that he had been there, or very close to it. Although that, he reminded himself, was poor evidence. Decker had not spelled it out and now he never would.
Ecuyer was at the door, holding it open for him, and he went out. The small plaza in front of the clinic was jammed with waiting people. There had been a number of them there when Tennyson had come in; now there were even more. They were quiet – not even the murmur of low whispering that ordinarily was the case with such a crowd.
Ecuyer walked forward and the crowd watched. They know, Tennyson told himself, what Ecuyer is about to say, but they’ll wait on his saying it. Human and robot alike will wait quietly for the word – word that Mary’s dead and they finally have a saint.
Ecuyer spoke quietly. He did not raise his voice.
‘Mary has gone to her reward,’ he told the waiting throng. ‘Only moments ago. She died peacefully, with a smile upon her lips. There was nothing that could be done to save her.’
A sound swept the crowd, a sound like a monstrous in-drawn breath. A sigh of relief? Tennyson wondered. The end of waiting.
Then someone with a foghorn voice – a human rather than a robot voice – broke into formalized prayer, and other voices joined in until the unison of prayer reverberated through all of Vatican. Many knelt to pray, but others remained standing, and a moment later the bells of the basilica began a steady, somber tolling.
Ecuyer came back to Tennyson and together the two of them walked away.
‘Shouldn’t you be joining in with them?’ asked Tennyson. ‘Don’t mind a heathen like myself.’
‘I’m not-‘ Ecuyer started to say, but did not finish it. He said something else. ‘If Mary could only know this, she’d love it. She was a devout person. She went regularly to mass, she spent hours upon her knees, telling the beads. Not for appearance’s sake, not for show – she lived her religion.’
Which probably accounted, Tennyson thought, for her finding Heaven, but he did not say it.
They walked in silence for a time. Then Ecuyer asked, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Sad,’ said Tennyson.
‘No guilt. You should feel no guilt,’
‘Yes, guilt. A doctor always feels some guilt. It’s a built-in penalty for a doctor, a price you pay for the privilege of being one. It will wear away.’
‘There is something I must see to. Will you be all right?’
‘I’ll go for a walk,’ said Tennyson. ‘A walk will do me good.’
He might as well, he thought. Jill had gone to work, back to the library, saying work would fill her mind and she’d be the better for it. He couldn’t go back to the apartment, for without her there, the apartment would be too empty. Anyhow, as he had told Ecuyer, a walk would do him good.
It did him less good than he thought it might. He still felt a vague uneasiness, and the steady, monotonous tolling of the basilica’s bells was a disturbing sound.
He walked for fifteen minutes before he realized that he was on the path that led to Decker’s cabin. He stopped dead in the path and turned around, began to retrace his steps. He could not go to Decker’s cabin, he simply could not go. It might be quite a while before he could visit Decker’s cabin.
He took a branching path that led up to a ridge where he often went to sit and watch the eternal shadow show of the looming mountains. The distant tolling of the bells beat at him as he went up the path.
He sat upon the low boulder where he always sat and gazed across the distance to the mountains. The sun was almost at zenith, and the slopes were pale blue with the darker splotches of the forests that climbed them, while the snowy peaks glittered back the brilliance of the sun. They change, he thought – the colors always change and shift. An hour from now they would not be the same as they were now. They change but they endure – in our time reference they endure. But someday they will not be here. Someday they will be worn down to a level plain and the sentient life that still remains here will walk across the plain and never dream there once were mountains here.
Nothing, he thought, ever stays the same.
We grasp for knowledge; panting, we cling desperately to what we snare. We work endlessly to arrive at that final answer, or perhaps many final answers which turn out not to be final answers but lead on to some other fact or factor that may not be final, either. And yet we try, we cannot give up trying, for as an intelligence we are committed to the quest.
He spread his hands before him and looked at them, looking at them with a new perspective, as if they were a part of him he had never seen before. One touch of these fingers, one loving touch, meant as nothing more than a loving touch, and the stigma on Jill’s face had gone away. There could be no doubt of it, he told himself; there could be no question. The great, spreading angry scar had been there when he stroked the cheek; when the stroke was ended, the ugly scar was gone. Spontaneous remission? he asked himself. No, it couldn’t be, for spontaneous remission did not work that way. Spontaneous remission took at least some little time, and this had taken almost no time at all.
A power, they had said among themselves, perhaps not believing it even as they said it, but needing something to say to one another- a power that had been given him by the equation folk, a gift from one world to another.
He stared at his hands. They seemed to be no different than they ever had been. He searched within himself and could detect no difference there – nowhere within himself.
Could it be possible, he wondered, that through millennia latent talents, or perhaps evolutional talents, had been glowing in the human race against that day when they might be needed? Throughout all of history, there had been tales of healing by the laying on of hands. Many claims of this work had been made, but there was no documentation that would bear out the claims. Too, there was the matter of Whisperer. Until Decker came to End of Nothing, there had been no one able to see Whisperer. Decker could not only see him, but could talk with him as well. Decker, however, had been unable to join Whisperer’s mind to his. Yet both Jill and he were able to join Whisperer’s mind with theirs. Why this difference between Decker and the two of them? Could it mark varying degrees of formerly latent abilities, now developing, but developing unequally from one human to another? Or having the ability and not knowing one had it, thus never making an effort to make use of it?