DEFENSE MINISTER: No ultimatum has been delivered. The threat was for Asian home consumption, as I see it; to cover their blunder in Itu Wan.
LADY REPORTER: How is your abiding faith in Motherhood today, Lord Ragelle?
DEFENSE MINISTER: I hope Motherhood has at least as much abiding faith in me as I have in Motherhood.
LADY REPORTER: You deserve at least that much, I’m sure.
The news conference, radiated from the relay satellite twenty-two thousand miles from Earth, bathed most of the Western Hemisphere with the flickering VHF signal which carried such intelligence to the panelescent wall screens of the multitudes. One among the multitudes, Abbot Dom Zerchi switched off the set.
He paced for a while, waiting for Joshua, trying not to think. But “not thinking” proved impossible.
Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again.
Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?
This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion, he thought.
The feeling of desperation passed abruptly when Brother Pat brought him the second telegram. The abbot ripped it open, read it at a glance and chuckled. “Brother Joshua here yet, Brother?”
“Waiting outside, Reverend Father.”
“Send him in.”
“Ho, Brother, shut the door and turn on the silencer. Then read this.”
Joshua glanced at the first telegram. “An answer from New Rome?”
“It came this morning. But turn on that silencer first. We’ve got things to discuss.”
Joshua closed the door and flipped a wall switch. Concealed loudspeakers squealed a brief protest. When the squealing stopped, the room’s acoustic properties seemed suddenly changed.
Dom Zerchi waved him toward a chair, and he read the, first telegram in silence.
“. . . no action whatever to be taken by you in connection with Quo peregrinatur grex,” he read aloud.
“You’ll have to shout with that thing on,” said the abbot, indicating the silencer. “What?”
“I was just reading. So the plan is canceled?”
“Don’t look so relieved. That came this morning. This came this afternoon.” The abbot tossed him the second telegram:
IGNORE EARLIER MESSAGE OF THIS DATE. “QUO PEREGRINATUR” TO BE REACTIVATED IMMEDIATELY BY BEQUEST OF HOLY FATHER. PREPARE CADRE TO LEAVE WITHIN THREE DAYS. WAIT FOR CONFIRMING WIRE BEFORE DEPARTURE. REPORT ANY VACANCIES IN CADRE ORGANIZATION. BEGIN CONDITIONAL IMPLEMENTATION OF PLAN. ERIC CARDINAL HOFFSTRAFF, VICAR APOST. EXTRATERR. PROVINCIAE.
The monk’s face lost color. He replaced the telegram on the desk and sat back in his chair, lips tight together.
“You know what Quo peregrinatur is?”
“I know what it is, Domne, but not in detail.”
“Well, it started as a plan to send a few priests along with a colony group heading for Alpha Centauri. But that didn’t work out, because it takes bishops to ordain priests, and after the first generation of colonists, more priests would have to be sent, and so on. The question boiled down to an argument about whether the colonies would last, and if so, should provision be made to insure the apostolic succession on colony planets without recourse to Earth? You know what that would mean?”
“Sending at least three bishops, I imagine.”
“Yes, and that seemed a little silly. The colony groups have all been rather small. But during the last world crisis, Quo peregrinatur became an emergency plan for perpetuating the Church on the colony planets if the worst came to pass on Earth. We have a ship.”
“A starship?”
“No less. And we have a crew capable of managing it.”
“Where?”
“We have the crew right here.”
“Here at the abbey? But who — ?” Joshua stopped. His face grew even grayer than before. “But, Domne, my experience in space has been entirely in orbital vehicles, not in starships! Before Nancy died and I went to the Cisterc—”
“I know all about that. There are others with starship experience. You know who they are. There are even jokes about the number of ex-spacers that seem to feel a vocation to our Order. It’s no accident, of course. And you remember when you were a postulant, how you were quizzed about your experience in space?”
Joshua nodded.
“You must also remember being asked about your willingness to go to space again, if the Order asked it of you.”
“Yes.”
“Then you were not wholly unaware that you were conditionally assigned to Quo peregrinatur, if it ever came to pass?”
“I — I guess I was afraid it was so, m’Lord.”
“Afraid?”
“Suspected, rather. Afraid too, a little, because I’ve always hoped to spend the rest of my life in the Order.”
“As a priest?”
“That — well, I haven’t yet decided.”
“Quo peregrinatur will not involve releasing you from your vows or mean abandoning the Order.”
“The Order goes too?”
Zerchi smiled. “And the Memorabilia with it.”
“The whole kit-and — Oh, you mean on microfilm. Where to?”
“`The Centaurus Colony.”
“How long would we be gone, Domne?”
“If you go, you’ll never come back.”
The monk breathed heavily and stared at the second telegram without seeming to see it He scratched his beard and appeared bemused.
“Three questions,” said the abbot. “Don’t answer now, but start thinking about them, and think hard. First are you willing to go? Second, do you have a vocation to the priesthood? Third, are you willing to lead the group? And by willing, I don’t mean ‘willing under obedience’; I mean enthusiastic, or willing to get that way. Think it over; you have three days to think — maybe less.”
Modern change had made but few incursions upon the buildings and the grounds of the ancient monastery. To protect the old buildings against the encroachment of a more impatient architecture, new additions had been made outside the walls and even across the highway — sometimes at the expense of convenience. The old refectory had been condemned because of a buckling roof, and it was necessary to cross the highway in order to reach the new refectory. The inconvenience was somewhat mitigated by the culvert walkunder through which the brothers marched daily to meals.
Centuries old, but recently widened, the highway was the same road used by pagan armies, pilgrims, peasants, donkey carts, nomads, wild horsemen out of the East, artillery, tanks, and ten-ton trucks. Its traffic had gushed or trickled or dripped, according to the age and season. Once before, long ago, there had been six lanes and robot traffic. Then the traffic had stopped, the paving had cracked, and sparse grass grew in the cracks after an occasional rain. Dust had covered it. Desert dwellers had dug up its broken concrete for the building of hovels and barricades. Erosion made it a desert trail, crossing wilderness. But now there were six lanes and robot traffic, as before.
“Traffic’s light tonight,” the abbot observed as they left the old main gate. “Let’s hike across. That tunnel can be suffocating after a dust storm. Or don’t you feel like dodging buses?”
“Let’s go,” Brother Joshua agreed.
Low-slung trucks with feeble headlights (useful only for warning purposes) sped mindlessly past them with whining tires and moaning turbines. With dish antennae they watched the road, and with magnetic feelers they felt at the guiding strips of steel in the roadbed and were given guidance thereby, as they rushed along the pink, fluorescent river of oiled concrete. Economic corpuscles in an artery of Man, the behemoths charged heedlessly past the two monks who dodged them from lane to lane. To be felled by one of them was to be run over by truck after truck until a safety cruiser found the flattened imprint of a man on the pavement and stopped to clean it up. The autopilots’ sensing mechanisms were better at detecting masses of metal than masses of flesh and bone.