'Cloning bothers me, said Marge. 'I know it makes a lot of sense and is generally accepted throughout most of the human galaxy. Still, it has a creepy feel to it. Anyone who dabbles in cloning must think they have a license to play God. The whole idea is unnatural.
'Playing God is nothing new, said James. 'Throughout all of history, both human history and otherwise, there has been a lot of God playing. The most flagrant example is the race that Ernie ran across. You remember it. Several years back.
'That's the one, said Herb, 'that creates worlds and peoples them with creatures out of their own imagination….
'That's right, said James, 'but the worlds are logical. Not a few sticks and a pile of mud and magic mumbled over them. That race's worlds are well engineered. All the factors that should go into the creation of a planet. Nothing phoney about them. All the right pieces put together correctly. And the creatures they put on them logical as well — some terribly screwy biological setups, but they work.
'Yes, I know, said Herb, 'and then what happens? Each world becomes a stress world, a living laboratory with the populations subjected to all sorts of tests, faced with all kinds of situations that have to be solved if they want to survive. Intellectual beings used as test animals. Probably a lot of data is obtained and some social problems studied in some depth, but it is rough on the planet populations. And for no purpose.
'Maybe there is a purpose, said Janet. 'Mind, I'm not defending the action, but there could be a purpose. Maybe not one that we would find sufficient, but…
'I don't know about that, said Ann. 'I'm inclined to doubt it. There must be, there simply has to be a set of universal ethics. There must, through all of space and time, be some things that are wrong and others that are right. We can't excuse a vicious race for its vicious acts on the sole ground that the race itself is vicious, that it knows no better.
'That is an argument, said James, 'that could go on forever.
'Did Ernie ever pin down the coordinates for that race of planet-making gods? asked Marge.
'I don't believe he did, said Herb. 'He went back several times, made a number of observations. In a perverse sort of way, he worked up some interest in the situation — that and all the various world situations that the race cooked up. But he finally decided he was not getting much of any real interest, so he pulled back and canceled out.
'He was lucky he could cancel, said James. 'Sometimes these experiences build up so much fascination that we get pulled back — just as Mary was pulled back to Heaven.
'The one that I keep thinking about, said Marge, 'is that old senile computer Betsy blundered into several years ago. Out on one of the globular clusters centered almost exactly above the galactic core. The computer is still in command of a vast array of rather mysterious machinery created for some unknown purpose. Some of the machinery apparently is beginning to break down because of lack of maintenance. What the machines were supposed to do, Betsy hasn't figured out. The entire planet's haywire. At one time there apparently was an intelligent biology there, but whether it built the machines Betsy doesn't know. The biology by now is fairly well wiped out, and what is left of it gone into hiding.
'Betsy is still working on that one, said Ann.
'And likely to be for some time, said Herb. 'Vatican has a special interest in the senile computer. They would like to know how and why a computer can fumble its way into senility. No one says so, but Vatican probably has His Holiness in mind.
'The Pope's not old enough, said Marge, 'for anyone to suspect him of senility.
'Not yet', said James. 'He is still a youngster. But the time could come. Give him a million years or so. I suspect Vatican is quite capable of thinking a million years ahead.
'Vatican won't exist for a million years, said Ann.
'Don't bet on that, said Herb. 'Robots are the most stubborn thing there is. They don't cave in. They won't give up. These Vatican robots have too much going for them to even think of it. In a million years they well may have the galaxy in the hollows of their hands.
Thirty-six
Jill went to the clinic to visit Mary. The nurse met her at the door. 'You can stay for only a few minutes, said the nurse. 'Don't try to speak with her.
Jill moved a few feet into the room and stopped, looking down upon the frail, pallid woman on the bed, her body so thin and unsubstantial that its shape barely showed beneath the sheet. Her gray hair was spread out on the pillow. Her two clawlike hands lay outside the sheet, clutched together, the fingers interlaced as if in desperation. Her thin lips were loosely pulled together. The jawbone and the cheekbones stood out in all their starkness, thinly covered by a parchment skin.
There was about her, Jill thought with some alarm, a certain look of skin-and-bones holiness, reminiscent of a drawing she once had seen of a fanatic medieval hermit who had managed to starve himself into acceptable holiness. This, she thought, this poor wreck of a woman, this skeleton — this is the one who is being touted as a saint!
Mary's eyes came open, slowly open, not naturally, but as if she'd forced them. Her head was so positioned on the pillow that the opened eyes looked squarely into Jill's face.
The loose lips moved and a question came out of them, a thin whisper that cut across the silence of the room.
'Who are you? she asked.
Jill whispered back at her. 'I'm Jill. I dropped by to see you.
'No, said Mary, 'you are not Jill. I have heard of Jill but I've never seen her. And I've seen you. Somewhere I have seen you.
Jill shook her head slowly, thinking to calm the woman on the bed.
'I recognize you, insisted Mary. 'Once, long ago, we talked together, but I can't remember where.
The nurse stalked toward Jill, then halted when Mary spoke again.
'Come close, she said. 'Close so I can see you better. My eyes are bad today. Bend down so I can see you.
Jill moved close to the bed, bent down.
On the sheet the two clasped hands came apart and Mary lifted a paper-tissue hand and patted Jill upon the cheek.
'Yes, yes, she said. 'I know you.
Then the hand fell back and the lids slid down across the eyes.
The nurse was beside Jill, tugging at her. 'You'll have to leave now.
'Get your hands off me, said Jill in sudden anger. 'I'm going.
Outside the clinic, she drew in a deep breath, suddenly feeling free. There was death inside that room, she told herself. Death and something else.
The sun was moving down the west, hanging just above the purple mountain wall, and this final hour of sunlight lay like a soft benediction on the land. Now, for the first time since she had come to End of Nothing (how long had it been — a few days, a few weeks, a few months?) — now, for the first time, she saw the land on which she stood not as an alien world, not as a grotesque setting for the great incomprehensibility that was Vatican, but as a place where she lived, as an environment in which she had comfortably settled herself.
Vatican lay against the land, now a part of it, growing out of the land as if it had sprouted roots deep into its soil — not a glaring obtrusion, but something that had grown as naturally as trees, blending into the biota of the planet. To the east and south lay the fields, the gardens and the orchards, an idyllic oasis that moved in close to the mass of squat, spreading buildings that made up Vatican, an ordered interface that linked Vatican to the primal soil. To the west were the mountains, the cloudlike mass of blue that was forever shifting shades, the continual shadow-show that Jason Tennyson had fallen in love with that first moment he had set eyes upon it. When he had drawn her attention to the mountains, she had not been impressed; to her, at that time, a mountain was a mountain and that was all it was. She had been wrong, she told herself. A mountain was a friend, or at least it could be one if you allowed it to be. The feeling for the great blue surge against the sky had stolen on her gradually from days of seeing it, becoming acquainted with it, and now realizing for the first time what it had come to mean to her — a landmark in her life, an eye-watching, surprisingly protective presence, a familiar figure that she could always turn to. It was only, she told herself, that until this moment she had never taken the time to stand and look. She had been wrong and Jason had been right.