You, an emissary from the Holy Father himself, have come to question me? I am sure you understand my surprise. I am an old Jesuit sitting in the sun, dreaming away the afternoon in this quiet seminary garden. What could I know that is of such interest to Rome? Perhaps of interest to the entire world, you say? Surely you know that my order has suppressed my thoughts for 40 years. What has happened to arouse the Holy Father's sudden interest?
Say nothing--I know why you have sought me out. I will tell you the story you have come to hear and answer the question you have come to ask. Indulge me. I am an old man and I may seem to ramble, but I am no fool. I am a Jesuit and an ordained priest, and I am a graduate of the Sorbonne's school of xeno-techno-archeology, right here in Paris. You would do well to pay attention.
You want me to tell you the story of how the quantum engineer Angstrom and I went to the planet Paschal II. You want me to tell you about Paschal's alien technology. I must warn you that my story will answer the Holy Father's question, but I doubt that the Holy Father will like my answer.
Isn't this garden beautiful? Let's take this path that winds between these irises and lilies. Charming. Here we will sit in this small, secluded arbor. I'll sit where the sun will shine on my back and you may sit there, on that wooden bench, in the shade, so the brightness will not shine into your eyes.
My story begins 20 years and three popes ago. I was 50 (I must add that I was fit and muscular) when a signal was received from an interstellar probe that had been silent for years and given up for lost. The probe was one of our Catholic probes, one of many such automatons sent out to seek the heathen.
Seeking the heathen. All that happened before you were born, when ruins abandoned by an alien race were found in several local systems. Your teachers probably did not teach you about the period of theological anguish caused by these discoveries. Non-human intelligence was seen as a mortal threat to man's central role in God's vision of the unfolding universe. No, they wouldn't teach you all the anguish. Instead they taught Rome's charitable compromise: intelligent aliens became an untapped source of heathen, making conversion the Church's obvious interstellar task. Thus the Church, and through the Church all mankind, was restored to its rightful place at the center of God's plan.
These interesting ideas are worth examination. One must first assume that heathen alien have real souls to save, which gives rise to some absorbing theological disputes. One must also assume that any converting to be done would be done by us, not by the aliens. But I said I would not ramble. In the abandoned ruins those first explorers found alien technology that was functional yet quite inscrutable. These machines (the word machine is misleading but there is no other word) manipulated a mysterious relationship between thought and thing. Alien technology is like the scent of honeysuckle on a calm, moonless night. The scent reveals the presence of the flower, but not the flower itself.
Is it true that Rome has aborted these futile attempts to find the alien race? Does Rome finally believe they have not set foot on their abandoned planets for a hundred thousand years? Perhaps our young new pope has been convinced by a hundred years of evidence. After all, he is trained as a scientist. Are you surprised that a biologist could be elected pope? If I didn't know better I would think I had been dreaming.
No matter. The aliens vanished who knows where, leaving behind their dormant technology, and we xeno-technoarcheologists fumble with its mysterious blend of material physics and spiritual metaphysics.
Are you comfortable on that bench? Good. I like to rest here in the afternoons. The drone of insects masks the hum of the traffic outside the wall. Outside the garden wall. That phrase is important. To speak of alien ideas is very difficult and best done through metaphor. In my forbidden writings I have said that metaphor is the poetry of reason.
See there, beyond the linden tree--do you see the hule patiently weeding amongst the flowers? A young official like yourself who works inside the Vatican probably has no experience with hules. They are manufactured creatures, wordless, two-legged things, cobbled together in vats from assorted mammalian genes, slaves bred for lives of toil. We took three hules to Paschal II. They are part simian--see how he holds his hoe with his thumbs?--and part canine. They have the eagerness of a dog and the intelligence of a higher ape, which is why the path we took is so well-swept. Although their hairy faces lack expression, one can see from their gait that they wear their coveralls with pride. They think they are more than animals.
But back to my tale. The probe had wandered light-years off its programmed course. I will offer an explanation for this later. Fifty light-years from here it had found an Earthlike planet with a single alien ruin. From low orbit around this blue-white globe the probe-- which was equipped with a whimsical database of minor figures from the history of Catholicism--named the planet Paschal II. Even though we religious have time on our hands and can learn many unimportant things, you may not know that Paschal II was Pope from 1099 to 1118, anno Domini.
The orbiting probe reported on its survey of Paschal II. There were cloud-streaked oceans and snow-capped mountains sweeping down to gloomy forests. Lush jungles hid the bulk of the biomass and dry savannas teemed with animals. On a clifftop beside a broad estuary stood a white building, a massive dome resting on slender pillars. This was the only sign of ancient alien visitation. The temple, as we came to call it, stood at the center of a wide terrace that looked over the eastern ocean.
The probe launched several pods of scientific instruments into Paschal's atmosphere. They all failed during their descent, reporting in their last seconds temperatures approaching absolute zero. If that were true, Paschal II should have been a wasteland of frozen gas. Right away the small community of Catholic xeno-technoarcheologists suspected that the entire planet was protected by an AMF--an anti-machine field. A few other AMF's, small ones, were known at that time, but experience with them was very limited.
Have you read my report of our expedition? Did you blow the dust from its cover and read it in some corner of the Vatican Library? Then you already know how Angstrom and I made the descent from orbit, even though in an AMF all machines freeze and fail when, and only when, you try to use them. Intent to use is the mark of the alien technology.
What I admire most about alien tech is its elegance. There is no structure, no obvious device, no clever machine--only an elegant location where an effect is triggered by a certain state of mind. My first encounter with alien tech was as a graduate student on the planet Passion. The tech was a simple staircase. Some people, some of the time they climbed it, arrived at the top with memories of things that never could have happened. They would talk as if their new memories were real, even write them down, but if they walked down the stairs they forgot those memories. We never understood what triggered these effects, or discovered the purpose of this machine, if I can use that word. We've never understood the workings of any alien tech.
AMF's are a rare form of alien tech. Only a few have been found, and only on three or four planets. Each protects a small area of space and--since on two occasions AMF's have appeared and later disappeared--perhaps they protect small areas of time as well.
Did you know that it was I who discovered the Tower of Echo? No? You haven't heard of the Tower of Echo? Well, I'm not surprised. It promised to be truly dangerous... to Rome, I mean. But the Tower is another story, and I promised not to ramble.
Paschal II is still the only planet completely protected by an AMF, making it something of an instant Holy Grail.
Humor an old man for a moment. When you were in the library, reading my report, did you see my proscribed essays gathering dust in some corner alcove? Did you glance at any of my work? No? Perhaps you didn't know my writing was the reason I went to Paschal.
As a young man I would express my thoughts in small essays which I would show to my friends. My ideas were well-received by a widening circle of thoughtful readers and took on a life of their own--electronic samizdat. In time, my essays came to the attention of the Office of the Congregation of the Faith. What a benign name--The Office of the Congregation of the Faith--for what was once called the Inquisition. If I were not a Jesuit, I would say with some pride that I believe my work was read by the Holy Father himself.
Over 20 years I had several interviews with Curial officials. Each interview followed months or even years of preparatory examination of documents while I waited, mutely, for approval of perhaps a single essay. My only rewards were long lists of required revisions that might, in the future, make my work acceptable for official publication.
During this time I continued my work as a xeno-techno-archeologist. My scientific writing was of no interest to the Church, but, unknown to Rome (and even to myself at first) my scientific work slowly merged with my religious beliefs. In my mid-forties I collected my ideas in a book that was to encompass all my beliefs: The Spiritual Evolution of Matter: Dust, Man and Beyond.
A few weeks after my manuscript arrived in Rome, the Congregation of the Faith leveled the specific and serious charge of Unsound Doctrine. The Spiritual Evolution of Matter contradicted fundamental Catholic dogma first set forth by Aquinas over a thousand years ago. Saint Thomas said that matter was merely matter and doomed to pass away, while spirit was eternal spirit. Unlike mass and energy--which are equivalent--ephemeral matter can never become eternal spirit. You do have some scientific training, enough to know that matter can be transformed into energy? Good.
This time there were no difficult passages, no suggested sections for revision, no authority was assigned me to help me clarify my thoughts. They simply told me that The Spiritual Evolution of Matter: Dust, Man and Beyond was profoundly heretical and could never be published.
If I may digress for a moment, you might be interested to know that I find heresy intriguing. It is a state of grace to which one is summoned. Once appointed a heretic, one's unauthorized thoughts are formally authorized. Unauthorized Thoughts. It is a validation, and like garden weeds, they can never be completely eradicated.
I believe that metaphor is the poetry of reason. Did I mention that before? Well, the human mind is a garden of thought. There are the flowers of human thought: the annuals of art and science, and the perennials of faith. There are weeds, too. But what lies outside the garden wall? Is there only desert, stretching to a hazy horizon, or are there other gardens, alien gardens of thought where we might wander if only we could find the narrow gate in the wall of our small garden? Perhaps weeds in our garden might be flowers in other, alien gardens? But, in our human garden, my heretical weeds were intolerable and Rome said I must not write.
I am a Jesuit who is sworn to a life of obedience. We who have sworn to obey know that, while God frowns on those who use authority irrationally, He smiles on those of us who irrationally obey. I felt He was smiling on me when, two years later, Rome's lost probe discovered Paschal II.
There was nothing for me here on Earth. I asked to be sent to the new planet. I knew there must be a great secret on a planet protected by an AMF. Unlike other XTA's I had nothing to lose by going to Paschal II. Even if I did not return I would be serving God. If I did discover how to defeat the AMF then I could not only return to Earth, but return in triumph.
And my friend Angstrom, why did he go with me? In my report I don't think I mentioned that Angstrom was the son of a Paris chef. Angstrom had inherited his father's love of food. Through all the years I worked with him he never weighed less than 150 kilos. Arcs of sweat stained the armpits of his shirts and those who worked beside him always breathed the faint smell of stale sweat.
Although his professional peers were disgusted by his obesity they were forced to respect his intellect. At the end of his career his hunger for truth, not food, led to his professional disgrace and ostracism. But more of that later. All you need to know about Angstrom at this time is that he was a kind man and that the chance of an uncertain quest on Paschal II offered him more than the miserable certainty of his lonely life on Earth.
And what was the purpose of our trip? I think you understand that it was to turn off the AMF and discover the secret that was hidden on Paschal II.
