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Robin, and with you goes My blessing." He raised His hands in a grand gesture
of grace. Then His expression changed as He peered down at me. You cannot say
that God is "annoyed," but at least He looked displeased. "Now what's the
matter?" He demanded.
I said stubbornly, "I'm still discontented."
"Of course you are discontented," God thundered. "I made you discontented,
because if you weren't discontented, why would you bother to try to become
better?"
"Better than what?" I asked, trembling in spite of myself.
"Better than Me," cried God.
18
Journey's End
Even the loneliest river winds somewhen to the sea, and at last-at long
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last-at long, long last-Albert appeared on the deck of the cruise ship
simulation where Essie and I were playing shuffleboard (missing even the
easiest of shots, because the cliffs and the unexpected waterfalls from the
glaciers and the ice floes in the water were so spectacular) and pulled his
pipe out of his mouth to say: "One minute to arrival. I thought you'd like to
know."
We did like to know. "Let's look at once!" Essie cried, and disappeared.
I took a little longer, studying Albert. He was wearing a brass-buttoned blue
blazer and a yachting cap, and he smiled at me.
"I still have a lot of questions, you know," I told him.
"And unfortunately I have not nearly that many answers, Robin," he said
kindly. "That's good, though."
"What's good?"
"To have many questions. As long as you know there are questions, there is
some hope of answering them." He nodded approval, in that way he has that
would drive me right up the wall if it didn't make me feel so good. He paused
for a moment to see if we were going to get into metaphysics again and then
added, "Shall we join Mrs. Broadhead and the general and his lady and the
others?"
"There's plenty of time!"
"There's no doubt of that, Robin. Indeed there is plenty of time." He smiled;
and I shrugged permission, and the Alaskan fjord disappeared. We were back in
the control cabin of the True Love. Albert's jaunty cap was gone, along with
his natty blue blazer. His slicked-down hair was flying in all directions
again, and he was back in his sweater and baggy pants, and we were alone.
"Where'd everybody go?" I demanded, and then answered for myself: "They
couldn't wait? They're scanning through the ship's instruments? But there's
nothing to see yet."
He shrugged amiable agreement, watching me as he puffed on his pipe.
Albert knows that I don't really like looking directly through the ship's skin
sensors. The good old viewscreen over the controls is usually good enough for
me. When you slide into the instrumentation of the True Love and look in all
directions at once, it is a disorienting experience-especially for people who
still cling to their meat-person habits, like me. So I don't do it often. What
Albert says is that it's just one of my old meat-person hang-ups.
That's true. I grew up as a meat person, and meat people can only see in one
direction at a time, unless they're cross-eyed. Albert says I should get over
it, but I usually don't want to.
This time I did, but not just yet. A minute is, after all, quite a long
stretch in gigabit time . . . and there was still something I wanted to ask
him.
Albert told me a story once.
The story was about one of his old meat-time buddies, a mathematician named
Bertrand Russell, a lifelong atheist like Albert himself
Of course, my Albert was not really that Albert, and so they weren't actual
buddies, but Albert (my Albert) often talked as though they were. He said that
once some religious person had cornered Russell at a party and said,
"Professor Russell, don't you realize what a grave risk you are taking with
your immortal soul? Suppose you have guessed wrong? What will you do if, when
you die, you find there really is a God, and He really does call you to
judgment? And when you arrive at the Throne of Judgment He looks down on you
and asks, 'Bertrand Russell, why did you not believe in Me?' What will you
say?"
According to Albert, Russell didn't turn a hair. He simply replied, "I
would say, 'God, You should have given me better evidence.'
So when I said to Albert, "Do you really think you've given me enough
evidence?" he simply nodded, understanding the reference, and leaned down to
scratch his ankle, and said, "I thought you'd come back to that, Robin. No. I
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haven't given you any evidence at all. The only evidence, one way or the
other, is in the universe itself"
"Then you're not God?" I burst out, finally daring.
He said gravely, "I wondered when you were going to ask me that."
"And I wonder when you're going to answer!"
"Why, right now, Robin," he said patiently. "If you are asking if the display
you interacted with came from the same datastores as the simulation I
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