The doubts and fears came flooding into him and he sat bowed against them. It would seem, he thought, one would become accustomed to them, for they'd been with him from the start (and with the others, too), but the sharpness of them had not dulled and they still cut him to the core. Rather than diminishing with familiarity, they had grown sharper as the years went on, with no answer found after centuries of poring over the meticulous commentaries and the extensive, searching writings of the human theologians. Was all of this, he asked himself in anguish, no more than a monstrous blasphemy? Could entities that had no souls minister to the Lord? Or might they, in their years of faith and work, have developed souls? He searched for a soul deep inside himself (and it was not the first time he had searched) and could find no soul. Even if there were one, he wondered, how could it be recognized? What ingredients went into the formation of a soul? Could one, in fact, be fashioned or need one be born with it—and if that should be the case, what genetic patterns were involved?

Were he and his fellow robots (his fellow monks?) usurping human rights? Were they, in sinful pride, aspiring to something reserved for the human race? Was it—had it ever been—within their province to attempt to maintain a human and a Godly institution that the humans had rejected and which even now God might not care about?

3

After breakfast, in the hushed quiet of the library, Jason Whitney sat at his desk and opened one of the bound record books which he had picked from a long row of its fellows on the shelf behind him.