Case of Conscience (12 page)

"This is the gift," Chtexa said. "It is the finest container yet to come out of Xoredeshch Gton. The material of which it is made includes traces of every element to be found on Lithia, even including iron, and thus, as you see, it shows the colors of every shade of emotion and of thought. On Earth, it will tell Earthmen much of Lithia."

"We will be unable to analyze it," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "It is too perfect to destroy, too perfect even to open."

"Ah, but we wish you to open it," Chtexa said. "For it contains our other gift."

"Another gift?"

"Yes, and a more important one. It is a fertilized, living egg of our species. Take it with you. By the time you reach Earth, it will have hatched, and will be ready to grow up with you in your strange and marvelous world. The container is the gift of all of us; but the child inside is my gift, for it is my child."

Appalled, Ruiz-Sanchez took the vase in trembling hands, as though he expected it to explode—as indeed he did. It shook with subdued flame in his grip.

"Good-bye," Chtexa said. He turned and walked away, back toward the entrance to the path. Cleaver watched him go, shading his eyes.

"Now what was that all about?" the physicist said. "The Snake couldn't have made a bigger thing of it if he'd been handing you his own head on a platter. And all the time it was only a jug!"

Ruiz-Sanchez did not answer. He could not have spoken even to himself. He turned away and began to ascend the cleats, cradling the vase carefully in one elbow. It was not the gift he had hoped to bring to the holy city for the grand indulgence of all mankind, no; but it was all he had.

While he was still climbing, a shadow passed rapidly over the hull: Cleaver's last crate, being borne aloft into the hold by a crane.

Then he was in the air lock, with the rising whine of the ship's Nernst generators around him. A long shaft of sunlight was cast ahead of him, picking out his shadow on the deck. After a moment, a second shadow overlaid and blurred his own: Cleaver's. Then the light dimmed and went out. The air lock door slammed.

At first Egtverchi knew nothing, in the peculiarly regular and chilly womb where he floated, except his name. That was inherited, and marked in a twist of desoxyribonucleic acid upon one of his genes; farther up on the same chromosome, the x-chromosome, another gene carried his father's name: Chtexa. And that was all. At the moment he had begun his independent life, as a zygote or fertilized egg, that had been written down in letters of chromatin: his name was Egtverchi, his race Lithian, his sex male, his inheritance continuous back through Lithian centuries to the moment when the world of Lithia began. He did not need to understand this; it was implicit.

But it was dark, chilly, and too regular in the pouch. Tiny as a speck of pollen, Egtverchi drifted in the fluid which sustained him, from wall to smoothly curved and unnaturally glazed wall, not conscious yet, but constantly, chemically reminded that he was not in his mother's pouch. No gene that he carried bore his mother's name, but he knew—not in his brain, for he had none yet, but by feel, with purely chemical revulsion—whose child he was, of what race he was, and where he should be: not here. And so he grew—and drifted, seeking to attach himself at every circuit to the chilly glass-lined pouch which rejected him always. By the time of gastrulation, the attachment reflex had run its course and he forgot it. Now he merely floated, knowing once more only what he had known at the beginning: his race Lithian, his sex male, his name Egtverchi, his father Chtexa, his life due to begin; and his birth world as bitter and black as the inside of a jug.

Then his notochord formed, and his nerve cells congregated in a tiny knot at one end of it. Now he had a front end and a hind end, as well as an address. He also had a brain—and now he was a fish—a spawn, not even a fingerling yet, circling and circling in the cold enclave of sea. That sea was tideless and lightless, but there was some motion in it, the slow roll of convection currents. Sometimes, too, something went through it which was not a current, forcing him far down toward the bottom, or against the walls. He did not know the name of this force—as a fish he knew nothing, only circled with the endlessness of his hunger—but he fought it, as he would have fought cold or heat. There was a sense in his head, aft of his gills, which told him which way was up. It told him, too, that a fish in its natural medium has mass and inertia, but no weight. The sporadic waves of gravity—or acceleration—which whelmed through the lightless water were no part of his instinctual world, and when they were over he was often swimming desperately on his back.

There came a time when there was no more food in the little sea; but time and the calculations of his father were kind to him. Precisely at that time the weight force returned more powerfully than had even been suggested as possible before, and he was driven to sluggish immobility for a long period, fanning the water at the bottom of the jug past his gills with slow exhausted motions.

It was over at last, and then the little sea was moving jerkily from side to side, up and down, and forward. Egtverchi was now about the size of a larval fresh-water eel. Beneath his pectoral bones twin sacs were forming, which connected with no other system of his body, but were becoming more and more richly supplied with capillaries. There was nothing inside the sacs but a little gaseous nitrogen, just enough to equalize the pressure. In due course, they would be rudimentary lungs.

Then there was light.

To begin with, the top of the world was taken off. Egtverchi's eyes would not have focussed at this stage in any case and, like any evolved creature, he was subject to the neo-Lamarckian laws which provide that even a completely inherited ability will develop badly if it is formed in the absence of any opportunity to function. As a Lithian, with a Lithian's special sensitivity to the modifying pressures of environment, the long darkness had done him less potential damage than it surely would have done another creature—say, an Earth creature; nevertheless, he would pay for it in due course. Now, he could sense no more than that in the up direction (now quite stable and unchanging) there was light. He rose toward it, his pectoral fins strumming the warm harps of the water.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru, late of Lithia, and always Fellow in the Society of Jesus, watched the surfacing, darting little creature with surfacing strange emotions. He could not help feeling for the sinuous eel the pity that he felt for every living thing, and an aesthetic delight in the flashing unpredictable certainty of its motions. But this little animal was Lithian.

He had had more time than he had wanted to explore the black ruin that underlay his position. Ruiz-Sanchez had never underestimated the powers which evil could still exercise, powers retained—even by general agreement within the Church—after its fall from beside the throne of the Most High. As a Jesuit he had examined and debated far too many cases of conscience to believe that evil is unsubtle or impotent. But that among these powers the Adversary numbered the puissance to create—no, that had never entered his head, not until Lithia. That power, at least, had to be of God, and of God only. To think that there could be more than one demiurge was outright heresy, and a very ancient heresy at that.

So be it, it was so, heretical or not. The whole of Lithia, and in particular the whole of the dominant, rational, infinitely admirable race of Lithians, had been created by Evil, out of Its need to confront men with a new, a specifically intellectual seduction, springing like Minerva from the brow of Jove. Out of that unnatural birth, as out of the fabled one, there was to come a symbolic clapping of palms to foreheads for everyone who could admit for an instant that any power but God could create; a ringing, splitting ache in the skull of theology; a moral migraine; even a cosmological shell-shock, for Minerva was the mistress of Mars, on Earth as—undoubtedly, Ruiz-Sanchez remembered with anguish—as it is in heaven.

After all, he had been there, and he knew.

But all that could wait a little while, at least. For the moment it was sufficient that the little creature, so harmlessly like a three-inch eel, was still alive and apparently healthy.

Ruiz-Sanchez picked up a beaker of water, cloudy with thousands of cultured Cladocera and Cyclops, and poured nearly half of it into the subtly glowing amphora. The infant Lithian flashed instantly away into the darkness, in chase after the nearly microscopic crustaceans. Appetite, the priest reflected, is a universal barometer of health.

"Look at him go," a soft voice said beside his shoulder. He looked up, smiling. The speaker was Liu Meid, the UN laboratory chief whose principal charge the Lithian child would be for many months. A small, black-haired girl with an expression of almost childlike calm, she peered into the vase expectantly, waiting for the image to reappear.

"They won't make him sick, do you think?" she said.

"I hope not," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "They're Earthly, it's true, but Lithian metabolism is remarkably like ours. Even the blood pigment is an analogue of hemoglobin, though the metal base isn't iron, of course. Their plankton includes forms very like Cyclops and the water flea. No; if he's survived the trip, I dare say our subsequent care won't kill him, not even with kindness."

"The trip?" Liu said slowly. "How could that have hurt him?"

"Well, I really can't say exactly. It was simply the chance that we took, Chtexa—that was his father—presented him to us inside this vase, already sealed in. We had no way of knowing what provisions Chtexa had made for his child against the various strains of space flight. And we didn't dare look inside to see; if there was one thing of which I was certain, it was that Chtexa wouldn't have sealed the vase without a reason; after all, he does know the physiology of his own race better than any of us, even Dr. Michelis or myself."

"That's what I was getting at," Liu said.

"I know; but you see, Liu, Chtexa doesn't know space flight. Oh, ordinary flight stresses are no secret to him—the Lithians fly jets; it was the Haertel overdrive that I was worried about. You'll remember the fantastic time effects that Garrard went through on that first successful Centaurus Sight. I couldn't explain the Haertel equations to Chtexa even if I'd had the time. They're classified against him; besides, he couldn't have understood them, because Lithian math doesn't include transfinites. And time is of the utmost importance in Lithian gestation."

"Why?" Liu said. She peered down into the amphora again, with an instinctive smile.

The question touched a nerve which had lain exposed in Ruiz-Sanchez for a long time. He said carefully: "Because they have physical recapitulation outside the body, Liu. That's why that creature in there is a fish; as an adult, it will be a reptile, though with a pteropsid circulatory system and a number of other unreptilian features. The Lithian females lay their eggs in the sea—"

"But it's fresh water in the jug."

"No, it's sea water; the Lithian seas are not so salt as ours. The egg hatches into a fishlike creature, such as you see in there; then the fish develops lungs and is beached by the tides. I used to hear them barking in Xoredeshch Sfath—they barked all night long, blowing the water out of their lungs and developing their diaphragm musculature."

Unexpectedly, he shuddered. The recollection of the sound was far more disturbing than the sound itself had been. Then, he had not known what it was—or, no, he had known that, but he had not known what it meant.

"Eventually the lungfish develop legs and lose their tails, like a tadpole, and go off into the Lithian forests as true amphibians. After a while, their respiratory system loses its dependence upon the skin as an auxiliary source, so they no longer need to stay near water. Eventually, they become true adults, a very advanced type of reptile, marsupial, bipedal, homeostatic—and highly intelligent. The new adults come out of the jungle and are ready for education in the cities."

Liu took a deep breath. "How marvelous," she whispered.

"It is just that," he said somberly. "Our own children go through nearly the same changes in the womb, but they're protected throughout; the Lithian children have to tun the gauntlet of every ecology their planet possesses. That's why I was afraid of the Haertel overdrive. We insulated the vase against the drive fields as best we could, but in a maturation process so keyed to the appearances of evolution, a time slowdown could have been crucial. In Garrard's case, he was slowed down to an hour a second, then whipped up to a second an hour, then back again, and so on along a sine wave. If there'd been the slightest break in the insulation, something like that might have happened to Chtexa's child, with unknowable results. Evidently, there was no leak, but I was worried."

The girl thought about it. In order to keep himself from thinking about it, for he had already pondered himself in dwindling spirals to a complete, central impasse, Ruiz-Sanchez watched her think. She was always restful to watch, and Ruiz-Sanchez needed rest. It now seemed to him that he had had no rest at all since the moment when he had fainted on the threshold of the house in Xoredeshch Sfath, directly into the astonished Agronski's arms.

Liu had been born and raised in the state of Greater New York. It was Ruiz-Sanchez' most heartfelt compliment that nobody would have guessed it; as a Peruvian he hated the nineteen-million-man megalopolis with an intensity he would have been the first to characterize as unchristian. There was nothing in the least hectic or harried about Liu. She was calm, slow, serene, gentle, her reserve unshakable without being in the least cold or compulsive, her responses to everything that impinged upon her as direct and uncomplicated as a kitten's; her attitude toward her fellow men virtually unsuspicious, not out of naivete, but out of her confidence that the essential Liu was so inviolable as to prevent anyone even from wanting to violate it. These were the abstract terms which first came to Ruiz-Sanchez' mind, but immediately he came to grief over a transitional thought. As nobody would take Liu for a New Yorker—even her speech betrayed not a one of the eight dialects, all becoming more and more mutually unintelligible, which were spoken in the city, and in particular one would never have guessed that her parents spoke nothing but Bronix—so nobody could have taken her for a female laboratory technician.