American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58

by Gary K. Wolfe

  “Dreadful, isn’t it?” Michelis’ voice said at his shoulder. RuizSanchez shot a surprised glance at the big chemist—not surprised that he had not heard Michelis enter, but that Mike was speaking to him again.

  “It is,” he said. “I’m glad you noticed it too. I thought it just might be hypersensitivity on my part—from having been away so long.”

  “It might well be that,” Michelis agreed gravely. “I was away myself.”

  Ruiz-Sanchez shook his head.

  “No, I think it’s real,” he said. “These are intolerable conditions to ask people to live under. And it’s more than a matter of making them live ninety days out of every hundred at the bottom of a hole. After all, they think of living every day of their lives on the verge of destruction. We trained their parents to think that way, otherwise there’d never have been enough taxes to pay for the shelters. And of course the children have been brought up to think that too. It’s inhuman.”

  “Is it?” Michelis said. “People lived all their lives on the verge for centuries—all the way up until Pasteur. How long ago was that?”

  “Only about 1860,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But no, it’s quite different now. The pestilence was capricious; one’s children might survive it; but fusion bombs are catholic.” He winced involuntarily. “And there it is. A moment ago, I caught myself thinking that the shadow of destruction we labor under now is not only imminent but transcendent; I was burlesquing a tragedy; death in premedical days was always both imminent and immanent, impending and indwelling—but it was never transcendent. In those days, only God was impending, indwelling and transcendent all at once, and that was their hope. Today, we’ve given them Death instead.”

  “Sorry,” Michelis said, his bony face suddenly turning flinty. “You know I can’t argue with you on those grounds, Ramon. I’ve already been burned once. Once is enough.”

  The chemist turned away. Liu, who had been making a serial dilution at the long bench, was holding the ranked test tubes up to the daylight, and peeping up at Michelis from under her half-shut eyelids. She looked promptly away again as RuizSanchez’ gaze fell on her face. He did not know whether she knew that he had caught her; but the tubes rattled a little in the rack as she put them down again.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Liu, this is Dr. Michelis, one of my confreres on the commission to Lithia. Mike, this is Dr. Liu Meid, who’ll be taking care of Chtexa’s child for an indefinite period, more or less under my supervision. She’s one of the world’s best xenozoologists.”

  “How do you do,” Mike said gravely. “Then you and the Father stand in loco parentis to our Lithian guest. It’s a heavy responsibility for a young woman, I should think.”

  The Jesuit felt a thoroughly unchristian impulse to kick the tall chemist in the shins; but there seemed to be no conscious malice in Michelis’ voice.

  The girl merely looked down at the ground and sucked in her breath between slightly parted lips. “Ah-sodeska,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  Michelis’ eyebrows went up, but in a moment it became obvious that Liu was not going to say anything more, to him, right now. With a slight huff of embarrassment, Michelis addressed himself to the priest, catching him erasing the traces of a smile.

  “So I’m all feet,” Michelis said, grinning ruefully. “But I won’t have time to practice my manners for a while yet. There are lots of loose ends to tie up. Ramon, how soon do you think you can leave Chtexa’s child in Dr. Meid’s hands? We’ve been asked to do a non-classified version of the Lithia report—”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Well, you and I.”

  “What about Cleaver and Agronski?”

  “Cleaver’s not available,” Michelis said. “I don’t offhand know where he is. And for some reason they don’t want Agronski; maybe he doesn’t have enough letters after his name. It’s The Journal of Interstellar Research, and you know how stuffy they are—they’re nouveau-riche in terms of prestige, and that makes them more academic than the academicians. But I think it would be worth doing, just to get some of our data out into the open. Can you find the time?”

  “I think so,” Ruiz-Sanchez said thoughtfully. “Providing it can be sandwiched in between getting Chtexa’s child born, and my pilgrimage.”

  Michelis raised his eyebrows again. “That’s right, this is a Holy Year, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Ruiz-Sanchez said.

  “Well, I think we can work it in,” Michelis said. “But—excuse me for prying, Ramon, but you don’t strike me as a man in urgent need of the great pardon. Does this mean that you’ve changed your mind about Lithia?”

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind,” Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly. “We are all in need of the great pardon, Mike. But I’m not going to Rome for that.”

  “Then—”

  “I expect to be tried there for heresy.”

  XI

  There was light on the mud flat where Egtverchi lay, somewhere eastward of Eden, but day and night had not been created yet, nor was there yet wind or tide to whelm him as he barked the water from his itchy lungs and whooped in the fiery air. Hopefully he squirmed with his new forelimbs, and there was motion; but there was no place to go, and no one and nothing from which to escape. The unvarying, glareless light was comfortingly like that of a perpetually overcast sky, but Somebody had failed to provide for that regular period of darkness and negation during which an animal consolidates its failures and seeks in the depths of its undreaming self for sufficient joy to greet still another morning.

  “Animals have no souls,” said Descartes, throwing a cat out the window to prove, if not his point, at least his faith in it. The timid genius of mechanism, who threw cats well but Popes badly, had never met a true automaton, and so never saw that what the animal lacks is not a soul, but a mind. A computer which can fill the parameters of the Haertel equations for all possible values and deliver them in two and a half seconds is an intellectual genius but, compared even to a cat, it is an emotional moron.

  As an animal which does not think, but instead responds to each minute experience with the fullness of immediately apprehended—and immediately forgotten—emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary death of nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body requires the battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long last, the somnolent self-confident adult which has been written aforetime in its genes; and here, too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was soap in his mud, a calculated percentage which allowed him to thrash on the floor of his cage without permitting him to make enough progress to bump his head against its walls. This was conservative of his head, but it wasted the muscles of his limbs. When his croaking days were over, and he was transformed into a totally air-breathing, leaping thing, he did not leap well.

  This too had been arranged, in a sense. There was nothing in this childhood of his from which he needed to leap away in terror, nor was there any place in it to which a small leap could have carried him. Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible bang and a slithering fall for the end of which, harmless though it invariably proved to be, no instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex helped him to cultivate a graceful recovery. Besides, an animal with a perpetually sprained tail cannot be graceful regardless of its instincts.

  Finally, he forgot how to leap entirely, and simply sat huddled until the next transformation overcame him, looking back dully at the many bobbing heads that were beginning to ring him round during his every waking hour. By the time he realized that all these watchers were alive like himself, and much larger than he was, his instincts were so far submerged as to produce in him nothing more than a vague alarm which resulted in no action.

  The new transformation turned him into a weak and spindly walker with no head for distance, oversized though it was. It was here that Somebody saw to it that he was transferred to the terrarium.

  Here at last the hormones of his true adolescence awakened and began to flow in his blood. T
he proper responses for a world something like this tiny jungle had been written imperatively upon every chromosome in his body; here, all at once, he was almost at home. He roved through the verdure of the terrarium on his shaky shanks with a counterfeit of gladness, looking for something to flee, something to fight, something to eat, something to learn. Yet in the long run he hardly found even a place to sleep, for in the terrarium night was as unknown as ever.

  Here he also became aware for the first time that there were differences among the creatures who looked in at him and sometimes molested him. There were two who were almost always to be seen, either alone or together. They were always the molesters, as well—except—except that it was not always exactly molestation, for sometimes these beings with their sharp stings and their rough hands would give him something to eat which he had never tasted before, or do something else to him which pleased as much as it annoyed. He did not understand this relationship at all, and he did not like it.

  After a while, he hid from all the watchers except these two —and even from them most of the time, for he was always sleepy. When he wanted them, he would call: “Szan-tchez!” (For he could not say “Liu” at all; his mesentery-tied tongue and almost cleft palate would never master so demanding a combination of liquid sounds—that had to wait for his adulthood.)

  But eventually he stopped calling, and took to squatting apathetically beside the pond in the center of the miniature jungle. When on the last night of his lizard existence he laid his bulging brain case again in that hollow of mosses where there was the most dimness, he knew in his blood that on the morrow, when he awoke into his doom as a thinking creature, he would be old with that age which curses those who have never even for an instant been young. Tomorrow he would be a thinking creature, but the weariness was on him tonight. . . And so he awoke; and so the world was changed. The multiple doors from sense to soul had closed; suddenly, the world was an abstract; he had made that crossing from animal to automaton which had caused all the trouble eastward of Eden in 4004 B.C.

  He was not a man, but he would pay the toll on that bridge all the same. From this point on, nobody would ever be able to guess what he felt in his animal soul, least of all Egtverchi himself.

  “But what is he thinking about?” Liu said wonderingly, staring up at the huge, grave Lithian head which bent down upon them from the other side of the transparent pyroceram door. Egtverchi—he had told them his name very early—could hear her, of course, despite the division of the laboratory into two; but he said nothing. Thus far, he was anything but talkative, though he was a voracious reader.

  Ruiz did not respond for a while, though the nine-foot young Lithian awed and puzzled him quite as much as he did Liu—and for better reasons. He looked sidewise at Michelis.

  The chemist was ignoring them both. Ruiz could understand that well enough, as far as he himself was concerned; the attempt to write a joint but impartial report on the Lithia expedition for the J. I. R. had proven disastrous for the already tense relationship between the two scientists. But that same tension, he could see, was distressing Liu without her being quite aware of it, and that he could not let pass; she was innocent. He mustered a last-ditch attempt to draw Mike out.

  “This is their learning period,” he said. “Necessarily, they spend most of it listening. They’re like the old legend of the wolf boy, who is raised by animals and comes into human cities without even knowing human speech—except that the Lithians don’t learn speech in infancy and so have no block against learning it in young adulthood. To do that, they must listen very hard—most wolf boys never learn to talk at all—and that’s what he’s doing.”

  “But why won’t he at least answer questions?” Liu said troubledly, without quite looking at Michelis. “How is he going to learn if he won’t practice?”

  “He hasn’t anything to tell us yet, by his lights,” Ruiz said. “And for him, we lack the authority to put questions. Any adult Lithian could question him, but obviously we don’t qualify—and what Mike calls the foster-parent relationship couldn’t mean anything to a creature adapted to a solitary childhood.”

  Michelis did not respond.

  “He used to call us,” Liu said sadly. “At least, he used to call you.”

  “That’s different. That’s the pleasure response; it has nothing to do with authority, or affection either. If you were to put an electrode into the septal or caudate nucleus areas in the brain of a cat, or a rat, so that they could stimulate themselves electrically by pushing a pedal, you could train them to do almost anything that’s within their powers, for no other reward but that jolt in the head. In the same way, a cat or a rat or a dog will learn to respond to its name, or to initiate some action, in order to gain pleasure. But you don’t expect the animal to talk to you or answer questions just because it can do that.”

  “I never heard of the brain experiments,” Liu said. “I think that’s horrible.”

  “I think so too,” Ruiz said. “It’s an old line of research that got sidetracked somehow. I’ve never understood why some of our megalomaniacs didn’t follow it up in human beings. A dictatorship founded on that device might really last a thousand years. But it has nothing to do with what you’re asking of Egtverchi. When he’s ready to talk, he’ll talk. In the meantime, we don’t have the stature to compel him to answer questions. For that, we would have to be twelve-foot Lithian adults.”

  Egtverchi’s eyes filmed, and he brought his hands together suddenly.

  “You are already too tall,” his harsh voice said over the annunciator system.

  Liu clapped her hands together in delighted imitation.

  “See, see, Ramon, you’re wrong! Egtverchi, what do you mean? Tell us!”

  Egtverchi said experimentally: “Liu. Liu. Liu.”

  “Yes, yes. That’s right, Egtverchi. Go on, go on—what did you mean—tell us!”

  “Liu.” Egtverchi seemed satisfied. The colors in his wattles died down. He was again almost a statue.

  After a moment, there was an explosive snort from Michelis. Liu turned to him with a start, and, without really meaning to, so did Ruiz.

  But it was too late. The big New Englander had already turned his back on them, as though disgusted at himself for having broken his own silence. Slowly, Liu too turned her back, if only to hide her face from everyone, even Egtverchi. Ruiz was left standing alone at the vertex of the tetrahedron of disaffection.

  “This is going to be a fine performance for a prospective citizen of the United Nations to turn in,” Michelis said suddenly, bitterly, from somewhere behind his shoulder. “I suppose you expected nothing else when you asked me here. What moved you to tell me what vast progress he was making? As I got the story, he ought to have been propounding theorems by this time.”

  “Time,” Egtverchi said, “is a function of change, and change is the expression of the relative validity of two propositions, one of which contains a time t and the other a time t-prime, which differ from each other in no respect except that one contains the coordinate t and the other the coordinate t-prime.”

  “That’s all very well,” Michelis said coldly, turning to look up at the great head. “But I know where you got it from. If you’re only a parrot, you’re not going to be a citizen of this culture; you can take that from me.”

  “Who are you?” Egtverchi said.

  “I’m your sponsor, God help me,” Michelis said. “I know my own name, and I know what kind of record goes with it. If you expect to be a citizen, Egtverchi, you’ll have to do better than pass yourself off as Bertrand Russell, or Shakespeare for that matter.”

  “I don’t think he has any such notion,” Ruiz said. “We explained the citizenship proposal to him, but he didn’t give us any sign that he understood it. He just finished reading the Principia last week, so there’s nothing unlikely about his feeding it back. He does that now and then.”

  “In first-order feedback,” Egtverchi said somnolently, “if the connections are reversed, any smal
l disturbance will be selfaggravating. In second-order feedback, going outside normal limits will force random changes in the network which will stop only when the system is stable again.”

  “God damn it!” Mike said savagely. “Now where did he get that? Stop it, you! You don’t fool me for a minute!”

  Egtverchi closed his eyes and fell silent.

  Suddenly Michelis shouted: “Speak up, damn it!”

  Without opening his eyes, Egtverchi said: “Hence the system can develop vicarious function if some of its parts are destroyed.” Then he was silent again; he was asleep. He was often asleep, even these days.

  “Fugue,” Ruiz said softly. “He thought you were threatening him.”

  “Mike,” Liu said, turning to him with a kind of desperate earnestness, “what do you think you’re doing? He won’t answer you, he can’t answer you, especially when you speak to him like that! He’s only a child, whatever you think when you have to look up at him! Obviously he learns many of these things by rote. Sometimes he says them when they seem to be apposite, but when we question him, he never carries it any farther. Why don’t you give him a chance? He didn’t ask you to bring any citizenship committee here!”

  “Why don’t you give me a chance?” Michelis said raggedly. Then he turned white-on-white. After a moment, so did Liu.

  Ruiz looked up again at the slumbering Lithian and, as assured as he could be that Egtverchi was truly asleep, pressed the button which brought the rumbling metal curtain down in front of the transparent door. To the last, Egtverchi did not seem to move. Now they were isolated and away from him; Ruiz did not know whether this would make any difference, but he had his doubts about the innocence of Egtverchi’s responses. To be sure, he had not overtly done anything but make an enigmatic statement, ask a simple question, quote from his reading—yet somehow everything he said had helped matters to go more badly than before.

  “Why did you do that?” Liu said.

  “I wanted to clear the air,” Ruiz said quietly. “He’s asleep, anyhow. Besides, we don’t have any argument with Egtverchi yet. He may not be equipped to argue with us. But we’ve got to talk to each other—you too, Mike.”