by James Blish
“What does he mean?” Liu said faintly. “I don't understand him at all any more. He calls it a demonstration — but what can he possibly demonstrate by that? It's childish!”
“Yes,” Michelis said. For the moment he could think of nothing else to say. He needed to get his temper back; he was losing it more and more easily these days. That had been one of the reasons for his urgency hi marrying Liu: he needed her calmness, for his own was vanishing with frightening rapidity.
No calmness seemed to be passing from her to him now. Even the apartment, originally such a source of satisfaction and repose for them both, felt like a trap. It was far above ground, in one of the mostly unused project buildings on the upper East Side of Manhattan . Originally Liu had had a far smaller set of rooms in the same building, and Michelis, after he had got used to the idea, had had them both installed in the present apartment with only a minimum of wirepulling. It was not customary, it was certainly not fashionable, and they were officially warned that it was considered dangerous — the gangs raided surface structures now and then; but apparently it was no longer outright illegal, if one had the money to live that high up in the slums.
Given the additional space, the artist buried inside Liu's demure technician's exterior had run quietly wild. In the green glow of concealed light which washed the apartment, Michelis was surrounded by what seemed to be a miniature jungle. On small tables stood Japanese gardens with real Ming trees or dwarf cedars in them. An oriental lamp was fashioned out of a piece of fantastically sculptured driftwood. Long, deep, woven flower boxes ran completely around the room at eye level; they were thickly planted with ivy, wandering Jew, rubber plants, philodendron, and other non-flowering species, and benind each box a mirror ran up to the ceiling, unbroken anywhere except by the placidly witty Klee reproduction which was the 3-V set; the painting, made almost wholly of detached angles and glyphs like the symbols of mathematics, was a welcome oasis of dryness for which Liu had paid a premium — QBC's stock “covers” were mostly Sargents and van Goghs. Since the light tubes were hidden behind the planting boxes, the room gave an effect of extraterrestrial exuberance kept under control only with the greatest difficulty.
“I know what he means,” Michelis said at last. “I just don't know quite how to put it. Let me think a minute — why don't you get dinner while I do it? We'd better eat early. We're going to have visitors, that's a cinch.”
“Visitors? But — All right, Mike.”
Michelis walked to the glass wall and looked out onto the sun porch. All of Liu's flowering plants were out there, a real garden, which had to be kept sealed off from the rest of the apartment; for in addition to being an ardent amateur gardener, Liu bred bees. There was a colony of them there, making singular and exotic honeys from the congeries of blossoms Liu had laid out so carefully. The honey was fabulous and ever-changing, sometimes too bitter to eat except in tiny fork-touches like Chinese mustard, sometimes containing a heady touch of opium from the sticky hybrid poppies that nodded in a soldierly squad along the sun porch railing, sometimes sickly-sweet and insipid until, with a surprisingly small amount of glassware, Liu converted it into a liqueur that mounted to the head like a breeze from the Garden of Allah. The bees that made it were tetraploid monsters the size of hummingbirds, with tempers as bad as Michelis' own was getting to be; only a few of them could kill even a big man. Luckily, they flew badly in the gusts common at this altitude, and would starve anywhere but in Liu's garden, otherwise Liu would never have been licensed to keep them on an open sun porch in the middle of the city. Michelis had been more than a little wary of them at first, but lately they had begun to fascinate him: their apparent intelligence was almost as phenomenal as their size and viciousness.
“Damn.” Liu said behind him.
“What's the matter?”
“Omelettes again. That's the second wrong number I've dialed this week.”
Both the oath — mild though it was — and the error were uncharacteristic. Mike felt a twinge, a mixture of compassion and guilt. Liu was changing; she had never been so distractible before. Was he responsible?
“It's all right. I don't mind. Let's eat.”
“All right.”
They ate silently, but Michelis was conscious of the pressure of inquiry behind Liu's still expression. The chemist thought furiously, angry with himself, and yet unable to phrase what he wanted to say. He should never have got her into this at all. No, that couldn't have been prevented; she had been the logical scientist to handle Egtverchi in his infancy — probably nobody else could have brought him through it even this well. But surely it should have been possible to keep her from becoming emotionally involved —
No, that had not been possible either; that was the woman of it. And the man of it, now that he was forced to think about his own role. It was no use; he simply did not know what he should think; Egtverchi's broadcast had rattled him beyond the point of logical thought. He was going to wind up with his usual bad compromise with Liu, which was to say nothing at all. But that would not do either.
And yet it had been a simple enough piece of foolery that the Lithian had perpetrated — childish, as Liu had said. Egtverchi had been urged to be off beat, rebellious, irresponsible, and he had come through in spades. Not only had he voiced his disrespect for all established institutions and customs, but he had also challenged his audience to show the same disrespect. In the closing mornents of his broadcast, he had even told them how: they were to mail anonymous, insulting messages to Egtverchi's own sponsors.
“A postcard will do,” he had said, gently enough, through his grinning chops. “Just make the message pungent. If you hate that powdered concrete they call a knish mix, write and tell them so. If you can eat the knishes but our commercials make you sick, write them about that, and don't pull any punches. If you loathe me, tell the Bifalcos that, too, and make sure you're spitting mad about it. I'll read the five messages I think in the worst possible taste on my broad—”
'To nobody,” Michelis said angrily.
“Quite so. And yet I repeat that I didn't select it deliberately for shock value, Dr. Michelis. It's a bagatelle — very mild, compared to some of the stuff we've been getting. This Snake obviously has an audience of borderline madmen, and he means to use it. That's why I came to see you. We think you might have some idea as to what he intends to use it for.”
“For nothing, if you people have any control over what you yourselves do,” Michelis said. “Why don't you cut him off the air? If he's poisoning it, then you don't have any other choice.”
“One man's poison is another man's knish mix,” the UN man said smoothly. “The Bifalcos don't see this — the way we do. They have their own analysts, and they know as well as we do that they're going to get more than seven and a half million dirty postcards in the next week. But they like the idea. In fact, they're positively wriggling with delight. They think it will sell products. They will probably give the Snake a whole half hour, solely sponsored by them, if the response comes through as predicted — and it will.”
“Why can't you cut Egtverchi off anyhow?” Liu said.
“The charter prevents us from interfering with the right of free speech. As long as the Bifalcos put up the money, we are obligated to keep the program on the air. It's a good principle at bottom; we've had experiences with it before that threatened to turn out nastily, but in every case we sweated them out and the public got bored with them eventually. But that was a different public — the broad public, which used to be mostly sane. The Snake obviously has a selected audience, and that's not sane at all. This time — for the first time — we are thinking of interfering. That's why we came to you.”
“I can't help you,” Michelis said.
“You can, and you will, Dr. Michelis. I'm talking from under both my hats now. QBC wants him off the air, and the UN is beginning to smell something which might prove to be much worse than the 1993 Corridor Riots. You sponsored this Snake, and your wife raised him from a
n egg, or damn near an egg. You know him better than anyone else on Earth. You will have to give us the weapon that we need against him. That's what I came to tell you. Think about it. You are responsible under the naturalization law. It's not often that we have to invoke that clause, but we're invoking it now. You'll have to think fast, because we have to have him closed out before his next broadcast.”
“And suppose we have nothing to offer?” Michelis said stonily.
“Then we will probably declare the Snake a minor, and you his guardians,” the UN man said. “Which will hardly be a solution from our point of view, but you would probably find it painful — you'd be well advised to come up with something better. I'm sorry to bring such bad news, but the news is bad tonight; that sometimes happens. Good-night, and thank you.”
He went out. He did not have to resume any of his three hats; he had never taken any of them off, visible or metaphorical. Michelis and Liu stared at each other, appalled.
“We-we couldn't possibly have him as a ward now,” Liu whispered.
“Well,” Michelis said harshly, “we were talking about wanting a son—”
“Mike, don't!”
“I'm sorry,” he said inadequately. “That officious son of a bitch. He was the man that passed on the application — and now he's throwing it right back in our laps. They must be really desperate. What are we going to do? I haven't an idea in my head.”
Liu said, after a moment's hesitation: “Mike — we don't know enough to come up with anything useful in a week. At least I don't, and I don't think you do either. We've got to get through to the Father somehow.”
“If we can,” Michelis said slowly. “But even so, what good will that do? The UN won't listen to him — they've bypassed him.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“They've made a de facto decision in favor of Cleaver,” Michelis said. “It won't he announced until after Ramon's church has finished disavowing him, but it's already in effect. I knew about it before he left for Rome , but I didn't have the heart to tell him. Lithia has been closed; the UN is going to use it as a laboratory for the study of fusion power storage — not exactly what Cleaver had in mind originally, but close enough.”
Liu was silent for a long time. She arose and went to the window, against which the huge bees were still butting like live battering-rams.
“Does Cleaver know?” she said, her back still turned.
“Oh yes, he knows,” Michelis said. “He's in charge. He was scheduled to land back at Xoredeshch Sfath yesterday. I tried to tip Ramon off indirectly as soon as I heard about it — that's why I promoted that collaboration for the J.I.R. — but Ramon just didn't seem to hear any of my hints. And I just couldn't tell him outright that his cause was already lost, before he'd even had a hearing.”
“It's ugly,” Liu said slowly. “Why won't they announce it until after Ramon is officially excommunicated? Why does that make any difference?”
“Because the decision is tainted, that's all,” Michelis said fiercely. “Whether you agree with Ramon's theological arguments or not, to decide for Cleaver is a dirty act — impossible to defend except in terms of raw power. They know that well enough, damn them, and sooner or later they're going to have to let the public see what the arguments were on the other side. When that day comes, they want Ramon's arguments discredited in advance by his own church.”
“What precisely is Cleaver doing?”
“I can't say, precisely. But they're building a big Nernst generator plant inland on the south continent, near Glesh-chtehk Sfath, to turn out the power, so that much of his dream is already realized. Later they'll try to trap the power raw, as it comes off, instead of stepping it down and throwing away ninety-five per cent of it as heat. I don't know how Cleaver proposes to do that, but I should guess he'd begin with a modification of the Nernst effect itself — the 'magnetic bottle' dodge. He'd better be damned careful.” He paused. “I suppose I'd have told Ramon if he'd asked me. But he didn't, so I didn't say anything. Now I feel like a coward.”
Liu turned swiftly at that, and came back to sit on the arm of his chair. “That was right to do, Mike,” she said. “It's not cowardice to refuse to rob a man of hope, I think.”
“Maybe not,” Michelis said, taking her hand gratefully.
“But what it all comes out to is that Ramon can't help us now. Thanks to me, he doesn't even know yet that Cleaver is back on Lithia.”
XVI
Shortly past dawn, Ruiz-Sanchez walked stiffly into the vast circle of the Piazza San Pietro toward the towering dome of St. Peter's itself. The piazza was swarming with pilgrims even this early, and the dome, more than twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, seemed frowning and ominous in the early light, rising from the forest of pillars like the forehead of God.
He passed under the right arch of the colonnade, past the Swiss Guards in their gorgeous, outré uniforms, and through the bronze door. Here he paused to murmur, with unexpected intensity, the prayers for the Pope's intentions obligatory for this year. The Apostolic Palace soared in front of him; he was astonished that any edifice so crowded with stone could at the same time contrive to be so spacious, but he had no time for further devotions now. Near the first door on the right a man sat at a table. Ruiz-Sanchez told him: “I am commanded to a special audience with the Holy Father.”
“God has blessed you. The major-domo's office is on the first floor, to the left. No, one moment — a special audience? May I see your letter, please?”
Ruiz-Sanchez showed it.
“Very good. But you will need to see the major-domo anyhow. The special audiences are in the throne room; he will show you where to go.” The throne room! Ruiz-Sanchez was more unsettled than ever. That was where the Holy Father received heads of state, and members of the college of cardinals. Certainly it was no place to receive a heretical Jesuit of very low rank —
“The throne room,” the major-domo said. “That's the first room in the reception suite. I trust your business goes well, Father. Pray for me.”
Hadrian VIII was a big man, a Norwegian by birth, whose curling beard had been only slightly peppered with gray at his election. It was white now, of course, but otherwise age seemed to have marked him little; indeed, he looked somewhat younger than his photographs and 3-V 'casts suggested, for they had a tendency to accentuate the crags and furrows of his huge, heavy face.
Ruiz-Sanchez found his person so overwhelming that he barely noticed the magnificence of his robes of state. Needless to say, there was nothing in the least Latin in the Holy Father's mien or temperament. In his rise to the gestatorial chair he had made a reputation as a Catholic with an almost Lutheran passion for the grimmer reaches of moral theology; there was something of Kierkegaard in him, and something of the Grand Inquisitor as well. After his election, he had surprised everyone by developing an interest — one might almost call it a businessman's interest — in temporal politics, though the characteristic coldness of Northern theological speculation continued to color everything he said and did. His choice of the name of a Roman emperor was perfectly appropriate, Ruiz-Sanchez realized: here was a face that might well have been stamped on imperial coin, for all the beneficence which tempered its harshness.
The Pope remained standing throughout the interview, staring down at Ruiz-Sanchez with what seemed at first to be nine-tenths frank curiosity.
“Of all the thousands of pilgrims here, you may stand in the greatest need of our indulgence,” he observed in English. Near by, a tape recorder raced silently; Hadrian was an ardent archivist, and a stickler for the letter of the text. “Yet we have small hope of your winning it. It is incredible to us that a Jesuit, of all our shepherds, could have fallen into Manichaeanism. The errors of that heresy are taught most particularly in that college.”
“Holiness, the evidence—”
Hadrian raised his hand. “Let us not waste time. We have already informed ourself of your views and your reasoning. You are subtle, Father, but you have c
ommitted a grievous oversight all the same — but we wish to defer that subject for the moment. Tell us first of this creature Egtverchi — not as a sending of the Devil, but as you would see him were he a man.”
Ruiz-Sanchez frowned. There was something about the word “sending” that touched some weakness inside him, like an obligation forgotten until too late to fulfill it. The feeling was like that which had informed a ridiculous recurrent nightmare of his student days, in which he was not to graduate because he had forgotten to attend all his Latin classes. Yet he could not put his finger on what it was.
“There are many ways to describe him, Holiness,” he said. “He is the kind of personality that the twentieth-century critic Colin Wilson called an Outsider, and that is the kind of Earth man he appeals to — he is a preacher without a creed, an intellect without a culture, a seeker without a goal. I think he has a conscience as we would define the term; he's very different from the rest of his race in that and many other respects. He seems to take a deep interest in moral problems, but he's utterly contemptuous of all traditional moral frames of reference — including the kind of rationalized moral automation that prevails on Lithia.”