by James Blish
“And this strikes some chord in his audience?”
“There can be no doubt of that, surely, Holiness. It remains to be seen how wide his appeal is. He ran off a very shrewdly designed experiment last night, obviously intended to test that very question; we should soon know just how great the response will be. But it already seems clear that he appeals to all those people who feel cut off, emotionally and intellectually, from our society and its dominant cultural traditions.”
“Well put,” Hadrian said, surprisingly. “We stand at the brink of unguessable events, that is certain; we have had forebodings that this might be the year. We have commanded the Inquisition to put away its bell, book and candle for the time being; we think such a move would be most unwise.”
Ruiz-Sanchez was stunned. No trial — and no excommunication? The drumming of events around his head had begun to remind him of the numbing, incessant rains of Xoredeshch Sfath.
“Why, Holiness?” he said faintly.
“We believe you may be the man appointed by our Lord to bear St. Michael's arms,” the Pope said, weighing every word.
“I, Holiness? A heretic?”
“Noah was not perfect, you will recall,” Hadrian said, with what might have been a half-smile. “He was merely a man who was given another chance. Goethe, himself more than a little heretical, reshaped the legend of Faustus to the same lesson: redemption is always the crux of the great drama, and there must be a peripataea first. Besides, Father, consider for a moment the unique nature of this case of heresy. Is not the appearance of a solitary Manichaean in the twenty-first century either a wildly meaningless anachronism — or a grave sign?”
He paused and fingered his beads.
“Of course,” he added, “it will be necessary for you to purge yourself, if you can. That is why we have called you. We believe as you do that the Adversary is the moving spirit behind this whole Lithian crisis; but we do not believe that any repudiation of dogma is required. It all hinges upon this question of creativity. Tell us, Father: when you first became convinced that the whole of Lithia was a sending, what did you do about it?”
“Do about it?” Ruiz-Sanchez said numbly. “Why, Holiness, I did only what was recorded. I could think of nothing else to do.”
“Then did it never occur to you that sendings can be banished — and that God has given that power into your hands?”
Ruiz-Sanchez had no emotions left.
“Banished… Holiness, perhaps I have been stupid. I feel stupid. But as far as I know, exorcism was abandoned by the Church more than two centuries ago. My college taught me that meteorology replaced the 'spirits and powers of the air,' and neurophysiology replaced 'possession.' It would never have occurred to me.”
“Exorcism was not abandoned, merely discouraged,” Hadrian said. “It had become limited, as you have just pointed out, and the Church wished to prevent its abuse by ignorant country priests — they were bringing the Church into disrepute trying to drive demons out of sick cows and perfectly healthy goats and cats. But I am not talking about animal health, the weather or mental illness now, Father.”
“Then… is Your Holiness truly proposing that… that I should have attempted to… to exorcise a whole planet?”
“Why not?” Hadrian said. “Of course, the fact that you were standing on the planet at the time might have helped to prevent you, unconsciously, from thinking of it. We are convinced that God would have provided for you — in Heaven certainly, and possibly you might have received temporal help as well. But it was the only solution to your dilemma. Had the exorcism failed, then there might have been some excuse for falling into heresy. But surely it should be easier to believe in a planet-wide hallucination — which in principle we know the Adversary has the power to do — than in the heresy of satanic creativity!”
The Jesuit bowed his head. He felt overwhelmed by his own ignorance. He had spent almost all his leisure hours on Lithia minutely studying a book which to all intents and purposes might have been dictated by the Adversary himself, and he had seen nothing that mattered, not in all those 628 pages of compulsive demoniac chatter.
“It is not too late to try,” Hadrian said, almost gently. “That is the only road left for you to travel.” Suddenly his face became stern, flinty. “As we have pointed out to the Inquisition, your excommunication is automatic. It began the instant that you admitted this abomination into your soul. It does not need to be formalized to be a fact — and there are political reasons, as well as spiritual ones, for not formalizing it now. In the meantime, you must leave Rome . We withhold our blessing and our indulgence from you, Dr. Ruiz-Sanchez. This Holy Year is for you a year of battle, with the world as prize. When you have won that battle you may return to us — not before. Farewell.”
Dr. Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a layman, damned, left Rome for New York that night by air. The deluge of happenstance was rising more rapidly around him; the time for the building of arks was almost at hand. And yet, as the waters rose, and the words, Into your hand are they delivered, passed incessantly across the tired surfaces of his brain, it was not of the swarming billions of the Shelter state that he was thinking. It was of Chtexa; and the notion that an exorcism might succeed in dissolving utterly that grave being and all his race and civilization, return them to the impotent mind of the Great Nothing as though they had never been, was an agony to him.
Into your hand… Into your hand…
XVII
The figures were in. The people who had taken Egtverchi as both symbol and spokesman for their passionate discontents were now tallied, although they could not be known. Their nature was no surprise — the crime and mental disease statistics had long provided a clear picture of that — but their number was stunning. Apparently nearly a third of twenty-first-century society loathed that society from the bottom of its collective heart. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered suddenly whether, had a similar tally been possible in every age, the proportion would have turned out to be stable.
“Do you think it would do any good to talk to Egtverchi?” he asked Michelis. Over his protests, he was staying in the Michelis' apartment for the time being.
“Well, it hasn't done any good for me to talk with him,” Michelis said. “With you it might be a different story — though frankly, Ramon, I'm inclined to doubt even that. He's doubly hard to reason with because he himself seems to be getting no satisfaction out of the whole affair.”
“He knows his audience better than we do,” Liu added. “And the more the numbers pile up, the more embittered he seems to become. I think they remind him continually that he can never be fully accepted on Earth, fully at home on it. He thinks he's of interest only to people who themselves don't feel at home on their own planet. That's not true, of course, but that's how he feels.”
“There's enough truth in it so that he'd be unlikely to be dissuaded of it,” Ruiz-Sanchez agreed gloomily.
He shifted his chair so as not to be able to see Liu's bees, which were hard at work in the shafts of sunlight on the porch. At another time he could not have torn himself away from them, but he could not afford to be distracted now.
“And of course he's also well aware that he'll never know what it means to be a Lithian — regardless of his shape and inheritance,” he added. “Chtexa might get a shadow of that through to him, if only they could meet — but no, they don't even speak the same language.”
“Egtverchi's been studying Lithian,” Michelis said. “But it's true that he can't speak it, not even as well as I can. He has nothing to read but your grammar — the documents are still all classified against him — and nobody to talk to. He sounds as rusty as an iron hinge. But, Ramon, you could interpret.”
“Yes, I could. But Mike, it's physically impossible. There just isn't time to get Chtexa here, even if we had the resources and the — authority to do it.”
“I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of CirCon, d'Averoigne's new circum-continuum radio. I don't know what shape it's in, but the Message Tree puts ou
t a powerful signal — possibly d'Averoigne could pick it up. If so, you might be able to talk to Chtexa. I'll see what I can find out, anyhow.”
“I'm willing to try,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But it doesn't sound very promising.”
He stopped to think, not of more answers — he had already hit his head against that wall more than often enough — but of what questions he still needed to ask, Michelis' appearance gave him the cue. It had shocked him at first, and he could still not quite get used to it. The big chemist had aged markedly: his face was drawn, and he had deeply cut, liverish circles under his eyes. Liu looked no better; while she had not seemed to age any, she looked miserable. There was a tension in the air between them, too, as though they had failed to find in each other sufficient release from the tensions of the world around them.
“It's possible that Agronski might know something that would be helpful,” he said, only half-aloud.
“Maybe,” Michelis said. “I've seen him only once — at a party, the one where Egtverchi caused such a stink. He was behaving very oddly. I'm sure he recognized us, but he wouldn't meet our eyes, let alone come and talk to us. As a matter of fact, I can't remember seeing him talking to anybody. He just sat in a corner and drank. It wasn't at all like him.”
“Why did he come, do you suppose?”
“Oh, that's not hard to guess. He's a fan of Egtverchi's.”
“Martin? How do you know?”
“Egtverchi bragged about it. He said he hoped to have the whole Lithia commission on his side eventually.” Michelis grimaced.
“The way Agronski was acting, he'll be of no use to Egtverchi or anybody else.”
“And so we have still another soul on the way to damnation,” Ruiz-Sanchez said grimly. “I should have suspected it. There's so little meaning in Agronski's life as it is, it won't take Egtverchi long to cut him off from any contact with reality at all. That is what evil does — it empties you.”
“I'm none too sure Egtverchi's to blame,” Michelis said, his voice steeped in gloom. “Except as a symptom. The Earth is riddled with schizophrenics already. If Agronski had any tendency that way, and obviously he did, then all he needed was to be planted here again for the tendency to flower.”
“That wasn't my impression of him,” Liu said. “From what little I saw of him, and from what you've told me, he seemed dreadfully normal — even simple-minded. I don't see how he could get deep enough into any question to be driven insane — or how he could be tempted to fall into your theological vacuum, Ramon.”
“In this universe of discourse, Liu, we are all very much alike,” Ruiz-Sanchez said dispiritedly. “And from what Mike tells me, I think we may be already too late to do much for Martin. And he's only-only a sample of what's happening everywhere within the sound of Egtverchi's voice.”
“It's a mistake to think of schizophrenia as a disease of the wits, anyhow,” Michelis said. “Back in the days when it was first being described, the English used to call it 'lorry-driver's disease.' When intellectuals get it, the results are spectacular only because they can articulate what they feel: Nijinski, van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Wilson … it's a long list, but it's nothing compared to the ordinary people who've had it. And they get it fifty-to-one over intellectuals. Agronski is just the usual kind of victim, no more, no less.”
“What has happened to that threat you mentioned?” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Egtverchi got on the air again last night without his being made a ward of yours. Was your friend in the complicated hat just flailing the air?”
“I think that's partly the answer,” Michelis said hopefully. “They haven't said another word to us, so I'm just guessing, but it may be that your arrival disconcerted them. They expected you to be publicly unfrocked — and the fact that you weren't has thrown their schedule for announcing the Lithia decision seriously out of joint. They're probably waiting to see what you will do now.”
“So,” Ruiz-Sanchez said grimly, “am I. I might just do nothing, which would probably be the most confusing thing I could do. I think their hands are tied, Mike. He's never mentioned the Bifalcos' products but that once, but obviously he must be selling them by the warehouse-load, so his sponsors won't cut him off. Nor can I see on what grounds the UN Communications Commission can do it.” He laughed shortly. “They've been trying for decades to encourage more independent comment on 3-V anyhow — and Egtverchi is certainly a giant step in that direction.”
“I should think he'd be open to charges of inciting to riot,” Michelis said.
“He hasn't incited any riots that I've heard about,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “The Frisco affair happened spontaneously as far as anyone could see — and I noticed that the pictures didn't show a single one of those uniformed followers of his in the crowds.”
“But he praised the rioters' spirit, and made fun of the police,” Liu pointed out. “He as good as endorsed it.”
“That's not incitement,” Michelis said. “I see what Ramon means. He's smart enough to do nothing for which he could be brought to trial — and a false arrest would be suicide, the UN would be inciting a riot itself.”
“Besides, what would they do with him if they got a conviction?” Ruiz asked. “He's a citizen, but his needs aren't like ours; they'd be chancing killing him with a thirty-day sentence. I suppose they could deport him, but they can't declare him an undesirable, alien without declaring Lithia a foreign country — and until that report is released, Lithia is a protectorate, with a right to admission to the UN as a member state!”
“Small chance of that,” Michelis said. “That would mean ditching Cleaver's project.”
Ruiz-Sanchez felt the same sinking of the heart that had overcome him when Michelis first gave him that news. “How far advanced is it now?” he asked.
“I'm not sure. All I know is that they've been shipping equipment to him in huge amounts. There's another load scheduled to leave in two weeks. The scuttlebutt says that Cleaver has some kind of crucial experiment ready to go as soon as that shipment gets there. That puts it pretty close — the new ships make the trip in less than a month.”
“Betrayed again,” Ruiz-Sanchez said bitterly.
“Then is there nothing you can do, Ramon?” Liu asked.
“I'll interpret for Egtverchi and Chtexa, if anything comes of that project.”
“Yes, but…”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Yes, there is something decisive that I can do. And possibly it would work. In fact, it is something that I must do.”
He stared blindly at them. The buzzing of the bees, so reminiscent of the singing of the jungles of Lithia, probed insistently at him.
“But,” he said, “I don't think that I'm going to do it.”
Michelis moved mountains. He was formidable enough under normal conditions, but when he was desperate and saw a possible way out, no bulldozer could have been more implacable in crushing through an opening.
Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, late Procurator of Canarsie, and always fellow in the brotherhood of science, received them all cordially in his Canadian retreat. Not even the sardonically silent figure of Egtverchi made him blink; he shook hands with the displaced Lithian as though they were old friends meeting again after a lapse of a few weeks. The count himself was a large, rotund man 'in his early sixties, with a protuberant belly, and he was brown all over: his remaining hair was brown, his suit was brown, he was deeply tanned, and he was smoking a long brown cigar.
The room in which he received them — Ruiz-Sanchez, Michelis, Liu, and Egtverchi — was a curious mixture of lodge and laboratory. It had an open fireplace, rough furniture, 257 mounted guns, an elk's head, and an amazing mess of wires and apparatus.
“I am by no means sure that this is going to work,” he told them promptly. “Everything I have is still in the breadboard stage, as you can see. It's been years since I last handled a soldering iron and a voltmeter, too, so we may well have a simple electronic failure somewhere in this mass of wiring — but i
t wasn't a task I could leave to a technician.”
He waved them to seats while he made final adjustments. Egtverchi remained standing in the rear of the room in the shadows, motionless except for the gentle rise and fall of his great chest as he breathed, and an occasional sudden movement of his eyes.
“There will be no image, of course,” the count said abstractedly.
“This giant J-J coupling you describe obviously doesn't broadcast in that band. But if we are very lucky, we may get some sound.… Ah.”
A loudspeaker almost hidden in the maze crackled and then began to emit distant, patterned bursts of hissing. Except for the pattern, it seemed to Ruiz-Sanchez to be nothing but noise, but the count said at once:
“I'm getting something in that region. I didn't expect to pick it up so soon. I don't make much sense of it, however.”
Neither did Ruiz, and for a few moments he had all he could do to get over his amazement. “Those are signals — the Message Tree is broadcasting now?” he said, with a touch of incredulity.
“I hope so,” the count said drily. “I have been busy all day installing chokes against any other possible signal.”
The Jesuit's respect for the mathematician came close to awe. To think that this disorderly tangle of wiring, little black acorns, small red and brown objects like firecrackers, the shining interlocking blades of variable condensers, massively heavy coils, and flickering meters was even now reaching directly through the subether, around fifty light-years of space-time, to eavesdrop on the pulses of the crystalline cliff buried beneath Xoredeshch Sfath…
“Can you tune it?” he said at last. “I think those must be the stutter pattern — what the Lithians use as a navigational grid for their ships and planes. There ought to be an audio band—”