A Case of Conscience

"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 out 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.