Case of Conscience (17 page)

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing?" he said in a hoarse voice.

"Good evening, Mike. I am attending a party, just as you are. Good evening, dear Liu. Countess, do you know my foster parents? But I am sure you do."

"Of course," the countess said, turning her bare shoulders and back unmistakably on Michelis and Liu, and looking up at Egtverchi's perpetually grinning head from under gilded eyelids.

"Let's go next door—there's more room, and it will be quieter. We've all seen enough of these train riders. After you, their arrivals will seem all alike."

"I cultivate the unique," Egtverchi said. "But I must have Mike and Liu by my side. Countess. I am the only reptile in the universe with mammalian parents, and I cherish them. I have a notion that it may be a sin; isn't that interesting?"

The gilded eyelids lowered. It had been years since the countess' caterers had come up with a new sin interesting enough to be withheld from the next evening's guests for private testing; that was common knowledge. She looked as if she scented one now, Michelis thought; and since she was, in fact, a woman of small imagination, Michelis was not in much doubt as to what it was. For all his saurian shape and texture, there was something about Egtverchi that was intensely, overwhelmingly masculine.

And intensely childlike, too. That the combination was perfectly capable of overriding any repugnance people might feel toward his additionally overwhelming reptilian-ness had already been demonstrated, in the response to his first interview on 3-V. His wry and awry comments on Earthly events and customs had been startling enough, and perhaps it could have been predicted even then that the intelligentsia of the world would pick him up as a new fad before the week was out. But nobody had anticipated the flood of letters from children, from parents, from lonely women. Egtverchi was a sponsored news commentator now, the first such ever to have an audience composed half-and-half of disaffected intellectuals and delighted children. There was no precedent for it in the present century, at least; learned men in communications compared him simultaneously with two historical figures named Adlai E. Stevenson and Oliver J. Dragon.

Egtverchi also had a lunatic following, though its composition had not yet been analyzed publicly by his 3-V network. Ten of these followers were being lugged limply out by the countess' livery right now, and Michelis' eyes followed them speculatively while he trailed with the crowd after Egtverchi and the countess, out of the amphitheater and into the huge lounge next door. The uniforms were suggestive—but of what? They might have been no more than costumes, designed for the party alone; had the ten young men who fell to the bleat of Egtverchi's silver whistle been physically different from each other, the effect would have been smaller, as Egtverchi would have known. And yet the whole notion of uniforms was foreign to Lithian psychology, while it was profoundly meaningful in Earth terms—and Egtverchi knew more about Earth than most Earthmen did, already.

Lunatics in uniforms, who thought Egtverchi to be a genius who could do no wrong; what could that mean?

Were Egtverchi a man, one would know instantly what it meant. But he was not a man, but a musician playing upon man as on an organ. The structure of the composition would not be evident for a long time to come—if it had a structure; Egtverchi might only be improvising, at least this early. That was a frightening thought in itself.

And all this had happened within a month of the awarding of citizenship to Egtverchi. That had been a pleasant surprise. Michelis was none too sure how he felt about the surprises that had followed; about those certain to come he was decidedly wary.

"I have been exploring this notion of parenthood," Egtverchi was saying. "I know who my father is, of course—it is a knowledge we are born with—but the concept that goes with the word is quite unlike anything you have here on Earth. Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies."

"In what way?" the countess said, not very much interested.

"Why, it seems to be based on a reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period. How they hate you!"

"I doubt that they know I exist," the countess said drily. She had no children.

"Oh, they hate their own parents first of all," Egtverchi said, "but there is enough hatred left over for every other adult on your planet. They write me about it. They have never had anybody to say this to before, but they see in me someone who has had no hand in their torment, who is critical of it, and who obviously is a comical, harmless fellow who won't betray them."

"You're exaggerating," Michelis said uneasily.

"Oh no, Mike. I have prevented several murders already. There was one five-year-old who had a most ingenious plan, something involving garbage disposal. He was ready to include his mother, his father, and his fourteen-year-old brother, and the whole affair would have been blamed on a computational error in his city's sanitation department. Amazing that a child that age could have planned anything so elaborate, but I believe it would have worked—these Shelter cities of yours are so complex, they become lethal engines if even the most minute errors creep into them. Do you doubt me, Mike? I shall show you the letter."

"No," Michelis said slowly. "I don't think I do."

Egtverchi's eyes filmed briefly. "Some day I will let one of these affairs proceed to completion," he said. "As a demonstration, perhaps. Something of the sort seems to be in order."

Somehow Michelis did not doubt that he would, nor that the results would be as predicted. People did not remember their childhoods clearly enough to take seriously the rages and frustrations that shook children—and the smaller the child, the less superego it had to keep the emotions tamed. It seemed more than likely that a figure like Egtverchi would be able to tap this vast, seething underworld of impotent fury and there was where you had to tap it, if you were hoping to do any good. Tapping it by hindsight, through analysis of adults, was successful with neurotics, but it had never proved effective against the psychoses; those had to be attacked pharmacologically, by regulating serotonin metabolism with ataraxics—the carefully tailored chemical grandchildren of the countess' crude smokes.

That worked, but it was not a cure, but a maintenance operation—like giving insulin or sulfonylureas to a diabetic. The organic damage had already been done. In the great raveled knot of the brain, the basic reverberating circuits, once set in motion, could be interrupted but never discontinued—except by destructive surgery, a barbarity now a century out of use.

And it all fitted some of the disturbing things he had been discovering about the Shelter economy since his return from his long sojourn on Lithia. Having been born into it, Michelis had always taken that economy pretty much for granted; or at least his adult memory of his childhood told him that. Maybe it had really been different, and perhaps a little less grim, back in those days, or maybe that was just an illusion cherished by the silent censor in his brain. But it seemed to him that in those days people had let themselves become reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors for the sake of their children, in the hope that the next generation would be out from under the fear and could know something a little better, a glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall of a leaf.

Since then, the restrictions on surface living had been relaxed greatly, nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war, since the Shelter race had produced an obvious impasse—but somehow the psychic atmosphere was far worse instead of better.

The number of juvenile gangs roaming the corridors had increased four hundred per cent while Michelis was out of the solar system; the UN was now spending about a hundred million dollars a year on elaborate recreation and rehabilitation programs for adolescents, but the rec centers stayed largely deserted, and the gangs continued to multiply. The latest measure taken against them was frankly punitive: a tremendous increase in the cost of compulsory insurance on power scooters, seemingly harmless, slow-moving vehicles which the gangs had adapted first to simple crimes like purse-snatching, and then to such more complicated and destructive games as mass raids on food warehouses, industrial distilleries, even utilities—it had been drag-racing in the air ducts that had finally triggered the confiscatory insurance rates.

In the light of what Egtverchi had said, the gangs made perfect and horrible sense. Nobody now believed in the possibility of nuclear war, but nobody could believe in the possibility of a full return to surface life, either. The billions of tons of concrete and steel were far too plainly there to stay. The adults no longer had hopes even for their children, let alone for themselves. While Michelis had been away in the Eden of Lithia, on Earth the number of individual crimes without motive—crimes committed just to distract the committer from the grinding monotony of corridor life—had passed the total of all other crimes put together. Only last week some fool on the UN's Public Polity Commission had proposed putting tranquilizers in the water supplies; the World Health Organization had had him ousted within twenty-four hours—actually putting the suggestion into effect would have "doubled crimes of this kind, by cutting the population further free of its already feeble grip on responsibility—but it was too late to counteract the effect on morale of the suggestion alone.

The WHO had had good reason to be both swift and arbitrary about it. Its last demographic survey showed, under the grim heading of "Actual Insanity," a total of thirty-five million unhospitalized early paranoid schizophrenics who had been clearly diagnosed, every one of whom should have been committed for treatment at once—except that, were the WHO to commit them, the Shelter economy would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than any a war had inflicted on mankind in all of its history. Every one of those thirty-five million persons was a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but the Shelter economy was too complicated to do without them, let alone do without the unrecognized, subclinical cases, which probably totaled twice as many. The Shelter economy could not continue operating much longer without a major collapse; it was on the verge of a psychotic break at this instant. With Egtverchi for a therapist?

Preposterous. But who else—?

"You're very gloomy tonight," the countess was complaining.

"Won't you amuse anyone but children?"

"No one," Egtverchi said promptly. "Except, of course, myself. And of course I am also a child. There now: not only do I have mammals for parents, but I am myself my own uncle, these 3-V amusers of children are always everyone's uncle. You do not appreciate me properly, Countess; I become more interesting every minute, but you do not notice. In the next instant I may turn into your mother, and you will do nothing but yawn."

"You've already turned into my mother," the countess said, with a challenging, slumbrous look. "You even have her jowls, and all those impossibly even teeth. And the talk. My God. Turn into something else—and don't make it Lucien."

"I would turn into the count if I could," Egtverchi said, with what Michelis was almost sure was genuine regret. "But I have no affinity for affines; I don't even understand Haertel yet. Tomorrow, perhaps?"

"My God," the countess said again. "Why in the world did I think I should invite you? You're too dull to be borne. I don't know why I count on anything any more. I should know better by now." Astonishingly, Egtverchi began to sing, in a high, pure, costrato tenor: "Swef, swef, Susa…" For a moment Michelis thought the voice was coming from someone else, but the countess swung on Egtverchi instantly, her face twisted into a Greek mask of pure rage.

"Stop that," she said, her voice as raw as a wound. Her expression, under the gilded gaiety of her party paint, was savagely incongruous.

"Certainly," Egtverchi said soothingly. "You see I am not your mother after all. It pays to be careful with these accusations."

"You lousy snake-scaled demon!"

"Please, Countess; I have scales, you have breasts; this is proper and fitting. You ask me to amuse you; I thought you might enjoy my jongleur's lullaby."

"Where did you hear that song?"

"Nowhere," Egtverchi said. "I reconstructed it. I could see from the cast of your eyes that you were a born Norman."

"How did you do it?" Michelis said, interested in spite of himself. It was the first sign he had encountered that Egtverchi had any musical ability.

"Why, by the genes, Mike," Egtverchi said; his literal Lithian mind had gone to the substance of Michelis' question rather than to its sense. "This is the way I know my name, and the name of my father. E-G-T-V-E-R-C-H-I is the pattern of genes on one of my chromosomes; the G, V and I alleles are of course from my mother; my cerebral cortex has direct sensual access to my genetic composition. We see ancestry everywhere we look, just as you see colors—it is one of the spectra of the real world. Our ancestors bred that sense into us; you could do worse than imitate them. It is helpful to know what a man is before he even opens his mouth."

Michelis felt a faint but decided chill. He wondered if Chtexa had ever mentioned this to Ruiz. Probably not; a discovery so fascinating to a biologist would have driven the Jesuit to talking about it. In any event, it was too late to ask him, for he was on the way to Rome; Qeaver was even farther away by now; and Agronski wouldn't know.

"Dull, dull, dull," the countess said. She had got back most of her self-possession.

"To be sure, to the dull," Egtverchi said, with his eternal grin, which somehow managed to disarm almost anything that he said.

"But I offered to amuse you; you did not enjoy my entertainment. It is your doom to amuse me, too, you know; I am the guest here. What do you have in the sub-basement, for instance? Let us go see. Where are my summer soldiers? Somebody wake them; we have a trip to take."