“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 small disturbance will be self-aggravating. 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.”
“Haven’t you had enough of that already, Ramon?” Michelis said, in a voice a little more like his own.
“Preaching is my vocation,” Ruiz said. “If I make a vice of it, I expect to atone for that somewhere else than here. But in the meantime—Liu, part of our trouble is the quarrel that I mentioned to you. Mike and I sharply disagreed on what Lithia means to the human race, indeed we disagreed on whether Lithia poses us any philosophical question at all. I think the planet is a time bomb; Mike thinks that’s nonsense. And he thought that a general article for a scientific audience was no place to raise such questions, especially since this particular question has been posed officially and hasn’t been adjudicated yet. And that’s one reason why we’re all snarling at each other right now, without any surface reason for it.”
“What a cold thing to be heated about!” Liu said. “Men are so exasperating. How could a problem like that matter now?”
“I can’t tell you,” Ruiz said helplessly. “I can’t be specific—the whole issue is under security seal. Mike thinks even the general issues I wanted to raise are graveyarded for the time being.”
“But what we’re waiting for is to find out what’s going to happen to Egtverchi,” Liu said. “The UN examining group must be already on its way. What business do you have to be hatching philosophical mandrake’s-eggs when the life of a—of a human being, there’s no other way to put it—is hanging on the next half hour?”
“Liu,” Ruiz said gently, “forgive me, but are you so convinced that Egtverchi is what you mean by a human being—a hnau, a rational soul? Does he talk like one? You were complaining yourself that he won’t answer questions, and that very often when he speaks he doesn’t make much sense. I’ve talked to adult Lithians, I knew Egtverchi’s father well, and Egtverchi isn’t much like them, let alone much like a human being. Hasn’t anything that’s happened in the past hour changed your mind?”
“Oh, no,” Liu said warmly, reaching out her hands for the Jesuit’s.
“Ramon, you’ve heard him talk yourself, as much as I have—you’ve tended him with me—you know he’s not just an animal! He can be brilliant when he wants to be!”
“You’re right, the mandrake’s eggs have nothing to do with the case,” Michelis said, turning and looking at Liu with dark, astonishingly pain-haunted eyes. “But I can’t make Ramon listen to me. He’s becoming more and more bound in some rarefied theological torture of his own. I’m sorry Egtverchi isn’t as far along as I’d thought, but I foresaw almost from the beginning, I think, that he was going to be a serious embarrassment to us all, the closer he approaches his full intelligence.
“And I didn’t get all my information from Ramon. I’ve seen the protocol on the progressive intelligence tests. Either they’re reports on something phenomenal, or else we have no really trustworthy way of measuring Egtverchi’s intelligence at all—and that may add up to the same thing in the end. If the tests are right, what’s going to happen when Egtverchi finally does grow up? He’s the son of a highly intelligent inhuman culture, and he’s turning out to be a genius to boot—and his present status is that of an animal in a zoo! Or far worse than that, he’s an experimental animal; that’s how most of the public tends to think of him. The Lithians aren’t going to like that, and furthermore the public won’t like it when it learns the facts.
“That’s why I brought up this whole citizenship question in the beginning. I see no other way out; we’ve got to turn him loose.” He was silent a moment, and then added, with almost his wonted gentleness:
“Maybe I’m naive. I’m not a biologist, let alone a psychometrist. But I’d thought he’d be ready by now, and he isn’t, so I guess Ramon wins by default. The interviewers will take him as he is, and the results obviously can’t be good.” This was precisely Ruiz-Sanchez’ opinion, though he would hardly have put it that way.
“I’ll be sorry to see him go, if he leaves,” Liu said abstractedly. It was evident, however, that she was hardly thinking about Egtverchi at all any more. “But Mike, I know you’re right, there’s no other solution in the long run—he has to go free. He is brilliant, there’s no doubt about that. Now that I come to think of it, even this silence isn’t the natural reaction of an animal with no inner resources. Father, is there nothing we can do to help?”
Ruiz shrugged; there was nothing that he could say. Michelis’ reaction to the apparent parroting and unresponsiveness of Egtverchi had of course been far too extreme for the actual situation, springing mostly from Michelis’ own disappointment at the equivocal outcome of the Lithia expedition; he liked issues to be clear-cut, and evidently he had thought he had found in the citizenship maneuver a very sharp-edged tool indeed. But there was much more to it than that: some of it, of course, tied into the yet unadmitted bond which was forming between the chemist and the girl; in that single word “Father” she had shucked the priest off as a foster parent of Egtverchi, and put him in a position to give her away instead.
And what remained left over to be said would have no audience here. Michelis had already dismissed it as “some rarefied theological torture” which was personal to Ruiz and of no importance outside the priest’s own skin. What Michelis dismissed would shortly fail to exist at all for Liu, if indeed it had not already been obliterated.
No, there was nothing further that could be done about Egtverchi; the Adversary was protecting his begotten son with all the old, divisive, puissant weapons; it was already too late. Michelis did not know how skilled UN naturalization commissions were at detecting intelligence and desirability in a candidate, even through the thickest smoke screen of language and cultural alienation, and at almost any age after the disease called “talking” had set in. And he did not realize how primed the commission would be to settle the Lithia question by a
And then, Ruiz would be left with no allies at all. It seemed now to be the will of God that he be stripped of everything, and brought before the Holy Door with no baggage, not even such comforters as Job had, no, not even burdened by belief. For Egtverchi would surely pass. He was as good as free—and closer to being a citizen in good standing than Ruiz himself.
