Case of Conscience

in. Egtverchi is still pretty weak for a Lithian, but he’s big, and the dividing walls apparently didn’t pose him any problems.

What happened thereafter is confused—it depends on which reporter you believe. Insofar as I’ve been able to piece all these conflicting accounts together, Egtverchi himself didn’t hurt anybody, and if his condottieri did, they got as good as they gave; one of them died. The major damage is to the countess, who is ruined. Some of the cells he broke into weren’t on the serpentine’s route at all, and contained public figures in private hells especially designed by the countess’ caterers: The people who haven’t themselves already succumbed to the sensation- mongers—though in some instances the publicity is no more vicious than they had coming—are out to revenge themselves on the whole house of Averoigne.

Of course the count can’t be touched directly, since he wasn’t even aware of what was going on. (Did you see that last paper from “H. O. Petard,” by the way? Beautiful stuff: he has a fundamental twist on the Haertel equations which make it look possible to see around normal space-time, as well as travel around it. Theoretically you might photograph a star and get a contemporary image, not one light-years old. Another blow to the chops for poor old Einstein.) But he is already no longer Procurator of Canarsie and, unless he takes his money promptly out of the countess’ hands, he will wind up as just another moderately comfortable troglodyte. And at the moment nobody knows where he is, so unless he has been reading the papers it is already too late for him to make a drastic enough move. In any event, whether he does or he doesn’t, the countess will be persona non grata in her own circles to the day she dies.

And even now I haven’t any idea whether Egtverchi intended exactly this, or whether it was all an accident springing out of a wild impulse. He says he will reply to the newspaper criticism of him on his 3-V program next week—this week nobody can reach him, for reasons he refuses to explain—but I don’t see what he could possibly say that would salvage more than a fraction of the good will he’d accumulated before the party. He’s already half- convinced that Earth’s laws are only organized whims at best—and his present audience is more than half children! I wish you were the kind of man who might say “I told you so'; at least I could get a melancholy pleasure out of nodding. But it’s too late for that now. If you can spare any time for further advice, please send it post haste. We are in well over our heads.

-Mike

P.S.: Liu and I were married yesterday. It was earlier than we had planned, but we both feel a sense of urgency that we can’t explain—almost a desperation. It’s as though something crucial were about to happen. I believe something is; but what? Please write.

-M.

Ruiz groaned involuntarily, drawing incurious glances from his compartment-mates: a Pole in a sheepskin coat who had spent the entire journey wordlessly cutting his way through a monstrous and smelly cheese he had boarded the train with, and a Hollywood Vedantist in sandals, burlap and beard whose smell was not that of cheese and whose business in Rome in a Holy Year was problematical.

He closed his eyes against them. Mike had had no business even thinking about such matters on his wedding morning. No wonder the letter was hard to read.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes again. The sunlight was almost intolerably bright, but for a moment he saw an olive grove sweeping by against burnt-umber hills lined beneath a sky of incredibly clear blue. Then the hills abruptly came piling down upon him and the express shot screaming into a tunnel.

Ruiz lifted the letter once more, but the ant tracks promptly puddled into a dirty blur; a sudden stab of pain lanced vertically through his left eye. Dear God, was he going blind? No, nonsense, that was hypochondria—there was nothing wrong with him but simple eyestrain. The stab through the eyeball was pressure in his left sphereoid sinus, which had been inflamed ever since he left Lima for the wet North, and had begun to become acute in the dripping atmosphere of Lithia.

His trouble was Michelis’ letter, that was plain. Never mind the temptation to blame eyes or sinuses, which were only surrogates for hands empty even of the amphora in which Egtverchi had been brought into the world. Nothing was left of his gift but the letter.

And what answer could he give?

Why, only what Michelis obviously was already coming to realize: that the reason for both Egtverchi’s popularity and his behavior lay in the fact that he was both mentally and emotionally a seriously displaced person. He had been deprived of the normal Lithian upbringing which would have taught him how fundamental it is to know how to survive in a predominantly predatory society. As for Earth’s codes and beliefs, he had only half-absorbed them when Michelis forcibly expelled him from the classroom straight into citizenship. Now he had already had ample opportunity to see the hypocrisy with which some of those codes were served and, to the straight-line logic of the Lithian mind, this could mean only that the codes must therefore be only some kind of game at best. (He had encountered the concept of a game here, too; it was unknown on Lithia.) But he had no Lithian code of conduct to substitute or to fall back on, since he was as ignorant of Lithian civilization as he was innocent of experience of Lithia’s seas, savannas and jungles.

In short, a wolf child.

The rapido hurled itself from the mouth of the tunnel as impetuously as it had entered, and the renewed blast of sunlight forced Ruiz to close his eyes once more. When he opened them he was rewarded by the sight of an extensive terraced vineyard. This was obviously wine country and, judging by the mountains, which were especially steep here, they must be nearing Terracina. Soon, if he was lucky, he might see Mt. Circeo; but he was far more interested in the vineyards.

From what he had been able to observe thus far, the Italian states were far less deeply buried than was most of the rest of the world, and the people were on the surface for much greater proportions of their lifetimes. To some extent this was a product of poverty—Italy as a whole had not had the wealth to get into the Shelter race early, or on anything like the scale which had been possible for the United States or even the other continental countries. Nevertheless, there was a huge Shelter installation at Naples, and the one under Rome was the world’s fourth biggest; that one had got itself dug with funds from all over the Western world, and with a great deal of outright voluntary help, when the first deep excavations had begun to turn up an incredible wealth of unsuspected archaeological finds.

In part, however, sheer stubbornness was responsible. A high proportion of Italy’s huge population, which had never known any living but in and by the sun, simply could not be driven underground on any permanent basis. Of all the Shelter nations—a class which excluded only countries still almost wholly undeveloped, or unrecoverably desert—Italy appeared to be the least thoroughly entombed.

If that turned out to hold true for Rome in particular, the Eternal City would also be by far the sanest major capital on the planet. And that, Ruiz realized suddenly, would be an outcome nobody would have dared predict for an enterprise founded in 753 B.C. by a wolf child.

Of course, about the Vatican he had never been in any doubt, but Vatican City is not Rome. The thought reminded him that he had been commanded to an udienza speciale with the Holy Father tomorrow, before the ring-kissing, which meant before 10:00 at the latest—probably as early as 7:00, for the Holy Father was an early riser, and in this year of all years would be holding audiences of all kinds nearly around the clock. Ruiz had had nearly a month to prepare, for the command had reached him very shortly after the order of the College to appear for inquisition, but he felt unreadier than ever. He wondered how long it had been since any Pope had personally examined a Jesuit convert to an admitted heresy, and what the man had found to say; doubtless the transcript was there in the Vatican library, as recorded by some papal master of ceremonies, assiduous as always in his duty toward history, as masters of ceremonies had been ever since the invaluable Burchard—but Ruiz would not have time to read it.

From here on out, there would be a thousand petty distractions to keep him from settling his mind and heart any further. Just getting his bearings was going to be a chore, and after that there was the matter of accommodations. None of the case religiose would take him in—word had apparently got around—and he had not the purse for a hotel, though if worse came to worst he had a confirmed-reservation slip from one of the most expensive which just might let him into some linen closet there. Finding a pensione, the only other tolerable alternative, was going to be particularly difficult, for the one which had been contracted for him by the tourist agency had become impossible the moment he received the papal summons; it was too far from St.