A Case of Conscience Read online

  A Case of Conscience

  James Blish

  A Case of Conscience is a science fiction novel by James Blish, first published in 1958. It is the story of a Jesuit who investigates an alien race that has no religion; they are completely without any concept of God, an afterlife, or the idea of sin; and the species evolves through several forms through the course of its life cycle. The story was originally published as a novella in 1953, and later extended to novel-length, of which the first part is the original novella. The novel is the first part of Blish's thematic “After Such Knowledge” trilogy, followed by Black Easter/The Day After Judgment and Dr Mirabilis.

  The story is unusual in several respects. Few science fiction stories of the time attempted religious themes, and still fewer did this with Catholicism. Some of the first part is taken up with the Jesuit's attempt to solve a puzzle, a long description of scandalous intrigue between various pseudonymous characters. As he is about to leave for Earth, he realizes the puzzle is soluble. The puzzle is contained within the pages of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce.

  Many reacted negatively to the story, but surprisingly few educated Catholics were among them. One even sent James Blish a copy of the actual Church guidelines for dealing with extraterrestrials. These are not detailed, but merely suggest overall strategy based on whether the beings have souls or not, and if they have them, whether they are fallen like humans, or exist in a state of grace.

  Won Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959.

  A Case of Conscience

  by James Blish

  I schal declare the disposcioun of rome fro hys first making… and the seconde part schal

  declar ye holynesse of ye same place fro his first crystendom; I schal not write but that i fynde in auctores or ellis that I sey with eye.

  John Capgrave: The Solace of Pilgrims

  to LARRY SHAW

  Pronunciation Key

  For any reader who cares, the Lithian words and names he will encounter here and there in this story are to be pronounced as follows:

  Xoredeshch: “X” as English “K” or Greek chi, hard; “shch” contains two separate sounds, as in Russian, or in English “fish-church.”

  Sfath: As in English, with a broad “a.”

  Gton: Guttural “G,” against the hard palate, like hawking.

  Chtexa: Like German “Stuka,” but with the flat “e.”

  gchteht: Guttural “g” followed by the soft “sh” sound, a flat “e,” and the “h” serving as equivalent of the Old Russian mute sign; thus, a four-syllable word, with a palatal tick at the end, but sounded as one syllable.

  Gleshchtehk: As indicated, with the guttural “G,” the “fish-church” middle consonants, and the mute “h” throwing the “k” back against the soft palate.

  THE RULE is that “ch” is always English “sh” in the initial position, always English “ch” as in “chip” elsewhere in the word; and “h” in isolation is an accented rest which always precedes, never follows, a consonant. As Agronski somewhere remarks, anybody who can spit can speak Lithian.

  Book One

  I

  The stone door slammed. It was Cleaver's trade-mark: there had never been a door too heavy, complex, or cleverly tracked to prevent him from closing it with a sound like a clap of doom. And no planet in the universe could possess an air sufficiently thick and curtained with damp to muffle that sound — not even Lithia.

  Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru , and always Clerk Regular of the Society of Jesus, professed father of the four vows, continued to read. It would take Paul Cleaver's impatient fingers quite a while to free him from his jungle suit, and in the meantime the problem remained. It was a century-old problem, first propounded in 1939, but the Church had never cracked it And it was diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally.) Even the novel which had proposed the case was on the Index Expurgatorius, and Father Ruiz-Sanchez had spiritual access to it only by virtue of his Order.

  He turned the page, scarcely hearing the stamping and muttering in the hall. On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more insoluble with every word:

  “…Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani,) who desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo Vitellius and Macdugalius, four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius by rendering conjugal duty when demanded. Anita who claims to have discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius- There now, he was lost again. Jeremias and Eugenius were-? Oh, yes, the “philadelphians” or, brotherly lovers (another crime hidden there, no doubt) at the beginning of the case, consanguineous to the lowest degree with both Felicia and Honuphrius-the latter the apparent prime villain and husband of Anita. It was Magravius, who seemed to admire Honuphrius, who had been urged by the slave Mauritius to solicit Anita, seemingly under the aegis of Honuphrius himself. This, however, had come to Anita through her tirewoman Fortissa, who was or at one time had been the common-law wife of Mauritius and had borne him children-so that the whole story had to be weighed with the utmost caution. And that entire initial confession of Honuphrius had come out under torture-voluntarily consented to, to be sure, but still torture. The Fortissa-Mauritius relationship was even more dubious, really only a supposition of the commentator Father Ware —

  “Ramon, give me a hand, will you?” Cleaver shouted suddenly. “I'm stuck, and-and I don't feel well.”

  The Jesuit biologist arose in alarm, putting the novel aside. Such an admission from Cleaver was unprecedented.

  The physicist was sitting on a pouf of woven rushes, stuffed with a sphagnumlike moss, which was bulging at the equator under his weight. He was half-way out of his glass-fiber jungle suit, and his face was white and beaded with sweat, although his helmet was already off. His uncertain, stubby fingers tore at a jammed zipper.

  “Paul! Why didn't you say you were ill in the first place? Here, let go of that; you're only making things worse. What happened?”

  “Don't know exactly,” Cleaver said, breathing heavily but relinquishing the zipper. Ruiz-Sanchez knelt beside him and began to work it carefully back onto its tracks. “Went a ways into the jungle to see if I could spot more pegmatite lies. It's been in the back of my mind that a pilot-plant for turning out tritium might locate here eventually — ought to be able to produce on a prodigious scale.”

  “God forbid,” Ruiz-Sanchez said under his breath.

  “Hm? Anyhow, I didn't see anything. A few lizards, hoppers, the usual thing. Then I ran up against a plant that looked a little like a pineapple, and one of the spines jabbed right through my suit and nicked me. Didn't seem serious, but—”

  “But we don't have the suits for nothing. Let's look at it. Here, put up your feet and we'll haul those boots off. Where did you get the — oh. Well, it's angry-looking, I'll give it that. Any other symptoms?”

  “My mouth feels raw,” Cleaver complained.

  “Open up,” the Jesuit commanded. When Cleaver complied, it became evident that his complaint had been the understatement of the year. The mucosa inside his mouth was nearly covered with ugly and undoubtedly painful ulcers, their edges as sharply defined as though they had been cut with a cookie punch.

  Ruiz-Sanchez made no comment, however, and deliberately changed his expression to one of carefully calculated dismissal. If the physicist needed to minimize his ailments, that was all right with Ruiz-Sanchez. An alien planet is not a good place to strip a man of his inner defenses.

  “Come into the lab,” he said. “You've got some inflammation in there.”

  Cleaver arose, a little unsteadily, and followed the Jesuit into the labo
ratory. There Ruiz-Sanchez took smears from several of the ulcers onto microscope slides, and Gram-stained them. He filled the time consumed by the staining process with the ritual of aiming the microscope's substage mirror out the window at a brilliant white cloud. When the timer's alarm went off, he rinsed and flame-dried the first slide and slipped it under the clips.

  As he had half-feared, he saw few of the mixed bacilli and spirochetes which would have indicated a case of ordinary, Earthly, Vincent's angina — “trench mouth,” which the clinical picture certainly suggested, and which he could have cured overnight with a spectrosigmin pastille. Cleaver's oral flora were normal, though on the increase because of all the exposed tissue.

  “I'm going to give you a shot,” Ruiz-Sanchez said gently. “And then I think you'd better go to bed.”

  “The hell with that,” Cleaver said. “I've got nine times as much work to do as I can hope to clean up now, without any additional handicaps.”

  “Illness is never convenient,” Ruiz-Sanchez agreed. “But why worry about losing a day or so, since you're in over your head anyhow?”

  “What have I got?” Cleaver asked suspiciously.

  “You haven't got anything,” Ruiz-Sanchez said, almost regretfully. “That is, you aren't infected. But your 'pineapple' did you a bad turn. Most plants of that family on Lithia bear thorns or leaves coated with polysaccharides that are poisonous to us. The particular glucoside you ran up against today was evidently squill, or something closely related to it. It produces symptoms like those of trench mouth, but a lot harder to clear up.”

  “How long will that take?” Cleaver said. He was still balking, but he was on the defensive now.

  “Several days at least — until you've built up an immunity. The shot I'm going to give you is a gamma globulin specific against squill, and it ought to moderate the symptoms until you've developed a high antibody titer of your own. But in the process you're going to run quite a fever, Paul; and I'll have to keep you well stuffed with antipyretics, because even a little fever is dangerous in this climate.”

  “I know it,” Cleaver said, mollified. “The more I learn about this place, the less disposed I am to vote 'aye' when the time comes. Well, bring on your shot — and your aspirin. I suppose I ought to be glad it isn't a bacterial infection, or the Snakes would be jabbing me full of antibiotics.”

  “Small chance of that,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I don't doubt that the Lithians have at least a hundred different drugs we'll be able to use eventually, but — there, that's all there is to it; you can relax now-but we'll have to study their pharmacology from the ground up, first. All right, Paul, hit the hammock. In about ten minutes you're going to be wishing you'd been born dead, that I promise you;”

  Cleaver grinned. His sweaty face under its thatch of dirty blond hair was craggy and powerful even in illness. He stood up and deliberately rolled down his sleeve.

  “Not much doubt about how you'll vote, either,” he said. “You like this planet, don't you, Ramon? It's a biologist's paradise, as far as I can see.”

  “I do like it,” the priest said, smiling back. He followed Cleaver into the small room which served them both as sleeping quarters. Except for the window, it strongly resembled the inside of a jug. The walls were curving and continuous, and were made of some ceramic material which never beaded or felt wet, but never seemed to be quite dry, either. The hammocks were slung from hooks which projected smoothly from the walls, as though they had been baked from clay along with the rest of the house. “I wish my colleague Dr. Meid were able to see it. She would be even more delighted with it than I am.”

  “I don't hold with women in the sciences,” Cleaver said, with abstract, irrelevant irritation. “Get their emotions all mixed up with their hypotheses. Meid-what kind of name is that, anyhow?”

  “Japanese,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Her first name is Liu-the family follows the Western custom of putting the family name last.”

  “Oh,” Cleaver said, losing interest. “We were talking about Lithia.”

  “Well, don't forget that Lithia is my first extrasolar planet,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “I think I'd find any new, habitable world fascinating. The infinite mutability of life forms, and the cunning inherent in each of them… It's all amazing, and quite delightful.”

  “Why shouldn't that be sufficient?” Cleaver said. “Why do you have to have the God bit too? It doesn't make sense.”

  “On the contrary, it's what gives everything else meaning,”

  Ruiz-Sanchez said. “Belief and science aren't mutually exclusive — quite the contrary. But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that's not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures. For me, biology is an act of religion, because I know that all creatures are God's — each new planet, with all its manifestations, is an affirmation of God's power.”

  “A dedicated man,” Cleaver said. “All right. So am I. To the greater glory of man, that's what I say.”

  He sprawled heavily in his hammock. After a decent interval, Ruiz-Sanchez took the liberty of heaving up after him the foot he seemed to have forgotten. Cleaver didn't notice. The reaction was setting in.

  “Exactly so,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “But that's only half the story. The other half reads, '…and to the greater glory of God.'”

  “Read me no tracts, Father,” Cleaver said. Then: “I didn't mean that. I'm sorry… But for a physicist, this place is hell… You'd better get me that aspirin. I'm cold.”

  “Surely, Paul.”

  Ruiz-Sanchez went quickly back into the lab, made up a salicylate-barbiturate paste in one of the Lithians' superb mortars, and pressed it into a set of pills. (Storing such pills was impossible in Lithia's humid atmosphere; they were too hygroscopic.) He wished he could stamp each pill “Bayer” before it set — if Cleaver's personal cure-all was aspirin, it would have been just as well to let him think he was taking aspirin — but of course he had no dies for the purpose. He took two of the pills back to Cleaver, with a mug and a carafe of Berkefeld-filtered water.

  The big man was already asleep; Ruiz-Sanchez woke him, more or less.

  Cleaver would sleep longer, and awaken farther along the road to recovery, for having been done that small unkindness now. As it was, he hardly noticed when the pills were put down him, and soon resumed his heavy, troubled breathing.

  That done, Ruiz-Sanchez returned to the front room of the house, sat down, and began to inspect the jungle suit The tear which the plant spine had made was not difficult to find, and would be easy to repair. It would be much harder to repair Cleaver's notion that the defenses of Earthmen on Lithia were invulnerable, and that plant-spines could be blundered against with impunity. Ruiz-Sanchez wondered whether either of the other two members of the Lithian Review Commission still shared that notion.

  Cleaver had called the thing which had brought him low a “pineapple.” Any biologist could have told Cleaver that even on Earth the pineapple is a prolific and dangerous weed, edible only by a happy and irrelevant accident. In Hawaii , as Ruiz-Sanchez remembered, the tropical forest was quite impassable to anyone not wearing heavy boots and tough trousers. Even inside the Dole plantations, the close-packed irrepressible pineapples could tear unprotected legs to ribbons.

  The Jesuit turned the suit over. The zipper that Cleaver had jammed, was made of a plastic into the molecule of which bad been incorporated radicals from various terrestrial radio-frequency induction, he felt more in the dark than ever.

  They had a completely marvelous radio network, which among other things provided a “live” navigational grid for the whole planet, zeroed on (and here perhaps was the epitome of the Lithian genius for paradox) a tree. Yet they had never produced a standardized vacuum tube, and their atomic theory was not much more sophisticated than Democritus' had been!

  These paradoxes, of course, could be explained in part by the things that Lithia lacked. Like any large rotating mass, Lithia had a magnetic field of its own, but a plan
et which almost entirely lacks iron provides its people with no easy way. to discover magnetism. Radioactivity had been entirely unknown on the surface of Lithia, at least until the Earthmen had arrived, which explained the hazy atomic theory. Like the Greeks, the Lithians had discovered that friction between silk and glass produces one kind of energy or charge, and between silk and amber another; they had gone on from there to van de Graaf generators, electrochemistry, and the static jet — but without suitable metals they were unable to make heavy-duty batteries, or to do more than begin to study electricity in motion.

  In the fields where they had been given fair clues, they had made enormous progress. Despite the constant cloudiness and endemic drizzle, their descriptive astronomy was excellent, thanks to the fortunate presence of a small moon which had drawn their attention outward early. This in turn made for basic advances in optics, and thence for a downright staggering versatility in the working of glass. Their chemistry took full advantage of both the seas and the jungles. From the one they took such vital and diversified products as agar, iodine, salt, trace metals, and foods of many kinds. The other provided nearly everything else that they needed: resins, rubbers, woods of all degrees of hardness, edible and essential oils, vegetable “butters,” rope and other fibers, fruits and nuts, tannins, dyes, drugs, cork, paper. Indeed, the sole forest product which they did not take was game, and the reason for this neglect was hard to find. It seemed to the Jesuit to be religious — yet the Lithians had no religion, and they certainly ate many of the creatures of the sea without qualms of conscience.

  He dropped the jungle suit into his lap with a sigh, though the popcorned tooth still was not completely trimmed hack into shape. Outside, in the humid darkness, Lithia was in full concert. It was a vital, somehow fresh, new-sounding drone, covering most of the sound spectrum audible to an Earthman. It came from the myriad insects of Lithia. Many of these had wiry, trilling songs, almost like birds, in addition to the scrapes and chirrups and wing-case buzzes of the insects of Earth. In a way this was lucky, for there were no birds on Lithia. Had Eden sounded like that, before evil had come into the world? Ruiz-Sanchez wondered. Certainly his native Peru sang no such song…