Blish,James - A Case of Conscience

A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

A Case of Conscience,

by James Blish

[online version, v1.0]

I schal declare the disposcioun of rome fro hys

first makyng . . . 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

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

The beginning of this novel first appeared in abridged form as "A Case of Conscience," in IF

First Printing: April, 1958

Second Printing: January, 1966

Third Printing: July, 1972

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-8569

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

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.

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

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

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

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 laboratory. 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."

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

"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

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

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.'"

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

"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!

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

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 planet 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...

Qualms of conscience--these were, in the long run, his essential business, rather than the

taxonomical mazes of biology, which had already become tangled into near-hopelessness on

Earth before space flight had come along to add whole new layers of labyrinths for each planet,

new dimensions of labyrinths for each star. It was only interesting that the Lithians were bipedal,

evolved from reptiles, with marsupial-like pouches and pteropsid circulatory systems. But it was

vital that they had qualms of conscience--if they did.

The calendar caught his eye. It was an "art" calendar Cleaver had produced from his luggage

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back in the beginning; the girl on it was now unintentionally modest beneath large patches of

brilliant orange mold. The date was April 19, 2049. Almost Easter--the most pointed of reminders

that to the inner life, the body was only a garment. To Ruiz-Sanchez personally, however, the

year date was almost equally significant, for 2050 was to be a Holy Year.

The Church had returned to the ancient custom, first recognized officially in 1300 by Boniface

VIII, of proclaiming the great pardon only once every half-century. If Ruiz-Sanchez was not in

Rome next year when the Holy Door was opened, it would never be opened again in his lifetime.

Hurry, hurry! some personal demon whispered inside his brain. Or was it the voice of his own

conscience? Were his sins already so burdensome--unknown to himself--as to put him in mortal

need of the pilgrimage? Or was that, in turn, only a minor temptation, to the sin of pride?

In any event, the work could not be hurried. He and the other three men were on Lithia to decide

whether or not the planet would be suitable as a port of call for Earth, without risk of damage

either to Earthmen or to Lithians. The other three men on the commission were primarily

scientists, as was Ruiz-Sanchez; but he knew that his own recommendation would in the long run

depend upon conscience, not upon taxonomy.

And conscience, like creation, cannot be hurried. It cannot even be scheduled.

He looked down at the still-imperfect jungle suit with a troubled face until he heard Cleaver

moan. Then he arose and left the room to the softly hissing flames.

From the oval front window of the house to which Qeaver and Ruiz-Sanchez had been assigned,

the land slanted away with insidious gentleness toward the ill-defined south edge of Lower Bay, a

part of the Gulf of Sfath. Most of the area was salt marsh, as was the seaside nearly everywhere

on Lithia. When the tide was in, the flats were covered to a depth of a yard or so almost half the

way to the house. When it was out, as it was tonight, the jungle symphony was augmented by the

agonized barking of a species of lungfish, sometimes as many as a score of them at once.

Occasionally, when the small moon was unoccluded and the light from the city was unusually

bright, one could see the leaping shadow of some amphibian, or the sinuously advancing sigmoid

track of the Lithian crocodile, in pursuit of some prey faster than itself but which it would

nonetheless capture in its own geological good time.

Still farther--and usually invisible even in daytime because of the pervasive mists--was the

opposite shore of Lower Bay, beginning with tidal flats again, and then more jungle, which ran

unbroken thereafter for hundreds of miles north to the equatorial sea.

Behind the house, visible from the sleeping room, was the rest of the city, Xoredeshch Sfath,

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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish

capital of the great southern continent. As was the case in all the cities the Lithians built, its most

striking characteristic to an Earthman was that it hardly seemed to be there at all. The Lithian

houses were low, and made of the earth which had been dug from their foundations, so that they

tended to fade into the soil even to a trained observer.

Most of the older buildings were rectangular, put together without mortar or rammed-earth

blocks. Over the course of decades the blocks continued to pack and settle themselves until it

became easier to abandon an unwanted building than to tear it down. One of the first setbacks the

Earthmen had suffered on Lithia had come about through Agronski's ill-advised offer to raze one

such structure with TDX; this was a gravity-polarized explosive, unknown to the Lithians, which

had the property of exploding in a flat plane which could cut through steel girders as if they were

cheese. The warehouse in question, however, was large, thick-walled, and three Lithian centuries

old--312 years by Earth time. The explosion created an uproar which greatly distressed the

Lithians, but when it was over, the storehouse still stood, unshaken.

Newer structures were more conspicuous when the sun was out, for just during the past half-

century the Lithians had begun to apply their enormous knowledge of ceramics to house

construction. The new houses assumed thousands of fantastic, quasi-biological shapes, not quite

amorphous but not quite resembling any form in experience, either; they looked a little like the

dream constructions once made by an Earth painter named Dali out of such materials as boiled

beans. Each one was unique and to the choice of its owner, yet all markedly shared the character

of the community and the earth from which they sprang. These houses, too, would have blended

well with the background of soil and jungle, except that most of them were glazed and so shone

blindingly for brief moments on sunny days, when the light and the angle of observation were

just right. These shifting coruscations, seen from the air, had been the Earthmen's first clue as to

where the intelligent life was hiding in the ubiquitous Lithian jungle. (There had never been any

doubt that there was intelligent life there; the tremendous radio pulses emanating from the planet

had made that much plain from afar.)

Ruiz-Sanchez looked out through the sleeping-room window at the city, for at least the ten

thousandth time, on his way to Cleaver's hammock. Xoredeshch Sfath was alive to him; it never

looked the same twice. He found it singularly beautiful. And singularly strange: though the cities

of Earth were very various, none was like this.

He checked Cleaver's pulse and respiration. Both were fast, even for Lithia, where a high partial

pressure of carbon dioxide raised the pH of the blood of Earthmen and stimulated the breathing

reflex. The priest judged, however, that Cleaver was in little danger as long as his actual oxygen

utilization was not increased. At the moment he was certainly sleeping deeply--if not very

restfully--and it would do no harm to leave him alone for a little while.

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Blish, James - A Case of Conscience

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