American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (62 page)

“The term assumes that the embryo is passing through the various stages of evolution which brought life from the singlecelled organism to man, but on a contracted time scale. There is a point, for instance, in the development of the fetus when it has gills, though it never uses them. It has a tail almost to the very end of its time in the womb, and rarely it still has it when it is born; and the tail-wagging muscle, the pubococcygeus, persists in the adult—in women it becomes transformed into the contractile ring around the vestibule. The circulatory system of the fetus in the last month is still reptilian, and if it fails to be completely transformed before birth, the infant emerges as a ‘blue baby’ with patent ductus arteriosus, the tetralogy of Fallot, or a similar heart defect which allows venous blood to mix with arterial—which is the rule with terrestrial reptiles. And so on.”

“I see,” Agronski said. “It’s a familiar idea; I just didn’t recognize the term. I had no idea that the correspondence was that close either, come to think of it.”

“Well, the Lithians, too, go through this series of metamorphoses as they grow up, but they go through it
outside
the bodies of their mothers. This whole planet is one huge womb. The Lithian female lays her eggs in her abdominal pouch, the eggs are fertilized, and then she goes to the sea to give birth to her children. What she bears is not a miniature of the marvelously evolved reptile which is the adult Lithian; far from it: instead, she hatches a fish, rather like a lamprey. The fish lives in the sea a while, and then develops rudimentary lungs and comes to live along the shore lines. Once it’s stranded on the flats by the tides, the lungfish’s pectoral fins become simple legs, and it squirms away through the mud, changing into an amphibian and learning to endure the rigors of living away from the sea. Gradually their limbs become stronger, and better set on their bodies, and they become the big froglike things we sometimes see down the hill, leaping in the moonlight, trying to get away from the crocodiles.

“Many of them do get away. They carry their habit of leaping with them into the jungle, and there they change once again, into the small, kangaroo-like reptiles we’ve all seen, fleeing from us among the trees—the things we called the ‘hoppers.’ The last change is circulatory—from the sauropsid blood system which still permits some mixing of venous and arterial blood, to the pteropsid system we see in Earthly birds, which supplies nothing to the brain but oxygenated arterial blood. At about the same time, they become homeostatic and homeothermic, as mammals are. Eventually, they emerge, fully grown, from the jungles, and take their places among the folk of the cities as young Lithians, ready for education.

“But they have
already
learned every trick of every environment that their world has to offer. Nothing is left them to learn but their own civilization; their instincts are fully matured, fully under control; their rapport with nature on Lithia is absolute; their adolescence is passed and can’t distract their intellects—they are ready to become social beings in every possible sense.”

Michelis locked his hands together again in an agony of quiet excitement, and looked up at Ruiz-Sanchez.

“But that—that’s a discovery beyond price!” he whispered. “Ramon, that alone is worth our trip to Lithia. What a stunning, elegant—what a
beautiful
sequence—and what a brilliant piece of analysis!”

“It is very elegant,” Ruiz-Sanchez said dispiritedly. “He who would damn us often gives us gracefulness. It is not the same thing as Grace.”

“But is it as serious as all that?” Michelis said, his voice charged with urgency. “Ramon, surely your Church can’t object to it in any way. Your theorists accepted recapitulation in the human embryo, and also the geological record that showed the same process in action over longer spans of time. Why not this?”

“The Church accepts facts, as it always accepts facts,” RuizSanchez said. “But—as you yourself suggested hardly ten minutes ago—facts have a way of pointing in several different directions at once. The Church is as hostile to the doctrine of evolution—particularly to that part of it which deals with the descent of man—as it ever was, and with good reason.”

“Or with obdurate stupidity,” Cleaver said.

“I confess that I haven’t followed the ins and outs of all this,” Michelis said. “What is the present position?”

“There are really two positions. You may assume that man evolved as the evidence attempts to suggest that he did, and that somewhere along the line God intervened and infused a soul; this the Church regards as a tenable position, but does not endorse it, because historically it has led to cruelty to animals, who are also creations of God. Or, you may assume that the soul evolved along with the body; this view the Church entirely condemns. But these positions are not important, at least not in this company, compared with the fact that the Church thinks
the evidence itself
to be highly dubious.”

“Why?” Michelis said.

“Well, the Diet of Basra is hard to summarize in a few words, Mike; I hope you’ll look it up when you get home. It’s not exactly recent—it met in 1995, as I recall. In the meantime, look at the question very simply, with the original premises of the Scriptures in mind. If we assume that God created man, just for the sake of argument, did He create him perfect? I see no reason to suppose that He would have bothered with any lesser work. Is a man perfect without a navel? I don’t know, but I’d be inclined to say that he isn’t. Yet the first man—Adam, again for the sake of argument—wasn’t born of woman, and so didn’t really
need
to have a navel. Did he have one? All the great painters of the Creation show him with one: I’d say that their theology was surely as sound as their aesthetics.”

“What does that prove?” Cleaver said.

“That the geological record, and recapitulation too, do not necessarily prove the doctrine of the descent of man. Given
my
initial axiom, which is that God created everything from scratch, it’s perfectly logical that he should have given Adam a navel, Earth a geological record, and the embryo the process of recapitulation. None of these need indicate a real past; all might be there because the creations involved would have been imperfect otherwise.”

“Wow,” Cleaver said. “And I used to think that Haertel relativity was abstruse.”

“Oh, that’s not a new argument by any means, Paul; it dates back nearly two centuries—a man named Gosse invented it, not the Diet of Basra. Anyhow, any system of thought becomes abstruse if it’s examined long enough. I don’t see why my belief in a God you can’t accept is any more rarefied than Mike’s vision of the atom as a-hole-inside-a-hole-through-a-hole. I expect that in the long run, when we get right down to the fundamental stuff of the universe, we’ll find that there’s nothing there at all—just no-things moving no-place through notime. On the day that that happens, I’ll have God and you will not—otherwise there’ll be no difference between us.

“But in the meantime, what we have here on Lithia is very clear indeed. We have—and now I’m prepared to be blunt—a planet and a people propped up by the Ultimate Enemy. It is a gigantic trap prepared for all of us—for every man on Earth and off it. We can do nothing with it but reject it, nothing but say to it,
Retro me, Sathanas
. If we compromise with it in any way, we are damned.”

“Why, Father?” Michelis said quietly.

“Look at the premises, Mike.
One:
Reason is always a sufficient guide.
Two:
The self-evident is always the real.
Three:
Good works are an end in themselves.
Four:
Faith is irrelevant to right action.
Five:
Right action can exist without love.
Six:
Peace need not pass understanding.
Seven:
Ethics can exist without evil alternatives.
Eight:
Morals can exist without conscience.
Nine:
Goodness can exist without God.
Ten
—but do I really need to go on? We have heard all these propositions before, and we know What proposes them.”

“A question,” Michelis said, and his voice was painfully gentle. “To set such a trap, you must allow your Adversary to be creative. Isn’t that—a heresy, Ramon? Aren’t you now subscribing to a heretical belief? Or did the Diet of Basra—”

For a moment, Ruiz-Sanchez could not answer. The question cut to the heart. Michelis had found the priest out in the full agony of his defection, his belief betrayed, and he in full betrayal of his Church. He had hoped that it would not happen so soon.

“It is a heresy,” he said at last, his voice like iron. “It is called Manichaeanism, and the Diet did not readmit it.” He swallowed. “But since you ask, Mike, I do not see how we can avoid it now. I do not do this gladly, Mike, but we have seen these demonstrations before. The demonstration, for instance, in the rocks —the one that was supposed to show how the horse evolved from Eohippus, but which somehow never managed to convince the whole of mankind. If the Adversary
is
creative, there is at least some divine limitation that rules that Its creations be maimed. Then came the discovery of intra-uterine recapitulation, which was to have clinched the case for the descent of man. That one failed because the Adversary put it into the mouth of a man named Haeckel, who was so rabid an atheist that he took to faking the evidence to make the case still more convincing. Nevertheless, despite their flaws, these were both very subtle arguments, but the Church is not easily swayed; it is founded on a rock.

“But now we have, on Lithia, a new demonstration, both the subtlest and at the same time the crudest of all. It will sway many people who could have been swayed in no other way, and who lack the intelligence or the background to understand that it is a rigged demonstration. It seems to show us evolution in action on an inarguable scale. It is supposed to settle the question once and for all, to rule God out of the picture, to snap the chains that have held Peter’s rock together all these many centuries. Henceforth there is to be no more question; henceforth there is to be no more God, but only phenomenology—and, of course, behind the scenes, within the hole that’s inside the hole that’s through a hole, the Great Nothing itself, the Thing that has never learned any word but
No
since it was cast flaming from heaven. It has many other names, but we know the name that counts. That will be all that’s left us.

“Paul, Mike, Agronski, I have nothing more to say than this: We are all of us standing on the brink of Hell. By the grace of God, we may still turn back. We must turn back—for I at least think that this is our last chance.”

The vote was cast, and that was that. The commission was tied, and the question would be thrown open again in higher echelons on Earth, which would mean tying Lithia up for years to come.
Proscripted area pending further study.
The planet was now, in effect, on the Index Expurgatorius.

The ship arrived the next day. The crew was not much surprised to find that the two opposing factions of the commission were hardly speaking to each other. It often happened that way.

The four commission members cleaned up in almost complete silence the house in Xoredeshch Sfath that the Lithians had given them. Ruiz-Sanchez packed the dark blue book with the gold stamping without being able to look at it except out of the corner of his eye, but even obliquely he could not help seeing its long-familiar title:

FINNEGANS WAKE

James Joyce

So much for his pride in his solution of the case of conscience the novel proposed. He felt as though he himself had been collated, bound and stamped, a tortured human text for future generations of Jesuits to explicate and argue.

He had rendered the verdict he had found it necessary for him to render. But he knew that it was not a final verdict, even for himself, and certainly not for the UN, let alone the Church. Instead, the verdict itself would be a knotty question for members of his Order yet unborn:

Did Father Ruiz-Sanchez correctly interpret the Divine case, and did this ruling, if so, follow from it?

Except, of course, that they would not use his name—but what good would it do them to use an alias? Surely there would never be any way to disguise the original of
this
problem. Or was that pride again—or misery? It had been Mephistopheles himself who had said,
Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris
. . .

“Let’s go, Father. It’ll be take-off time shortly.”

“All ready, Mike.”

It was only a short journey to the clearing, where the mighty spindle of the ship stood ready to weave its way back through the geodesics of deep space to the sun that shone on Peru. There was even some sunlight here, piercing now and then through low, scudding clouds; but it had been raining all morning, and would begin again soon enough.

The baggage went on board smoothly and without any fuss. So did the specimens, the films, the tapes, the special reports, the recordings, the sample cases, the slide boxes, the vivariums, the type cultures, the pressed plants, the animal cages, the tubes of soil, the chunks of ore, the Lithian manuscripts in their atmospheres of helium—everything was lifted decorously by the cranes and swung inside.

Agronski went up the cleats to the air lock first, with Michelis following him, a barracks bag slung over one shoulder. On the ground Cleaver was stowing some last-minute bit of gear, something that seemed to require delicate, almost reverent bedding down before the cranes could be allowed to take it in their indifferent grip; Cleaver was fanatically motherly about his electronic apparatus. Ruiz-Sanchez took advantage of the delay to look around once more at the near margins of the forest.

At once, he saw Chtexa. The Lithian was standing at the entrance to the path the Earthmen themselves had taken from the city to reach the ship. He was carrying something.

Cleaver swore under his breath and undid something he had just done to do it in another way. Ruiz-Sanchez raised his hand. Immediately Chtexa walked toward the ship, in great loping strides which nevertheless seemed almost leisurely.