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"Thank you, Mike. All right, here we go. This planet is what I think is called
in English 'a set-up.'
Let me describe it for you briefly as I see it, or rather as I've come to see
it.
"Lithia is a paradise. It has resemblances to a number of other planets, but
the closest correspondence is to the Earth in its pre-Adamic period, before
the coming of the first glaciers.
The resemblance ends there, because on Lithia the glaciers never came, and
life continued to be spent in the paradise, as it was not allowed to do on
Earth."
"Myths," Cleaver said sourly.
"I use the terms with which I'm most familiar; strip off those terms and what
I am saying is still a fact that all of you know to be true. We find here a
completely mixed forest, with plants that fall from one end of the creative
spectrum to the other living side by side in perfect amity, cycad with
cycladella, giant horsetail with flowering; trees. To a great extent that's
also true of the animals.
The lion doesn't lie down with the lamb here because Lithia has neither
animal, but as an allegory the phrase is apt. Parasitism occurs rather less
often on Lithia than it does on Earth, and there are very few carnivores of
any sort except in the sea. Almost all of the surviving land animals eat
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plants only, and by a neat arrangement which is typically Lithian, the plants
are admirably set up to attack animals rather than each other.
"It's an unusual ecology, and one of the strangest things about it is its
rationality, its extreme, almost single-minded insistence upon one-for-one
relationships. In one respect it looks almost as though somebody had arranged
the whole planet as a ballet about Mengenlehre--the theory of aggregates.
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish
"Now, in this paradise we have a dominant creature, the Lithian, the man of
Lithia. This creature is rational. It conforms, as if naturally and without
constraint or guidance, to the highest ethical code we have evolved on Earth.
It needs no laws to enforce this code. Somehow, everyone obeys it as a matter
of course, although it has never even been written down. There are no
criminals, no deviates, no aberrations of any kind. The people are not
standardized--our own very bad and partial answer to the ethical dilemma--but
instead are highly individual. They choose their own life courses without
constraint--yet somehow no antisocial act of any kind is ever committed.
There isn't even any word for such an act in the Lithian language."
The recorder made a soft, piercing pip of sound, announcing that it was
threading a new tape. The enforced pause would last about eight seconds, and
on a sudden inspiration, Ruiz-Sanchez put it to use. On the next pip, he said:
"Mike, let me stop here and ask you a question. What does this suggest to you,
thus far?"
"Why, just what I've said before that it suggested," Michelis said slowly. "An
enormously superior social science, evidently founded in a precise system of
psychogenetics. I should think that would be more than enough."
"Very well, I'll go on. I felt as you did, at first. Then I came to ask myself
some correlative questions. For instance: How does it happen that the Lithians
not only have no deviates--think of that, no deviates!--but that the code by
which they live so perfectly is, point for point, the code we strive to obey?
If that just happened, it was by the uttermost of all coincidences. Consider,
please, the imponderables involved. Even on Earth we have never known a
society which evolved independently exactly the same precepts as the Christian
precepts--by which I mean to include the Mosaic. Oh, there were some
duplications of doctrine, enough to encourage the twentieth century's
partiality toward synthetic religions like theosophism and Hollywood Vedanta,
but no ethical system on Earth that grew up independently of Christianity
agreed with it point for point.
Not Mithraism, not Islam, not the Essenes--not even these, which influenced or
were influenced by Christianity, were in good agreement with it in the matter
of ethics.
"And yet here on Lithia, fifty light-years away from Earth and among a race as
unlike man as man is unlike the kangaroos, what do we find? A Christian
people, lacking nothing but the specific proper names and the symbolic
appurtenances of Christianity. I don't know how you three react to this, but I
found it extraordinary and indeed completely impossible--mathematically
impossible--under any assumption but one. I'll get to that assumption in a
moment."
"You can't get there any too soon for me," Cleaver said morosely. "How a man
can stand fifty light-years from home in deep space and talk such parochial
nonsense is beyond my
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A Case Of Conscience, by James Blish comprehension."
"Parochial?" Ruiz-Sanchez said, more angrily than he had intended. "Do you
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mean that what we think true on Earth is automatically made suspect just by
the fact of its removal into deep space? I
beg to remind you, Paul, that quantum mechanics seem to hold good on Lithia,
and that you see nothing parochial about behaving as if it does. If I believe
in Peru that God created and still rules the universe, I see nothing parochial
in my continuing to believe it on Lithia. You brought your parish with you; so
did I. This has been willed where what is willed must be." As always, the
great phrase shook him to the heart. But it was obvious that it meant nothing
to anyone else in the room; were such men hopeless? No, no. That Gate could
never slam behind them while they lived, no matter how the hornets buzzed for
them behind the deviceless banner. Hope was with them yet.
"A while back I thought I had been provided an escape hatch, incidentally," he
said. "Chtexa told me that the Lithians would like to modify the growth of
their population, and he implied that they would welcome some form of birth
control. But, as it turns out, birth control in the sense that the
Church interdicts it is impossible to Lithia, and what Chtexa had in mind was
obviously some form of fertility control, a proposition to which the Church
gave its qualified assent many decades ago. So there I was, even on this small
point forced again to realize that we had found on
Lithia the most colossal rebuke to our aspirations that we had ever
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