Case of Conscience by James Blish

Author:James Blish
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: SciFi-Masterwork
ISBN: 9780345438355
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1957-12-31T14:00:00+00:00

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XII

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Egtverchi's coming-out party was held at the underground mansion of Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, a fact which greatly complicated the already hysterical life of Aristide, the countess' caterer. Ordinarily, such a party would have presented Aristide with no problems reaching far beyond the technical ones with which he was already familiar, and used to drive the staff to that frantic peak which he regarded as the utmost in efficiency; but planning for the additional presence of a ten-foot monster was an affront to his conscience as well as to his artistry.

Aristide—born Michel di Giovanni in the timeless brutal peasantry of un-Sheltered Sicily—was a dramatist who knew well the intricate stage upon which he had to work. The count's New York mansion was many levels deep. The part of it in which the party was being held protruded one storey above the surface of Manhattan, as though the buried part of the city were coming out of hibernation—or not quite finished digging in for it. The structure had been a carbarn, Aristide had discovered, a dismal block-square red brick building which had been put up in 1887 when cable street cars had been the newest and most hopeful addition to the city's circulatory system. The trolley tracks, with their middle division for the cable grips, were still there in the asphalt floor, with only a superficial coating of rust—steel does not rust appreciably in less than two centuries. In the center of the top storey was a huge old steam elevator with a basketwork shaft, which had once been used to tower the trolley cars below ground for storage. There were more tracks in the basement and sub-basement, whose elaborate switches led toward the segments of rail in the huge elevator cab. Aristide had been stunned when he first encountered this underlying blueprint, but he had promptly put it to good use.

The countess' parties, thanks to his genius, were now confined in their most formal phase to the uppermost of these three levels, but Aristide had installed a serpentine of fourteen two-chair cars which wound its way sedately along the trolley tracks, picking up as passengers those who were already bored with nothing but chatter and drinking, and rumbled onto the elevator to be taken down—with a great hissing and a cloud of rising steam, for the countess was a stickler for surface authenticity in antiques—to the next level, where presumably more interesting things were happening. As a dramatist, Aristide also knew his audience: it was his job to provide that whatever was seen on the next levels was more interesting than what had been going on above. And he knew his dramatis personae, too: he knew more about the countess' regular guests than they knew about themselves, and much of his knowledge would have been decidedly destructive had he been the talkative type. Aristide, however, was an artist; he did not bribe; the notion was as unthinkable to him as plagiarism (except, of course, self-plagiarism; that was how you kept going during slumps.

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