The Judas Rose Read online

  “Well, what does Chornyak propose that we should do about it, at this late date?”

  Bellena shrugged, trim and handsome and larger than life on the comset screen of the desk. And apparently quite comfortable. Heykus knew how much could be learned from the most minute details of a caller’s expression and posture and movement; he insisted on the very best, and the largest possible, comset screens. It was not something he was frugal about, and people who called him personally were usually aware of the kind of scrutiny they would be getting. Bellena was sufficiently relaxed, under the circumstances, to give Heykus the impression that he was telling the entire truth as he perceived it. And Heykus wasn’t easily fooled. He’d been sitting in on linguistics classes at Georgetown for many years; he’d been a member of the Linguistics Society of America before it changed its name to Language Scientists of America to escape the prejudice against the linguists of the Lines. He was no linguist, but he was as expert in the swift analysis of nonverbal communication as any layman in Washington.

  “He wants us to authorize a transfer for her,” Bellena said.

  “Where?”

  “Well, not to another federal installation. He thinks she’s had more than her share of that. He wants to move her to Chornyak Barren House—that barn they maintain for their barren women. Hame would have the company of other adult women there. She could do routine housework, help in their effing vegetable gardens, that kind of thing. They’d be kind to her, Heykus.”

  “Can we risk that?” Clete demanded, and his question was abrupt enough to get past the younger man’s polite attempts to avoid causing his superior any loss of face. Bellena looked more than a little surprised, and his voice matched his expression.

  “What risk is there?” he asked, obviously puzzled. “How could there be any risk? She’s just like the tubies we Interfaced, Heykus, except that she survived puberty. She has no language. None.”

  “None at all? Are you absolutely sure of that?” Heykus was disgusted with himself; he should have kept track of this.

  “None whatsoever,” Bellena repeated firmly. “Even if she remembered what happened to her—which is impossible, since she was only a baby—even if she did, she couldn’t tell anybody about it.”

  Heykus let his breath out slowly, and sighed. He didn’t like this; it was careless, and unnecessary.

  “I see,” he said. “This is a sad situation, John.”

  “Yes, it is,” Bellena agreed. “And I’m ashamed of it. We just forgot all about her, and there’s no excuse for that. We should have taken her out of the federal orphanage forty years ago and made some sort of decent provision for her.”

  “You’re mighty charitable with that ‘we,’ ” Heykus observed, “considering that you had nothing to do with putting her there. It’s not something you could be blamed for.”

  “The information is right there in the GW databanks. I’ve reviewed all that data a thousand times. I should have known. I did know—that mess was one of the first things I was briefed on when I came aboard here. I forgot, Heykus, just like everybody else did. And I’m not completely heartless; if I’d remembered, I would have protested. She’s not an animal, she’s a human being, and her life must be unspeakably dreary at The Maples. God . . . what an ugly thing.”

  Heykus paused a moment, tapping his lower lip gently with one fingertip, watching Bellena. The man’s regret seemed genuine, more than just conventional good manners, and that was a little bit unusual. True, Hame was a human being and she’d had a bad time of it. But it wasn’t as if she’d ever been deprived of any of the necessities of life. Like every other Terran child, she would always have been provided with ample food and housing and education and medical care, always safeguarded against accident or peril of any kind. Bellena must be a married man, with a satisfactory wife, and children he was fond of.

  “John,” he said carefully, “I agree with you that this is unfortunate. Like most of what GW has to deal with, it seems to be a mess. It got past us somehow, and it shouldn’t have—you’re quite right. But I’m not sure that we ought to transfer the woman into a household of linguist females. Isn’t that using a hasty wrong to make a very tardy right?”

  “Hame’s not a child, sir,” Bellena pointed out. “It’s not as if she were a child, or even a young woman. What harm can they do to a woman her age, who has no language? Heykus, she couldn’t live alone, she has to be somewhere where she can be looked after and cared for. And the linguists apparently want her.”

  “To experiment on.”

  The man from Government Work shook his head sharply.

  “That’s the first thing we thought of,” he said. “And we pinned Chornyak down hard. He reminded us that Selena Hame is long past the age of language acquisition. They might have tried something forty years ago, for all I know, but they wouldn’t waste their time that way now. They’re too busy, and it’s too late.”

  “You really feel that it would be a good thing, don’t you, John?” Heykus found the young man’s concern downright touching. He would make a note of it, just in case.

  “Yes, I do. She ought to be out of there. Hell, Heykus, she’s never been away from the orphanage, never even been off the grounds. She ought to have some life! Now that we’ve had the situation called to our attention, we have to make some kind of arrangements. We can’t pretend we don’t know about it. And the linguists know just enough of her history—we won’t have to work up a false identity for her, or anything like that. Nobody from outside the Lines ever goes into their houses—no worries there, either. It’s an ideal solution under the circumstances. I think we ought to do it.”

  Heykus could see what he was getting at, but he disliked the idea of giving in to the Lines on an issue like this. It set an undesirable precedent.

  “What happens,” he asked, “if we don’t do it?”

  “If we don’t do it, the Chornyaks are sure to try some kind of publicity tactic to force us to. I suggest we move on this before they start something, but I’d like to do it quietly—without going through forty different bureaus and spreading the word around. That’s why I called you.”

  “Would they talk, John? Could they do that without revealing their own participation in the project?”

  John Bellena stiffened, and he stared openly right at Heykus Clete. He didn’t have a comset image like the one Heykus was looking at, he had the standard fuzzy Civil Service equipment, but he could see his man. “Heykus,” he asked deliberately, “do you understand Lingoes?”

  “No. Of course I don’t.” It was a lie Heykus considered justified, and knew to be prudent.

  “Well, neither do I. And neither does anybody else I know, including all the world’s eggdomes laid end to end. I’m not prepared to say that the Lines couldn’t find a way to put out some kind of twisted news story, something that would fry us nicely while it left them clear. That’s just words, Heykus. That’s what they do. Better than anybody else alive. If you want to chance it, you just give me the order and I’ll say nothing more about it. I’ll tell them they can’t have Hame, and we’ll work out some alternative arrangement for her. But it’s not something I’m prepared to do without authority from the top.”

  Heykus nodded. Slowly and reluctantly, but he nodded. Bellena was right. After you’d had a few chances to experience the obscenely clever ways of linguists, with only language as their implement, you learned that it could be quicker and less painful to just step out an airlock.

  “All right,” he said, then. “If you don’t think they’ll make some kind of fuss no matter what we do.”

  “They were very specific about it. If we let them have the woman to look after, they’ll drop the matter. They think we’re complete bastards—with good reason, I have to admit—and they just want to get this settled and go on about their business.

  “It’s not worth fooling around with,” Heykus concluded. It was too trivial an issue to challenge the Lines about, precedent or no precedent. Better not to give them the impre
ssion that the government saw it as anything more than trivial.

  “No, it’s not. Not in any way.”

  “Do it, then,” said Heykus, his mind made up. The men of the Lines would make careful notes somewhere in the bowels of their computers; someday in the future a time would come when this knuckling under would be brought out and dangled as a reason for something else that he could not now predict. But he would deal with that when it happened. Or his successor would. It had been many decades since the nonsense about an obligatory retirement age for government employees had been struck down, but Heykus knew he could not go on forever. And the Lingoes had long memories, and an awesome patience.

  “Thank you, Heykus. I don’t mind telling you I’m relieved.”

  “Do you need anything official from me?”

  “No, we can handle it. We, too, can fill out forms. But I wanted your verbal approval before we bypassed all the usual guardianship protocols.”

  “You’ve got it. And I’m glad you called me. How fast can you move on this?”

  Bellena smiled for the first time, and Heykus noted that it was one of those smiles usually referred to as boyish; he hadn’t been aware of that before. He would send a memo advising the young man to do something about that; it wasn’t appropriate to his position.

  “We’ll have Hame at Chornyak Barren House by tomorrow morning. She has to have a routine medical first, or we’d send her today.”

  “Good work, John. But use a medrobot. We don’t want any live med-Sammys involved in this and asking us strange questions.”

  “Absolutely. You can count on it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. I’ll let you get back to your work.”

  The screen went dark, and Clete sat quietly, reading the fiz-status display across its base. John Bellena’s pulse, heartbeat, blood pressure, electrolyte balance, and both output and composition of sweat, were boringly normal. Which did no more than confirm Clete’s expectations. Bellena was a good man, and a loyal one. Not a zealous Christian, but a decent churchgoing man. Heykus remembered now; there was a Mrs. Bellena. A dowdy blonde female always acompanied by a pair of pallid little blonde daughters. Bellena was reliable and steady, and the physical status check was superfluous.

  But Heykus never dispensed with the status check. That was the way careless mistakes were made. That was how people under pressures you knew nothing about were left in place to do mischief. If Bellena called him ten times today, Heykus would read the fiz-display every single time. It was particularly important when the caller was from Government Work. A GW man had a lot more reasons to go round the bend in a basket than your average bureaucrat. Heykus believed in keeping a very close eye on the people from GW.

  As for Selena Opal Hame. . . . He thought about it, and then he turned to his keyboard to call up the relevant data. He was still annoyed that he’d forgotten about her; he wouldn’t forget again; and he’d flag the file to see that he got regular reports hereafter.

  And when he had finished picking the computer’s brains for what it knew about Hame, he was going to see what he could find out about how that handsome three-planet cluster had been picked off by the Soviets without so much as a warning note coming through his desk. His staff knew damn well he was especially interested in three-planet clusters. He should have been alerted that the Soviets were poking around, and he was going to find out why he hadn’t been. And if somebody had been neglecting his duties, he was going to find himself on Heykus’ carpet before the morning was over. There was no room in Heykus’ life for incompetence, not his or anybody else’s. When the work you do is God’s work, you don’t have to accept anybody’s excuses, and you don’t have any for yourself.

  Because he was a man of more than average intelligence and good sense, born canny and born wary, Heykus had never been tempted to tell anyone about the angel. He had lived with the secret more than half a century now and intended to live with it till he died. He had never had any desire to spend his life on a short chemical tether through which he could just barely realize that he was alive. Sometimes when he was very weary, it would seem to him that all the weariness had settled like a stone into the place in his consciousness occupied by the secret about the angel; at such times Heykus went to the wilderness with a bubble tent and ruffitpack, all alone, and stayed until the fit had passed. Even then, the temptation he felt was a longing to share the message, not its source. Never its source.

  He had been in his third year at the United Reformed Baptist Seminary in Tulsa when the angel appeared to him. He had been the apple of his various professors’ eyes. A brilliant young man, personable and charming, devout but in no way womanish, passionate in his fervor for the Savior, with a gift for the pulpit and an effortless knack for power . . . a charismatic young preacher-candidate who would do the seminary and its faculty proud, well into the future; that was how they had seen him. They had expected him to be a new Billy Graham, a new Marcus Graynje, a new Clark Ndala; they had expected him to set the Earth afire with love for the Word, and to inspire missionaries who would in their turn set the Earth’s colonies afire with that same love. He had been precious to them in every way, and he had returned their regard. He had loved the seminary and everything about it; every last detail had been as pleasing to him as if it had been designed precisely to his specifications.

  That was until the angel came. On a night when, praise God, Heykus’ roommate had gone home for the weekend and he was alone in his room. He had been studying; he suspected that the roommate’s departure had been an attempt to get away from the intolerable example of his constant studying, which tended to be so intense that Heykus forgot about both food and sleep.

  He could still see that angel after a fashion, in his mind’s eye; it was a funny kind of seeing, for which he had no words. That is, although it seemed to him that he could still see it, and that in some portion of his mind he could still gaze at it straight on, there was no way he could have said what it looked like. Not because he didn’t have words—Heykus had no patience at all with the claims of “mystics” who pleaded that they saw things for which there were no words—but as if something were wrong with his eyes, or with the connection between his eyes and his brain. As if his eyes somehow could not add up what he was seeing. He thought it must be something like looking at a foreign language written down, and recognizing it as a language but not being able to read it.

  He had no such perceptual problems with the angel’s voice. To this day, he could hear it as clearly as if it still spoke, and he remembered every word with total fidelity. It was that voice that had sent him home from the seminary with only his Bachelor’s in theology, instead of the Professor of Divinity degree that had been planned for him. It was that voice that had sent him into the State Department and eventually into the Department of Analysis & Translation, instead of into the ministry.

  It had broken his mother’s heart . . . like so many women, she was overly and blatantly religious, and she had been so childishly proud when she’d thought he would be a great preacher. His father, on the other hand, had been delighted. He would have supported his son’s choice of a religious career and had been prepared to do so. But he made no secret of his pleasure when Heykus changed his mind and took the more manly route of diplomacy and administration instead of the church. As for the professors at the seminary—for a while Heykus had thought there would never be an end to their opposition to his change of plans. First there had been the open pleading, and all the outpouring about the waste of his talents; then there had been more subtle pressures; finally there had been some dirty tricks that had shocked him at the time, in his youthful perception of the clergy as composed entirely of martyrs and saints. The ministry was not the most highly regarded profession in the United States, but neither was it despised, and he learned that influential clergymen had a surprising number of strings they could pull when something mattered to them. But Heykus had ignored it all, and had dealt with the dirty tricks as effo
rtlessly as he had dealt with such frivolities as food and sleep, and in time they had given it up and let him get on with his life. He had never explained to anyone; the angel had forbidden him to.

  “Heykus Joshua Clete,” the angel had said to him, “hear my words and know that they are the words of Almighty God; know that I am a messenger of the Divine Word, That raised up all the worlds and everything that is within them. Hear me!” Heykus had heard most clearly; he had fallen to his knees and listened to every word that came from the glorious unseeable being that he somehow saw nonetheless. Mankind, the angel had said, were being let out of their cradle; not because they were ready for such freedom but because they seemed otherwise determined to destroy themselves and because they had persisted in misinterpreting the Holy Scriptures.

  The Second Coming was indeed at hand, the angel had said. But “at hand” meant something quite different to God than it did to man, and there was still time for a great work that had not yet even been begun. There was still time—time before Armageddon, time before Christ came trailing clouds of glory to gather in His beloved children in the last rapture—there was still time for the new holy work of carrying the Good News out to all other worlds. Countless billions of souls beyond this little Earth, the angel said to him, were still condemned to outer darkness because they had not accepted the Good News; there was time, the angel said, to save those souls, as many of them as would hear the message and believe and come forward to join the ranks of the blessed! Mankind ought to have started this great work long before, the angel had thundered, making Heykus tremble; but they had persisted instead in the folly of little toy wars on their nursery planet, squandering all their substance on meaningless nonsense instead of moving on to do the holy work that was God’s plan.