The Judas Rose Page 6

  Clete had glared fiercely at Kony, and had spoken in a long rush of angry words. “They’re technologically centuries beyond us. They have humanoid brains. They speak humanoid languages. I don’t believe that they don’t know when a sequence of utterances is meaningless!”

  Kony had sighed, too worn out with it all to care very much.

  “Mr. Clete,” he’d said, “you think about it. What if we were negotiating, you and I, with some truly primitive tribe. Say we were, out of the goodness of our superior hearts, letting this tribe have two . . . oh, I don’t know, make it two laser scalpels a year. For their medical needs. Say they want us to give them fifty, but we don’t trust them with fifty. They might cut themselves up at parties or something. We tell ’em they can have two, they ask for fifty, we say they can have two, and they whirl around three times and shout ‘Kabbakabba ding dong two three four!’ Do you really believe we’re going to stop and concern ourselves with that? We’re going to think to ourselves, ‘Hmmmm . . . some kind of primitive incantation,’ and we’re going to exchange knowing glances with one another, and then we’re going to say again, patiently, that they can have two laser scalpels.”

  “It’s like that? As bad as that?”

  “It’s like that. Always. Oh, not at the real negotiations, where the linguists are brought in and we’re working out details for something they’ve already agreed to. But in our so-called negotiations, Director, it is exactly like that.”

  Clete had sat there smacking one big fist over and over into his other palm, chewing on his bottom lip, while Kony waited. You believe you could do better, Kony thought. You think you could get through to them, make them understand we’re worth the time it would take for them to really work with us. You go right ahead and try it! But he didn’t say any of that. The old man was terrified of spaceflight; everybody knew it, but everybody pretended it was a secret. You’d never get him beyond the toddle-along commercial flightlanes, and rumor had it that Klete even had a tendency to go all white-knuckled anywhere that his own personal flyer couldn’t take him. He’d turned D.A.T. down flat when they’d offered to give him a small artificial asteroid for an operations base instead of this creaky old office in Washington.

  Eventually the silence broken only by the slow steady thud of his fist had brought Clete out of whatever state he’d drifted into; Kony did not make the mistake of assuming that it was a daydream. When Heykus Clete was thinking, you were respectful, because you could be absolutely sure that he was not thinking idle thoughts.

  “Sorry, Special Ambassador Flagg,” Clete had said finally. “I’m afraid my mind was wandering.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I was wondering. . . . You still haven’t been able to get them to tell you how the Aliens-in-Residence are selected? Whether they volunteer, or are drafted, or what?”

  “No, sir. And we have tried. They just say not to concern ourselves with such matters, and change the subject.”

  “I see. That’s not good.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You know, Flagg, I’m convinced that—even if there’s no real diplomatic interaction—it would be best to keep the title you men now use. To avoid causing comment within the Department. But if we’d realized it would be like this, we’d have chosen something that didn’t rub your nose in it. Agent. Consultant. Something like that.”

  “If we had known it would be like this, sir,” Kony had asked cautiously, “would we ever have started Interfacing at all?”

  Heykus Clete had looked shocked. “We most certainly would have!” he’d said sternly. “We had to get out into space, and we had no time to waste. We couldn’t decide we’d go by covered wagon because our feelings were hurt.”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s all, then, Flagg.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  You had to give the old man one thing (you had to give him a hell of a lot of things!); he didn’t try any of the crap about how it was going to get better and it couldn’t go on like this forever and so on and on and smarmily on. Kony appreciated that, because it was not going to get better, and it was going to go on like this, and all that Kony prayed for was that they would continue to be able to keep the lid on it. It was random good luck that the Aliens felt the same way about the confidentiality . . . they could just as well have gone on all the comsets of Earth at once, like in the ancient films, and said, “NOW HEAR THIS . . .” and blown the whole thing sky high. They chose not to do so. By random good luck. Kony would settle for that.

  He realized, finally, that Antony was discreetly nudging his boot to get his attention; this time he was the one whose mind had wandered. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. If he had fallen out of his chair and lain on the floor laughing, the Aliens would have assumed it was an exotic primitive native custom. It would not have made the least bit of difference.

  “Steady, Kony,” said his partner clearly, and Kony steadied. It was over again for six months. The national anthem began to play again, and Antony keyed in the parting utterances to the speech synthesizers, and it was time to go home to the reservation.

  It occurred to Kony for a few brief seconds then to wonder why, in his making of the list called “List,” he had never included a scenario in which he rampaged through Alien ports and Alien bars, leaving behind him a trail of battered and bleeding Alien toughs. The thought wandered through his mind, was firmly stashed under some cognitive bulkhead, and disappeared from his awareness.

  Kony would sleep now, all the way back to Earth.

  CHAPTER 4

  “According to the radical feminologists, men were directly responsible—through negligence, not malice—for the rise of feminism in the epidemic form which it took in the late twentieth century. These so-called scholars acknowledge the magnificent research of Haskyl and Netherland which proved the genetic inferiority of the human female. They admit that it was the prompt and efficient male response to Haskyl and Netherland’s work, at every level of government, which brought about the speedy passage in 1991 of the constitutional amendments restoring to women their proper and valuable place in society, and formally imposing upon men the stewardship role so many had neglected for at least the preceding fifty years. But they persist—with an almost feminine disregard for the requirements of scholarship—in their claim that prior to Haskyl and Netherland the twentieth century was a scientific wasteland, in which no research or publication in feminology whatsoever could be found. As if Haskyl and Netherland’s discoveries sprang full-blown from the void, owing nothing to the work of others before them!

  “This is manifestly absurd. These gentlemen know full well the difficult circumstances in which the early feminologists were obliged to do their work, in a time when the mere statement of the basic principles of the discipline could actually lead to legislative and judicial penalties; they know that the pioneers of the field had no choice but to speak and write in veiled terms. But they were not silent, and their work did not go unnoticed! Anyone who denies this has failed to examine the history of twentieth-century America with even minimal care; certainly no such individual has taken even the elementary step of viewing the historical collections of commercial advertisements presented in all American media of the period. The most cursory viewing of these collections demonstrates that although lip service to ‘feminist’ views was paid by what might be referred to as the intellectual media, no such distortion existed elsewhere. Academics, themselves all too frequently effeminate, may indeed have been unaware of the work of the early feminologists; but those with true power—for example, those who controlled the advertising industry, the giant corporations, the health care industry, the national defense, and the major churches—were clearly quite free of such ignorance.

  “Any scholar who reads the records of history from about 1940 to 1990 with care finds an abundance of examples stating both the inferiority of the female and the custodial obligations of the male. This is true even when the curious social customs of the time necess
itate various mechanisms for disguising those principles, as opposed to stating them openly. To insist that the twentieth-century preoccupation with high technology and its military applications delayed Haskyl and Netherland’s work is more than just a vicious lie. It is a blatant exhibition of ignorance which must no longer be tolerated within our field. It ignores the unobtrusive but superbly effective statesmanship of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; it ignores the equally restrained—and equally effective—statesmanship of Pope John Paul the Second; it ignores all the thousands of wise and capable men who steadfastly kept our nation on course through a period of temporary turmoil that would have meant the collapse of Western society had they been less faithful to their principles.

  “There is not sufficient space to name all those men here. Some, like Chodoff, or the great Dobson, need no mention. But the manner in which our stubborn colleagues persist in denying them the honor to which they are entitled shames us all.

  “I ask them just one question in closing: how do they explain the fact that Haskyl and Netherland were able to obtain funding for their research into women’s cognitive and emotional competence during this period, as well as an immediate forum for the publication of their results? I challenge them to explain!”

  (from “A Call for an End to Radical Feminology,” editorial by Broos W. Clawn, Ph.D., Annals of Patriarchy 37:4, Spring 2207)

  There was no way that Jo-Bethany could keep from hearing her brother-in-law’s voice, however much she might have wanted to . . . human beings, by some curious oversight of the Creator, were not equipped with earlids as they are with eyelids and have no way to shut out the sounds coming at them. But she didn’t have to look at him, as long as she made some noncommittal noise every once in a while to indicate that she was still there, and so she looked out the window at the yard outside while he talked.

  She had been with her sister and her fiancé when they went to order the yard, as chaperone. And she had done what she could to talk them out of it. She had done her best to make a case for something more pleasant to look at, something with grass and a few evergreens and perhaps a white picket fence or a nice low redwood or cedar one. But it hadn’t been any use. Ham Klander was absolutely determined to have what she was looking at now. A formal courtyard all the way round the house, laid in burgundy slate, and a wrought-iron fence topped with vicious spikes. Formal granite urns with topiary roses in them, and a formal granite pool with a formal granite boy standing in it holding a formal granite ram’s horn from which a stream of water was allowed to fall, formally, into the pool. And that was all. Not a blade of grass, not a daisy, not a tree. . . . Jo-Bethany didn’t consider the skinny bile-green ornamental cypresses to be trees, whatever the botany people might say. It looked like the courtyard of a not very flourishing stuffy small hotel, and in the slow steady rain it was a dismal prospect. Just as she had told them it would be.

  She had known, even then, that Ham Klander’s major concern in life was to avoid any unnecessary labor, and she’d gone out of her way to be sure he knew that the grass which was offered with the more traditional yards was specially bred to stop at one-and a-half velvety inches, and would never have to be cut. “And there’s a service contract that comes with it, Mr. Klander,” she had added. “When you buy one of those you can forget about maintenance; the company comes around every month or two and does whatever needs doing.”

  He’d grinned at her and told her to call him Ham, and he’d hugged Melissa to him as if she were already his property. And Melissa hadn’t opposed him, of course. She had looked like a terrified scrawny rabbit; she was hugged in under his big arm and clasped to his side so hard that Jo-Bethany was sure it must have hurt her. Nobody had ever held her like that, but she was positive it couldn’t be comfortable. And there the yard was, this minute, just as it had been displayed on the comset catalog. Number 171, French Townhouse Courtyard. Jo-Bethany loathed it, and so did Melissa, but if Ham liked it that made no difference at all, and Ham liked it very much. He said it had class, and Ham valued class.

  “Hey, Jo?”

  She jumped, startled, realizing that she’d let too many minutes of his monologue go by without an encouraging murmur, and she gave him her swift attention.

  “Yes, Ham,” she said. “I’m sorry. I must have been daydreaming.”

  “I didn’t call you in here to daydream, Jo.”

  “I know you didn’t, Ham.’

  “You think you could manage to stay awake for two minutes?”

  And then she heard it. What he’d said before. It had taken her brain that long to get over the shock and present it to her awareness.

  “Oh!” she said, foolishly.

  “Oh? What does that mean . . . oh?”

  “Ham, you can’t be serious,” she said slowly, her fists clenching at her sides. It was possible that he was teasing her. He thought it hilariously funny to tease her, or Melissa, or any other woman unfortunate enough to be close at hand; if he could make that woman cry, he was genuinely amused. It was good sport, teasing women.

  “Damn right I’m serious,” he told her, and he grinned just the way he always had. That grin that says I’m the boss and you’re nothing and if you don’t like it you can stop breathing.

  “Ham, don’t tease,” she pleaded.

  “Hoo baby . . . I’m not teasing. You’d better listen, Jo-Bethany.”

  She bit her lower lip and watched him. Hating the grin; hating the way he lay there on the couch with his hands clasped behind his thick neck and his shoes making marks on the upholstery that somebody else would have to clean up; hating his expensive suit and his expensive shirt and his immaculate fingernails that Melissa tended; hating everything about him. He was laughing at her.

  “Jo-baby,” said her brother-in-law, “I’ve already signed your contract. You start Monday morning . . . and you move Saturday afternoon, so you’ll be right there to start in bright and early.”

  “Ham,” she said softly, “I don’t believe it. You wouldn’t send me to work for—” She paused, because it wasn’t a nice word, and then she said it anyway. “You wouldn’t send me to work for Lingoes, Ham.” Not even you, she thought.

  “At the salary they’re offering?” He made a small circle in the air with the tip of one shoe, admiring its silver gleam. “You can be damn sure I would send you, lady! And I am sending you. We can use the money . . . I’ve got big plans for that money. Three hundred credits a month, plus room and board, Jo—that’s a good four hundred a month in my pocket. I’d send you to work for the devil himself for that kind of money.”

  Jo-Bethany reached behind her for a chair that was near the window, not taking her eyes off him, and sat down carefully. He meant it. He really meant it.

  “Please, Ham,” she said, deadly serious now, and frightened. “Please don’t do it.”

  “I told you. I’ve done it. I’ve already signed the papers.”

  “You can’t do this. You can’t send me to live with linguists.”

  He didn’t bother to answer that. It was his legal right, as her guardian, to send her anywhere he chose, as long as it didn’t endanger her physically. She was talking nonsense, and he had no tolerance for women’s nonsense.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Have you got anything else to say, Sis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say it, then. I’ve got things to do.”

  “Ham, if it’s the money, why don’t we do something that would bring in real money? I don’t mean three hundred credits a month, Ham. I mean real money!”

  “Jo, don’t start that shit about going out to the colony planets again. I’m warning you.”

  “Ham, you’re not thinking! They need nurses desperately in the colonies, and they need men like you—strong men, young vigorous men who can get things done! We could have twice the income we have here, Ham . . . and why not? There’s nothing here you couldn’t have on—”

  “Shut up, Jo.”

  He swung his legs over and sat up straight, slamming the
heavy glass he held in his hand down on the tabletop.

  “But, Ham—”

  “I said shut up.”

  Jo-Bethany closed her mouth, convinced, and sagged in the chair. She knew why he didn’t want to go out to one of the colonies, even those that had been there long enough to be well established and very comfortable. If he did that, he might end up involved in some real work; Hamilton Norse Klander was not about to be involved in real work. Right now he pushed a button all day. Every thirty minutes. The rest of the time, he sat and watched the robots to be sure they didn’t stop doing what the pushed button signaled them to do. And that was absolutely the sum total maximum of work that he was willing to do in this world. Jobs like that were rare in the colonies, and they didn’t go to able-bodied men.

  “Ham,” she began, because there wasn’t anything to lose, “‘I’m not suggesting that we go to a frontier colony. I mean some place like—”

  “Hey!” he shouted, and she hushed instantly. “If I was going to go anyplace, lady, it would be a frontier colony, someplace where men can stretch out and be men! I’m not afraid of any goddam thing they’ve got, and you’d better remember that! But I’m not going anywhere, because I like it right here where I am. You are the one going someplace, lady. You, day after tomorrow, are going to march your skinny butt over to Chornyak Barren House and move in there to be their live-in nurse. Where I won’t have to look at your ugly face or listen to your effing whining and nagging all the time. And I don’t want to hear any more out of you about it.”

  She didn’t answer him. There was no point in it. But he wasn’t quite through.

  “One more thing, Jo-Jo,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. “Just one more thing. Let’s say you’ve got some shitty idea about going over to Family Court and complaining that I’m forcing you to do something you shouldn’t have to do, or some shit like that. Let’s just say that’s occurred to you. I want you to know, dear Jo-Bethany, that if you even think about doing that I’ll put your sweet little sister into nursing training so fast she won’t have time to pack! You got that? You foul this up, Jo-Jo, and I’ll see to it that you’re both out working . . . I could use two salaries coming in. You just think about that.”