Callahan's Lady

by Spider Robinson

  But the majority clearly showed their revulsion and shame and fury. Lady Sally, twirling in a constant slow circle to witness everything that was taking place in her Parlor, looked as if her eyelashes were about to catch fire. The only completely empty expression in the room belonged to Priscilla the bouncer, the deadliest human being I’ve ever known: it seemed as though she had been asked to try and knock herself out, and had succeeded after a dismayingly long time. Doctor Kate, the house physician, kept glancing over wistfully at this patient in need, but could not stop what she was doing with her sphygmomanometer to help Priscilla.

  I took all this in in the most appalling state of dreamy confusion. I mean, I saw every detail, and will remember them all to my dying day—but meanwhile a good half of my attention was taken up with the serious question: when someone has asked you not to move, does breathing count? Blinking I could handle, blinking was easy, it would be at least thirty seconds more before my eyes began to hurt, but what about breathing? It was a thorny question: if I stopped, shortly I would pass out, and therefore almost certainly move. On the other hand, since I’d be unconscious at the time, would it really be “I” who moved?

  And then my eyes focused on Diana, and the fog burned away.

  I had been aware of her all this time, while avoiding thinking about her. I knew she had seen me come in, had watched me most carefully until she was sure I had seen the sign…and then had dismissed me and my useless guns from her mind for the moment and gone back to what she was doing. I saw what she was doing, and who she was doing it to, and became so angry I had to warn myself sternly that, just as you can’t wince without closing your eyes, you can’t have apoplexy without moving. Now I understood where the damned sign had come from; I even knew what the sheet underneath it would probably say. I could guess how it had been for Judith, guess at how it must be for her now.

  Judith is deaf. Somehow everybody seems to think that all deaf people know how to read lips—that they could pick it up in a week, themselves, if the need ever arose. Try it sometime; I have. Judith couldn’t do it. God knows what she must have thought when everyone around her started going mad. How long did it take before she managed to identify Diana as the focus of the infection? Once she had, she must have realized she was the only one immune, and done or tried to do something that had frightened Diana.

  It hadn’t worked, of course, since Diana could get unlimited willing accomplices as fast as she could ask for them. Now she was returning the fright to Judith, with terrible interest. (Oh God, thought a portion of my mind, another pun.) What she had done was simple. I couldn’t help but think how eagerly Judith must have watched, struggling in the grip of her dearest friends, as Diana began writing on the signpad, how anxious Judith must have been to find out what was going on. How disappointing it must have been to read only, PLEASE DON’T MOVE. Perhaps hope flared again as Diana scratched out a second message, then died as she held it up.

  PLEASE KEEP YOUR EYES SHUT, it must have read.

  Now Judith was about as helpless as a human can be. More helpless than a deaf person, more helpless than any blind person. I wondered how Diana planned to ever get her eyes open again. Probably she didn’t care. She had borrowed someone’s belt…

  Apparently enough pain could mitigate the compulsion of even one of Diana’s requests—or perhaps the limited movements she was making were as involuntary as my own breathing reflex. But an unkind God gave us more tender places than He gave us hands to cover them. The result was a horrid guessing game that Judith always lost. She was the one ghastly exception to the silence in which the others were suffering, emitting a sound so nakedly, indescribably ugly that no hearing person could have made it even in extremis. My earmuffs were no help at all.

  I was not in the dreamy, cooperative frame of mind I’d had earlier, upstairs: if enough pain could make Judith writhe and dance like that, in defiance of Diana’s wishes, couldn’t enough rage allow me to just adjust the angle of one wrist slightly, and twitch one little finger—?

  —no.

  Damn it. I was completely in thrall. I couldn’t even get a good look at Diana: she was at the edge of my peripheral vision, and I couldn’t move my eyes.

  Either Diana finished, or her arm got tired. She dropped the belt, turned away and, now that she was no longer busy, came to look me over and see what sort of amusement I might afford.

  When she got close enough to recognize me, her eyes widened in momentary panic. “How the hell did you get down here?” she barked, instinctively raising her hands in self-defense.

  Don’t move, speak, I wished she’d make up her mind. Well, at least this implied that breathing was allowed. I explained the tortuous and torturous thought process that had gotten me downstairs without going down stairs, wishing she would stand directly in front of me so I could see her better.

  She relaxed. “Jesus. Imprecision of speech, is that what it was?” She began to giggle. I could hear her quite well despite the earmuffs. “Serves me right. Damn lucky I thought to put this sign here for insurance—that old bag out there looked like she might be worthless. All right, let’s see if we can’t build a failsafe into this. No matter how I phrase my requests from now on, would you please interpret them so that your actions are not, in your best judgment, liable to make me unhappy in any way?”

  “Yes, Diana.” Damn. I had to make such a judgment call right away. I had been implicitly given permission to speak. If I used it without orders, would that make her unhappy? Only one way to find out. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Sure. One.”

  I was pretty sure the question wouldn’t make her unhappy. “Why are you doing this?”

  Across the room I could see Lady Sally, with what must have been titanic effort, nodding at me. The motion was so slight I might have imagined it—but her eyes were glittering as they spun away.

  And indeed it was my best and only shot. Villains love to justify themselves to their victims, and by doing so they often give away their weaknesses. Back when I was sixteen, and a chattel of Big Travis, I had thought to ask him once why he was beating me, and when I got past the obvious “’cause y’all won’t mind me,” to the root of why he would want to beat a woman for not obeying him, we had ended up crying in each other’s arms together. The bastard.

  Diana laughed out loud. (I was, I’m disgusted to say, intensely relieved by this confirmation that she was happy.) “Don’t you want to know how I’m doing this?”

  I wanted to shake my head, but instead had to say, “No. What’s the point? I wouldn’t understand it anyway. And if I could, I don’t want to know, I don’t want anybody to know.” I almost added, you included, but that might have made her unhappy.

  She kept laughing. “You’re not as dumb as you look, honey—and you do look dumb in that getup. Just call it magic and let it go. If it matters to you, it was so difficult to stumble across that no one else is going to figure it out any time soon.”

  “But why? Why use it…like this?”

  “Please shut up and I’ll tell you, since you ask.”

  I was committed now. If I had not managed to ask her the right question, I might never get another.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  Just for the hell of it I tried to flick my eyes away from her for a second before training them on her.

  No good. I’d been wondering if her commands had to be phrased as questions to be effective. I had noticed that they carried more force when she said, “Please.” But no soap. A command is really just a request you don’t bother to phrase politely. She usually asked because it amused her to do so. How had I ever managed to resist her will enough to get down here, sophistry or not?

  So I looked at her.

  Bright. God, she was bright, in so many ways.

  Madwoman’s eyes, radioactive turquoise, sparkling like the earrings that framed them. Glowing cheeks. Forehead glistening with sweat. Hair so long and straight and shiny it looked almost like a blonde helmet. Face of a mode
l. Body of a Norse goddess, well over six feet of lithe grace, visible beneath my unbelted bathrobe. From the thighs down and the shoulders out she was muscled like a swimmer; in between she was as soft and opulent as Marilyn herself. Her features and her actions so far showed that she was bright in the mental sense as well. She stood straight, and proud, and bright. She had, I realized suddenly, the face and body and hair and carriage I had always yearned for myself; we even had the same taste in jewelry. She was perfect. What had made her a monster, when I’d survived a childhood like mine?

  She seemed to read my mind. “Do you think I look nice?”

  “Yes.” Again, by requiring me to speak she broke the ice. God, the two guns were getting heavy! “May I—”

  “Hush. Short answers to direct questions only. Would you like to look like me—would you trade bodies with me if you could?”

  “Probably.” Especially now. I was beginning to tremble from the strain of remaining motionless so long.

  A face that pretty should never hold a grin that twisted and malevolent. “Honey, you’re a jerk.” She turned to address the room and raised her voice. “Would everyone please stop what they’re doing for the moment and stand still and pay silent attention?”

  All the horror came to a halt. Except the sound Judith was still making, less forceful than before but just as awful.

  Diana grimaced in annoyance. “Another oversight. Now how the heck can I shut her up?”

  I didn’t want to tell her, but she’d asked. “Bone conduction.”

  “Huh? What did you say?”

  “Bone conduction.”

  She waited—then sighed with amused exasperation. “Would you amplify that?”

  The pun center of my brain was still operating: I thought briefly of cupping my hands and yelling “bone conduction!” But it might make her unhappy. “If you put your head against hers and talk, she can hear you, like astronauts touching helmets.”

  “And she understands speech?”

  “She wasn’t born deaf.” Or she’d have learned to read lips by now. For the first twenty-three years of her life, Judith just wasn’t paying enough attention to lips. She didn’t need to.

  “Good.” Diana went to her, again moving to the extreme edge of my field of view, touched her head to Judith’s in a horrible parody of tenderness. “Would you please try very hard not to make any noise, honeybunch?” she asked loudly, and Judith became silent except for her hoarse breathing. Diana patted her like one gentling a horse, and came back toward where I stood. As she did so I became overwhelmingly glad that I could not move my eyes. They could not give me away.

  Someone was creeping down the spiral staircase behind her.

  Not Phillip. A client, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, barefoot. I recognized him vaguely, a Russian attached to their U.N. delegation. I was holding his pistol, might have been wearing his hat. He was moving carefully, gracefully, like a trained athlete, and in his hands was not Phillip’s softball bat as I had expected, but the most lovely, beautiful fire ax you ever saw.

  My pulse rate must have jumped sharply, but you can’t see that. I know my face stayed wooden. Others within my range of vision could see him too, but none of us made a sound or a twitch.

  Sergei, that was his House name, the trite joke being that he was anything but gay, sir. Come on, Sergei!

  Thank God iron stairs don’t creak. He reached the bottom safely and then I couldn’t see him because Diana was blocking my view. I willed her to talk to me again instead of turning to address the room, and she did.

  “So you think if you had my looks and brains, you could do better with them than I have?”

  “Yes.”

  She slapped my face. “Stupid. No imagination. Look at me again.” The slap had spun my face, and I’d been unable to turn it back to her without orders. “You didn’t seem unimaginative, upstairs. Can’t you—”

  Some paranoid instinct or barely perceptible sound warned her. She leaped sideways, hit the floor in a tuck and roll as Sergei bisected the signboard in front of me with a hissing grunt. The two syllables she hollered were louder than the sounds Judith had made, and nearly as harsh.

  “DON’T MOVE!”

  My heart nearly stopped.

  It took him a second or so to end up at rest with the ax dangling from one hairy hand, his face frozen in a comic look of disappointment.

  She rolled easily to her feet and paced around him a circle three times, breathing hard, murderous rage draining slowly from her bright turquoise eyes. She stopped in front of him. Slowly and carefully, she slapped him six times, much harder than she had slapped me. When the last report had faded, she straightened his face toward hers with a contemptuous hand.

  “You jerk,” she snarled. “Did you really think you could threaten me?”

  “Da,” he said.

  She brightened. “Russian. What do you know?” She began to giggle. “Oh, my. My, my. This must be your very worst nightmare come true, isn’t it?”

  “Da. May I speak?” He had made the same discovery I had, that an order to speak implied speech was permissible.

  “Why?” she asked cautiously.

  “So that I may curse you.”

  “Really?” she said, delighted. “In Russian? I think I’d like to hear that. Go ahead.”

  He did. It lasted over a minute, and sounded like two large cats in a sack.

  “Are you done?” she asked when he wound down.

  “Da. Spasebo.”

  She told him what to do with the ax.

  He succeeded. But along the way he must have decided that the command implied a rescinding of the earlier general order not to move. His face distorted, and he fell to the floor on his side.

  “Come on, for God’s sake,” she said, kicking him, “get up! I’ve had worse than that done to—Jesus Christ!” She broke off short, bent over his rigid form, and whistled. “Well, I’ll be damned. They really have those things. I guess this really was his worst nightmare come true.”

  I could smell it too, now. Bitter almonds, just like in the books.

  It shook me. I was as unhappy about all this as I’d ever been about anything—but I didn’t want to suicide. I wanted to kill Diana, and then cry for about a year. For the first time I began to wonder how this was going to end. Would she politely ask us to drop dead? Or simply ask us to forget we’d ever met her?

  Come to think of it, which did I prefer, if I had my druthers?

  She straightened and backed away from him, bumped into me, jumped three feet and whirled. “Jesus, don’t do that!”

  I made a mental note never to back into any paralyzed people.

  She gave him one last long glance, then dismissed him from her thoughts. “All right,” she said, turning back to me, “as I was saying…”

  She raised her volume so the others could all hear:

  “Now I maintain—and you, of all people, ought to agree with me—that anyone born into this son of a bitching world with female genitalia has got it rough. Am I right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sure, I’m right. Men run everything, and we’ve got something they need, so we’re a threat. What is more threatening than a female?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Quit answering rhetorical questions, you’ll screw up my rhythm. What is more threatening than a female? A tall female.” True. “And what is more threatening than a tall female? A tall, muscular female, who hasn’t been trained to be awkward.” Also true. “What’s more threatening than a tall, muscular female, as tough as a man? What if she were gorgeous?” I was beginning to get what she meant. “I mean, suppose she was this bombshell, like blonde and bosomy? And suppose worst of all, worst of all, her mind was awake? Say she was intelligent and educated and confident and ambitious. Now you’ve got a tall gorgeous strong smart woman; to any man who sees her, she’s a prize he can’t have and a threat he can’t beat; now you tell me: is there a man alive who wouldn’t spend every single minute from the m
oment he met her until the day she passed out of his life for good trying to control her, one way or another? And keep her controlled?”

  It was a rhetorical question. But I knew what I would have answered.

  “And the only people who’ve usually treated me even worse than men are most of the women I’ve ever met. I’m an unforgivable threat to them, too—because I’m a superior candidate for enslavement. They actually resent the fact that most men would prefer to rope and break and brand me than them. So I got into bisexuality, thinking that would help me find people who wouldn’t want to control me or compete with me. Fat chance. Even to hard-core Lesbians I was either a prize or a threat—so they used their own little schemes to try and control me.

  “I am a scientist,” she went on, anger building in her voice. “I won’t tell you what kind, because it would be a clue, and I’ve learned tonight that I can’t be too careful. But I’m a damned good one, and every day of my working career I have had to deal with what I look like! Are you one of those jerks who think scientists must be clear-thinking types with wide-open minds, liberal hearts, enlightened attitudes? Honey, take it from me: the worst, most Stone Age male chauvinist apes on this planet have multiple doctorates in things you couldn’t pronounce.” She was yelling by now. “Science is the last great Old Boys’ Club in America, and the very worst strike against me was that I had a mind as good as theirs, that I wasn’t just an incompetent, clumsy but ornamental lab mascot. God damn it, of all the people on Earth, they were the ones that should have been my brothers. They didn’t even have stupidity for an excuse!”

  She broke off, annoyed at herself.

  “Shouldn’t lose control like that,” she muttered. “Control.” She giggled suddenly. “Control.” She frowned darkly and said it again. “Control. Laboratory controls, you know about those, Sherry-hon? Those bastards invented the word. They thought they could control me, control my lab, control my mind, control me, because I wasn’t born with a piece of gristle hanging off my belly. I might have gotten away with it if I’d had a face like a foot or the body of a bag lady, but anything that came in a package like this was meant to be kept out of the lab, with the civilians and pets, lower than a graduate student, preferably in a nice third floor walkup on Gramercy Park with a big mirror on the ceiling and a—”