They had sent a granddaughter with it to demonstrate all the new toy’s dials and frills and features and whatnots, under strict orders to be sure that she fully understood every last item, doddering though she was. And the poor thing had been so sorry to bother Nazareth that way.
“‘Natha, darling,” Demarest had said, looking at her feet, “I am so sorry—but they insisted.”
Nazareth had smiled and told her to go right ahead by all means and run the silly gadget through its paces so that when she was called in to the office she could report that yes indeed Demarest had shown her absolutely and to its fullest complexity how superior this toy was to her thologys.
“I am instructed to say, Natha, that there is now no excuse for you to sit and listen to a stupid newscaster droning away hour after hour, with nothing but flat visuals on a screen to back him up. Please be advised that I have quoted exactly the statement your sons specified, Grandmother—I have not left out one single word.”
“Duly noted, child,” she had replied. “Then what did they say?”
“Next. Nobody in full possession of her faculties would listen to the thologys, which are intended only for the frontier colonies where nothing else is available but the thologys. I am so sorry to have to say such a rude thing to you, Grandmother. And there was one more thing, which you will be able to guess without my having to say it.”
“Ah, yes,” Nazareth had said. “The one more thing was that the only real reason I listen to the thologys is to get attention.”
“Men,” signed her granddaughter. The sign for “male” is a hypothetical tug at the hypothetical bill of a hypothetical cap, but Demarest was inventive; she made it large and elaborate and with overtones of tremendous burdens, so that the only possible image was of these poor creatures hauling about great ponderous penises that hung swollen from their aching foreheads.
Nazareth thought it was hilarious, and Demarest kept it up until they were both weak from laughing. She signed a pitiful man with the recalcitrant phallus straight ahead down his nose, so that his eyes crossed, and another like a deformed rhinoceros, but triumphant at his good management of the appendage, and it was clear to Nazareth that she was only just getting warmed up and must be stopped.
“Demarest, do please quit,” she begged, wiping her eyes; she had no penis to lug about, and thanks to the economies of her male relatives no breasts either, but her ribs were still with her and they ached even when left entirely alone. Battered with waves of hilarity, they were screaming for mercy.
Demarest stopped instantly; she was a kind young woman, and she would have walked through fire for Nazareth. And Nazareth asked her weakly, “Is that all now, I hope? I can go and turn on the thologys now and listen to them in peace? You’ve carried out every last instruction?”
“Almost.”
“Almost? Whatever more could there be?”
“Grandmother, I am instructed to bring back a complete account of your reaction. ‘Exactly what she says—every word,’ is the way it was put.”
“I perceive. Well, then, please get ready, because here comes my reaction. Are you ready? REACTION: ‘How very kind and thoughtful my sons are! How did they ever guess that I had been wanting one of these!’ There. Do you have it?”
“Every word,” said Demarest gravely.
“Can you remember it?”
“Oh, yes. But I am shocked to discover that you would deliberately lie to your own sons.”
“Your delicate sensibilities . . .”
“Yes, Grandmother. After all, you’re supposed to set me an example.”
“But I haven’t lied, Demarest, and you needn’t be shocked. I have been wanting one of these.”
“Really?” Demarest looked at her, astonished, because Nazareth was known to hate gadgets, especially expensive gadgets.
“Oh, yes. You see how beautifully it’s made, and how well balanced? It is just exactly what I need, to set my cup of tea down on so it won’t mark the surface of the table. The perfect size, the perfect shape, and not tippy at all. Perceive!”
She set the receiver down on the table beside her—beautiful old oak, and something she really did treasure—and set her cup on it to demonstrate.
“You agree?” she asked, decorously, and Demarest did, observing that of course she would have been hankering after one of those for a good long time. And then Demarest went off laughing to find out if anyone needed her help for Christmas dinner, leaving Nazareth thinking that probably only a woman of the Lines, and one who’d lived as a woman of the Lines ninety years and more, could truly understand why the thologys pleased her so.
All those years of her life, she’d never had any time to really find out what was happening. First she was a child, and there was all the predigested pap of Homeroom, and the Department of Education’s carefully assembled mass-ed lessons on the comsets, and that was all she knew. And then at fifteen she was married, and at sixteen she was a mother, and from then on she had never had a moment’s leisure. She knew it seemed to people outside the linguist families that she had lived a life of giddy excitement and adventure; it would seem that way, compared to the life of most women. Six days a week she’d spent in the interpreting booths in negotiations between the governments of Earth and a constantly-changing parade of negotiating Aliens. She’d gone everywhere, flying from city to city, to Washington and San Francisco and New Orleans and Paris and Peking and Copenhagen and Tokyo. . . . Because she had nine children, she almost never went offplanet; but still, she was forever rushing from flyer to government building to flyer again, always traveling, always part of important business. While most women stayed home and awaited their husband’s pleasure, she was in almost daily contact with exotic Aliens from all over the known universe. Such an exciting life!
Except that it hadn’t been like that. Perhaps it was, if you were a man of the Lines. But not for the women. Every interpreting booth was just like every other interpreting booth, no matter where it was; because women weren’t allowed to go out into the cities unescorted, meals were brought to them in the booths to simplify matters . . . she had never even seen the restaurants or the shops of all those glamorous places she had traveled to. And a good simultaneous interpreter has to be like a conduit. If you actually stop to think about what you are translating you fall behind; it can’t be done like that. So that you can spend hours presenting the most intricate business and diplomacy and come away from it with almost no memory of what has been said. She had begun by eight in the morning, spent the day in the booth, and gone home to tend the children and see to Household business and prepare for the following day’s negotiations; and then she would fall exhausted into her bed. On Sunday she went to church, and that was a treat because it was at least a change—but you don’t hear news in church.
All those years! She supposed she had often been present while history was being made. But she’d had no opportunity to take notice of it or be involved in it, any more than a robot would have had.
She’d had no social life. Linguists do not mingle outside the Lines, because it would be awkward for everyone else present and because they don’t have time. And within them, the women were sent away when the men began to talk of anything serious, so that their presence wouldn’t inhibit the conversation. Even before the Womanhouses were built, when women still not barren lived in the main houses with their husbands, the men never talked to them except of personal and Household matters.
And then, when she was in her seventies and it was decided that she was no longer able to keep up an interpreting schedule, she still had not had a moment to herself. There was the education of the little girls, which had to be left to the women no longer actively at work, because they were the only ones available to do it. You can’t hire lay persons to train little girls in how to be linguists. She had had to deal with the constant crises that are part of the life of any woman, be she linguist or lay . . . the problems of daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters, and sisters and the offsp
ring of sisters, and dear friends and the offspring of dear friends. . . . The work had been endless. Endless!
So. Now she was past ninety, and obviously frail. With twenty more years ahead of her if she wasn’t killed in a flyer crash, chances were, but old enough to be able to tell everyone to go find somebody else to do whatever it was, and not to have to feel guilty about it any more. There were so many somebody elses now, and all of them perfectly capable of doing almost everything without her assistance. And so at last she had a little time that she could use just as she liked, to do exactly what she wanted.
What Nazareth wanted was to catch up. Find out what had happened since she was flung into the whirlwind at the age of six! Other women out there in the world, reading all the latest best sellers with their pretty little microfiche pendants, watching the newspapes on their comsets half a dozen times a day, going out to their social clubs, subscribing to the holomagazines ever since they’d been available and having time to watch them, moving in a sea of information—they knew so much. What did Nazareth know? Thousands of verb endings. Tens of thousands of postpositions. She wanted to know what other women knew, and she had set about closing the gap.
The holos had been too much, though. Even the newspapes were too much, except in very small doses. All that data coming at her at once, and she not only didn’t recognize the names and the faces and the events, she couldn’t put a label to half the objects people were carrying or wearing or using. Her mind wouldn’t handle it, and her eyes wouldn’t. It blinded her, looking at all that multitude of phenomena while at the same time there was talk and smells and textures, and during the commercials there were even tastes, unless you remembered to turn them off.
Nazareth had gone to her Aunt Clara, bless her dear soul, and how she did miss her now that she was gone, and she’d told her what the trouble was, and Clara had set her right. “Listen to the thologys, Natha dear,” she’d said. “You don’t have to even look at the screen unless you’re especially interested. All you have to do is just listen. And it’s one person at a time, just telling you things. No multiple narrators, no ‘real life drama.’ Just quiet talk, like a friend telling you what she’s done that day. They’re on all day long, Natha, on one channel or another. All of them taped and then flown straight out to the frontier colonies every day on the mail rockets, so that the people out there can keep up with the worlds. That’s what you need.”
Clara had been absolutely right; the thologys were perfect. Nazareth had been listening to them for several years now; often she listened to them many hours of the night, because of course in the natural way of things now that she could finally get a good night’s sleep whenever she liked, she no longer needed much sleep. And she was beginning—just beginning—to acquire a kind of grasp of the shape of events over the past hundred years. She felt a little less ignorant now, and that was the point.
As for being thought senile, that was just fine, too. The less useful they thought she was, the less they’d bother her with nonsense, and that suited her. She’d been bothered more than long enough, to her way of thinking.
CHAPTER 6
“The New St. Louis Blues”
I hate to see the dawn come up on Mars;
I hate to see the dawn come up on Mars;
’cause the NASA police, they shut down all the bars!
Oh, New St. Louis ain’t got no grass or trees
and they pollinate the rosebush with little robot bees;
I get so lonesome, don’t know what to do—
guess I’ll just sit here and sing the New St. Louis Blues. . . .
Got the new St. Louis blues, blue as I can be!
My clones’ve got hearts like rocks cast in the sea . . .
or else they’d of shipped out to New St. Louis with me!
If I was a bird, I tell you where I’d be;
if I was a bird, I tell you where I’d be;
I’d be wingin’ for home through zero gravity!
Oh, New St. Louis, it’s like a red rock jail—
I go from bar to bar, leavin’ a red rock trail.
Tweren’t for liquor and for my foolish pride,
I’d find a crater and throw myself over the side. . . .
Got the New St. Louis blues, blue as I can be!
My clones’ve got hearts like rocks cast in the sea . . .
or else they’d of shipped out to New St. Louis with me!
We ain’t got no arch, no river flowin’ by;
ain’t got no arch—no river flowin’ by;
you look at New St. Louis, you sit right down and cry!
Well, back on Terra, I’d be in jail right now;
but that sounds better to me than New St. Louis anyhow.
They say in two hundred years, it’ll be an Eden here—
well, I’ll be dead and gone long before two hundred years. . . .
Got the New St. Louis blues, blue as I can be!
My clones’ve got hearts like rocks cast in the sea . . .
or else they’d of shipped out to New St. Louis with me!
(popular song, set to the twentieth-century tune, “St. Louis Blues”)
“Look. This makes me sick.”
Five words of one syllable. Each one dropped into the air like a flat rock. Separate, and square, and hard. Heykus was angry. The way the man from Coast Guard sat there in the desk, carrying his foul news and dumping it into this day that had been a fine day until he arrived to ruin it, was making him even angrier. Heykus saw no sign of remorse, or even a decent embarrassment at this newest evidence of incompetence, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He wished he were a man who smoked cigars; he would have liked to take one and grind it out on the surface of the seeyum, right where the Coast Guard man’s glazed eyes seemed to be firmly glued . . . as if there were something significant there to look at. Heykus never allowed clutter on the seeyum of his desk. There was a holo of his family, nicely grouped; there was an antique digital clock, with an American Eagle on it; there was the glass of water that he sometimes needed for a throat that age had made inconveniently dry for extended conversation. That was all. There was no excuse for anything else, in Heykus’ opinion.
“Well?” he demanded, impatient with the man’s silence and with his staring. “Do you plan to sit there all morning wasting my time and yours, or are you going to explain?”
“Director Clete,” the fellow said stiffly, “we are sorry, you know.”
“You’re sorry. The Coast Guard is sorry.”
“Certainly. We deeply regret the incident.”
“Well, damn it, what do I care if you’re sorry? I want to know precisely how it happened, and I don’t want any bureaucratic nonsense to wade through while you’re telling me about it.”
“It was not the Coast Guard’s fault, Director Clete,” said the man stubbornly. He wasn’t comfortable, but it was obvious that he wasn’t intimidated, either; he looked up from the seeyum and met Heykus’s eyes with a determined stolid look that said to get off his back. This was a long-time man, who’d been chewed out by experts and had learned to look them right in the eye and never blink; Heykus realized that to go on leaning on him would mean that they’d sit there all morning demonstrating who was toughest. Heykus had no doubt that he was, but he didn’t have time to waste that way; he leaned back a bit, loosened his shoulders, unclenched his fists, and asked the man mildly if he’d be so kind as to make his report, adding, “I genuinely thought we had put an end to this kind of thing, Captain Frege. There are laws that ought to be enough to guarantee that. And there’s staff in ample number, paid to enforce those laws. I’d be pleased to hear how all that was bypassed, Captain.”
“The satellite scanner for the sector where we found the women started reporting sentient life about a week ago,” Frege said calmly, now that the amenities had been seen to and his status acknowledged. “There wasn’t any distress signal, so we just instructed the nearest vessel to swing by there and make sure everything was all ri
ght.”
“Is that usual?”
The man shrugged, and blew air like a horse. “Director Clete,” he said, “this kind of thing usually isn’t an emergency. Usually, say you bust your ass to send out a seeker mission on top priority, when you get there you find some old millionaire on safari with his sportjet landed for minor repairs, and the guy isn’t grateful, he’s furious. You bust your ass to get to him, and he threatens to sue the government for invasion of privacy because his wife thought he was someplace else and so did his mistress. It doesn’t pay, usually.”
“I see. I wasn’t aware of that aspect of the problem. Go on.”
“Well, when the vessel sent a landing party down to check matters, they found these eleven women all alone, and busy as clams under a floodlight. Putting in gardens, building a kind of hut—very badly—and clearly intending to stay right where they were. They had a working distress beacon with them, with more than adequate range and power; when the officer in charge asked why they hadn’t called for help they told him they didn’t need any help, thank you. And then they rushed him.”
“Rushed him? Women?”
“Damn right they rushed him. They had all kinds of tools with them. Old stuff, the kind of thing women like to hang up on walls, god knows why, not stuff anybody would ever use. Except they were using it. Building tools. Gardening tools. They did their damndest to stop the three men in the landing party, sir, and they managed to do a respectable amount of damage. The men weren’t expecting to be attacked—they’d put their weapons away when they saw it was only women.”
“Are they all right?”
Frege shrugged again. “They needed patching and pasting, and the officer they went for first is still not fit for duty. One of the bitches tore up his face with the point of a hoe, if you can believe that.”
The Judas Rose Page 10