The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  It made Benia’s mouth twitch, thinking of it, but not with humor. She had never known that a baby could stink . . . her friends had had babies, and her relatives had had babies, but they were always fresh and rosy and fragrant from their Tenders. She wondered what Lu-Sharon Naybers would have said, her with her precious twins, if she’d ever gotten a whiff of what a woman-tended baby could turn into dozens of times a day. Lu-Sharon had had the prettiest dresses in South Philadelphia, and so had the twins, and she’d been Benia’s best friend, and she always looked wonderful; but she didn’t care much for any kind of effort. Probably, if she’d been Benia, she’d have carried the baby down and pitched him into Harry’s Pond without giving it a second thought. “I am not slave labor!” Lu-Sharon would have said haughtily; Benia’d heard her say it more than once, and about less. And Bran would have sunk like a stone into the deeps of Harry’s Pond and that would have been the end of his stink. But Lu-Sharon would never have to deal with any of this, because her husband worked for the Department of Education, and Lu-Sharon was never going to find herself on Polytrix.

  The baby was limp now, deadweight against her, and the smell wasn’t getting any better. At home, she would have said sharply, “Air Change!”, and the house computers would have removed the odor in seconds; of course at home the odor wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  Benia sighed and looked up at the ceiling, less than three feet above her head. The bubble hut had come out with them in a tiny cube that stowed away under their seat; she and Daryl had argued about it. “There can’t be a house in there!” she had insisted. “Not in that tiny little thing!” And Daryl had chuckled, and reached over to tweak her nipples, and told her that there sure as hell was a house in there. But it wasn’t really a house. It was a hut, which made perfectly good sense when you remembered that its name was “bubble hut.” You stood out of the way, and pulled the ring on the box with a long string, and it inflated itself majestically, and there it was, ready to be staked down. It had a living room and two bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom and a kind of breakfast cubbyhole and a utility room and a tiny greenhouse on one side, and that was all. Even if she’d been born poor, Benia thought, even if she’d stayed poor and married poor, she never would have had to live in something like this if she’d stayed in Philadelphia. The government wouldn’t have allowed it.

  Daryl thought it was cute.

  “It suits you, Peaches,” he’d said, grinning at her. “It’s like a playhouse.”

  Sure. It was like a work house, was what it was like. And now it stank.

  Crying, Benia carried the baby into the bathroom to clean him up and throw away the soaking clothes he was wearing. Daryl would fuss at her when he saw how many clothes she’d used up this month, she knew he would, and he’d talk about what kind of mess she was going to be in if she ran out of clothes before the next freighter docked at Polytrix with fresh supplies. But she didn’t care. If they were going to have to live like savages, they might as well go naked like savages, that was how she felt about it. Then she could just hose the baby down with the ultrasonics, the way she did the walls. Why not? There wasn’t anybody around to care what she did, or even see what she did. There were only five women on all of Polytrix, and not one of the others was like Benia. There were two nurses, and there was a missionary nun, and there was an old woman whose son had brought her with him, nobody knew why; he said she had insisted she wanted to come, and he didn’t see any reason why not, which was crazy. But then anybody who would come to Polytrix was crazy. And there was Benia, Woman Number Five. The only one with a baby. There was nobody to be Benia’s friend.

  “Someday, Benia Sharon,” Daryl kept telling her solemnly, “you’ll be an important person on Polytrix, you realize that? You’ll be Old Polytrician, Peaches; you’ll be like people in Philadelphia that had family come over on the Mayflower. You’ll be able to just lord it over all the other women, when they come. I can just see you now!”

  Benia couldn’t see that bright future, herself. She had this day to get through. Her and Bran. That was as far as her imagination could stretch.

  It was funny, how she’d never once thought of herself being a colonial wife. Oh, she knew about the colonies, she’d had to learn all that stuff for Earth History from the mass-ed computers, and she’d been in skits at Homeroom all about the First Colonists, and she’d been as quick as anybody to bring out the champagne whenever a new colony was founded, even if it had started getting a little old after a while. She knew, vaguely, that there was a whole universe of worlds, Out There Somewhere; she even knew that much of her personal comfort and pleasure depended on the products of those worlds, or knowledge exchanged with those worlds. But it had never been real to her. Not really real. Not like Philadelphia was real.

  She knew there were Aliens; she’d watched the docudramas, and once when she was visiting an aunt in Washington she’d even seen one land near the Capitol Building in a big limoflyer. But she’d seen the threedy stars once in a while, too, in their limos, and a lot of them looked stranger than the Aliens did. And nobody she knew, nobody her family associated with, went to the colonies. Why would they? Philadelphia was home, and it was wonderful and comfortable and familiar; and her family, and all her family’s friends and their families, had lived in Philadelphia for as many generations back as Benia cared to keep track of.

  Colonies, in Benia’s mind, were for people who were weird. People who couldn’t get along on Earth. Criminals. Foreigners, from countries where things weren’t as nice as they were in the United States. Refugees, maybe; people who had fighting going on in their countries. Or they were for young men, going out just temporarily—not to settle, not to stay, but to make a fortune and then take it home and enjoy it. And for the very very rich, of course; people who could afford to buy a whole asteroid all for themselves and bring in a top terraforming company to make it exactly like they wanted it, with a private port and fast offplanet flyers so that they could go back and forth between the asteroid and Earth the way Benia’s family would go back and forth between Philadelphia and their vacation homes in Greece and Japan. But not ordinary solid respectable people like Benia, or Benia’s parents, or even Daryl’s parents.

  When she met Daryl, he was working for the Department of the Interior, doing something in management with the National Parks Division, and she’d thought that was pretty exotic. Romantic, even. The way he hated being stuck at the office and was always trying to wangle assignments “in the field” and flying off to the Grand Canyon and to Hawaii. She should have known. She should have listened to her parents when they tried to warn her. She should have married Victor Harbraccery, who’d gone to Homeroom with her and was going to be a lawyer with the Justice Department till the day he died, if he ever did, and whose wildest dream was to be a Supreme Court Justice someday. But Daryl . . . the sight of him, the smell of him, the sound of his voice, had made Benia’s heart pound, made her weak and brainless. It was still that way, in spite of everything; when he called her on their tiny comset, she would be wet and ready for love just listening to him to tell her about the latest amazing thing he and Andy had seen or how late he would be for dinner. Victor Harbraccery had left her as dry and raspy as sandpaper. It had been hard for Benia even to wait till she’d finished her year at the marital academy and earned her wifery diploma before she and Daryl married—she’d thought the waiting would never be over.

  And so she had found herself smack in the middle of the Plan. Daryl’s Plan. Daryl had signed up for Polytrix before he ever met her, but they’d turned him down; too many bachelors on Polytrix already, the government had decided, time that Polytrix began to have a population of families. Single, Daryl couldn’t have gotten the job on Polytrix; he had to go as part of a Founding Family. That’s what they were, she and Daryl and poor little Bran . . . a Founding Family. Someday there would be a museum in the capital—where right now there was nothing but bubble huts with signs that said “Capitol Building” and “Co
urthouse” and “Bureau of Minerals” and “Hospital”—and in that museum there would be an entire holo that was just of her and Daryl and Bran. First Founding Family Of Polytrix, it would say. Bran Daryl O’Fanion, First Human Child Born On Polytrix. Without her to make him eligible, without her to produce Bran, Daryl couldn’t have carried out the Plan.

  She wondered: did she mean anything at all to him? Except as part of the Plan? He was kind to her. He made love to her frequently. He was firm about the budget, and about what must be done around the house, and about taking care of Bran, but he spoiled her in a lot of ways. She knew Andrew Felk thought Daryl was a fool for letting her have a servo. He’d said so, the very first time he’d come to dinner at their house, saying that if it had been him he’d have expected her to take care of the yard herself. “You know how many really important supplies you could have brought along,” he’d demanded, glaring at her in a way that Daryl never glared at her, “if you hadn’t wasted so much of your cargo allowance carting in that servomechanism?” There’d been contempt in his voice, and contempt in his eyes, and Benia hadn’t known what to say to him. The servo mattered a lot to her. It was bad enough having to take care of Bran, and not even having a household computer, without having to do the outside work, too. And she hated to go outside, anyway; it frightened her to be out there in that looming awfulness of purple rock and sky.

  Daryl had laughed, easy and fond, and poured Andrew Felk another glass of the wine he was so proud of, the wine he made himself from some kind of mysterious Polytrix berries. “It’s a damn good thing you’re not married, Andy,” he’d chuckled. “You’d make a lousy husband!”

  “Well, what does she need a yard servo for? There’s nothing to do out there!” Felk had objected, waving at the yard of bare rock. “It just wanders around, polishing the rock and watering that . . . what is it you’ve got there, a boll-rose? It wouldn’t take her five minutes a day to water the boll-rose, and the rock isn’t supposed to be polished. The whole thing is stupid.”

  “Women,” Daryl had said, good-humored as ever, “have different needs. They need something . . . something they don’t need, if you know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “If all a woman has is what she actually needs, she isn’t happy. She has to have something she doesn’t need. It’s a symbol. It says: you sweet little thing, you’re worth it.”

  Andy Felk had just snorted, and Daryl had thrown his head back and roared. “You see?” he’d bellowed, and Benia had put her hands over her ears because they were so loud, both of them! “You see? You don’t know the first thing about women, Andy! You stay single, my friend, for the women’s sake!”

  “You can count on it,” Andy’s answered, his voice thick with something Benia recognized only as not very nice. “You can absolutely count on it. I’d rather take a lampa into my house than a woman.”

  And Daryl had roared with laughter again. He thought Andrew Felk was an unending source of comedy entertainment.

  “You could reprogram it, you know,” Felk had muttered. “To do something useful.”

  Daryl had reached over under the table and pinched her bottom, and grinned at them both. “Don’t you worry, Peaches,” he’d said to Benia. “We aren’t going to let Andy the Pirate here take your servo away. I promise.”

  Benia had heard Felk say “Sentimental fool!” under his breath, and had thought that might make Daryl angry, because in the tiny hut you could hear everything; it wasn’t like a proper diningroom. But Daryl had just thought that was funny, too, and had said, “Bigot! Old fart!” back at him, and then they’d started talking about some kind of enzyme strain that tasted like bacon and they’d forgotten all about her.

  The servo was out in the yard right now, polishing. Polishing the surface of the Indigo Step, that gleamed even on the duskiest of days, without any polishing. She didn’t care. Seeing it out there working away was important to her. It made her feel better about being here. It was something of home.

  “Won’t they ever run out of colonies?” she’d asked Daryl once when he was holding her, after love, relaxed. He was always relaxed then, and she didn’t think he’d ever noticed that she usually wasn’t relaxed at all.

  “Run out, sweetie? Of colonies? What do you mean, run out?”

  “Well . . . fill them all up? So there won’t be any more of them?” She’d been thinking that if all the colonies were full then there wouldn’t be any other women like her, who had to be ripped up out of their real lives to become Founding Mothers.

  “Oh, Peaches, for god’s sakes . . .” He’d held her close and shaken her gently and told her she was adorable.

  “Is it a stupid question?” she’d mumbled through the hair on his chest, knowing it must be, if she was suddenly adorable.

  “Benia Sharon O’Fanion,” he’d said, grave and fake-pompous, “do you know what infinite means?”

  “Yes,” she’d answered. Of course she did.

  “Well, space is infinite, Peaches. And it has within it an infinite number of worlds.”

  “That means—that means there’s never going to be any end?”

  “Not so far as we can tell, sweetie. Not ever.”

  She had thought about that, while he stroked her breasts with a free hand and whispered nonsense into her ear.

  “How awful,” Benia had said after a while. “That’s just awful.”

  “Awful?” He’d stopped short in his absentminded fondling and propped himself on one elbow and raised his eyebrows and stared at her. “It’s wonderful! Finally, Benia, there’s plenty of room for everybody, forevermore, until the end of time! Nobody has to ever go to war again because they don’t have room, Benia—nobody has to be stuck in a life that’s a dead end. That’s not awful, you ninny, that’s heaven!”

  And then he hadn’t let her talk anymore, because he had other things in mind, and she had hushed about it. But she still wondered. If they weren’t going to run out of worlds to settle, weren’t they going to run out of people to settle them? People weren’t infinite, were they? And wouldn’t people just get tired of it and begin to long for something that was not new, the way she did? Surely there had to come a day when somebody rubbed his hands together, satisfied, and said, “Well, that’s enough colonies. No more; we’ve got all we need.”

  It seemed to her that it was as ridiculous to be expanding forever out into space as it had been to be all crowded together and stuck on Earth. Or wherever—if you were an Alien—you happened to be stuck. It seemed to her that there ought to be a middle ground.

  “I want to go home,” said Benia aloud, to nobody at all. Benia, who was never, never going to go home again. “I want to go home.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Gentlemen: we have now presented to you the first forty semantic units of the interplanetary signal-language PanSig, in three major sensory moralities, together with a brief historical introduction to the system. At this point, it is our experience that someone inevitably rises to make what we at D.A.T. call “the Krawfkelliga Proposal”, in honor of the first staff trainee to suggest it. In order to save time for all of us, we are going to run that proposal past you and get it over with; it goes like this:

  Since the inventory of shapes on which the PanSig vocabulary is based is necessarily limited, each shape should be used more than once, as a mechanism for increasing the vocabulary. For example, take the triangle, which has been assigned the meaning equivalent [LET’S DO BUSINESS TOGETHER]; that’s one shape used, and only one semantic unit gained. Suppose we take as vocabulary items one triangle, two triangles, and three triangles, assigning to each of them a meaning-equivalent; then we’ve still used only one shape from the inventory, but we’ve tripled our vocabulary for that shape. And so on through the entire set of meaningful shapes.

  Gentlemen, this seems so intuitively obvious, and so right—certainly, if we were using PanSig only with human beings it would be the first step we’d take! But if we were communicating
with human beings, we wouldn’t need PanSig, remember? Gentlemen, the Krawfkelliga Proposal was tried, and it failed in the most spectacular fashion. It will not work. We will be grateful if you will refrain from bringing it up again in this course.

  The reason it won’t work is that nothing in the optic system of humanoid Aliens—much less nonhumanoid Aliens—guarantees that the Alien looking at one square or one triangle or one circle (from the Terran point of view, that is) is not already seeing two or more of that shape. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether the number of shapes seen remains a stable number over time, the way it does for us. Where the nonhumanoids are concerned, you must remember that we have no way of knowing even if they see the same shape we see; all we know is that, like us, they distinguish among the shapes and see them as differing and unique items. But how many do they see? Gentlemen, for all we know they see hundreds, or thousands! Let us not complicate matters any further than they are complicated already by the simple facts of the situation.

  (from Training Lecture #2, for junior staff; Special PanSig Division, United States Department of Analysis & Translation)

  “Are you absolutely sure of your facts, Crab?” Heykus was leaning forward with his hands on the seeyum’s gleaming surface, half-standing. “Are you positive?”