The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “Well?” demanded the general. “Has anything been overlooked, or not?”

  “Probably not,” Professor Bydore answered icily. “We won’t be able to determine that until we’ve put this absurd project into operation. And I want it a matter of record that we’re opposed to it.”

  “Noted.” The general’s intonation carried the same weight of ice. “I will then direct Mr. White to report that all appears adequate, and to indicate that if there turn out to be missing items the department will be promptly so advised.” He looked at Paul, then, and asked, “When should we expect the animals to arrive?”

  “Failing a specific order to the contrary,” Paul told him, “within the next two hours. Perhaps you might want to get started making preparations.”

  The general abandoned parade rest and assumed some version of alert for action. “Certainly,” he agreed. “At once. Gentlemen?” And then he was gone, presumably off to find the Cetacean Head Keeper, or whatever it was he had on tap of that kind. He did not bother trying to disguise the eagerness with which he was leaving.

  When they were alone, Paul White leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and spoke very gravely and carefully. “All right, Professors. What’s the real problem here?”

  “I should think it would be obvious,” said Bydore.

  “No, Professor, it’s not a bit obvious. But I’m willing to be told.”

  “At least you could see that there was a problem—unlike our military friend.”

  “The general is trained to command soldiers, chimps, and military robots; the commanding of scientists was not part of his curriculum at the Academy. Be reasonable. How good do you think you three would be at coordinating a laser attack?”

  “Then what the bloody hell is he doing here?”

  “All operations at this level having military implications or national security implications must be administered by individuals with high military rank and the necessary security clearances,” Paul recited, straight from the manual with very few modifications.

  “It makes no sense.”

  “Not scientifically, perhaps. Administratively, it makes excellent sense. Now please, instead of attempting to reform the Department of Analysis & Translation, tell me what it is that is so obvious and let me get on back to Washington. I may even be able to do something useful.”

  The eggdome nodded slowly. “All right,” he said. “This is what is obvious. The human beings of Earth, as of this date, are not capable of communicating with the cetaceans of Earth. Suppose the Aliens that the military is pleased to assume are whales—no matter what they really are—do interact with the animals you’re sending, in such a fashion that the end result is a Terran whale that has acquired an Alien language. So what?”

  “So,” said Paul, “then we have to Interface some human babies with that whale, so that we can get access to the new language. An extra step, that’s all.”

  “Mr. White—that’s what we’ve been trying to do here for decades.”

  “What?”

  “What do you think is going on up on the first floor of this installation, damn it?”

  The eggdome was actually bellowing at him. Paul felt a vague alarm; eggdomes bellow at one another, but they do not bellow at the ignorant layman. It seemed improper, and undignified, to Paul.

  “First floor?” he echoed, playing for time. What had he missed on the first floor?

  “That’s an Interface up there, man, with a couple of whales on one side and a human infant on the other. For god’s sake!”

  “But that’s just for show, Professor,” Paul stammered. “I mean, it’s just a cover for the real work done here. It’s not—”

  “Listen, White!” Professor Bydore slammed both hands on the table, and Paul stopped talking, astonished. “That is a real Interface! It contains real whales, and real babies! And that is all there is in any Interfacing!”

  “Now, Professor—” Paul began, but the man only threw up his hands, shouted that he gave up, and implored heaven to be his witness that the level of stupidity he faced was more than any human being should be expected to tolerate in one lifetime. Paul was astounded; he’d heard plenty of jokes about eggdome tantrums, he even had a few in his own repertoire, but this was the first time in his life that he’d actually seen such a display. In his personal experience the academics and scientists were slow-moving lethargic creatures given to grunts and mumbling; he’d had no idea that one could behave with so much passion.

  The computer whiz put in an oar, then; whether out of sympathy for Paul, or some personal motive, nobody would ever know. He had all the dates and names and places right on the tip of his tongue. It was an impressive performance, making Paul wonder obscenely about Interfacing humans and computers. The end result was not ambiguous—many experiments had been tried with human/whale Interfacing, and every last one had failed.

  “Why?” Paul asked. “Do they know why? Some of those were done a long time ago—don’t we know a lot more about it now?”

  “Mr. White,” said another of the professors, “we don’t know one thing more about Interfacing than we knew by the end of the first year that it was done. That’s how long it took to find out everything we know. Oh, we know more about the engineering—it doesn’t take us as long to get the right mix for the atmosphere the Alien breathes, we have better barriers between the Alien’s quarters and the area where the human infants are placed, that kind of thing. But the basic process is exactly what it always was. You put a human infant on one side of the barrier, you put a cooperative Alien or two on the other side, and you let them spend a few hours a day together interacting for four or five years; the result is a human infant that is a native speaker of the Alien language. But the important word here, the crucial word, is cooperative. The Terran whales won’t cooperate.”

  Paul was intent now—this was important. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Can you say something like that and not be . . . what’s the word . . . anthropomorphizing?”

  “I can,” the man answered. “In every experiment that has been tried, the whales have simply done a Ghandi. They don’t object, they don’t charge the barrier, they don’t turn belly up and die, they don’t refuse to eat . . . they give us no trouble. But so long as a human infant is on the other side of the Interface partition, the whales do not make a single sound. Nor, so far as we can tell, do they make any movements—any body language—other than what is necessary to their survival. They just wait until somebody removes the infant and then they resume normal behavior. This has been true for all types and varieties of whales studied. Why else do you think that after all these years we are still without any results to report from upstairs?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” breathed Paul, leaning back in his chair. He ought to have known about this; he ought to have been briefed on it. Even if it was only a cover operation, it had clear—and as the eggdomes said, obvious—bearing on the current project. They’d had no business sending him here to collect egg on his face, half-briefed, and somebody was going to be sorry, once he got back to D.A.T. and found out where the information gap was originating.

  Bydore spoke up, calm now after his outburst. “There’s no possible way to misunderstand the message, Mr. White,” he said. “A long time ago, we called in a linguist to observe and comment, a man from the Lines. And he gave us a solemn translation, which I now quote: ‘The whales say, “We won’t play your silly game.” ’ And that was that.”

  “I see; thank you.” Paul sat there, thinking, and then he decided to cut his losses, because pretending wasn’t going to work with these men. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I finally understand what you’re telling me. I apologize for having arrived here so badly prepared, and for having been so goddam slow after you began helping me out. I understand the problem you face now—I do understand. But I am going to ask you to do me, and the department, a favor. I am going to ask you to go ahead with this project, in spite of the difficulties you have been kind enough to ma
ke clear to me, while I explore ways of dealing with the whales’ determination not to help.”

  “We can’t communicate with the whales,” the professor objected. “How are you going to ‘explore’ anything, as you put it, when they won’t have anything to do with us?”

  Paul smiled, and began gathering his files together. “We have communicated with them,” he pointed out. “The message was completely unambiguous, and—as you of course were demonstrating—we didn’t need a linguist to tell us what it was.”

  “A refusal to cooperate does not constitute language,” said the scientist. “An earthworm digging desperately to escape the light you shine on it is not communicating.”

  “Tropism,” Paul said, guessing. It was close enough. “The whales’ behavior is not like that. And I’ve seen human beings do precisely what you describe the whales doing. That, gentlemen, we know how to deal with.”

  Bydore closed his eyes. “Vee half vayss,” he murmured, “uff making zem talk.”

  Paul laughed, and stood up quickly, tucking the files under his arm. “I’ll ignore that,” he said. “And I want you to know that your cooperation—without benefit of cattle prod or Takeover Chip—is greatly appreciated. But trust me, please. I am a government troubleshooter. My function is to find out what’s wrong and find out who can fix it and order it done. Your function is to start Interfacing these Aliens with infant Earth whales. You leave it to me to put together whatever it will take to deal with the subsequent stage of this project, which is years in the future. And I’ll be in touch with you—or someone else from D.A.T. will be—as soon as we have something useful to tell you.”

  “You really think something can be done? In spite of all the evidence? After all these years?”

  “Something can always be done,” Paul told him. “The only question, ever, is whether it’s worth doing. There’s plenty of time. Set your minds at rest, and let me get started on this. Let me see what I can find out . . . let me get in touch with some people. Don’t worry about it—you fulfilled your obligations when you took the time to get the facts into my thick head. Now it’s up to D.A.T., and I have got to get going.”

  Hands were shaken all around, even if reluctantly, and he backed out of the room, Mister Joe Cordial all the way, smiling and nodding, and praise be to god he was again in the elevators and on his way back to civilization. With a lot more to do than when he’d arrived, but that was all right; keeping busy was Paul White’s middle name. He ate and drank and lived and breathed and thrived on keeping busy. Some men cared about sex; Paul didn’t mind it. But work, now—that was what really mattered to him. And if he could find a way to break this particular logjam, which had obviously been sitting around forgotten in the files, a plum just ripe and red and waiting for the plucking of some enterprising individual, why then, by god, you’d see some action!

  He was looking forward to it.

  CHAPTER 15

  “I am Selena Opal Hame, and this is what I want to say to you.”

  I do know what they are doing. I have known for a long time. Yes, I do know. I can see what it is. Here is what I do know.

  I know that when their mouths move and noises come it is because they are sharing what is inside their heads. They can show each other, or they can do it when no other person is there. (I do not understand that part, no. Why would they want to show their own selves what is in their own heads? But when there is more than one person there, then I understand what they are doing.)

  I know that sometimes when their bodies move that is a way to show what is inside the head, too. Not always. It is very hard for me to know which moving is about the real things in the head and which moving is only doing. Cutting is doing. Sewing is doing. Digging is doing. Eating is doing. But I cannot always tell.

  And I have seen another thing. I have seen persons that shape their hands and arms and move them in a way that is a special doing. Those persons move their hands and arms and faces the way others move their mouths, to show what is inside their heads.

  All this is magic, and I do not have any magic, you see. I never have had it. Only wonderings. How do they do it? I think I know what must be the what of it. I think there is first the real chair, inside their head . . . that chair is what is real inside their head. And then, some magic how, there is a noise that they hook together and make with their mouth and it tells another person that what is real in the first one’s head is CHAIR. Then, you see, they both know! And that must be a joy. Sharing what is in your head. That is what I cannot do.

  It took me a long time to learn even this much. I did not always understand the what of it. When I was a small person, I saw their mouths move and their hands move and it was a great wondering and nothing more than that. For a very long time, while cold times and hot times came and went away and came again.

  I remember well when I was one of the small ones, but that was very long ago. Now I am a large person, that has gray lines in the hair. No small ones ever have gray lines in the hair. And now that I am a large person, too, I understand that much—but I do not understand the how. I do not understand how a person decides which noise will be for which real thing, or which shape of the fingers and hands will be for which real thing. Who decides? How does one of them know which noise the other one has chosen to be the real thing? How can they remember which noise it was, when all the noises are so different, and none of them go together in the air? No, I do not understand that, except that it is magic.

  I am not the only broken one there is. Where I lived before, there were other small ones almost like me, that could not do the magic either. Almost like me, but not exactly like me. Because now I am a person with gray in the hair, you see, and every single one of those other small ones was there only as many hot times and cold times as I have fingers, or maybe a few more, and then they grew very white and thin. And then they were gone, in the sleep that does not have a waking. So that I was all alone at that place among the ones that know how to make the noises and shapes and hook them to real things. Alone. I was so alone.

  Those other small ones that were broken like I am broken—they tried to show me what was inside their heads. They did try. Their mouths did not move, their bodies did not move, but they caused a noise to happen in my ears. But I could not understand their noises. I was so sorry, but I could not understand. They made a noise like the dog makes. A noise like the noise when glass breaks and falls. A noise like when persons walk over many small rocks. A noise like the noise when much water is coming from the wall. Or just noise-noise, that nothing else makes. . . . They did not have the magic, either, and their own magic did not work with me. I do not know if it ever worked between some two of them, but I think probably it did not. If it had, why would they have gone away so quickly?

  Many times large persons came and looked in our ears, looked in our mouths, put little wires on our heads. Always I thought they were bringing the magic to me, and to the other small ones, and when it was over I would turn and look at the mouths or the fingers, and think MAYBE NOW I WILL UNDERSTAND. But it never happened.

  I don’t know what in me is the broken part. My ears work; my eyes work; my head works. My fingers are not broken; I can cut and sew and dig and stir and cook. All the doings. I can go where other persons go, I know it is not my legs. My mouth opens like their mouths, but it does not make any noise . . . perhaps it is my mouth that is the broken part.

  And when I was all alone in that other place, where all the small ones are together with only a few large persons to look after them, a person came and brought me to this new place. Where at first it was the same; I understood the what, but I did not understand the how.

  But now, there is a new thing! This is what I want to tell you. There was a day, in a cold time. I was rubbing the long table in the eating room with a soft cloth and a kind of stuff like butter, that smells of lemons. To make the table shine in the light, you see. I know how to do this. One of the persons here taught me, the first day I came. This person stood beh
ind me and held my hands and moved them. This person helped me pick up the cloth and put the lemon stuff on the wood. Moved my arms making circles on the wood, making it shine, until I knew what the doing should be and did it myself. Every day I do some of the wood in this house, so that all of it shines in the light. I am very strong; I do this very well.

  And that day it was the long table for eating that I was making bright, when suddenly one of them came up to me holding a small box in the hand. So small it could be hidden away in the hand. This one touched me, so that I would look. Took my hand and put it on the small box, to feel that there were buttons on it. Took one of my fingers and touched three of the buttons on it. And the box made noises! Noises! But it was the other kind of noises, the kind that stay the same and make a real thing in the air! Like a very little piece of what comes from a much bigger box that is in one of the other rooms—it makes long strings of noises that are real. Whenever that box is making the noises, I always stop and I wait until it stops, if they will let me. They have seen me do that, and almost always they let me, unless it goes on for too long. It’s wonderful, it makes noises that hold together and don’t just leak away like the noises the persons make, like water running into the ground leaks away.