The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  The silence went on and on; it went on so long that it started to be scary. Had his father fainted from the shock? Had a heart attack? He was bracing himself to open his eyes and look when Macabee Dow, in a voice his son had never heard before, and using words his son had never heard from his mouth before, said, “Why, those filthy clever effing sons of lust-crazed whores!” Gabriel’s eyes flew open, and he forgot all about his own distress. It was like a mountain breaking into song, or something. Breaking into an obscene song! Macabee Dow did not curse. Curses were the expression of excessive and uncontrolled emotion. Curses were for lesser mortals who were unable to perceive the universe as a confluence of numbers or whatever.

  “Macabee?” Gabriel whispered, tentatively, ready to throw himself out through the door of the desk to safety if he had to, even if the staircase was locked, if his dad had finally fulfilled all the predictions and gone clear over the edge into insanity.

  “Gabriel!” The words came fast and steady and thumping into the acoustic space of the desk like bursts from a rapid fire automatic weapon. “When I went to propose that you should be Interfaced with the Chornyak infants, I was prepared to have to fight for it. I was prepared to pay an enormous sum of credits. I thought it might take a lawsuit to force them to let you do it. I was prepared to take them to court and charge them with denying you your economic civil rights—I thought it was going to be hard. And when I told them what I wanted, and they just said, ‘Oh, fine, we’ll start Monday,’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The bureaucrats over at D.A.T. came around, after they’d sewed up all the Interface places for D.A.T. employees’ kids, and asked me how that figured—they couldn’t believe it either—and I told them I didn’t know. I think we all just decided—like you, Gabriel—that linguists are crazy. Crazy enough to give up what had been, up to that point, a total monopoly on a profession that brings in enormous wealth, without a quibble. Without even a discussion. For free! They had to be crazy, we thought . . . but we were wrong, Gabriel. They weren’t crazy at all. They knew exactly what they were doing, from the first minute. Sweet shit, how they must have been laughing at us, all these years!”

  Macabee let out a long breath in the silence, loud in the silence, and his mouth twisted as if he had been hurt. “Gabriel,” he asked abruptly, “do the other kids feel the same way you do? The other kids that aren’t from the Lines?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “I don’t know all of them, Macabee. But those I know, they hate it. Just like I do. I mean it was fun at first, when we were little, getting to travel and go all those places and do grownup work, and having people treat you like you were a grownup—and earning all that money. But it wears off fast, let me tell you. They hate it, just like I hate it. And they all goof off. Just like I goof off.”

  “Gabriel, we can’t have that.” Macabee Dow’s voice was urgent, tense. “These matters are too important for anyone to be ‘goofing off’ with them.”

  “Then let the Lingoe kids do it, damn it, the way they used to! They don’t know how to goof off! They beat it out of them at home, or something!”

  The mathematician wasn’t looking at the boy, he was looking at something he remembered, but he kept talking in that lasergun way, and Gabriel was fascinated. Usually Macabee only talked that way when he was talking about math.

  “They knew,” he was saying. “And they slipped it over on us like a bib on a baby. When they said sure, we could put you kids in their Interfaces, and build Interfaces of our own if we could get AIRYs to staff them and put more kids in those—but that was it, as soon as the Interfacing session was over we had to pick you up and remove you from their premises—they knew. They knew perfectly well that without the rest of the life, the activities that the children of the Lines spend all their time in from infancy, they weren’t risking one thing. Not one thing! They knew it wasn’t going to work . . . could not possibly work. Damn their souls to the innermost crypts of hell!”

  Gabriel waited a minute, to be sure it was over, and then he added some more data. “Macabee,” he said, “there’s so many other things to do, don’t you know that? Nobody wants to stay here, on Earth, fooling around with a lot of stupid federals and ET’s! You know? There’s a whole universe of stuff to do out there—” He waved one arm, showing the universe, and slammed his elbow painfully into the wall of the desk. “There’s planets to see, and planets to explore, and planets to conquer, there’s the whole effing universe, Macabee! And you really expect me to sit all day long, six days a week, in an interpreting booth in Washington or Chicago or some such place? Bored out of my mind? Macabee . . . if that’s how you see it, just because of the money, you’re as crazy as the linguists are.”

  “It wasn’t the money,” his father said gently. “I don’t care about money, Gabe, not the way you mean. It was the power. I wanted the power for you. I still do.”

  “Well, I don’t. I want to have some fun. I want to live like a normal person. Power! Macabee, there are ten thousand million ways to get power, and every last one of them is more interesting than being a linguist.”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand, Gabriel, that the Lines literally control the fate of entire planets, and of whole alliances of planets.”

  “Who cares?” Gabriel shrugged. “What good is it? If I want power, you know what I can do? I can buy myself a whole asteroid—I’ve got enough money, the way you’ve invested it, the way it’ll earn more money while I’m getting old enough to have control of it—and I can be king! I can run the place, a whole asteroid of my own, just exactly any way I please! That’s power, Macabee!”

  “It’s not the same thing at all.” His father’s voice was as cold as Gabriel’s drenched armpits. “It’s little puny power.”

  “It’s enough for me, sir.”

  “You really don’t understand the difference, do you, Gabriel?”

  Gabriel could hear the sadness in his father’s voice, and he was sorry. It was the same sadness that Rafe was going to hear when he had to give up and admit that he hated mathematics. And Michael would hear it when he got a little older, too, unless Macabee just happened by a fluke to choose for his youngest son some passion that the child would have chosen even if left to himself. Gabriel didn’t care. He’d always known this was coming. And no, he didn’t understand. Why wouldn’t a whole asteroid of your own be power enough, for anybody?

  He sat there stubbornly, and waited, not saying anything more. Whatever was going to happen, it would happen. And finally Macabee Dow released the lock on the staircase and let down the steps.

  “You want to quit right away, Gabe?” he asked quietly.

  “If I can.” That was a little scary, because he hadn’t ever done much else, but it wasn’t a chance he dared pass up. His father might change his mind if he said he wanted to think about it or something. “Yeah. Right away.”

  “When you are a grown man, Gabe, I want you to remember this morning. And I want you to promise me now that you will forgive me. Because when you are a grown man, you will understand about the difference between real power and the illusion of power. I want you to engrave this morning in your mind, and I want you to remember that this was your own choice, freely made. Do you understand me, Gabriel?”

  “Sure. I understand.”

  “You don’t, Gabe. But it doesn’t matter. It’s eleven years too late to set this right, and making you go on doing something you hate won’t accomplish one single useful thing except to amuse the men of the Lines. You go on, Gabriel—I’ll see to this.”

  “Really, Macabee? You really mean that?”

  “I really mean that.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Please, Gabriel.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . it’s not what I expected. I thought you were going to try to argue about it.”

  “You go on now,” said his father. “And you think about what you might like to do. Not with your whole life, Gabriel, I don’t mean th
at. I mean, what you’d like to do with the empty hours you’re going to have now.”

  “You’re really going to get me out of D.A.T.? I don’t have to go back?”

  “I really am. I will be just delighted to do so,” said Macabee. Thickly, as if he’d been drinking; but he never drank anything except a very good wine, with a very good dinner. “It’s not your fault that I’ve been had, Gabe—me and the whole United States government. There’s no reason why you should have to pay for our stupidity.”

  “Who’s going to do my language?” Gabriel hadn’t thought about that before. ‘“We were right in the middle of that new clause . . . sir, who’s going to take care of that?”

  Now it was Macabee Dow who shrugged.

  “That’s their problem,” he said flatly. “Let ’em call a linguist.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “It wasn’t that we didn’t think it would be wonderful, and valuable, to have a Womansign—a sign language that would express the perceptions of women, as Láadan expresses them through oral language. At the beginning, deafness was still a common problem on Earth, and we spent many anguished hours trying to decide how a Womansign project could be managed. One of the very first things we did, just as soon as our alphabet was firmly established, was to work out a manual alphabet that allowed the fingerspelling of Láadan. Not because fingerspelling was even a small step toward a Womansign, but because we wanted to demonstrate our respect for the tactile mode of language—and because it was something we had enough time to do. And because, unlike a complete sign, it was something that could legitimately be done by hearing persons.

  “But things were so difficult for us then. . . . All information about Láadan had to be exchanged in our recipe codes. We worked in constant fear that the men would discover what we were doing and put an end to the Encoding Project. We had to work in scraps of time, five minutes here, ten minutes there, stolen from other work or from badly-needed sleep . . . sometimes we considered ourself lucky to find thirty uninterrupted minutes for the language in a whole month. If there was any way that we could have constructed a Womansign at the same time, we were unable to perceive it.

  “Later, when we no longer had to maintain such secrecy, when Láadan had begun to be spoken by women throughout the Lines, we had to face the enormous, awe-inspiring, almost paralyzingly difficult task of trying to move the language out into the world of other women. And by that time deafness had ceased to be a problem; by then, deafness was as much medical history as smallpox was, so that there was serious concern for the preservation of existing sign languages.

  “The dream of a Womansign remains, because the love for communication by sign remains. But I think it is a dream that will have to wait for the work of women who have great genius and great love and great skill, and—most difficult of all for the women of the Lines—who have abundant leisure. It will not happen in my lifetime, not this time round.”

  (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

  Cassie St. Merill is not just failing to enjoy herself. It’s much worse than that. She is furious; her narrow strange face is distorted and ugly with her petulance, like the face of an Egyptian cat slightly crushed by some accident. She is furious with her hostess, who has played a cheap trick and managed to take Cassie in completely—not for the first time. Cassie is thinking that she ought to have known; that she ought to have asked her husband for permission to turn down the invitation; that she should have found some way to avoid this humiliation. O.J. is going to make her pay for this for a long time; she can hear him already, every morning at breakfast for weeks and weeks, finding a way to bring up this night at the Coloridons’ and Cassie’s incomprehensible stupidity and the way that she is forever disgracing him and making it impossible for him to advance in his career in the way he would advance without her as baggage. He will say, “Can’t you ever find a way to outsmart Burgundy Coloridon? For the sake of your own self-respect, if not for my sake?” She will plead, “O.J., how could I have known? She swore it was an informal dinner party, a little simple dinner for four couples! How was I supposed to know she was setting me up?” And he will say, “Isn’t that why you spent two years at the marital academy, Cassandra? Isn’t that what your father’s money was supposed to be paying for? Learning how to deal with people like Burgundy Coloridon? Who always whips your ass, I might add!” And Cassie will have nothing to say back. She never has anything to say back. She does not know how to talk to him without getting caught in the traps he sets; it would be bad enough if he were only a man, but O.J. is a psychotherapist. She cannot say that the academy she attended wasn’t even in the same league as the one where Burgundy went, not without facing O.J.’s icy stare and a severe, “Do I hear you criticizing your father again, Cassandra?”

  It hadn’t been Daddy’s decision to send her to Briary Marital Academy, it had been her own. They had had plenty of money, she could have gone anywhere; he had told her she could choose and she had picked one that she thought she would like, from looking at the catalogs she’d dialed up on the comset. It had looked so pretty . . . she had chosen it for its pretty name, and for the pretty rooms in its dormitories, with their canopy beds, and for the way the rosebushes trailed over the stone arches of its handsome old buildings. Burgundy now, she had gone to Mary Margaret Plymouth, one of the very best—perhaps the very best—and she apparently majored there in Dirty Tricks & Deceptions. Cassie hates Burgundy fiercely, and envies her; she knows not a single woman in the circle of friends selected for her by O.J. who doesn’t feel the same way about Burgundy that she does.

  There are to be four couples at the dinner party. There are their hosts, Krol and Burgundy Coloridon; there are Doby Phalk and his wife Brune; there are herself and O.J.; like him, Krol and Doby are successful young psychotherapists. And like Cassie, Brune is wearing a simple spraysheath. Brune’s is a silver and gold stripe; Cassie’s is scarlet with a narrow band of white fur around the hem. Just right, both of them, for a small informal dinner party for four couples.

  But Burgundy Coloridon isn’t dressed like that. To the uninformed eye, Burgundy Coloridon is clothed only in miniature roses, palest yellow through delectable peach to deep rose-gold; Cassie wishes bitterly that the roses were real instead of holograms, so that they might attract real bees with real stingers. The dress is magnificent, and it is set off by a ruff of golden lace that rises high behind Burgundy’s head and out of which she herself seems to rise, like a final perfect rose. She is wearing contacts that exactly match the tint of the most dramatic of the holo flowers, and the rose-gold eyes are glorious in her tanned face. She is exquisite, and Cassie wants her dead.

  Brune and Cassie know that Burgundy has only rented the dress; Krol Coloridon is doing a little better than their husbands, but not so much better that he could afford to let her buy that dress. But that makes no difference, it’s not the kind of dress that you could wear more than once a year anyway, and tonight it is Burgundy’s, and that is all that matters.

  It could have gone differently, if they’d been lucky, Cassie thinks. It could have happened that Brune’s and Cassie’s husbands would have decided that Burgundy’s dress was overdone and exhibitionist and that they would have been sorry for Krol and proud of their own wives’ good taste. But Burgundy has been very careful; not one other detail is anything but the most classic conservative style, making her the single item of display and thus an acceptable ornament. The dinner table floating in its nook beside the tier of three reflecting pools is bare of any cloth—just the crystal acrylic, almost invisible with the lights from the pools glowing through it. Square acrylic plates with a single silver stripe around the border; glassware to match, and serving pieces to match, and flatware of massive sterling without any decoration but its flawless shape. No centerpiece . . . Burgundy is daring, she is not afraid to do things like omit the centerpiece at a dinner party, and she is right, of course, because through the bare central space of the table you can see the water lilies in the pools, and an
occasional flash of color from the giant carp. A centerpiece would have ruined that. Burgundy has carefully spraycovered every room of the house to coordinate with the dining area; everything is silver and white, with just a touch here and there in rich genuine wood to set it off. And in the midst of all this understatement and elegance, there is Burgundy, wearing the full spectrum of shades of gold. It is absolutely perfect! Cassie knows that O.J. will expect her to top it sometime in the next month or two when they return the social obligation and ask the Coloridons to their place, and she is frantic just thinking about it—how do you do better than absolute perfection?

  Brune is ashen, a color that does not go well with her dress, and her eyes are wide with a fear she is not able to conceal. Cassie knows that Doby makes Brune’s life miserable, using a twisted vicious teasing that is much more ingenious than anything O.J. would ever consider doing with Cassie; she also knows that Doby treats Brune that way because what he would really like to do is hit her. Brune could report Doby to Family Court, and Cassie knows that she sometimes secretly records the interminable verbal battering she endures from him, just in case. But then what would she do, even if the court took her seriously? It would only make Doby worse, and the chances are ninety-nine to one that what the court would do is send Brune for counseling, not Doby. Already Brune’s father blames many of his own problems in the House of Representatives on Brune’s social failures—and that is ridiculous, but what can Brune do about it? If she turned in her own husband, who supports her in luxury and has never laid one harsh finger on her, even in the marriage bed, her family would consider themselves disgraced. And they would probably be right. The word would get around. Brune would find herself divorced and living in a Federal Women’s Hostel before she could say, “But I just could not stand it any longer!” If she were lucky. If she did not find herself in a tasteful mental hospital instead. Poor Brune. . . .

  The fourth couple is not here yet, and Burgundy has refused to tell them who is coming. It’s a surprise, she says charmingly, raising one luscious shoulder high and turning her lovely head to shelter in it. Burgundy is the only woman Cassie knows who is able to carry off that particular piece of bodyparl, although every woman who attends a marital academy is required to learn it. Most women who chance it only look like they’re trying to check their armpits. But not Burgundy. When she does it, it works, it is alluring, delightful, exchanting; even hating her as they do, Cassie and Brune can admire her skill.