The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  There were a number of things that Heykus might have said to him if Pugh hadn’t been there. I always knew you had a blind spot that made you overlook small things that turn out to be important, Stuart, but until this moment I never thought you were actually stupid. Now you have changed my mind. He did not choose to say that, or any of the other remarks along that same line that occurred to him, in front of Tatum Pugh. Not so much because Pugh might have wondered why he’d left a stupid man in charge of the Cetacean Project; often the very best place for a stupid man was the “in charge” position, leaving people who knew what they were doing free to do it, while he spun his wheels. But he could not afford to encourage the sort of disrespect for authority that he already saw in Tatum Pugh’s face.

  “Dear Lord,” said Heykus fervently, and he meant no disrespect for his superior. He went back over to the table, dialed for coffee, and watched the gravytrain float over. Meticulously, tenderly, as he would have cared for a badly flawed child, he poured coffee for General Stuart Charing, and handed it to him. He took his own cup, black and strong, as he preferred it, and he let Tatum Pugh fend for himself. The silence thickened round the table; and in that silence, Heykus stirred his coffee with a spoon. There was nothing in it to stir, but he stirred it nonetheless. It filled the silence, while he thought about what he would say next.

  “Stuart,” he began, finally, “I’m afraid there’s a piece of the problem that you didn’t look at from precisely the right angle. You see, this was always a no-win situation. Right from the beginning. Paul White wouldn’t have realized that—he hasn’t had that much experience, and he doesn’t believe in making that kind of judgment in any case—but you ought to have known.”

  A line of beads of sweat stood out across the general’s upper lip, and he sputtered at Heykus; what the sputter meant was impossible to determine.

  “If the scientists were right, and the little whale did not acquire the Alien language,” Heykus said, keeping his voice casual, “we lost. We’d wasted time and resources and a lot of money. If, on the other hand, the little whale did acquire the Alien language, we still lost—because we can’t communicate with whales, right? They told you this, at the very beginning. They came to you, in a group, and they explained that all attempts to Interface whales with humans had been failures. Without exception. And they told you that they, and the men of the Lines, were quite certain that this was deliberate on the whales’ part—and would not change.”

  The general cleared his throat and raised his hand in the gesture that means wait-a-minute-there’s-something-I-want-to-add-right-here, and Heykus stopped for him.

  “Well, you see, Heykus, that’s just the point. Now, it seemed to me—I mean, I have been there, all these years, while those whales up on the first floor were in the Interface with tubies, and I have seen that nothing whatsoever was happening. I knew about that. It was just a cover, anyway, and nobody cared. But it seemed to me that this was a whole new ball game, Heykus. It seemed to me that the whales of Earth might well feel that now there was a reason to communicate with us. They might want to share with us this entirely new set of circumstances.”

  Heykus and the computer whiz exchanged glances, and Tatum Pugh shook his head sadly; and Heykus shouldered the burden and went on speaking in the same compassionate tender mode he had been using before the general pranced through the linguistic environment stark naked in that awful fashion, with his thoughts hanging out.

  “This one little whale,” Heykus mused, “this infant whale, alone of all its kind, and with no other whale for company but its mother. It might know all the past history of human/cetacean Interfacing. And it might decide, on the basis of its ample knowledge, that the time had come to . . . to what, Stuart? What did you think it was going to do, demand to be put in the first floor Interface so it could teach the current tubie? Or was it going to rely on its mother to make that demand? Or what?”

  “When you put it that way,” said the general slowly, “it does sound a little unlikely.”

  “Does it?”

  “But I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”

  Heykus wasn’t angry with Stu Charing any longer. Anger was an emotion that he reserved for his peers, for equals, for those who were equipped to defend themselves as rational adult males. This man wasn’t stupid. This man was mentally defective. He had been under stress too long, had suffered the humiliation of too many failures for which it was clear that he had been the cause; he had broken under the weight of it. He should not have been in charge of anything—he should have been in a sheltered environment where he could have been looked after. And he wasn’t angry with Tatum Pugh, because he knew about really good computer people; they reported trouble with computers. Period. Human being trouble was not their province. “I don’t do humans,” they’d tell you if you asked. The better the computer man, the more that was going to be true. But the anger Heykus felt toward his subordinates in D.A.T. was a mighty anger. They should have spotted General Charing as a man who—however capable he had been before—was now as useless as a chocolate computer chip. They were there so that he, Heykus, would not have to worry about pathetic creatures like Stuart Charing. He recognized in his anger a core of passion that would not do; if it was still there by the time he got back to Washington he would spend an hour on his knees in prayer before he called in any of the upper level men who ought to have alerted him to Charing’s breakdown. Anger was permitted to him, but vengeance was the Lord’s; he would pray for the breadth of spirit to remember that.

  “Heykus?” Charing’s voice was trembling now.

  “Yes, Stuart?”

  “What’s the next step? Do we negotiate with the whales now, or what?”

  “How would you suggest we do that, General?”

  “I don’t know.” Charing swallowed hard. “But there has to be a way. Heykus, it’s intolerable that there’s a nonhumanoid language that’s been cracked by a Terran, and we can’t get at it. It won’t be easy to live with that, Heykus.”

  “Astute observation.”

  “Nobody could argue with that,” Pugh said, adding his contribution.

  “What are we going to do, Heykus?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you would know,” the General said. “I was counting on you.”

  “You thought I’d have a magic solution? Stuart, I’m an administrator, not an animal trainer. How would I know what to do about an ocean full of whales that won’t stoop to talk to human beings?”

  The general sat there blinking at him, and Heykus couldn’t bear to look at the man any longer; he turned his attention to Tatum Pugh. “Mr. Pugh,” he said. “Do you have anything to contribute? You’ve had very little to say.”

  “He never talks,” the general said. “Never.”

  “I have a suggestion.”

  “Make it, Mr. Pugh.”

  “I suggest that you ask the Lingoes what to do.”

  Heykus saw the general open his mouth to say what he thought of that, and he told him to shut it. He was kind, but he was firm. “You think they’d help?” he asked Pugh, well aware that the man was making a vast concession in even taking part in this discussion.

  “No,” answer Pugh. “I don’t think they’d help. But I think they’d be just purely fascinated, and that might sucker them in. A nonhumanoid language . . . god almighty, can’t you just imagine how the Lingoes would want to get at that? After all this time? I don’t think they would help, because—once again—you’ve ignored everything they said and gone right on fouling it all up just like they told you you would. But I don’t think they could resist, Mr. Clete. If you just told them what had happened, and then you got out of the way, I think they’d come in. And while they were around, they just might do whatever there is that could be done.”

  “You think they could get the whales to cooperate?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think anybody else could, and I think they might.”

  “And if they did . . .
then what would we do?”

  Tatum laughed. “Then,” he said, “we would have to negotiate. With the Lingoes.”

  “Could you handle setting that up?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Pugh. “I don’t do humans.”

  “You must have somebody on your staff that could do it,” said Heykus.

  “Nope.” Pugh’s voice was flat. “The General here can’t do it. The eggdomes won’t—they hate the Lingoes. And there’s nobody else at our installation that I—or you—would trust with the arrangements.”

  “All right,” Heykus sighed. “I’ll see to it. I’ll contact the linguists myself.”

  He kept confidence in his voice, still working on subduing the unwholesome rebelliousness he sensed in Tatum Pugh; but if he had been forced to state his expectations they would not have matched his tone. The linguists functioned by a code of ethics so bizarre that Heykus could not ever be certain what they would do or how they would react in a given set of circumstances. He was grateful for it—without it, he was sure they could never have been forced to lead the lives of constant sacrifice, cradle to grave, that were essential to D.A.T.’s plans and to the Lord’s. Still, sometimes it was awkward.

  He could just hear the linguists now. Explaining. That the whales had made it more than amply clear that they did not choose to communicate with humans. That they had every right to make that decision. That if the whales had found a creature they did choose to communicate with, the linguists were happy for them. That come the day the whales wanted to communicate with humans, they would no doubt make that desire known. And until that day—Heykus could just hear the linguists. Saying:

  “We don’t do whales.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “I was so very slow to grow up; I don’t suppose I began to approach anything like adult womanhood before I was thirty years old. And it was terrible, then, when it did come, to awaken into life no longer young and with children of my own, and to discover that almost everything that made up the reality in which we lived was simply lies. I didn’t know what to do. Fortunately, I was the sort of awkward and cumbersome personality who makes no impassioned speeches and wouldn’t be listened to if she did; I managed not to make a complete fool of myself. I looked at all those lies, and I saw at once that not one stood alone. Every lie was intertwined with every other lie; every lie was wound into a dense fabric of lies that seemed impenetrable; there were so many lies that existed only to protect people from the consequences of other lies. And that structure went on, layer after layer; I had lived within it for thirty years and never guessed that it was there.

  “When I recovered from my astonishment all I could think of was that something must be done, and that whether I was the only one who felt that way or one of countless millions who felt that way, it was my place to do what had to be done, to the limits of my strength. I thought then: no matter how deep the dung, no matter how long the task, if you just go at it one shovel at a time the day will come when you can see clean earth at the bottom of the pile.

  “It is possible—barely possible—that I was right. I’m not sure, though I have now lived three times thirty years and more. But right or wrong, there was one way in which my error was large, was vast . . . Never, you perceive, did I so much as begin to guess at the scale of time with which I was dealing. “No matter how deep the dung,” I thought. “No matter how long the task.” I believe I was thinking of decades, of tens of years; and I do believe that I was considering myself a remarkably patient woman! My arrogance, like my ignorance, was almost as abundant as that pile of dung . . . that pile of preprocessed lies, excreted all tidy and steaming by our culture . . . that I fancied I might be able to at least make smaller.

  “I know better now. The unit of time that must be taken into account here is not decades but centuries, and tens of centuries. It has meaning only in the context of eternal time. Imagine eternity, where a million centuries might still be ahead of you before some event that you were anxious for, and the Holy One would say to you gently and honestly, ‘Wait . . . it will only be a minute.’ That is the sort of time we are speaking of.”

  “Well . . . I was a human being, a woman of Earth, a Terran female; I was ill-prepared to set my mind to plans that must be based upon thousands and thousands of years. Nothing about me was large enough to stretch itself to such a scale. And so, because there was quite literally nothing else to do, I set Time aside. I pretended that there was no such entity as Time; I abandoned it utterly. And then I set my shovel to the pile. I began to do whatever I humanly could. Outside the context of Time.

  “It would have frightened me, I think, if I had allowed myself to think about it.”

  (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

  Belle-Sharon lay in the broad firm bed in the rendezvous room, as carefully arranged for Jared’s pleasure as an earth-wise plant arranged for sunlight or for rain. Like the plants, Belle-Sharon was earth-wise, but she had the additional benefit of conscious intention. She had washed her long hair that afternoon, and had dried it in the sun while she took her turn at watching the little ones in the Interface, and when she came to her appointment with her husband she loosed her hair and let its ends sweep the pillows and sheets, to loose also the lilac scent that Jared preferred. At first he had wanted that perfume so strong and so pervasive that she had found it hard to breathe; over the months she had decreased it in almost imperceptible steps until it was no longer overpowering. She had been scrupulously careful, and Jared was not aware that there had been any change.

  He was calling her “sweetheart,” over and over again, and setting rows of kisses along the side of her throat and down over her breasts; he had come upon the spot between her breasts where she had touched the lilac oil directly to her skin and he was nuzzling there now like a blissful infant. As he moved, she felt his penis touch her hip and noted that it had begun to harden; soon he would be ready to enter her for the act itself. She shifted her body carefully beneath him, so that although he could still reach the nuzzling-spot his penis would lie cradled against the inner surface of her thigh, to make the erection swifter and easier for him; with both strong hands she stroked the long muscles of his back and buttocks.

  Jared’s murmuring had stopped being recognizable words and become a blurred babble of passion and pleasure; she fit her own murmuring to his so that it would form a constant background. Not that he really heard her; she could have lain there under him saying “Hail Columbia, let the good times roll” or “when in the course of human events” or “six times six is thirty-six” or anything else whatsoever; it was the intonation of her voice, the melody to which she set the syllables, that he heard, and not their lexical form.

  He gasped, and his hands were busy at the fork of her body; she arched her throat to give him a place for his mouth while he fumbled, because she knew he didn’t like her to see his face at this particular moment, and as soon as she felt the tip of the penis within her she moved her hips to grasp him and settle herself around him so that he would have maximum contact with her vagina. An ugly word, vagina; like that ugly word, penis. Their ugliness would serve her purpose, however, as Jared began to move, moaning with each thrust, the carefully prepared surfaces that sheathed him offering no resistance except the skilled grip of her inner muscles tightening around him to increase his ecstasy.

  “Vagina,” Belle-Sharon repeated to herself, aloud. If he did understand her he would think only that in her passion she was talking a bit scandalously, and he would be delighted by that; at the same time, her careful consideration of the word’s ugliness was a helpful distraction. She had had difficulty early in her marriage with Jared, because despite her best efforts she would become aroused. But she had gone immediately to the more experienced women for advice and they had described to her a dozen ways to manage. Ugly words always helped, they told her, and there are plenty of those .“Menstruation,” she said—now there was a truly ugly word! The n-s-t-r sequence before the vowel was so un-English, s
o un-Panglish, that it fought your mouth when you tried to pronounce it; she had heard many a med-Sammy slip and say “menestration” instead. She said it again, softly, correctly; Jared was moving more quickly now, well into his best rhythm; it would soon be over. And if things became truly serious she could always switch to Nazareth’s favorite technique. “Oh, the times tables are useful,” Nazareth had said to her, and “verb conjugations have their place, but the very best way I know to avoid going so far into arousal that you suffer is to say the alphabet backward. It takes an extraordinary amount of concentration!” The old woman had chuckled, and added that if the time came when the alphabet in reverse had been so well learned that it lost its efficiency as a distractor, you simply turned to the alphabet of the Alien language you were interpreter for, and so on down the list. “But don’t get too distracted, now,” she had warned. “There is a moment when your attention must be on your husband.”

  Yes. Jared had almost arrived at that moment, and Belle-Sharon was aware of it. She began to pant, tiny gasps like a woman in labor; when the spasm took him, her own body was arched tight against him, and she screamed sharply—just once—and allowed a series of shudders to race through all her muscles as he climaxed. She was as good at those shudders as any woman in Chornyak Womanhouse, and she prided herself on their perfection. Her mother had begun her instruction as soon as her breasts had shown curve enough to draw the attention of the unmarried men, and before pronouncing herself satisfied with Belle-Sharon’s performance she had brought in her own mother to observe the demonstration. Only then, when Noura Hashihawa Adiness had said, “Yes, my dear—that is exactly right,” had the instruction come to an end. And if Noura said it was exactly right, you could be certain that it was; she was well into her sixties, but her husband still called her to the rendezvous rooms weekly, and sometimes oftener. Belle-Sharon had known herself complimented, and she had said, “Thank you, Grandmother,” and been kissed in reply. “You are a good child,” Noura had said, “and you will be a superb wife.”