“Heykus, are you still with us?”
Heykus made an effort to pull his attention back to them, and to exclude firmly the attitudes and prejudices of the man that he must not, really must not, appear to be. Fortunately, at his age the others expected a certain amount of doddering and absent-mindedness; he could always fall back on that.
“I suppose it was stupid,” he managed. “It didn’t seem stupid at the time . . . but perhaps it was.”
“Like I said, there are a few exceptions.”
“Six. Of one hundred.”
“Maximum. Maybe less than six.”
Heykus drew a long weary breath. “You think this whole project ought to be shut down for good, don’t you? All of you?”
“Heykus,” Sundbystyner put in, “we think the opportunity should be left open. We think that the rare child who comes to his parents at the age of three or four and swears with shining eyes and a passionate little voice that he wants to be a linguist when he grows up should be encouraged to go into the Interfaces. But our current program is so ludicrously irrational that it’s an embarrassment to every one of us.”
Heykus nodded slowly. “It makes good sense,” he said. “It makes excellent sense. And it is . . . as you say . . . embarrassing. Because it is just beginning to dawn on me that the linguists of the Lines have been having a great deal of fun at our expense. If I appear to be slightly stunned, gentlemen, it is because I’m having a very bad time with what I am starting to see far too clearly. I assume that all of you are getting the same impression I am. That we have been providing extensive entertainment, god help us, to the linguist households, for quite some time.”
“You are putting your finger right on it, Heykus.” There was almost a hint of emotion in Sundbystyner’s voice. “They must sit around at night telling layman stories. Slapping their thighs. Rolling on the floor.”
“Shit, Sundbystyner,” pleaded Androvarus Barton, “cut it out, will you? I think we all realize the extent to which we have been suckered.”
“They wouldn’t see it that way,” Heykus noted.
“No. They’d say we came and asked them—begged them, they’d say—and that they courteously allowed us to indulge our whims. And they would be right. But we should have known that they were not that stupid . . . you realize that. The idea that they didn’t even feel that they needed to make a pretense of arguing—that they were so sure we were that deluded, and were right—dear god, that’s hard to live with.” Barton’s voice trembled, and he added, “I can understand why there’s been so little difficulty in persuading people to hate them. I’m having a hell of a time not hating them, for this. It’s not their fault—it’s our fault—but I hate them anyway.”
“There’s never been even a hint from them.”
“No. They’ve just let us toddle down the road, swinging our little pails and singing our little songs, and they’ve never said one word to stop us.”
“How could they be like that?” demanded Lo Chen bitterly. “It’s not human, damn it. How can they hold off like that . . . not one dig, not one hint. . . . I couldn’t do that. I would not be able to hold out like that. Jesus . . . it’s been years. And they’ve just been waiting all this time. Knowing that eventually—eventually—we’d find out and feel like very tiny flat little shits. Heykus, that isn’t human. Not really human.”
“Perhaps,” said Sundbystyner, “they felt that we had it coming. And the longer it went on, the worse it would be. They wouldn’t have wanted to spoil it.”
“It must have given them great pleasure,” said Heykus huskily.
“I’m sure it did. Enormous pleasure.”
Heykus sat there looking at these men, his colleagues, his good friends, thinking how they had been writhing under the humiliation of this since the pieces started falling into place, and he felt a genuine regret. They were good men, and he was sorry.
He folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Well,” he said flatly, “I withdraw my previous objections. ‘Total failure’ is the proper phrase, after all. I apologize.”
“We demolish the GW Interface-sharing program, then?”
He shook his head. “I’m not ready to answer that yet,” he told them. “This is all very new to me. I need to go run a set of extrapolations and compare them.” I need to go wash my mouth out with soap and spend an hour on my knees praying for my soiled lying soul! “But you have my word—I’ll go over the data, I’ll reach an appropriate decision, and I’ll advise all of you as quickly as possible. And if I need help, I’ll call on you for input before I make the decision.”
“Fair enough.”
“Until next year, then, gentlemen.”
“We don’t disband this group?” Phong Lo Chen was clearly surprised.
“We don’t disband this group,” Heykus said firmly. “This is a group that will find a function—regardless of what my decision is regarding the Interfacing.”
When they were gone, and he was left alone to stare down through the foolish floor at the dwindling tourists—some of whom were staring back—he reminded himself that this was all for the best, that it had been obvious from the beginning, and that all was as right with the world as was consistent with the human condition. If things had turned out differently, the problems of keeping every one of the lay linguists under adequate surveillance would have been a logistics nightmare. Even with the vast financial resources at Earth’s disposal, it would have put a strain on his budget; there were better places for the money to be allocated.
But still . . . he had had that small hope. Foolish. Naive. Irrational, no question about it. If it had not turned out this way, and if whatever it was that motivated the linguists of the Lines had somehow transmitted itself, along with the languages, to the children outside the Lines—he would have been willing to take on the logistics. It would have been worth it, to have had all those new young men, each armed with the priceless treasure of an Alien tongue. And all of them under his direction, instead of the control of the Lines! If it had happened, he thought sorrowfully, if it had, he would have found a way, somehow, to pay for it.
CHAPTER 25
“The terms Lingoe (for a linguist of the Lines), wimpoe (for an effeminate male individual), and medicoe (to refer to a physician), are coarse epithets, similar to ethnic slurs, and should be avoided. Educated people of good taste do not use them even in private conversation. (It should be noted in this context that the term med-Sammy, which entered popular usage subsequent to the publication of the much-anthologized Greddzohej essay titled “The American Medical Profession as a Samurai Class,” is also to be avoided. It is not as vulgar as “medicoe,” but is a slang term proper only for informal contexts and colloquial conversation. It should never be used informal speech or writing.)”
(from the Harbrace Handbook, 83rd edition, page 411)
Heykus hated hospitals. All hospitals. They were almost always ugly, both inside and out, and this creaking old medical barn in the middle of Washington DC was one of the ugliest; the staff had not bothered even to take down the antique fluorescent light fixtures, although none had bulbs in them, praise be, to turn a person green and purple and bloated-looking like something left under water over a weekend. They were always clean, which was a point in their favor, and Washington General was no exception; its ugliness was a scrubbed ugliness.
But there were things about hospitals that bothered Heykus far more than their physical appearance did. There were the things that hospitals made him think of. That: with sufficient faith there would have been no need for hospitals or for any of their apparatus, because everyone who lay here being tended lay here for lack of sufficient faith in God and His Son. That: sickness was a punishment for sin, so that a hospital was a kind of museum of collected sins, and no way to know what horrible secrets it might contain . . . there were no labels on the exhibits. (That offended Heykus; he felt that there ought to have been an orderly system, so that the sin of gluttony resulted only in gastrointestinal disorde
rs, and the sin of pride only disorders of the genitourinary system, and so on.) That: there were people in hospitals who lay at the point of death, and many of those were headed straight for Hell and its eternal fires. None of this added to Heykus Clete’s perception of hospitals anything but the internal equivalent of an all-pervasive stink; he did not think of healing when he came here, he thought of damnation. And he thought with shame of all the times he had resolved to find a few hours to come here and minister to those who would listen, and all the times he had found compelling excuses not to do so.
This visit was different. There was no excuse that would spare him this time. The man he was here to see had been a childhood friend; had been at Heykus’ wedding; had been a deacon in Heykus’ church before his incomprehensible conversion to Roman Catholicism in his early sixties; had been a business associate and a colleague; had been someone Heykus could always call on, always rely on in time of trouble. This was a man he loved, a man he had mourned over when the Romans ensnared him, and a man he would sorely miss when he was gone. It would have been a disgrace not to visit him as he lay here so desperately ill, and Heykus had known he must come. Philip Cendarianis had a right to expect him, and a right to expect him promptly; Heykus had come at once, as soon as he had heard that visitors would be allowed at all. But he still hated it. It was like visiting a cesspool.
In a more modern hospital there would have been a separate entrance, and separate elevators, to the private room where Philip was. But here at Washington General no amount of architectural ingenuity could have made that possible, not without tearing down the vast pile of brick and stone and starting over. (Which would have been an excellent idea, to Heykus’ way of thinking, but was unlikely ever to happen; the building was on the list of historical sites.) And so the route to Philip’s room led down a hallway past a public ward, where patients lay on beds with nothing to shield them except spotless bedspreads and blankets. It was indecent, and unkind; Heykus resented it on their behalf. The Supreme Court decision had been very clear and very precise: every American citizen, and any person visiting on American soil, was entitled by law to full medical care at the expense of the government of these United States, with no exceptions. But any such citizen not in critical condition was entitled to a medpod only if he or she chose to spend personal funds for it, not as an automatic part of that “full” medical care.
There was no excuse for that, Heykus thought. It was nothing more than the vindictive spleen of the ancient Justices, who had not had free medpods when they were young and therefore felt an obligation to get even. Earth had more than enough money to provide a free medpod for everyone who entered its hospitals; no one needed to lie in a plain bed with an ugly old healthy beside it clacking away day and night, doing things with its array of ingenious arms, in full view of anyone who chose to stroll past. Disgusting, he thought. And proof, as if any more proof were needed, that appointing Supreme Court judges for life in a time when “life” meant an average span of one hundred and thirty years had its serious drawbacks.
It was a relief to step into the elevator that led to the private wards. Heykus tried to compose himself as it swept him upward, and to put his frustration with the medical system out of his mind. Things had been much worse, as recently as the twenty-first century. There had been a time, impossible to conceive of but a matter of historical record, when the first thing required of a sick person entering a hospital had been proof that he had money of his own to pay for his care or had spent enough money of his own to oblige an insurance company to pay for it. There had been a time when hospitals turned sick people away for lack of money. There had been times of horrors, when the very term “health care system” had been synonymous with greed and degradation; it was during those times that the physicians had acquired the nickname “med-Sammys” that they still carried, although today their Samurai status was no longer quite so blatant. It was no longer possible for a physician to perform the equivalent of the beheading-by-whim, just by refusing to certify someone as near enough to death’s door to require emergency care regardless of financial condition. Those awful times were past, relegated to the annals of barbarism, he reminded himself. When the heart attack had slammed its fist of pain into Philip Cendarianis’ chest, he had not had to consider first whether he had money to pay for it before he called for help. And he would never have to lie, as people once had lain, in pain and in despair, unable to even begin to achieve the emotional peace that is as necessary to health as cleanliness, because he was frantic about the medical bills he would not be able to pay. No; things were better now. Remember that, Heykus, he told himself sternly, and set yourself in order; try not to look like Death in person come to gather Philip Cendarianis to the Lord, or else go home and spare him this visit! It was not likely that Philip needed to see a face that matched the grimness of the thoughts he was thinking at this moment.
The elevator sighed and brought him to a gentle halt only a short distance from Philip’s door, high in a tower away from the noise of ground traffic and sufficiently well insulated to keep the air traffic noise to a constant hum rather than a roar. He shook himself, not just mentally but physically as well, not caring who might see him, to break the chain of thought the public wards had wrapped round his mind, and decided that he was fit to share the air of a sickroom at least briefly. Here the walls of the corridors were a pleasant soft blue, and the carpets were American Orientals—imitations, of course, but a lovely path of flowers and colors under his feet all the same—and the fluorescent fixtures had either been taken down or covered up. There were handsome framed prints and textured hangings to look at, and a holo fountain played at the end of the hallway. It was almost like any large public building of a certain age. He could feel himself beginning to relax, and that was an improvement; he went through the door into Philip’s room with what he was reasonably sure was a pleasant expression on his face and a pleasant set to his body.
“May I help you, sir?”
The voice startled him; it was an astonishing voice, and it came from a tall woman in heavy black garments that marked her as a nun. He should have realized that there would be a nun here; he was fortunate there wasn’t a priest as well. It had slipped his mind.
“My name is Heykus Joshua Clete, Sister,” he said to her. “I’m a friend of Mr. Cendarianis—one of his oldest and closest friends. His doctor said I could visit him this morning.”
If he had been a Catholic male he would have then told her that she had permission to speak, but he was decently Protestant and proud of it and he said nothing of the kind. Until he realized, as the silence dragged on, that she had no way of knowing that and was waiting for the ridiculous, hopelessly un-American line to come from his lips.
“I’m not Catholic, Sister,” he told her, preferring that, hoping he didn’t sound as repulsed as he felt; it wasn’t the poor woman’s fault that she was subject to a sociolinguistic constraint that made him queasy. “I’m Baptist . . . Protestant. You don’t have to wait for my permission before you can talk. Is it all right if I come in and see Philip?”
She looked directly at him then, abandoning the lowered eyelids that went with the submission to silence, and smiled. “Of course,” she said. “But please understand that you can’t stay long—he’s very weak. And I am ordered not to leave him; I’m sorry for the intrusion on your privacy.”
That wonderful voice again! Heykus was charmed. To find such a voice, in such a place, and from such a source; he wondered how it had happened. Perhaps she had been a choir nun once, trained to sing those horrendously difficult Catholic substitutes for the wholesome Protestant hymns.
“I understand, Sister,” he said, adding, “Please don’t stand on my account.”
She smiled again, and thanked him courteously, and he saw that although she wasn’t young she was beautiful; but she remained standing at the head of the medpod where Philip lay. He supposed she must have been given orders to do that, too, poor thing.
“May I?�
� he asked, motioning toward the pod.
“Yes . . . for a very short time, please.”
Heykus touched the small blue circle that made the pod transparent from the patient’s waist to head, and braced himself for the worst, but it wasn’t as bad as he had expected. Through the pod he could see that his friend was awake, and not in pain, and apparently not in emotional distress.
“Philip,” he said, “you look well!”
“And you, Heykus, look surprised. What were you expecting?”
The voice was a little odd, coming through the pod’s speakers, but it was strong and cheerful and amused.
“I don’t know exactly,” Heykus admitted. “I certainly wasn’t expecting a man who looks and sounds ready to follow a plow.”
“I’m only dying, Heykus. Not plowing. Death doesn’t take much strength when you’re tucked into a medpod. Plowing, now—that might be more than I could manage.”
“I’m sorry this is happening, Philip,” Heykus said, meaning it. “I wish I knew something to say that would be appropriate.”
The man in the medpod chuckled softly. “Just don’t pray over me,” he said. “Anything but that.”
“If—”
“I mean it, Heykus. No praying. You leave me to the pros.”
To the priests. And to their blackgarbed handmaidens. Heykus glanced at the nun, but she had a nun’s control of her face; she might have been carved of wood for all the sign she gave that she was hearing anything they said.
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