The Judas Rose (19 page)

His grandson said nothing at all; this was no time to interfere with whatever James Nathan was up to, however much he disliked it. Not before a stranger, and especially not before this particular stranger. The phrase “a trial” must be the key. An
hour
could be considered a “trial.”

“Good,” said Macabee Dow. “Glad to hear it. Name your price, then.”

“No price,” said the old man. “Why should we charge you? One baby doesn't use very much air. However, there are some conditions.” His voice changed abruptly, losing the casual tone, and he laid down the prerequisites with the measured snap of a drill instructor. “The baby will be brought here each day promptly at six A.M. and picked up just as promptly at nine A.M., by an individual in your employ. It will spend the period from six to nine in the Interface, although of course those of our women supervising will remove the child at once if it requires attention, just as they would one of our own infants. It will not participate in any other activity of this Household, and we will have no responsibility for it other than as part of the Interfacing proper. We do not Interface our infants on Sundays; we will not Interface yours. Should the child be ill in any way, however minor, you will keep it at home. If you know it to have been exposed to any sort of illness, you will keep it at home. The child's mother will not be permitted to observe the Interfacing or to interfere in the procedure—we have no time for the sort of emotional extravagance you describe and do not wish our own women exposed to it. We will set up this agreement for a trial period of three months, to be renegotiated at the end of that time and each six months thereafter; under no circumstances will it be continued
beyond the child's fifth birthday; continuing practice with the language thereafter will be your responsibility, and I advise you to begin considering that aspect immediately—it won't be a simple arrangement. Any questions?”

Dow had stopped fidgeting, and was warily alert; Jonathan would have laid quite a large wager that he hadn't been spoken to in that fashion since he was a teenager. He narrowed his eyes again, and Jonathan saw a pulse beating at his temple.

“No questions,” he said. “Not at the moment. I'll want it all in writing, of course, but it seems satisfactory. However, I would prefer to pay you a fee. I assure you I can afford to.”

“Absolutely not,” snapped James Nathan. “We are unimpressed by your ‘financial standing.' We have no interest in any monetary transaction with you. Not now; not any time in the future. We perceive this as a scientific experiment—even privately educated as we are, without the advantage of the rarified intellectual atmosphere within what you refer to as the real scientific community, we remain interested in science. We agree to participate. Our attorneys will draw up the necessary documents and forward them to your attorneys for examination and—if you find them in proper order—for your signature. We will not negotiate the terms stated. We will expect the infant one week from today at six A.M., or we will expect a communication from your attorneys stating that you have decided not to proceed. And that will suffice. Good day, Professor Dow; the stairs are straight ahead at the end of the corridor.”

Jonathan continued to be impressed with the eggdome; most men would have been distracted from their resolve by his grandfather's skilled tonguelashing, and by the heavy freight of contempt it carried in intonation and other bodyparl. This man merely nodded, handed over his attorneys' card, announced that they'd be hearing from him, and left. If he was typical of the “real” scientific community, Jonathan was encouraged. Someone had obviously told Dow that no matter what happened he must not let the linguists get him rattled, and he'd put on a remarkable display. There might be some hope for the old profs after all, if Dow was even approximately representative. It was time somebody sat in on a few classes and got a more current perspective on the situation, that was clear. He made a brief note to send some suitably ordinary-looking young males with gaps in their schedules over to Georgetown as soon as possible.

And then he leaned back in his chair, turned off the Bach, folded
his
arms over his chest, and stared coldly at James Nathan Chornyak. “All right, Grandfather,” he said heavily. “That was
my fault—I invited you to join this meeting. And I didn't interfere, because your judgment has never failed us yet.”

“That is
why
you invited me to join you,” his grandfather pointed out.

“Correct. That and the fact that I didn't want you to miss the fun.”

“You're too kind to a useless old man, Jonathan. Try to curb your mawkish sentimentality, will you?”

“Mawkish sentimentality, my rosy
butt!
”

“Is it? Rosy?”

“Grandfather, I don't have time for this crap.”

“In that case, do not refer to business as ‘fun'; the semantics is too intricate for me. Please get on with it.”

“I'll be happy to. But I'm not sure where to begin, because I'm completely baffled.”

“Well, Jonathan, my boy, if we had let him pay us—”

“Grandfather,” Jonathan interrupted, grimly, “cut it out. Of course we don't want his money. The last thing we want is to be involved with him in an employee relationship . . . or, sweet suffering Christ, to have him perceive himself as ‘renting' our Interface. I understand that, and I am in full agreement with you—furthermore, you know that. What I don't understand is why you agreed to do it on
any
terms.”

“As I said at the time, Jonathan, why not?”

“Grandfather, I don't need to remind you that the livelihood of all thirteen of the Lines rests upon the maintenance of our monopoly. Do you have some kind of job training plan in mind for us, once you've handed over the only kind of work any of us knows how to do? I agree that Dow is likely to do unusual things; but when the word gets out on this—and I didn't hear you adding any requirement of confidentiality to your list of conditions—you can't tell me we won't have dozens more eggdomes wanting to copy him and get
their
kiddies a piece of the power, too. We only have thirteen Interfaces, but we could add four or five lay infants to each of them without any strain. And then you're talking about fifty lay linguists in competition with the Lines! I realize that we're always being pushed to do more work than we can keep up with, but I don't think that turning over the Alien language business to the general public is a solution to that problem.”

James Nathan had listened to all this with an infuriating grin on his face, and it was still there after Jonathan stopped talking, so that he found himself adding stiffly that he would appreciate less humor and more information.

“I'm a little surprised,” said the old man. “I always thought you were a man who saw straight to the heart of a situation. That's why we made you Head.”

“BEM-dung. I was made Head because I had sense enough to make use of the wisdom to be found all around me instead of trying to be an effing Emperor. I remember very well being told that we'd had too many Emperor types in a row and it was time for a correction in the curve. Now
share
your wisdom—and it had better be top grade.”

James Nathan chuckled, and Jonathan ignored that.

“
Now
, please, Grandfather,” he said. “I'm a busy man.”

James Nathan liked the Bach fugues, and considered it cheap of his grandson to save them for visitors; he reached over and flipped them on to provide an accompaniment. And he proceeded to explain the situation. “Let me tell you what's going to happen, Johnny,” he said indulgently, “so that you can stop fretting. And then you have my permission to apologize to me for being so goddamn slow to perceive the overpoweringly obvious.”

And after a while, as the overpoweringly obvious took on a delightful clarity for him, it was Jonathan who was chuckling.

CHAPTER 8

“I sat there and I stared at that lovely child; Aquina's descendant—named for her, and so like her in character that it made me doubt the principles of genetics. And I wondered. She had come so willingly, almost eagerly. I wondered if there were anything at all I could have asked her to do for the sake of Láadan that she would have said no to. If I had said, ‘Aquina, find a cliff and jump off, for the sake of Láadan,' would she even have stopped to ask me why? I doubted it. I thought she would have just said, ‘Yes, Nazareth!', and taken off at a run in search of an appropriate precipice. I remember that it was storming outside; that would not have slowed Aquina down at all.

“She had exactly the set of characteristics I always looked for, and so very rarely found, in every girlchild of the Lines past puberty. She was the daughter of a widow not remarried, and was therefore free of a male parent's close surveillance; she was herself both unmarried and unbetrothed, and seemed contented to be without a man's attentions; she was intelligent and industrious and brave; she had the troublesome but absolutely crucial sense of mission that was required. And she had a mother I could manage with ease; without that, all of the rest would have been useless to me.

“I sat there, studying her, thinking that fierce and passionate as she was, at seventeen she had more common sense than her great-grandmother had ever had. Still
. . . that
Aquina had grown up in a very different time. Before we began to speak Láadan. Before the building of the Womanhouses, when we still lived much of our lives with the men. Perhaps she would have been different, too, in different circumstances. Remembering how miserable her life had been, and how wasted, hardened my resolve. I ignored the reflex the girl provoked in me, that made
me want to protect and shelter her, and I took the syringe from my needlework bag and laid it on the table between us.

“ ‘Aquina,' I said, ‘you'll want to play close attention now to what I tell you. It isn't complicated, but if it's done wrong, it might as well not be done at all.'

“She laughed at me, and at my serious face, and asked me, ‘What could go wrong? I wait outside the rendezvous room for Lara's husband to leave her alone, I go into the room, I—'

“ ‘Listen carefully all the same!' I said sharply. ‘There are things that matter, names and addresses and facts that you must remember. That you must not write down, even in code.' ”

“She hushed at that, and I warned her again, before I went on. I have warned each one of the nine, and not one has let the warning hold her back, but there could always be a first time. I said, ‘Aquina, dearlove, stop and think. This will be very unpleasant and difficult and dangerous. It has consequences that will go on for all the rest of your life. Are you absolutely sure you want to go on with it?”

“ ‘It's for Láadan, isn't it?'

“ ‘Yes. Of course.'

“ ‘Then I don't care about any of that,' she said. As calm and confident as if all she had to do was go get me a cup of tea.

“They've all been like that—so calm, so serene, so sure of themselves. I am still waiting for the first one to fail.”

(from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

The tour of the Chornyak Household, with every last closet and cranny opened for her inspection except the bachelor bedrooms, had clarified one thing for Jo-Bethany absolutely: the idea that the linguists of the Lines lived in luxury was a myth. Unless the Chornyaks were lying to her, and among the thirteen families there were exceptions, the linguists lived in a manner that most Americans would have considered appropriate only for the poor. It was a very
elegant
poverty, to be sure, and a poverty that was a matter of choice rather than necessity. But it was a lifestyle so different from the one portrayed for the Lines by the media that it was bewildering. Why would they want to distort the truth that way? Jo-Bethany had no idea, and she preferred not to think about it; the linguists themselves had proposed no explanation. And she had seen that although nothing in the Chornyak dwellings was luxurious, everything was sturdy and durable and in decent taste—clearly, they were
not
poor. It was odd, and baffling, and she had tried one very tentative question.

“At first,” Dorcas Chornyak had answered, “during the time of the anti-linguist riots, we lived very simply as a way of demonstrating to people outside the Lines that they had no
reason
to consider us some sort of robber barons. It was an important matter, for us.”

“But it didn't help!” Jo-Bethany had objected.

“You don't think so?”

“No, I don't. You might just as well have gone ahead and installed the marble pools and diamond chandeliers and all the rest of it, so far as I can see. Because after all these years, all this deliberate low-budget living of yours, the public image is precisely what it always was. I can understand why you might have gone on as you did for a while, thinking that eventually things would change and people would come to realize the truth. But after you saw it wasn't working, why didn't you give it up?”

Dorcas had smiled at her and said, “I suppose by then we'd lost our taste for luxury,” and Jo-Bethany could see that she didn't intend to say anything more.

Everyone was so busy that opportunities to explore the subject further didn't present themselves naturally, and Jo-Bethany wasn't sure she could have brought herself to try it even if they had. It was rude, somehow, and childish. Asking people: “But why do you do
this?
But why do you do
that?
” They might well have told her it was none of her business, and they would have been right. Still, it was irritating to live with so many puzzles. So irritating that Jo—to her amazement—found herself wishing she had Melissa there to talk to about it. It was an indication of the disorganized state of her mind; she could have talked more productively to a philodendron than to Melissa. And so she held her peace, and paid attention, and waited for revelation to dawn.