The Judas Rose (15 page)

“Is that usual?”

The man shrugged, and blew air like a horse. “Director Clete,” he said, “this kind of thing usually isn't an emergency. Usually, say you bust your ass to send out a seeker mission on top priority, when you get there you find some old millionaire on safari with his sportjet landed for minor repairs, and the guy isn't grateful, he's furious. You bust your ass to get to him, and he threatens to sue the government for invasion of privacy because his wife thought he was someplace else and so did his mistress. It doesn't pay, usually.”

“I see. I wasn't aware of that aspect of the problem. Go on.”

“Well, when the vessel sent a landing party down to check matters, they found these eleven women all alone, and busy as clams under a floodlight. Putting in gardens, building a kind of hut—very badly—and clearly intending to stay right where they were. They had a working distress beacon with them, with more than adequate range and power; when the officer in charge asked why they hadn't called for help they told him they didn't
need
any help, thank you. And then they rushed him.”

“Rushed him?
Women
?”

“Damn right they rushed him. They had all kinds of tools with them. Old stuff, the kind of thing women like to hang up on walls, god knows why, not stuff anybody would ever use. Except they
were
using it. Building tools. Gardening tools. They did their damndest to stop the three men in the landing party, sir, and they managed to do a respectable amount of damage. The men weren't expecting to be attacked—they'd put their weapons away when they saw it was only women.”

“Are they all right?”

Frege shrugged again. “They needed patching and pasting,
and the officer they went for first is still not fit for duty. One of the bitches tore up his face with the point of a hoe, if you can believe that.”

“I can believe it,” Heykus told him grimly. “When women go mad they're worse than any animal.”

“Yes. I suppose they are. But everyone's going to be all right.”

“Good. Maybe next time they find a pack of women alone they won't be so careless.”

“No. I don't expect they will be.”

“Go on, please.”

“Well, it was obvious then what the situation was. As soon as the men realized they were under attack, they stopped being polite and subdued the bitches.”

“
Stop calling them bitches
.”

Frege straightened, startled, and opened his mouth to mention that he wasn't a mail clerk; and then he got a look at the old man's eyes and he dismissed that idea.

“Sorry, Director Clete,” he said. “Subdued the females.”

“There were no males on the asteroid?”

“No. The crew took the women aboard, and then they checked the scanners; there was no sentient life signal from the place once the women were removed.”

Heykus sat there thinking, while Captain Frege waited. He hadn't expected Heykus to be pleased, and he hadn't expected the session to be pleasant. But that was all right. Pleasant wasn't his major interest in life, anyway.

“This asteroid . . .” Clete asked him, slowly. “
Could
the women have stayed there, if they hadn't been caught? Is it suitable for settlement?”

“Oh, I guess so. If you were absolutely desperate, I suppose you could manage to survive. But it wasn't any island paradise. Just a godforsaken scraggly little bare rock, with maybe enough tillable land for a carrot patch and some onions. Way off the shipping lanes, in a zone of rotten weather—what soil there is probably blows away every couple of cycles. Nobody in his right mind would have wanted that place. Atmosphere just
barely
breathable, and the gravity all wrong . . . . Somebody with plenty of money to spend on terraforming could have made it livable, sure; but nobody with that much money would have wanted it. As for being stranded out there the way those bi—those women were, with antique hand tools and survival packs—shit! In their place, I'd have been yelling mayday with all the power I had available.”

Heykus sighed, and rubbed his temples with the base of his
palms. It was not supposed to be possible. Here women were, not even legally adults. They couldn't have any money of their own, they couldn't buy property, they couldn't apply for a passport, they couldn't even get through customs without a male escort. Even women on the most primitive frontier settlements, women who had to do a lot of things that women in more civilized places would never have been allowed to do, were under the legal guardianship of responsible adult males. For a lone woman to stow away in a baggage hold, or sneak out an airlock during a commercial cruise, something like that, was always possible. But a
group
of women? A group of eleven women, off by themselves in the wilderness sectors, playing survival games? It was beyond his comprehension.

“Trying to establish a settlement in space is not
like
just hiking into the woods,” he stated, as if that weren't self-evident. “We send out exploring parties of well-trained men, equipped with every one of the newest technological tools—and they still have it damn rough.”

“They do,” Frege agreed.

“Well, what in blazes could possibly make a bunch of ignorant women, runaways with no skills and no equipment, think they could do such a thing? And what kind of worthless men were in charge of them, that they would even think of trying?”

“I don't know,” Frege answered. “I don't understand it any more than you do.”

“Didn't you interrogate them? Once you had them aboard?”

“They sent for me, sir, and I did my best. But you know the law. You can't use any of the spilldrugs unless you have the permission of the woman's legal guardian, or her husband, or at least a senior male relative. The courts are extremely touchy about any violation on that.”

“I'm touchy about it myself!” snapped Heykus. “I wasn't suggesting that you break any laws. But it seems to me that a man with your experience . . . how long have you been in Coast Guard Security? Twenty-some years now, isn't it? It seems to me you might have known a few ways to persuade the ladies to talk sensibly. In some legal and appropriate manner, Frege.”

The captain laughed harshly. “Director Clete,” he said, “these were not ladies. I've duly noted that the word ‘bitches' offends you, and I won't use it again in your office. But you might want to give a little thought to what kind of female human being tries to tear out a man's eyes with a hoe. These women were not ‘persuadable.' Not in any legal manner that
I
know about.”

“I see. Well . . . it's an ugly story.”

“It is.”

“What's the ending like?”

“Attempts to identify male relatives or guardians were unsuccessful—we're still working on that. Out in that neck of space, it could take a while.”

“All you had to do was check their armpit tattoos,” Heykus noted impatiently. “I don't see the problem.”

Frege shook his head, and his lips twitched at the corners. “They'd taken care of that before we got to them, Director.”

“Oh, they
had?
And just how did they manage that?”

“Regular sewing needles and indelible ink, from the look of it. They'd really messed it up.
No armpit data
—just blurred black lines. They must have done it before they tackled anything else.”

“But that's against the law!”

“I don't think the law was one of their main concerns, sir. Under the circumstances, we waited the regulation seventy-two hours and then we took them to the nearest institutional facility and we turned them over.”

“Suitably tranquilized.”

“Absolutely.”

Heykus sighed again, and his regret was genuine. He knew what would happen to the women now. He even approved of it, because the mind of a madwoman was a sewage pit that had to be cleaned out. But a mind treated in that fashion, however essential the process, was a mind beyond the reach of any ministry. Satan was eleven souls richer, at least for the time being. And that reminded him.

“Reversible procedures only?” he asked.

“Sir?”

“I said, reversible procedures only. You made sure that the women would be administered only reversibles, while we locate the male trash that let them get to such a state.”

“Director Clete, this was a particularly nasty kind of incident.”

“So? The law says, only reversibles for at least sixty days if you can't locate male guardians. No matter
how
nasty the circumstances.”

“True. But scruples were superfluous in this case.”

Heykus' eyes narrowed, and he laid both palms flat on the seeyum, fingers spread wide. “Explain that,” he ordered.

“Because there was only one way those women could have been where they were, in the condition they were in, and doing what they were doing. And that's for them to have landed along with a party of men—probably criminals, because there've been
no missing person reports or any other kind of inquiry—but conceivably just a party of loners and oddballs. They could not possibly have gotten there as a group of eleven women, Director Clete; you're right about that. They had men with them, when they landed.”

Heykus frowned. “You mean the men abandoned them there?”

“No, sir.”

“I don't understand.”

“Sir, the women killed them.”

The sound Heykus made was the sound a man makes when a fist takes him in the belly, with no warning. Frege looked politely down at the floor while he recovered his composure.

“You know that to be true?” Heykus said heavily. “Be careful what you say, Captain.”

“No, I
don't
know it to be true,” answered Frege, his irritation obvious in his voice. “It
could
be that a gender-selective plague wiped out all the men, and the women went crazy with grief. You want to accept something like that, fine. I don't care. But the men were all very, very dead, Director.”

“You found them.”

“The women had done a pretty good job of cleaning up after themselves,” said Frege coldly, “but that asteroid was hard rock, and they hadn't brought anything along that would dig very deep. When we went back with lawprobe lasers, we found the bodies without any trouble.”

“Dear Jesus,” said Heykus, with complete reverence; he leaned back wearily in his chair and closed his eyes. Women. Women murdering their men, burying their bodies, defacing their tattoos . . . he couldn't imagine it, and he was glad he couldn't.

“I want a full investigation,” he said. “I want no murder charges
unless they can be proved
, do you understand me?”

“Certainly.”

“Captain, did those women say anything that made sense?”

“Not to me. They quoted that Chaleuvre woman and her sister that were jailed in Paris last February—not jailed fast enough, in my opinion, but I'm glad they're finally off the streets. That kind of filth. And they said they wanted to be free.”

“Free. Of
what?
Had somebody abused them?

Frege spoke carefully, and gently; the old man was tough, but he looked heartsick about this situation. “Director Clete,” he said, “they were all completely—one hundred percent—insane.
Mad
women, sir. You couldn't expect them to say anything logical.”

“Free to starve. Free to die of exposure. Free to choke on foul air. Free to die of diseases no doctor has seen in a century. Free to suffer unspeakably. They want to be
free
, to do all those things?”

Frege didn't say anything. What was there to say?

“I wish I could talk to them myself,” Heykus declared. “I'd like to hear them say whatever they have to say. To
me
. To my face.”

“Sir . . .” Frege knew that Heykus would resent his showing any concern, but it bothered him to see the old man so upset. He was sure it wasn't good for him. “Director Clete, they said things you wouldn't want to hear, believe me. I'd be just as glad if I hadn't had to listen to them, myself.”

“They are not responsible,” Heykus told him sternly. “No more than little children! No woman becomes sick like that overnight. Where were their men all this time, while their minds were rotting away? Frege, you tell me—could your wife, or your sister, or your mother, or any other woman in your care, reach a state of deterioration in which she would be capable of ending your life, without you ever noticing that she needed medical attention?”

“Of course not.”

“It's awful. It's unspeakable.”

“Yes. It is. It was.”

“Frege, were all eleven of them killers? Or was there just one ringleader . . . or two or three?”

Before Frege could say anything, Heykus waved him silent. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I understand—you don't know anything about what happened. And God forgive me, I'm doing just what I ordered you not to do . . . I'm condemning those poor sick women without a scrap of evidence. I apologize.”