The Judas Rose (16 page)

Heykus had spoken to one such woman. Just once, nearly ten years ago. She'd been caught almost immediately, had stolen her husband's flyer and been intercepted before she ever made landing anywhere. They'd brought her kicking and biting and shrieking like a rabid animal into the port office where he and the husband were waiting. They'd been prepared to give her a spilldrug; the husband—a pompous bully of a man Heykus had felt no sympathy for—had been perfectly willing. But it hadn't been necessary. The problem with that one had been getting her to shut up.

He'd made a real effort to reach her. He had been careful not to say anything that might sound accusing, or punitive. And he had asked her the question that was every man's question in
these cases:
why?
“My dear,” he'd said to her gently, “we don't understand. On Earth, and on every colony of Earth, to the very limit of our resources, you women are cherished. Treated tenderly. Indulged in every way. Looked after, deferred to, sheltered. . . .
Why
do you turn to this perversion? What more do you want? What is it that we aren't giving you?”

He had been speaking the truth. No woman had to suffer want. No woman had to work, from the day she was born till the day she died; even those women who chose to be nurses or who followed their men out to the frontiers did not really do
work
. In the colonies a woman might need to spend a little more time looking after home and family than she would have on Earth, but it was strictly temporary; it never took many years for the comforts of the motherworld to begin showing up on those colony worlds where women were permitted to go. No man took a woman to Baron, or to Gehenna. And no man dared mistreat or abuse a woman, any more than he dared abuse a child; one call, and the courts would take her away from him forever. Even a woman whose husband earned very little could spend most of her life shopping in the fembouteeks, and chatting with her friends, and involved with her clubs, and enjoying her hobbies. Looking at the runaway, he had thought of his own mother, adored by her sons till the day she died, petted and cosseted, showered with presents, all her foolishness as gently handled as if it had been a major contribution to civilization; and he had leaned toward the raving creature they were holding for him and pleaded with her to explain to him what was wrong.

She had spat in his face. Literally, she had spat on him. He had gone on talking to her nevertheless, wiping the foul slime off his skin, reminding himself that she was only a woman, only a very sick woman, and not responsible for her behavior, until she had exhausted the stream of almost incomprehensible hysterical gibberish that poured from her.

“You don't know anything about it!” she had screamed, over and over. “you don't know anything about women, not anything at all!” He had understood that much, in among the gibberish. He had had a mother, two beloved grandmothers, three adored great-grandmothers; he had a wife he would have cheerfully died for, and two sisters he doted on, and daughters he loved. As for the granddaughters and great-granddaughters, he was a perfect fool about them. He had never known a woman, even one he disliked, who didn't inspire in him an immediate protective impulse. He had never been able even to begin to understand how men could once have been so weak and so worthless that
they had allowed their women to dirty themselves in the world of business and politics and all the rest—men knew better than that now, and Heykus thanked God for it. But it was his own conviction that
he
would have known better even if he'd lived in the 1980s, and would have cherished
his
women decently regardless of the social perversities of the time. He, Heykus Joshua Clete, was an
expert
on women.
How dare this runaway female tell him that he didn't know anything about women?
He knew everything there was to know about normal women; it was only a specimen like this that baffled him.

A sudden thought had struck him that day, and he had turned to the pompous husband and asked, “Are you a linguist? Of the Lines?” If the feminist was a woman of the Lines . . . their lives were hard, they were subject to dangerous stresses and influences that no woman should have to experience. He knew that, and it was a social evil he deplored and had always wished he could set right without endangering the Lord's plan for the universe. If she was a linguist woman, it might go a long way toward explaining. But the husband had recoiled, insulted; that hadn't been it. And they'd taken the woman away still cursing and shrieking, and left Heykus standing there with tears in his eyes that he was in no way ashamed of. Seeing her . . . it broke his heart. It still broke his heart, remembering. She couldn't have been more than twenty years old, and her life was over. As surely as if she were dead. She would have been better off dead, if it hadn't been for the fact that death for her meant eternal damnation. She would spend all the years left to her in a mental institution; the pompous ass she'd married would divorce her at once and forget that she ever existed.

Men must do better, Heykus was thinking. Remembering that terrible mad child. Filthy . . . scratched bloody by her own frantic nails. Men must learn to look after their women better, with more wisdom; they must learn to see the first tiniest seeds of perversion. This blind folly, assuming that it could never happen in your own family, would always happen to someone else, was not an adequate excuse.

“Director Clete?”

Heykus was startled, but he didn't allow the Captain to see that; not a muscle twitched. He had been sitting there, he realized, staring, remembering. Wasting the younger man's time. In just the way that he'd reproached Frege for at the beginning of their meeting.

“I'm sorry, Captain,” he said forthrightly. “I apologize. I'm afraid this is something I've never been able to take lightly.”

“No decent man can. No need to apologize for decency.”

“I'm sorry, nevertheless. My reaction is—excessive. I keep wondering. Is there some needed safeguard in the law that we're overlooking? Is it something in the way they're educated? Are we still asking too much of them, Frege? Perhaps we are wrong to allow them to go beyond the inner colonies? Perhaps we should shelter them more. Women are so frail, Captain, so precious—they are given to us to cherish, not to neglect.”

Pierre Frege cleared his throat, speaking carefully. “Your concern does you credit, sir. I think far too many of us forget our responsibilities in these matters. But I would remind you that there haven't been more than a dozen attempts of this kind in the past twenty years, and most have involved only two or three women. These are statistical accidents, Director. Every once in a while someone is killed because he trips stepping out his front door and cracks his skull open—it's that kind of thing. You can't predict it, and you can't prevent it. It's like trying to control lightning.”

Heykus chuckled. “We do
that
rather well, Captain. But I understand the figure of speech, and I appreciate your courtesy. I'm getting sentimental in my old age, and you're very tolerant of an old man's foibles.”

“My pleasure,” said Frege sturdily, thinking that Clete was known to be about as sentimental as a guillotine.

“You'll keep me posted on this, Captain?”

“You'll get full reports—and if anything confidential turns up, I'll come tell you about it myself.”

“Do that, please. And perhaps it won't happen again, eh?”

“Perhaps not. I certainly hope not. We
all
hope not.”

Heykus watched him leave, nodding a parting gesture—this was a good man, a valued employee—and then ran the fiz-status report; everything normal there. As he would have expected.

He began double-checking then. Making sure that all the steps in the program that would suppress this story completely had been implemented. It was worth taking the trouble, worth being scrupulous. The idea of other women reading about this was not acceptable. There had never been any leaks on these episodes, not one, in his entire career. And there were not ever
going
to be any. And there were not going to be any more episodes like the activities of those two Chaleuvre women in France . . . he was going to make some calls that would guarantee that. Such females should be given expert help immediately, at the first signs of their illness, not allowed to wander around in public with their pathetic condition on view to all the world. Whatever was wrong
in France that accounted for their slipshod handling of the Chaleuvre case would have to be rooted out and set right; he intended to see to that personally.

II

“Reverend Pinter?”

The preacher already had his raincape over his arm and his hat in his hand, and was reaching out to palm the latch; he was leaving, and not lingering about it. But he stopped readily enough, and smiled at Jo-Bethany.

“Yes, Mrs. Chornyak,” he said politely. “Did you want something?”

She didn't bother explaining about her name. Every woman in the place was addressed by outsiders as either Miss or Mrs. Chornyak, apparently on the basis of age alone. The linguist women let it pass, and she intended to do the same.

“There's something I'm uneasy about, Reverend,” she told him. “I wonder if I could have a few minutes of your time to discuss a small problem.”

“A spiritual problem, my dear?”

“Yes . . . if you can spare the time. I know you're busy, and you must be tired—it's awfully late—but I'm uncomfortable about this.”

She could see the reluctance in his eyes; no doubt he had to listen to amazing amounts of gush and nonsense from women involved in “spiritual” problems. But he looked at her as a man looks who knows his duty and does it, and when he spoke he spoke kindly enough.

“I always have time to tend the sheep,” he said. “And of course I have time to speak to you. It's a matter of some urgency to you, I take it.”

“I wouldn't bother you if it weren't, Reverend Pinter,” she said, feeling absurd, wishing there were someone else a woman
could
speak to in a situation like this. If only there could have been women who were preachers, she thought fretfully, knowing it was a scandalous idea and not caring. It was
degrading
, having to appeal to him to grant her an audience. It was like going to a doctor—degrading, and disgusting. You did not
do
it unless it was urgent.

Reverend Pinter was looking around him at the room of quiet women, seated at their various tasks, and Jo-Bethany knew what
he was thinking. A spiritual problem—that meant privacy. She was going to have to clarify her status after all.

“Reverend,” she said hastily, “I'm the resident nurse here. A member of the staff. If I may walk with you to your flyer, no one will have any objection. They'll assume that I have a health question of some kind to discuss with you.”

His face changed, and his smile became less false; he looked at her as if they were not meeting for the first time, as if they shared some secret, and said, “You're not a Chornyak, then? Not a member of the Lines?”

“No, Reverend. I'm not a linguist. I live here because I work here.”

“I
see.
” The smile was warm now, and the eyes were smiling, too, and she understood—he was glad to learn that he was no longer slumming. “In that case, of
course
. By all means, walk to the curb with me and let's see if I can be of help to you. It's not Mrs. Chornyak, then.”

“No, Reverend Pinter. It's Miss. Miss Schrafft. I am Jo-Bethany Schrafft.”

“Jo-Bethany . . . a charming old name, my dear.”

“It was my grandmother's name.”

He bowed slightly as he opened the door for her, and waited while she stepped outside into the darkness, saying, “I do apologize, Miss Schrafft.”

“That's all right,” she said, reminding herself that the question she had was one he'd know the answer for, whether he was in fact a godly man or not; it was a technical question. “You couldn't have known.”

“No, I couldn't, could I?” He laughed softly. “It's not as if they were all green, or all purple, or all spotted—you can't tell.”

Jo-Bethany made a polite vague sound of assent, and looked around to be sure no one was close enough to hear them . . . no, they had the lawn to themselves. He moved straight along the walk toward the curb, where a sedate dark flyer with a narrow white clerical stripe on its door was parked, and she walked at his side, hurrying a little to keep up.

“You say you're
uneasy
, Miss Schrafft. Oops . . . watch out for the lilies, or whatever those are! What is the source of this uneasiness, exactly?”

“It's these Thursday night services.”

“Like the one tonight?'

“Yes. This is . . . perhaps the fifth one I've gone to.”

“And you're uneasy? Why? Regular worship should be encouraged, Miss Schrafft, no matter where it takes place. I'm
more than happy to come here and preach when I'm called on to do so—I certainly don't feel uneasy about it.”

“Reverend Pinter, it's not the regular service that troubles me. It's the rest of it. The other things.”

“Other things?” He stopped his brisk trek down the long walk and turned to look at her, his eyes twinkling. “What other things, my dear? Do they really sacrifice babies?”