The Judas Rose (2 page)

Heykus wore glasses because his father and grandfather had worn glasses, because he liked the slight edge of privacy they gave him behind the heavy lenses, and because there were a number of useful clusters of bodyparl that he could carry out with his glasses during language interactions. He didn't need glasses; if he
had
needed them, it had been half a century since the laser surgeons had perfected the techniques that made glasses obsolete. He wore glasses because that was the tradition to which male heads of family in
his
family subscribed. He had not pressured his own son to adhere to that tradition, but he had been serenely confident that when the boy got past the normal state of rebellion against parental values he would take it up of his own accord, and he had been right. At the age of twenty-six Heykus Jr. had appeared at a Sunday family dinner properly bespectacled
despite his perfect vision. Heykus had made no comment, nor had anyone else; no comment is necessary when all things are precisely as they should be.

When the computer announced the incoming call from John Bellena of Government Work, Heykus was not seated inside his desk. He was standing in the center of his office at parade rest, glaring at an area of space that displeased him mightily. A map of the known universe took up three walls of the office, floor to ceiling, and it kept him as up to date on interplanetary conditions as it was possible for anyone to be. Every planet, moon, asteroid or other body capable of supporting even one usable installation was shown on the map, with the vast intervening distances collapsed according to a formula about which he knew little and cared less. Heykus was adamantly ignorant about such things as astronomy and astrophysics and space science; that was what his staff of experts was for. What he did understand was the system of lights that he had devised for himself; they told him what he really needed to know.

Heykus had every known usable body in space indicated on his map by a single tiny light. A world lost to the Soviet hordes glowed red; a discovered but as yet unclaimed world—still available for exploration and colonization or other practical use, and still neutral—glowed green. And every world claimed by the Christian nations of Earth, as Heykus defined “Christian,” was marked by a light of clear bright yellow. Heykus was much too shrewd to let anyone, be it a member of his private staff or a member of Congress, know that he viewed those lights as golden crosses; he referred to them as “X's” and used the expression “worlds I can cross off my list” as a private joke.

What he was glaring at right now was a nice little cluster of planets that he was accustomed to seeing and had long hankered for. Just the sort of three-cluster that put him in mind of the Holy Trinity and spoke loudly to his esthetic sense, as well as to his experience of the sort of planetary arrangement that was likely to be both efficient and profitable. And he was positive that yesterday all three of those lights had been a steady emerald green. This morning they were neither green nor steady. They were a deep and bloody red, and they were blinking at him.

The blinking meant their status had changed within the previous twenty-four hours; it was intended to get his attention. The red meant they had gone from Status 3 (Unexplored, Uncolonized, Not Off Limits) to Status 7 (Claimed for Exploration by the Soviet Union.) And that galled him. That was bitter. That made his gut twist and his chest ache. Heykus' gestures, like his
carefully nurtured country drawl, were smooth and slow; he smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand and swore softly, calling upon the beards of various prophets to witness his outrage. Three more worlds
gone
, and no way to get them back! Three more opportunities lost. Three more nests of Communists polluting the immensity of space, and only the Almighty knew how many thousands of souls condemned to eternal damnation.

It made Heykus sick. Physically sick. He had to swallow hard, and breathe deeply, for just a minute. As often happened in such situations, he had the feeling that the portrait of Ronald Reagan that hung on the outer wall of his desk behind him was frowning at the back of his head. He was always careful not to look.

“Heykus Joshua Clete,” said the computer again in its clear mellow Panglish, as entirely free of regional taint as technology could make it, “you have an incoming call from John Oliver Bellena of Division Twelve, on Line Six.” It would give him four chances before it told Bellena that Heykus Joshua Clete was not answering his comset.

Heykus heard it this time, and went straight into his desk, setting aside his fury at the new red cluster of lights. He was always willing and ready to talk to anyone from Division Twelve, which was more generally known as “Government Work”; the projects of GW were dear to his heart. Even today, when a lifespan of one hundred and thirty was not unusual, and vigorous men in their late nineties or early hundreds were no longer a matter for comment in government service, a man of seventy-eight knew the years left to accomplish his goals were beginning to wind down. Heykus was counting on the younger men at GW to carry on when he was gone. Or when he could no longer do more than sit and fidget and polish the voluminous journals that he had kept since his fiftieth birthday for publication after his death.

He touched the stud to complete the circuit for the line, but he didn't bother with any of his scramblers or printers. If the call had been anything rigorously confidential the computer would not have announced it aloud, and it would not have come in on Line Six. He sat down and watched the comset screen, giving it his full attention.

“Heykus? John Bellena here,” said the man who appeared on the screen. “Good morning.”

“Morning, John,” Heykus said easily. He liked and trusted young John Bellena, and expected great things of him. “What can I do for you?”

“We need a favor, Heykus.”

“If I can do it, you've got it. What's the problem?”

Bellena cleared his throat. “You're alone?” he asked.

“All secure here, unless you called in on the wrong line.”

“Heykus, I had a call yesterday from the orphanage at Arlington.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Do you remember a baby called Selena Opal Hame, Chief?”

“Should I?”

“It was an awfully long time ago. Long before I went to work for the State Department, and a little while before
you
did, maybe. You would have known about the kid, but it wasn't anything you were personally involved in.”

“You'll have to refresh my memory, John. The name doesn't mean anything to me.”

“Selena Opal Hame,” said Bellena, fixing his eyes on some vague point beyond Clete's massive shoulders so that there'd be no embarrassment, “was one of the infants we Interfaced with the Beta-2 Alien. The time it was the
Alien
who died in the Interface, for once. That would be at least sixty years ago. I was still in school.”

Heykus never wasted time beating around bushes unless no other course seemed indicated. He still didn't remember the name, but he was painfully familiar with the records of the incident and the resulting mess. It had taken weeks of negotiations, and a stunning sum of money that had to be hidden from Congress, to keep
that
one quiet. And this Hame had been a womb infant, not a tubie. Tubies didn't have names, they had numbers, and Heykus preferred not to think about them. It was true that nowhere in the Bible was there a command, “Thou shalt not make tubies,” but he was much afraid there ought to have been. He had no trouble imagining some translator, back in the dimness of time, looking at whatever strange word the Lord God had then provided for the semantic concept of the infant-conceived-in-a-test-tube-and-brought-to-term-in-a-laboratory-incubator and deciding that some even earlier translator or scribe must have been either drunk or delirious. He could easily see the man deleting the offending piece of nonsense from the Holy Scriptures on the assumption that it was not the inspired word of God but the clerical error of man.

“What does Selena Opal Hame want?” he asked abruptly, to avoid having to consider the theological question further. “Compensation? I wouldn't blame her, and we can certainly provide it. Within reason, of course.”

“She's not involved in this directly at all,” Bellena answered
quickly. “It's nothing like that. As for what she might want, nobody knows. What happened is that a Lingoe doing a routine language check at the orphanage somehow stumbled over Miss Hame—and he didn't like it one damn bit, Heykus.”

Heykus frowned. “What was a linguist doing at The Maples, John? That's supposed to be a job for our own people.”

“Heykus, if we don't let the linguists in there every once in a while, they get suspicious. That part was routine. The mistake was not keeping him away from Selena Hame, and that happened—I'm going to be frank, Chief—that happened because we'd simply forgotten all about her. But let me tell you, the Lingoe
really
did not like what he saw.”

“So? Do we care what a Lingoe does or does not like? Is he threatening a shutdown over one lapse of the federal memory?” The linguists
could
wreak havoc if they chose to do so; they were crucial to dozens of ongoing negotiation sessions at all times. But they had never pulled out yet, and they'd had far more compelling reasons to do so.

“He's a member of the
Lines
, Heykus. From Chornyak Household. You know how they are. He immediately started filling out forms. Rocking boats. Left, right, and center.”

“Huh.” Heykus considered that, and John Bellena waited courteously for him to go on.

“I don't understand,” Heykus said finally, slowly. “Why should a linguist of the Lines, with all the myriad of important things he has to deal with, care about one insignificant woman at a federal orphanage?”

Bellena sighed, and spread his hands wide. “She's all alone out there, Heykus,” he explained. “You know what happens to the tubies we use—they all die by the time they're twelve or thirteen, god only knows why. I wish
we
knew why, so we could fix it. But this Hame wasn't a tubie, and she didn't die. And now she's a middle-aged woman in her sixties, still living in that orphanage full of infants and young children. I suppose the Lingoe's right—she probably
is
lonely, and it probably
is
disgraceful.”

“Well, what does Chornyak propose that we should do about it, at this late date?”

Bellena shrugged, trim and handsome and larger than life on the comset screen of the desk. And apparently quite comfortable. Heykus knew how much could be learned from the most minute details of a caller's expression and posture and movement; he insisted on the very best, and the largest possible, comset screens. It was not something he was frugal about, and people who called
him personally were usually aware of the kind of scrutiny they would be getting. Bellena was sufficiently relaxed, under the circumstances, to give Heykus the impression that he was telling the entire truth as he perceived it. And Heykus wasn't easily fooled. He'd been sitting in on linguistics classes at Georgetown for many years; he'd been a member of the Linguistics Society of America before it changed its name to Language Scientists of America to escape the prejudice against the linguists of the Lines. He was no linguist, but he was as expert in the swift analysis of nonverbal communication as any layman in Washington.

“He wants us to authorize a transfer for her,” Bellena said.

“Where?”

“Well, not to another federal installation. He thinks she's had more than her share of that. He wants to move her to Chornyak Barren House—that barn they maintain for their barren women. Hame would have the company of other adult women there. She could do routine housework, help in their effing vegetable gardens, that kind of thing. They'd be kind to her, Heykus.”

“Can we risk that?” Clete demanded, and his question was abrupt enough to get past the younger man's polite attempts to avoid causing his superior any loss of face. Bellena looked more than a little surprised, and his voice matched his expression.

“What risk
is
there?” he asked, obviously puzzled. “How could there be any risk? She's just like the tubies we Interfaced, Heykus, except that she survived puberty. She has no language.
None
.”

“None at all? Are you absolutely sure of that?” Heykus was disgusted with himself; he should have kept track of this.

“None whatsoever,” Bellena repeated firmly. “Even if she remembered what happened to her—which is impossible, since she was only a baby—even if she did, she couldn't tell anybody about it.”

Heykus let his breath out slowly, and sighed. He didn't like this; it was careless, and unnecessary.

“I see,” he said. “This is a sad situation, John.”

“Yes, it is,” Bellena agreed. “And I'm ashamed of it. We just forgot all about her, and there's no excuse for that. We should have taken her out of the federal orphanage forty years ago and made some sort of decent provision for her.”

“You're mighty charitable with that ‘we,' ” Heykus observed, “considering that you had nothing to do with putting her there. It's not something you could be blamed for.”

“The information is right there in the GW databanks. I've
reviewed all that data a thousand times. I should have known. I
did
know—that mess was one of the first things I was briefed on when I came aboard here. I forgot, Heykus, just like everybody else did. And I'm not completely heartless; if I'd remembered,
I
would have protested. She's not an animal, she's a human being, and her life must be unspeakably dreary at The Maples. God . . . what an ugly thing.”