The Judas Rose (24 page)

She saw Nizhona then, holding a bundle in her arms—she must have just wound everything up in her bedsheet, the one
with spots of blood, to be washed carefully in icewater and dried in early sunlight and folded away among her treasures. She stood in the dim outline of the door, waving goodbye to her. Jessamin waved back, and the girl disappeared—and then Jessamin remembered, and gasped, and dashed after her, just barely catching her at the foot of the staircase to tuck the pass into her nightgown pocket. “Mercy, girl!” she whispered. “Were you going to go the
whole way
without a
pass?
”

“Nobody will be awake up there yet,” Nizhona scoffed. “It's a non-problem, they're all asleep!”

“Maybe,” Jessamin said solemnly. “But that's because they haven't heard the splashing yet, as you go through the house. And I don't want some fool man sending you back down here. Or dragging you along with him and waking up everybody in the room demanding an explanation, and me having to spend the rest of the night getting babies back to sleep instead of working . . . no thank you, dearlove. Your pass is in your pocket, if you need it. For my sake.”

She set a kiss firmly on Nizhona's mouth, and glanced at the floor; as she had expected, there was no trail of scarlet to be seen. Not this time.

“Off you go now,” she said tenderly. “Belle-Anne's waiting for you. And I'll be over, first thing when everyone's up, to get the fandangous festivities started. Hurry, now; and go in loving-kindness, Nizhona Maria!”

The girl went up the stairs at a run, hugging the bundle, not even looking back at this place where she'd lived her whole life; and Jessamin watched her, contented, until she was out of sight and on her way down the corridor at the landing.

CHAPTER 10

            
“The World They Call Terra”

            
“Sing me a song!” said the child in the garden.

            
“Grandmother, sing! I'll sit here by your side . . .

            
Sing me a song of the world they call Terra,

            
the world that you came from when you were a bride!”

            
“Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields,

            
out to the rim of the worlds that we know—

            
child, I can't sing you a song about Terra,

            
for Terra was too many planets ago.”

            
“Sing me a song!” said the child in the garden.

            
“Grandmother, sing to me—tell me no lies!

            
Sing me a song of the world they call Terra—

            
I know you remember by the tears in your eyes!”

            
“Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields!

            
Child, I have left all my memories behind—

            
child, I can't sing you a song about Terra,

            
for I have put Terra clear out of my mind . . .”

            
“Grandmother, sing!” said the child in the garden.

            
“I have learned all about stubborn from you—

            
sing me a song of the world they call Terra,

            
where the grasses grow green and the oceans are blue!”

            
“Child, how you weary me, asking of Terra!

            
You are no babe—you should understand why!

            
We who left Terra forever and ever

            
were those who could tell her forever goodbye!”

               
“Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields,

               
out to the rim of the worlds that we know—

               
child, I can't sing you a song about Terra,

               
for Terra was too many planets ago . . .”

(folksong, to the traditional tune, “Come in the Evening”)

Benia stood at the round window, stubbornly ignoring the screams of the furious child on the plastic floor behind her, staring fixedly out at the landscape past the window as if it had some attraction to offer. In fact, it had none; it was a vast shelf of dark blue rock, stretching off to a horizon where she knew that to stand and look over the abrupt edge would only give you a view of still another vast shelf of dark blue rock. And so on, for miles and miles and miles. There were seventeen Indigo Steps, each as absolutely flat as if a giant laser had sliced them for a colossal staircase, and her house sat on the fourth one from the top. They led down, eventually, to a small and boring body of water called “Harry's Pond”—somebody's idea of a joke. Harry's, maybe? Benia hadn't bothered to ask. The water was no pond, it was a sea of sorts, as big as Earth's Mediterranean. But the steps of rock that led off from it in all directions were so enormous, and the pitiful little splat of water so lost at the base of the funnel they made toward the sky, that it
looked
pondlike. Only when one of the rare boats happened to be on its surface was there anything to give it scale and perspective, and even then there was little by which to judge whether it was a liner or a fishingboat. Benia thought of the fish that swam in Harry's Pond, and shuddered all over; she would stay with the hydroponics and the enzyme flats, thank you.

She'd heard that looking out at the Indigo Steps long enough caused visions. Hallucinations of mountains and caravans and walled cities, and worse. She didn't know anything about that, either, because she'd never had the patience to look for very long. It was boring, like the sea.
Everything
on Polytrix was boring. The bubble hut was boring, and the landscape was boring, and the squat plants with their geometric shapes were boring, and the thologys that came in for the tiny survival comset were boring, and god knew the baby was boring. He was supposed to be “company” for her, Daryl said. That had been the point of having him, that and the usual line about her duty to increase the colony's population.

Company! She sneered out the window, and her son screamed even louder behind her, as if he knew what she was thinking. Perhaps he did. Who knew what being born on Polytrix might do
to the brain of an innocent baby? Polytrix. Daryl thought it was so funny. “It's the name of a magic stone that makes all your hair fall out,” he'd told her when they were still just talking about this place. “Isn't that crazy?” What was crazy was having come here. Marrying Daryl, and then coming here.

If she'd been back on Earth right now, if they'd stayed, like her parents had begged them to—but no, Daryl wouldn't even listen!—she could have gone to the Sparkle Club with the rest of the wives. And Bran, instead of screaming himself insane on the floor of this squalid hole that was the very best Polytrix had to offer, would have been in the Tender Room with the rest of the babies, having a wonderful time.

She was going to have to pick Bran up pretty soon; his cries were getting that funny rhythm to them that meant he would be throwing up if she didn't do something. But at least he would be exhausted enough by then to go to sleep and let her be miserable in peace. She had learned, by paying very careful attention, the exact amount of time she could let him scream, that would be enough to wear him out but not enough to make him vomit on the floor. What she would do when he got big enough to walk around in here she did not know; she had no capacity for imagining the stretch of time and tedium that lay between the endless day ahead of her and that day still weeks away, maybe months away, when Bran Daryl O'Fanion would struggle up onto his sturdy legs and begin to add his walking around to her torments.

Daryl loved it here, just as he'd been sure he would. He loved being a forest ranger on Polytrix, where there were no forests. He was out all day six days a week in a two-man flyer with Andrew Felk; the two of them were like kids, laughing and telling jokes and making the flyer do stunts that set the onboard computer whooping alarms and the two men whooping with glee. Chasing the herds of lampa, stupid creatures like big striped goats, away from the agricultural stations. Taking photographs—not even holos, just plain photographs—to send to the so-called capital of this cursed lump in space, for the so-called archives. Watching for the telltale white streaks in the rock that meant deposits of beshokkite crystals, worth far more than gold for all that they were ugly things. “What do they do with them?” she had asked Daryl, the first time he'd brought one back with him, and he'd patted her rump fondly and grinned at her and said, “They use them in biogenetics, baby . . . it's way over your head.” Biogenetics. That was boring, too.

Expertly, not one second too late, she stepped backward and
scooped the gulping baby up into her arms, laid him against her chest, and began rubbing him between his shoulderblades, making the soothing noises that the microfiche said she was supposed to make. He was drenched, dripping with a rank mixture of sweat and urine, and she was terribly afraid that she hated him. She had never suspected that a woman could hate her own baby, and if you'd asked her about it before she came here she'd have said without hesitation that such a woman was very very sick. Babies were lovely, and lovable; you put them in their Tender and smiled at them while the Tender cleaned them and oiled and powdered them and dressed them in fresh disposable clothing, blue for boys and pink for girls, and then you took them back out again and played with them. And of
course
you loved them!

But Benia didn't have a Baby Tender. There weren't any on Polytrix. And there wouldn't be any for a long time. Benia had seen the list posted in the window of the station, the sequence of orders for shipments out to the colony set up for years in advance; Baby Tenders weren't even scheduled to be requisitioned yet, and it was a five year list. That was why a Gerber Microfiche was packed for every woman who came out here, so she could find out how babies had been looked after in the Dark Ages.

“Not the Dark Ages, Benia,” Daryl had scolded her when she brought the subject up. “You know better than that, sweetie.
All
women took care of their own babies, just like it tells you on the fiche, clear up to the end of the 30's. The Baby Tender wasn't even
invented
until 2037, Benia. Dark Ages, for chrissakes!”

Daryl always knew things like that. When things were invented, and who did it, and where things were located, and how long they'd been there. All those endless boring things that nobody cared about. So far as Benia was concerned, anything before the Baby Tender was the Dark Ages. And it showed how selfish men were, too, because a Tender wasn't anything but a plain old ordinary healthy, like they'd had for sick people forever and ever; it just wasn't as fancy as a healthy. Babies didn't need tubes in their veins and up their noses, and they didn't need something that could sew them up and give them pills. There could already have been Tenders
twenty years
before they came on the market, she'd told Daryl, and he had agreed with her emphatically and said that he only wished to hell he'd thought of it and made the millions of credits that Woo Hee had made. Benia wished so, too, and envied Woo Hee's wife . . . no doubt Woo Hee was the man who
had
thought up the Baby Tender.
She bet Mrs. Woo Hee wasn't stuck off in a bare wasteland of purple rocks all by herself with a baby that stank.

It made Benia's mouth twitch, thinking of it, but not with humor. She had never known that a baby
could
stink . . . her friends had had babies, and her relatives had had babies, but they were always fresh and rosy and fragrant from their Tenders. She wondered what Lu-Sharon Naybers would have said, her with her precious twins, if she'd ever gotten a whiff of what a woman-tended baby could turn into dozens of times a day. Lu-Sharon had had the prettiest dresses in South Philadelphia, and so had the twins, and she'd been Benia's best friend, and she always looked wonderful; but she didn't care much for any kind of
effort
. Probably, if she'd been Benia, she'd have carried the baby down and pitched him into Harry's Pond without giving it a second thought. “I am
not
slave labor!” Lu-Sharon would have said haughtily; Benia'd heard her say it more than once, and about less. And Bran would have sunk like a stone into the deeps of Harry's Pond and that would have been the end of his stink. But Lu-Sharon would never have to deal with any of this, because
her
husband worked for the Department of Education, and Lu-Sharon was never going to find herself on Polytrix.