The Judas Rose (44 page)

He stopped, and leaned back against the wall, almost sobbing, closing his eyes, and this time he didn't apologize for all the swearing. He moaned, too, and he didn't apologize for that either.

The silence went on and on; it went on so long that it started to be scary. Had his father fainted from the shock? Had a heart attack? He was bracing himself to open his eyes and look when Macabee Dow, in a voice his son had never heard before, and using words his son had never heard from his mouth before, said, “Why, those filthy clever effing sons of lust-crazed
whores!
” Gabriel's eyes flew open, and he forgot all about his own distress. It was like a mountain breaking into song, or something. Breaking into an
obscene
song!
Macabee Dow did not curse
. Curses were the expression of excessive and uncontrolled emotion. Curses were for lesser mortals who were unable to perceive the universe as a confluence of numbers or whatever.

“Macabee?” Gabriel whispered, tentatively, ready to throw himself out through the door of the desk to safety if he had to,
even if the staircase was locked, if his dad had finally fulfilled all the predictions and gone clear over the edge into insanity.

“Gabriel!” The words came fast and steady and thumping into the acoustic space of the desk like bursts from a rapid fire automatic weapon. “When I went to propose that you should be Interfaced with the Chornyak infants, I was prepared to have to fight for it. I was prepared to pay an enormous sum of credits. I thought it might take a lawsuit to force them to let you do it. I was prepared to take them to court and charge them with denying you your economic civil rights—I thought it was going to be
hard
. And when I told them what I wanted, and they just said, ‘Oh, fine, we'll start Monday,' I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The bureaucrats over at D.A.T. came around, after they'd sewed up all the Interface places for D.A.T. employees' kids, and asked me how that figured—they couldn't believe it either—and I told them I didn't know. I think we all just decided—like you, Gabriel—that linguists are crazy. Crazy enough to give up what had been, up to that point, a total monopoly on a profession that brings in enormous wealth, without a quibble. Without even a discussion. For
free!
They had to be crazy, we thought . . . but we were wrong, Gabriel. They weren't crazy at all. They knew
exactly
what they were doing, from the first minute. Sweet shit, how they must have been laughing at us, all these years!”

Macabee let out a long breath in the silence,
loud
in the silence, and his mouth twisted as if he had been hurt. “Gabriel,” he asked abruptly, “do the other kids feel the same way you do? The other kids that aren't from the Lines?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“I don't
know
all of them, Macabee. But those I know, they hate it. Just like I do. I mean it was fun at first, when we were little, getting to travel and go all those places and do grownup work, and having people treat you like you
were
a grownup—and earning all that money. But it wears off fast, let me tell you. They hate it, just like I hate it. And they all goof off. Just like I goof off.”

“Gabriel, we can't have that.” Macabee Dow's voice was urgent, tense. “These matters are too important for anyone to be ‘goofing off' with them.”

“Then let the
Lingoe
kids do it, damn it, the way they used to! They don't know
how
to goof off! They beat it out of them at home, or something!”

The mathematician wasn't looking at the boy, he was looking
at something he remembered, but he kept talking in that lasergun way, and Gabriel was fascinated. Usually Macabee only talked that way when he was talking about math.

“
They knew
,” he was saying. “And they slipped it over on us like a bib on a baby. When they said sure, we could put you kids in their Interfaces, and build Interfaces of our own if we could get AIRYs to staff them and put more kids in those—but that was
it
, as soon as the Interfacing session was over we had to pick you up and remove you from their premises—
they knew
. They knew perfectly well that without the rest of the life, the activities that the children of the Lines spend all their time in from infancy, they weren't risking one thing. Not one thing! They knew it wasn't going to work . . . could not possibly work. Damn their souls to the innermost crypts of hell!”

Gabriel waited a minute, to be sure it was over, and then he added some more data. “Macabee,” he said, “there's so many other things to do, don't you know that? Nobody wants to stay here, on Earth, fooling around with a lot of stupid federals and ET's! You know? There's a whole
universe
of stuff to do out there—” He waved one arm, showing the universe, and slammed his elbow painfully into the wall of the desk. “There's planets to see, and planets to explore, and planets to conquer, there's the whole effing
universe
, Macabee! And you really expect me to sit all day long, six days a week, in an interpreting booth in Washington or Chicago or some such place? Bored out of my mind? Macabee . . . if that's how you see it, just because of the money, you're as crazy as the linguists are.”

“It wasn't the money,” his father said gently. “I don't care about money, Gabe, not the way you mean. It was the
power
. I wanted the power for you. I still do.”

“Well, I don't. I want to have some fun. I want to live like a normal person. Power! Macabee, there are ten thousand million ways to get power, and every last one of them is more interesting than being a linguist.”

“You don't understand. You don't understand, Gabriel, that the Lines literally control the fate of entire planets, and of whole alliances of planets.”

“Who cares?” Gabriel shrugged. “What good is it? If I want power, you know what I can do? I can buy myself a whole asteroid—I've got enough money, the way you've invested it, the way it'll earn more money while I'm getting old enough to have control of it—and I can be
king!
I can run the place, a whole asteroid of my own, just exactly any way I please!
That's
power, Macabee!”

“It's not the same thing at all.” His father's voice was as cold as Gabriel's drenched armpits. “It's little puny power.”

“It's enough for me, sir.”

“You really don't understand the difference, do you, Gabriel?”

Gabriel could hear the sadness in his father's voice, and he was sorry. It was the same sadness that Rafe was going to hear when he had to give up and admit that he hated mathematics. And Michael would hear it when he got a little older, too, unless Macabee just happened by a fluke to choose for his youngest son some passion that the child would have chosen even if left to himself. Gabriel didn't care. He'd always known this was coming. And no, he didn't understand. Why
wouldn't
a whole asteroid of your own be power enough, for anybody?

He sat there stubbornly, and waited, not saying anything more. Whatever was going to happen, it would happen. And finally Macabee Dow released the lock on the staircase and let down the steps.

“You want to quit right away, Gabe?” he asked quietly.

“If I can.” That was a little scary, because he hadn't ever done much else, but it wasn't a chance he dared pass up. His father might change his mind if he said he wanted to think about it or something. “Yeah. Right away.”

“When you are a grown man, Gabe, I want you to remember this morning. And I want you to promise me now that you will forgive me. Because when you are a grown man, you
will
understand about the difference between real power and the illusion of power. I want you to engrave this morning in your mind, and I want you to remember that this was your own choice, freely made. Do you understand me, Gabriel?”

“Sure. I understand.”

“You don't, Gabe. But it doesn't matter. It's eleven years too late to set this right, and making you go on doing something you hate won't accomplish one single useful thing except to amuse the men of the Lines. You go on, Gabriel—I'll see to this.”

“Really, Macabee? You really mean that?”

“I really mean that.”

“
Jesus!
”

“Please, Gabriel.”

“I'm
sorry
. It's just . . . it's not what I expected. I thought you were going to try to argue about it.”

“You go on now,” said his father. “And you think about what you might like to do. Not with your whole life, Gabriel, I
don't mean that. I mean, what you'd like to do with the empty hours you're going to have now.”

“You're really going to get me out of D.A.T.? I don't have to go back?”

“I really am. I will be just delighted to do so,” said Macabee. Thickly, as if he'd been drinking; but he never drank anything except a very good wine, with a very good dinner. “It's not your fault that I've been had, Gabe—me and the whole United States government. There's no reason why you should have to pay for our stupidity.”

“Who's going to do my language?” Gabriel hadn't thought about that before. ‘“We were right in the middle of that new clause . . . sir, who's going to take care of that?”

Now it was Macabee Dow who shrugged.

“That's their problem,” he said flatly. “Let 'em call a linguist.”

CHAPTER 20

“It wasn't that we didn't think it would be wonderful, and valuable, to have a Womansign—a sign language that would express the perceptions of women, as Láadan expresses them through oral language. At the beginning, deafness was still a common problem on Earth, and we spent many anguished hours trying to decide how a Womansign project could be managed. One of the very first things we did, just as soon as our alphabet was firmly established, was to work out a manual alphabet that allowed the fingerspelling of Láadan. Not because fingerspelling was even a small step toward a Womansign, but because we wanted to demonstrate our respect for the tactile mode of language—and because it was something we had enough time to do. And because, unlike a complete sign, it was something that could legitimately be done by hearing persons.

“But things were so difficult for us then. . . . All information about Láadan had to be exchanged in our recipe codes. We worked in constant fear that the men would discover what we were doing and put an end to the Encoding Project. We had to work in scraps of time, five minutes here, ten minutes there, stolen from other work or from badly-needed sleep . . . sometimes we considered ourself lucky to find thirty uninterrupted minutes for the language in a whole month. If there was any way that we could have constructed a Womansign at the same time, we were unable to perceive it.

“Later, when we no longer had to maintain such secrecy, when Láadan had begun to be spoken by women throughout the Lines, we had to face the enormous, awe-inspiring, almost paralyzingly difficult task of trying to move the language out into the world of other women. And by that time deafness had ceased to
be
a problem; by then, deafness was as much medical history as
smallpox was, so that there was serious concern for the preservation of
existing
sign languages.

“The dream of a Womansign remains, because the love for communication by sign remains. But I think it is a dream that will have to wait for the work of women who have great genius and great love and great skill, and—most difficult of all for the women of the Lines—who have abundant leisure. It will not happen in my lifetime, not this time round.”

(from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

Cassie St. Merill is not just failing to enjoy herself. It's much worse than that. She is furious; her narrow strange face is distorted and ugly with her petulance, like the face of an Egyptian cat slightly crushed by some accident. She is furious with her hostess, who has played a cheap trick and managed to take Cassie in completely—not for the first time. Cassie is thinking that she ought to have known; that she ought to have asked her husband for permission to turn down the invitation; that she should have found some way to avoid this humiliation. O.J. is going to make her pay for this for a long time; she can hear him already, every morning at breakfast for weeks and weeks, finding a way to bring up this night at the Coloridons' and Cassie's incomprehensible stupidity and the way that she is forever disgracing him and making it impossible for him to advance in his career in the way he would advance without her as baggage. He will say, “Can't you
ever
find a way to outsmart Burgundy Coloridon? For the sake of your own self-respect, if not for my sake?” She will plead, “O.J., how could I have known? She swore it was an informal dinner party, a little simple dinner for four couples! How was I supposed to know she was setting me up?” And he will say, “Isn't that why you spent two years at the marital academy, Cassandra? Isn't that what your father's money was supposed to be paying for? Learning how to deal with people like Burgundy Coloridon? Who
always
whips your ass, I might add!” And Cassie will have nothing to say back. She never has anything to say back. She does not know how to talk to him without getting caught in the traps he sets; it would be bad enough if he were only a man, but O.J. is a psychotherapist. She cannot say that the academy she attended wasn't even in the same league as the one where Burgundy went, not without facing O.J.'s icy stare and a severe, “Do I hear you criticizing your father again, Cassandra?”