The Judas Rose (8 page)

“There will be six pairs,” said the simulack courteously; at its side, the Alien nodded.

“The United States will be delighted to cut its request by fifty percent!” Kony declared. Flourish of trumpets, stage left.

Gently, the simulack repeated itself. “There will be six pairs.”

“It is not satisfactory,” said Kony. “Let that be noted, for the record.”

They smiled at him, and then looked down at the conference table. More politeness . . . wouldn't do to let the Earthlings see their amusement, donchaknow. And the Terrans shrugged. They were used to this; they knew the orchestration and the choreography, and they had given up trying to do variations.

There had been a time when D.A.T.'s Special Ambassador had genuinely tried to negotiate. Not any more. They all knew now that it made no difference whether they recited nursery rhymes or burst into tears or broke into word salad. The communication of the Consortium's representatives was not a feedback system except in the absolute formal sense in which an utterance by one speaker is followed by an utterance from another speaker. There was no rule demanding a semantic connection among those utterances. The Aliens came in pairs to announce the current statistics for the two major Terran power blocks and the current quota for Interfacing; those predetermined announcements would be made, no matter what was said. That they didn't just send a memo instead of meeting with the Terrans was no doubt just one more example of their determination to be well-bred at all costs.

Kony had explained it to Heykus Clete himself, once. A command performance.

“Say they tell me there'll be ten pairs for the Interfaces this time,” he'd told the Director. “And I say we need twenty. The Alien will say, ‘There will be ten pairs.' And if I then say, ‘Mary had a little lamb,' the same thing will happen. The Alien will say, ‘There will be ten pairs.' Politely.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Clete had objected.

“Why should it make sense? They are
Aliens
. That's what ‘Alien'
means
.”

Clete had glared fiercely at Kony, and had spoken in a long rush of angry words. “They're technologically centuries beyond us. They have humanoid brains. They speak humanoid languages.
I don't
believe
that they don't know when a sequence of utterances is meaningless!”

Kony had sighed, too worn out with it all to care very much.

“Mr. Clete,” he'd said, “you think about it. What if we were negotiating, you and I, with some truly primitive tribe. Say we were, out of the goodness of our superior hearts, letting this tribe have two . . . oh, I don't know, make it two laser scalpels a year. For their medical needs. Say they want us to give them fifty, but we don't trust them with fifty. They might cut themselves up at parties or something. We tell 'em they can have two, they ask for fifty, we say they can have two, and they whirl around three times and shout ‘Kabbakabba ding dong two three four!' Do you really believe we're going to stop and concern ourselves with that? We're going to think to ourselves, ‘Hmmmm . . . some kind of primitive incantation,' and we're going to exchange knowing glances with one another, and then we're going to say again, patiently, that they can have two laser scalpels.”

“It's like that? As bad as that?”

“It's like that. Always. Oh, not at the
real
negotiations, where the linguists are brought in and we're working out details for something they've already agreed to. But in
our
so-called negotiations, Director, it is
exactly
like that.”

Clete had sat there smacking one big fist over and over into his other palm, chewing on his bottom lip, while Kony waited.
You believe you could do better
, Kony thought.
You think you could get through to them, make them understand we're worth the time it would take for them to really work with us. You go right ahead and try it!
But he didn't say any of that. The old man was terrified of spaceflight; everybody knew it, but everybody pretended it was a secret. You'd never get him beyond the toddle-along commercial flightlanes, and rumor had it that Klete even had a tendency to go all white-knuckled anywhere that his own personal flyer couldn't take him. He'd turned D.A.T. down flat when they'd offered to give him a small artificial asteroid for an operations base instead of this creaky old office in Washington.

Eventually the silence broken only by the slow steady thud of his fist had brought Clete out of whatever state he'd drifted into; Kony did not make the mistake of assuming that it was a daydream. When Heykus Clete was thinking, you were respectful, because you could be absolutely sure that he was not thinking idle thoughts.

“Sorry, Special Ambassador Flagg,” Clete had said finally. “I'm afraid my mind was wandering.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was wondering. . . . You still haven't been able to get them to tell you how the Aliens-in-Residence are selected? Whether they volunteer, or are drafted, or what?”

“No, sir. And we have tried. They just say not to concern ourselves with such matters, and change the subject.”

“I see. That's not good.”

“No, sir.”

“You know, Flagg, I'm convinced that—even if there's no real diplomatic interaction—it would be best to keep the title you men now use. To avoid causing comment within the Department. But if we'd realized it would be like this, we'd have chosen something that didn't rub your nose in it. Agent. Consultant. Something like that.”

“If we had known it would be like this, sir,” Kony had asked cautiously, “would we ever have started Interfacing at all?”

Heykus Clete had looked shocked. “We most certainly would have!” he'd said sternly. “We had to get out into space, and we had no time to waste. We couldn't decide we'd go by covered wagon because our feelings were hurt.”

“No, sir.”

“That's all, then, Flagg.”

“Yes, sir.”

You had to give the old man one thing (you had to give him a hell of a
lot
of things!); he didn't try any of the crap about how it was going to get better and it couldn't go on like this forever and so on and on and smarmily on. Kony appreciated that, because it was
not
going to get better, and it
was
going to go on like this, and all that Kony prayed for was that they would continue to be able to keep the lid on it. It was random good luck that the Aliens felt the same way about the confidentiality . . . they could just as well have gone on all the comsets of Earth at once, like in the ancient films, and said, “NOW HEAR THIS . . .” and blown the whole thing sky high. They chose not to do so. By random good luck. Kony would settle for that.

He realized, finally, that Antony was discreetly nudging his boot to get his attention; this time he was the one whose mind had wandered. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. If he had fallen out of his chair and lain on the floor laughing, the Aliens would have assumed it was an exotic primitive native custom. It would not have made the least bit of difference.

“Steady, Kony,” said his partner clearly, and Kony steadied. It was over again for six months. The national anthem began to
play again, and Antony keyed in the parting utterances to the speech synthesizers, and it was time to go home to the reservation.

It occurred to Kony for a few brief seconds then to wonder why, in his making of the list called “List,” he had never included a scenario in which he rampaged through
Alien
ports and
Alien
bars, leaving behind him a trail of battered and bleeding
Alien
toughs. The thought wandered through his mind, was firmly stashed under some cognitive bulkhead, and disappeared from his awareness.

Kony would sleep now, all the way back to Earth.

CHAPTER 4

“According to the radical feminologists, men were directly responsible—through negligence, not malice—for the rise of feminism in the epidemic form which it took in the late twentieth century. These so-called scholars acknowledge the magnificent research of Haskyl and Netherland which proved the genetic inferiority of the human female. They admit that it was the prompt and efficient male response to Haskyl and Netherland's work, at every level of government, which brought about the speedy passage in 1991 of the constitutional amendments restoring to women their proper and valuable place in society, and formally imposing upon men the stewardship role so many had neglected for at least the preceding fifty years. But they persist—with an almost feminine disregard for the requirements of scholarship—in their claim that prior to Haskyl and Netherland the twentieth century was a scientific wasteland, in which no research or publication in feminology whatsoever could be found. As if Haskyl and Netherland's discoveries sprang full-blown from the void, owing nothing to the work of others before them!

“This is manifestly absurd. These gentlemen know full well the difficult circumstances in which the early feminologists were obliged to do their work, in a time when the mere statement of the basic principles of the discipline could actually lead to legislative and judicial penalties; they know that the pioneers of the field had no choice but to speak and write in veiled terms
. But they were not silent, and their work did not go unnoticed!
Anyone who denies this has failed to examine the history of twentieth-century America with even minimal care; certainly no such individual has taken even the elementary step of viewing the historical collections of commercial advertisements presented in all American media of the period. The most cursory viewing of
these collections demonstrates that although lip service to ‘feminist' views was paid by what might be referred to as the
intellectual
media, no such distortion existed elsewhere. Academics, themselves all too frequently effeminate, may indeed have been unaware of the work of the early feminologists; but those with
true
power—for example, those who controlled the advertising industry, the giant corporations, the health care industry, the national defense, and the major churches—were clearly quite free of such ignorance.

“Any scholar who reads the records of history from about 1940 to 1990 with
care
finds an abundance of examples stating both the inferiority of the female and the custodial obligations of the male. This is true even when the curious social customs of the time necessitate various mechanisms for disguising those principles, as opposed to stating them openly. To insist that the twentieth-century preoccupation with high technology and its military applications delayed Haskyl and Netherland's work is more than just a vicious lie. It is a blatant exhibition of ignorance which must no longer be tolerated within our field. It ignores the unobtrusive but superbly effective statesmanship of Ronald Reagan and George Bush; it ignores the equally restrained—and equally effective—statesmanship of Pope John Paul the Second; it ignores all the thousands of wise and capable men who steadfastly kept our nation
on course
through a period of temporary turmoil that would have meant the collapse of Western society had they been less faithful to their principles.

“There is not sufficient space to name all those men here. Some, like Chodoff, or the great Dobson, need no mention. But the manner in which our stubborn colleagues persist in denying them the honor to which they are entitled shames us all.

“I ask them just one question in closing: how do they explain the fact that Haskyl and Netherland were able to obtain funding for their research into women's cognitive and emotional competence during this period, as well as an immediate forum for the publication of their results? I
challenge
them to explain!”

           
(from “A Call for an End to Radical Feminology,” editorial by Broos W. Clawn, Ph.D.
, Annals of Patriarchy
37:4, Spring 2207)

There was no way that Jo-Bethany could keep from hearing her brother-in-law's voice, however much she might have wanted to . . . human beings, by some curious oversight of the Creator, were not equipped with earlids as they are with eyelids and have
no way to shut out the sounds coming at them. But she didn't have to look at him, as long as she made some noncommittal noise every once in a while to indicate that she was still there, and so she looked out the window at the yard outside while he talked.

She had been with her sister and her fiancé when they went to order the yard, as chaperone. And she had done what she could to talk them out of it. She had done her best to make a case for something more pleasant to look at, something with grass and a few evergreens and perhaps a white picket fence or a nice low redwood or cedar one. But it hadn't been any use. Ham Klander was absolutely determined to have what she was looking at now. A formal courtyard all the way round the house, laid in burgundy slate, and a wrought-iron fence topped with vicious spikes. Formal granite urns with topiary roses in them, and a formal granite pool with a formal granite boy standing in it holding a formal granite ram's horn from which a stream of water was allowed to fall, formally, into the pool. And that was all. Not a blade of grass, not a daisy, not a tree. . . . Jo-Bethany didn't consider the skinny bile-green ornamental cypresses to be trees, whatever the botany people might say. It looked like the courtyard of a not very flourishing stuffy small hotel, and in the slow steady rain it was a dismal prospect. Just as she had told them it would be.