The Judas Rose (55 page)

Lo Chen spoke up to add support. “He's
right
, my friends. And he's right to say that we ought to have known. You know what it's like? It's like we had volunteered all those boys for the priesthood . . . celibacy, poverty, obedience, the whole bag . . . and had expected them nevertheless to go on living out in the world where everybody else has full access to all the goodies. And we were counting on the
glamour
to carry them through, don't you see? The linguist children are in communities, where the constant sacrifices they make are sacrifices everybody else is
making. Our kids are not in that situation. They have to spend their time off duty in the company of their siblings and their friends; they're all alone. Heykus—this whole thing was a really dumb idea.”

Heykus was being very quiet. He was being careful not to talk, or move. This was difficult for him; because he was a man who
did
have an avocation, and he had to continue to perform in this discussion as would a man who had none. He could not sit here and continue to feel that those little boys should have been thankful to the bottom of their hearts for the opportunity to carry out the Lord's holy work. It wasn't like that for them. They had a different view of things. No angel had dropped by to speak to any of them. And this was not the only aspect of deliberate deceit that he was obligated to maintain.

“Heykus, are you still with us?”

Heykus made an effort to pull his attention back to them, and to exclude firmly the attitudes and prejudices of the man that he must not, really must not, appear to be. Fortunately, at his age the others expected a certain amount of doddering and absent-mindedness; he could always fall back on that.

“I suppose it
was
stupid,” he managed. “It didn't seem stupid at the time . . . but perhaps it was.”

“Like I said, there are a few exceptions.”

“
Six
. Of one hundred.”

“Maximum. Maybe less than six.”

Heykus drew a long weary breath. “You think this whole project ought to be shut down for good, don't you? All of you?”

“Heykus,” Sundbystyner put in, “we think the opportunity should be left open. We think that the rare child who comes to his parents at the age of three or four and swears with shining eyes and a passionate little voice that he wants to be a linguist when he grows up should be encouraged to go into the Interfaces. But our current program is so ludicrously irrational that it's an embarrassment to every one of us.”

Heykus nodded slowly. “It makes good sense,” he said. “It makes excellent sense. And it is . . . as you say . . . embarrassing. Because it is just beginning to dawn on me that the linguists of the Lines have been having a great deal of fun at our expense. If I appear to be slightly stunned, gentlemen, it is because I'm having a very bad time with what I am starting to see far too clearly. I assume that all of you are getting the same impression I am. That we have been providing extensive entertainment, god help us, to the linguist households, for quite some time.”

“You are putting your finger right on it, Heykus.” There was
almost a hint of emotion in Sundbystyner's voice. “They must sit around at night telling layman stories. Slapping their thighs. Rolling on the floor.”

“Shit, Sundbystyner,” pleaded Androvarus Barton, “cut it out, will you? I think we all realize the extent to which we have been suckered.”

“They wouldn't see it that way,” Heykus noted.

“No. They'd say we came and asked them—begged them, they'd say—and that they courteously allowed us to indulge our whims. And they would be right. But we should have known that
they
were not that stupid . . . you realize that. The idea that they didn't even feel that they needed to make a
pretense
of arguing—that they were so sure we were that deluded, and were right—dear god, that's hard to live with.” Barton's voice trembled, and he added, “I can understand why there's been so little difficulty in persuading people to hate them. I'm having a hell of a time not hating them, for this. It's not their fault—it's our fault—but I hate them anyway.”

“There's never been even a hint from them.”

“No. They've just let us toddle down the road, swinging our little pails and singing our little songs, and they've never said one word to stop us.”

“How could they be like that?” demanded Lo Chen bitterly. “It's not
human
, damn it. How can they hold off like that . . . not one dig, not one hint. . . . I couldn't do that. I would
not
be able to hold out like that. Jesus . . . it's been
years
. And they've just been waiting all this time. Knowing that eventually—
eventually
—we'd find out and feel like very tiny flat little shits. Heykus, that
isn't
human. Not really human.”

“Perhaps,” said Sundbystyner, “they felt that we had it coming. And the longer it went on, the worse it would be. They wouldn't have wanted to spoil it.”

“It must have given them great pleasure,” said Heykus huskily.

“I'm sure it did. Enormous pleasure.”

Heykus sat there looking at these men, his colleagues, his good friends, thinking how they had been writhing under the humiliation of this since the pieces started falling into place, and he felt a genuine regret. They were good men, and he was sorry.

He folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Well,” he said flatly, “I withdraw my previous objections. ‘Total failure'
is
the proper phrase, after all. I apologize.”

“We demolish the GW Interface-sharing program, then?”

He shook his head. “I'm not ready to answer that yet,” he
told them. “This is all very new to me. I need to go run a set of extrapolations and compare them.”
I need to go wash my mouth out with soap and spend an hour on my knees praying for my soiled lying soul!
“But you have my word—I'll go over the data, I'll reach an appropriate decision, and I'll advise all of you as quickly as possible. And if I need help, I'll call on you for input
before
I make the decision.”

“Fair enough.”

“Until next year, then, gentlemen.”

“We don't disband this group?” Phong Lo Chen was clearly surprised.

“We don't disband this group,” Heykus said firmly. “This is a group that will find a function—regardless of what my decision is regarding the Interfacing.”

When they were gone, and he was left alone to stare down through the foolish floor at the dwindling tourists—some of whom were staring back—he reminded himself that this was all for the best, that it had been obvious from the beginning, and that all was as right with the world as was consistent with the human condition. If things had turned out differently, the problems of keeping every one of the lay linguists under adequate surveillance would have been a logistics nightmare. Even with the vast financial resources at Earth's disposal, it would have put a strain on his budget; there were better places for the money to be allocated.

But still . . . he had had that small hope. Foolish. Naive. Irrational, no question about it.
If
it had not turned out this way, and
if
whatever it was that motivated the linguists of the Lines had somehow transmitted itself, along with the languages, to the children outside the Lines—he would have been willing to take on the logistics. It would have been worth it, to have had all those new young men, each armed with the priceless treasure of an Alien tongue. And all of them under
his
direction, instead of the control of the Lines! If it
had
happened, he thought sorrowfully, if it had, he would have found a way, somehow, to pay for it.

CHAPTER 25

“The terms
Lingoe (
for a linguist of the Lines
), wimpoe (
for an effeminate male individual), and
medicoe (
to refer to a physician), are coarse epithets, similar to ethnic slurs, and should be avoided. Educated people of good taste do not use them even in private conversation. (It should be noted in this context that the term
med-Sammy,
which entered popular usage subsequent to the publication of the much-anthologized Greddzohej essay titled “The American Medical Profession as a Samurai Class,” is also to be avoided. It is not as vulgar as “medicoe,” but is a slang term proper only for informal contexts and colloquial conversation. It should never be used informal speech or writing.)”

(
from the
Harbrace Handbook,
83rd edition, page 411
)

Heykus hated hospitals.
All
hospitals. They were almost always ugly, both inside and out, and this creaking old medical barn in the middle of Washington DC was one of the ugliest; the staff had not bothered even to take down the antique fluorescent light fixtures, although none had bulbs in them, praise be, to turn a person green and purple and bloated-looking like something left under water over a weekend. They were always clean, which was a point in their favor, and Washington General was no exception; its ugliness was a
scrubbed
ugliness.

But there were things about hospitals that bothered Heykus far more than their physical appearance did. There were the things that hospitals made him
think
of. That: with sufficient faith there would have been no need for hospitals or for any of their apparatus, because everyone who lay here being tended lay here for lack of sufficient faith in God and His Son. That: sickness
was a punishment for sin, so that a hospital was a kind of museum of collected sins, and no way to know what horrible secrets it might contain . . . there were no labels on the exhibits. (That offended Heykus; he felt that there ought to have been an orderly system, so that the sin of gluttony resulted only in gastrointestinal disorders, and the sin of pride only disorders of the genitourinary system, and so on.) That: there were people in hospitals who lay at the point of death, and many of those were headed straight for Hell and its eternal fires. None of this added to Heykus Clete's perception of hospitals anything but the internal equivalent of an all-pervasive stink; he did not think of healing when he came here, he thought of damnation. And he thought with shame of all the times he had resolved to find a few hours to come here and minister to those who would listen, and all the times he had found compelling excuses not to do so.

This visit was different. There was no excuse that would spare him this time. The man he was here to see had been a childhood friend; had been at Heykus' wedding; had been a deacon in Heykus' church before his incomprehensible conversion to Roman Catholicism in his early sixties; had been a business associate and a colleague; had been someone Heykus could always call on, always rely on in time of trouble. This was a man he loved, a man he had mourned over when the Romans ensnared him, and a man he would sorely miss when he was gone. It would have been a disgrace not to visit him as he lay here so desperately ill, and Heykus had known he
must
come. Philip Cendarianis had a right to expect him, and a right to expect him promptly; Heykus had come at once, as soon as he had heard that visitors would be allowed at all. But he still hated it. It was like visiting a cesspool.

In a more modern hospital there would have been a separate entrance, and separate elevators, to the private room where Philip was. But here at Washington General no amount of architectural ingenuity could have made that possible, not without tearing down the vast pile of brick and stone and starting over. (Which would have been an excellent idea, to Heykus' way of thinking, but was unlikely ever to happen; the building was on the list of historical sites.) And so the route to Philip's room led down a hallway past a public ward, where patients lay on beds with nothing to shield them except spotless bedspreads and blankets. It was indecent, and unkind; Heykus resented it on their behalf. The Supreme Court decision had been very clear and very precise: every American citizen, and any person visiting on American soil, was entitled by law to full medical care at
the expense of the government of these United States, with no exceptions. But any such citizen not in critical condition was entitled to a medpod only if he or she chose to spend personal funds for it, not as an automatic part of that “full” medical care.

There was no excuse for that, Heykus thought. It was nothing more than the vindictive spleen of the ancient Justices, who had not had free medpods when
they
were young and therefore felt an obligation to get even. Earth had more than enough money to provide a free medpod for everyone who entered its hospitals; no one needed to lie in a plain bed with an ugly old healthy beside it clacking away day and night,
doing
things with its array of ingenious arms, in full view of anyone who chose to stroll past.
Disgusting
, he thought. And proof, as if any more proof were needed, that appointing Supreme Court judges for life in a time when “life” meant an average span of one hundred and thirty years had its serious drawbacks.

It was a relief to step into the elevator that led to the private wards. Heykus tried to compose himself as it swept him upward, and to put his frustration with the medical system out of his mind. Things had been much worse, as recently as the twenty-first century. There had been a time, impossible to conceive of but a matter of historical record, when the first thing required of a sick person entering a hospital had been proof that he had money of his own to pay for his care or had spent enough money of his own to oblige an insurance company to pay for it. There had been a time when hospitals turned sick people away for lack of money. There had been times of horrors, when the very term “health care system” had been synonymous with greed and degradation; it was during those times that the physicians had acquired the nickname “med-Sammys” that they still carried, although today their Samurai status was no longer quite so blatant. It was no longer possible for a physician to perform the equivalent of the beheading-by-whim, just by refusing to certify someone as near enough to death's door to require emergency care
regardless
of financial condition. Those awful times were past, relegated to the annals of barbarism, he reminded himself. When the heart attack had slammed its fist of pain into Philip Cendarianis' chest, he had not had to consider first whether he had money to pay for it before he called for help. And he would never have to lie, as people once had lain, in pain and in despair, unable to even begin to achieve the emotional peace that is as necessary to health as cleanliness, because he was frantic about the medical bills he would not be able to pay. No; things were better now.
Remember that, Heykus
, he told himself sternly,
and
set yourself in order; try not to look like Death in person come to gather Philip Cendarianis to the Lord, or else go home and spare
him
this visit!
It was not likely that Philip needed to see a face that matched the grimness of the thoughts he was thinking at this moment.