“I can believe it,” Heykus told him grimly. “When women go mad they’re worse than any animal.”
“Yes. I suppose they are. But everyone’s going to be all right.”
“Good. Maybe next time they find a pack of women alone they won’t be so careless.”
“No. I don’t expect they will be.”
“Go on, please.”
“Well, it was obvious then what the situation was. As soon as the men realized they were under attack, they stopped being polite and subdued the bitches.”
“Stop calling them bitches.”
Frege straightened, startled, and opened his mouth to mention that he wasn’t a mail clerk; and then he got a look at the old man’s eyes and he dismissed that idea.
“Sorry, Director Clete,” he said. “Subdued the females.”
“There were no males on the asteroid?”
“No. The crew took the women aboard, and then they checked the scanners; there was no sentient life signal from the place once the women were removed.”
Heykus sat there thinking, while Captain Frege waited. He hadn’t expected Heykus to be pleased, and he hadn’t expected the session to be pleasant. But that was all right. Pleasant wasn’t his major interest in life, anyway.
“This asteroid . . .” Clete asked him, slowly. “Could the women have stayed there, if they hadn’t been caught? Is it suitable for settlement?”
“Oh, I guess so. If you were absolutely desperate, I suppose you could manage to survive. But it wasn’t any island paradise. Just a godforsaken scraggly little bare rock, with maybe enough tillable land for a carrot patch and some onions. Way off the shipping lanes, in a zone of rotten weather—what soil there is probably blows away every couple of cycles. Nobody in his right mind would have wanted that place. Atmosphere just barely breathable, and the gravity all wrong . . . . Somebody with plenty of money to spend on terraforming could have made it livable, sure; but nobody with that much money would have wanted it. As for being stranded out there the way those bi—those women were, with antique hand tools and survival packs—shit! In their place, I’d have been yelling mayday with all the power I had available.”
Heykus sighed, and rubbed his temples with the base of his palms. It was not supposed to be possible. Here women were, not even legally adults. They couldn’t have any money of their own, they couldn’t buy property, they couldn’t apply for a passport, they couldn’t even get through customs without a male escort. Even women on the most primitive frontier settlements, women who had to do a lot of things that women in more civilized places would never have been allowed to do, were under the legal guardianship of responsible adult males. For a lone woman to stow away in a baggage hold, or sneak out an airlock during a commercial cruise, something like that, was always possible. But a group of women? A group of eleven women, off by themselves in the wilderness sectors, playing survival games? It was beyond his comprehension.
“Trying to establish a settlement in space is not like just hiking into the woods,” he stated, as if that weren’t self-evident. “We send out exploring parties of well-trained men, equipped with every one of the newest technological tools—and they still have it damn rough.”
“They do,” Frege agreed.
“Well, what in blazes could possibly make a bunch of ignorant women, runaways with no skills and no equipment, think they could do such a thing? And what kind of worthless men were in charge of them, that they would even think of trying?”
“I don’t know,” Frege answered. “I don’t understand it any more than you do.”
“Didn’t you interrogate them? Once you had them aboard?”
“They sent for me, sir, and I did my best. But you know the law. You can’t use any of the spilldrugs unless you have the permission of the woman’s legal guardian, or her husband, or at least a senior male relative. The courts are extremely touchy about any violation on that.”
“I’m touchy about it myself!” snapped Heykus. “I wasn’t suggesting that you break any laws. But it seems to me that a man with your experience . . . how long have you been in Coast Guard Security? Twenty-some years now, isn’t it? It seems to me you might have known a few ways to persuade the ladies to talk sensibly. In some legal and appropriate manner, Frege.”
The captain laughed harshly. “Director Clete,” he said, “these were not ladies. I’ve duly noted that the word ‘bitches’ offends you, and I won’t use it again in your office. But you might want to give a little thought to what kind of female human being tries to tear out a man’s eyes with a hoe. These women were not ‘persuadable.’ Not in any legal manner that I know about.”
“I see. Well . . . it’s an ugly story.”
“It is.”
“What’s the ending like?”
“Attempts to identify male relatives or guardians were unsuccessful—we’re still working on that. Out in that neck of space, it could take a while.”
“All you had to do was check their armpit tattoos,” Heykus noted impatiently. “I don’t see the problem.”
Frege shook his head, and his lips twitched at the corners. “They’d taken care of that before we got to them, Director.”
“Oh, they had? And just how did they manage that?”
“Regular sewing needles and indelible ink, from the look of it. They’d really messed it up. No armpit data—just blurred black lines. They must have done it before they tackled anything else.”
“But that’s against the law!”
“I don’t think the law was one of their main concerns, sir. Under the circumstances, we waited the regulation seventy-two hours and then we took them to the nearest institutional facility and we turned them over.”
“Suitably tranquilized.”
“Absolutely.”
Heykus sighed again, and his regret was genuine. He knew what would happen to the women now. He even approved of it, because the mind of a madwoman was a sewage pit that had to be cleaned out. But a mind treated in that fashion, however essential the process, was a mind beyond the reach of any ministry. Satan was eleven souls richer, at least for the time being. And that reminded him.
“Reversible procedures only?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“I said, reversible procedures only. You made sure that the women would be administered only reversibles, while we locate the male trash that let them get to such a state.”
“Director Clete, this was a particularly nasty kind of incident.”
“So? The law says, only reversibles for at least sixty days if you can’t locate male guardians. No matter how nasty the circumstances.”
“True. But scruples were superfluous in this case.”
Heykus’ eyes narrowed, and he laid both palms flat on the seeyum, fingers spread wide. “Explain that,” he ordered.
“Because there was only one way those women could have been where they were, in the condition they were in, and doing what they were doing. And that’s for them to have landed along with a party of men—probably criminals, because there’ve been no missing person reports or any other kind of inquiry—but conceivably just a party of loners and oddballs. They could not possibly have gotten there as a group of eleven women, Director Clete; you’re right about that. They had men with them, when they landed.”
Heykus frowned. “You mean the men abandoned them there?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sir, the women killed them.”
The sound Heykus made was the sound a man makes when a fist takes him in the belly, with no warning. Frege looked politely down at the floor while he recovered his composure.
“You know that to be true?” Heykus said heavily. “Be careful what you say, Captain.”
“No, I don’t know it to be true,” answered Frege, his irritation obvious in his voice. “It could be that a gender-selective plague wiped out all the men, and the women went crazy with grief. You want to accept something like that, fine. I don’t care. But the
men were all very, very dead, Director.”
“You found them.”
“The women had done a pretty good job of cleaning up after themselves,” said Frege coldly, “but that asteroid was hard rock, and they hadn’t brought anything along that would dig very deep. When we went back with lawprobe lasers, we found the bodies without any trouble.”
“Dear Jesus,” said Heykus, with complete reverence; he leaned back wearily in his chair and closed his eyes. Women. Women murdering their men, burying their bodies, defacing their tattoos . . . he couldn’t imagine it, and he was glad he couldn’t.
“I want a full investigation,” he said. “I want no murder charges unless they can be proved, do you understand me?”
“Certainly.”
“Captain, did those women say anything that made sense?”
“Not to me. They quoted that Chaleuvre woman and her sister that were jailed in Paris last February—not jailed fast enough, in my opinion, but I’m glad they’re finally off the streets. That kind of filth. And they said they wanted to be free.”
“Free. Of what? Had somebody abused them?
Frege spoke carefully, and gently; the old man was tough, but he looked heartsick about this situation. “Director Clete,” he said, “they were all completely—one hundred percent—insane. Madwomen, sir. You couldn’t expect them to say anything logical.”
“Free to starve. Free to die of exposure. Free to choke on foul air. Free to die of diseases no doctor has seen in a century. Free to suffer unspeakably. They want to be free, to do all those things?”
Frege didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
“I wish I could talk to them myself,” Heykus declared. “I’d like to hear them say whatever they have to say. To me. To my face.”
“Sir . . .” Frege knew that Heykus would resent his showing any concern, but it bothered him to see the old man so upset. He was sure it wasn’t good for him. “Director Clete, they said things you wouldn’t want to hear, believe me. I’d be just as glad if I hadn’t had to listen to them, myself.”
“They are not responsible,” Heykus told him sternly. “No more than little children! No woman becomes sick like that overnight. Where were their men all this time, while their minds were rotting away? Frege, you tell me—could your wife, or your sister, or your mother, or any other woman in your care, reach a state of deterioration in which she would be capable of ending your life, without you ever noticing that she needed medical attention?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s awful. It’s unspeakable.”
“Yes. It is. It was.”
“Frege, were all eleven of them killers? Or was there just one ringleader . . . or two or three?”
Before Frege could say anything, Heykus waved him silent. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I understand—you don’t know anything about what happened. And God forgive me, I’m doing just what I ordered you not to do . . . I’m condemning those poor sick women without a scrap of evidence. I apologize.”
Heykus had spoken to one such woman. Just once, nearly ten years ago. She’d been caught almost immediately, had stolen her husband’s flyer and been intercepted before she ever made landing anywhere. They’d brought her kicking and biting and shrieking like a rabid animal into the port office where he and the husband were waiting. They’d been prepared to give her a spilldrug; the husband—a pompous bully of a man Heykus had felt no sympathy for—had been perfectly willing. But it hadn’t been necessary. The problem with that one had been getting her to shut up.
He’d made a real effort to reach her. He had been careful not to say anything that might sound accusing, or punitive. And he had asked her the question that was every man’s question in these cases: why? “My dear,” he’d said to her gently, “we don’t understand. On Earth, and on every colony of Earth, to the very limit of our resources, you women are cherished. Treated tenderly. Indulged in every way. Looked after, deferred to, sheltered. . . . Why do you turn to this perversion? What more do you want? What is it that we aren’t giving you?”
He had been speaking the truth. No woman had to suffer want. No woman had to work, from the day she was born till the day she died; even those women who chose to be nurses or who followed their men out to the frontiers did not really do work. In the colonies a woman might need to spend a little more time looking after home and family than she would have on Earth, but it was strictly temporary; it never took many years for the comforts of the motherworld to begin showing up on those colony worlds where women were permitted to go. No man took a woman to Baron, or to Gehenna. And no man dared mistreat or abuse a woman, any more than he dared abuse a child; one call, and the courts would take her away from him forever. Even a woman whose husband earned very little could spend most of her life shopping in the fembouteeks, and chatting with her friends, and involved with her clubs, and enjoying her hobbies. Looking at the runaway, he had thought of his own mother, adored by her sons till the day she died, petted and cosseted, showered with presents, all her foolishness as gently handled as if it had been a major contribution to civilization; and he had leaned toward the raving creature they were holding for him and pleaded with her to explain to him what was wrong.
She had spat in his face. Literally, she had spat on him. He had gone on talking to her nevertheless, wiping the foul slime off his skin, reminding himself that she was only a woman, only a very sick woman, and not responsible for her behavior, until she had exhausted the stream of almost incomprehensible hysterical gibberish that poured from her.
“You don’t know anything about it!” she had screamed, over and over. “you don’t know anything about women, not anything at all!” He had understood that much, in among the gibberish. He had had a mother, two beloved grandmothers, three adored great-grandmothers; he had a wife he would have cheerfully died for, and two sisters he doted on, and daughters he loved. As for the granddaughters and great-granddaughters, he was a perfect fool about them. He had never known a woman, even one he disliked, who didn’t inspire in him an immediate protective impulse. He had never been able even to begin to understand how men could once have been so weak and so worthless that they had allowed their women to dirty themselves in the world of business and politics and all the rest—men knew better than that now, and Heykus thanked God for it. But it was his own conviction that he would have known better even if he’d lived in the 1980s, and would have cherished his women decently regardless of the social perversities of the time. He, Heykus Joshua Clete, was an expert on women. How dare this runaway female tell him that he didn’t know anything about women? He knew everything there was to know about normal women; it was only a specimen like this that baffled him.
A sudden thought had struck him that day, and he had turned to the pompous husband and asked, “Are you a linguist? Of the Lines?” If the feminist was a woman of the Lines . . . their lives were hard, they were subject to dangerous stresses and influences that no woman should have to experience. He knew that, and it was a social evil he deplored and had always wished he could set right without endangering the Lord’s plan for the universe. If she was a linguist woman, it might go a long way toward explaining. But the husband had recoiled, insulted; that hadn’t been it. And they’d taken the woman away still cursing and shrieking, and left Heykus standing there with tears in his eyes that he was in no way ashamed of. Seeing her . . . it broke his heart. It still broke his heart, remembering. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and her life was over. As surely as if she were dead. She would have been better off dead, if it hadn’t been for the fact that death for her meant eternal damnation. She would spend all the years left to her in a mental institution; the pompous ass she’d married would divorce her at once and forget that she ever existed.
Men must do better, Heykus was thinking. Remembering that terrible mad child. Filthy . . . scratched bloody by her own frantic nails. Men must learn to look after their women better, with more wisdom; they must learn to see the first tinie
st seeds of perversion. This blind folly, assuming that it could never happen in your own family, would always happen to someone else, was not an adequate excuse.
“Director Clete?”
Heykus was startled, but he didn’t allow the Captain to see that; not a muscle twitched. He had been sitting there, he realized, staring, remembering. Wasting the younger man’s time. In just the way that he’d reproached Frege for at the beginning of their meeting.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said forthrightly. “I apologize. I’m afraid this is something I’ve never been able to take lightly.”
“No decent man can. No need to apologize for decency.”
“I’m sorry, nevertheless. My reaction is—excessive. I keep wondering. Is there some needed safeguard in the law that we’re overlooking? Is it something in the way they’re educated? Are we still asking too much of them, Frege? Perhaps we are wrong to allow them to go beyond the inner colonies? Perhaps we should shelter them more. Women are so frail, Captain, so precious—they are given to us to cherish, not to neglect.”
Pierre Frege cleared his throat, speaking carefully. “Your concern does you credit, sir. I think far too many of us forget our responsibilities in these matters. But I would remind you that there haven’t been more than a dozen attempts of this kind in the past twenty years, and most have involved only two or three women. These are statistical accidents, Director. Every once in a while someone is killed because he trips stepping out his front door and cracks his skull open—it’s that kind of thing. You can’t predict it, and you can’t prevent it. It’s like trying to control lightning.”
Heykus chuckled. “We do that rather well, Captain. But I understand the figure of speech, and I appreciate your courtesy. I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and you’re very tolerant of an old man’s foibles.”
“My pleasure,” said Frege sturdily, thinking that Clete was known to be about as sentimental as a guillotine.
“You’ll keep me posted on this, Captain?”
“You’ll get full reports—and if anything confidential turns up, I’ll come tell you about it myself.”
The Judas Rose Page 11
