“Sure. The youngest child in that Interface there right now isn’t a Chornyak, it’s one of the outside kids.”
“Well, I want you to get my boy into that program. I want you to do that fast. I called the people at D.A.T. that are in charge of it and told them I wanted Danny in, and they gave me a whole planeload of shit about a waiting list, and special qualifications . . . all that stupid shit. So I came straight to you. I’m not about to miss out on this, and it’s only for babies, right? Danny’s the right age now, and god knows I don’t want any more kids. I want you to get Danny in the Interfacing program right now, Sis. Here, with the effing Chornyaks, so I don’t have to commute someplace with him all the time. And so I don’t have to listen to Melissa having hysterics about her baby being too far away and all that crap. That’s what I want, Jo-Bethany, and what I want, I get. You just look at my track record, any time. I mean to have it, and I will have it.”
Jo-Bethany leaned back in the chair, glad of the sunlight that gave her an excuse to close her eyes, praying for patience to deal with him without irritating him, and inspiration to say no to him in a way that he could not quarrel about. She realized that she ought to have expected this. Ham was dead set against work for himself, but he had no objection to others working on his behalf. The kind of money an interpreter of an Alien language could earn would draw Ham the way naked women drew him, and the fact that the boy could start earning that money while he was still only a child would look to Ham like Christmas In Perpetuum. She should have been expecting this, from the very first day that the news of the Interfacing breakthrough had been leaked to the media by the Multiversity professor.
“Well, Jo? Come on, say something.” His voice was truculent; he hated being here where he wasn’t top dog; he hated being so near the AIRYs; he hated the constant flow of people through the atrium; she could hear the unease in his voice, and she knew it wasn’t a good sign. She could not risk his making a scene, not here.
“Ham, I don’t think I can help you,” she said slowly. “I’d be glad to, of course—I’d love to see Danny here, it would be a wonderful opportunity for him, and it would be nice to have someone from the family around even just a few hours at a time. But I don’t think you understand the situation.”
“No? Listen, Jo-Baby, I always understand the situation! The situation is: you work here, and you’ve got all kind of stuff you can hold over the Lingoes. Somebody’s got a little touch of something nasty, you’d know about it. Somebody’s a little warped, maybe shows up in your office with a foreign object in a place it shouldn’t be, you know? You’d be the one that knows about it, in a case like that.” He snickered, and winked at her to signal the conspiracy of nice powerful filth they could wallow in together.
Jo-Bethany fought her own bad temper—she spoke as evenly as she could. If she let him provoke her, he’d start a fight right here in the middle of Chornyak House. She didn’t want that—she wanted him to leave. And that meant not upsetting him.
“No, Ham, I wouldn’t be the one. In a case like that, the person would go to an emergency room, not to me.”
“So, maybe that’s not a perfect example; you know what I mean, all the same. There’s bound to be plenty of dirt that gets into a clever little ugly head like yours, Sis, because that goes with nursing. People tell you stuff. And I expect you to show a decent loyalty to your family and put that dirt to good use. Like I said—don’t give me a hard time. Just do your thing. Get your butt in gear and do your thing for the sake of your sister’s kid, and her peace of mind. You understand me, Jo?”
“I understand,” she answered.
“Well? How long will it take?”
She was thinking. She would have to stall him as long as possible. And she could hope that before it came right down to the wire something else would happen and he’d lose interest in this. She would have to be convincing. She wondered . . . what were the special qualifications for the babies sharing the Interface? She had no information that would help her, and no recollection of having heard anything about it from the Chornyaks. Fake it, Jo-Bethany, she told herself, but go slow.
“Ham, it’s a great idea,” she said. “You’re right—it should be in the family! And it’s just an indication of how stupid I am that you had to come all the way over here, and miss work besides, to point out to me something that I would have thought of myself if I’d had one brain in my head!”
She was watching him as she spoke, watching for that subtle change in his expression that would mean she was going too far and he was about to realize that she was putting him on. But he seemed genuinely pleased—unless he was putting her on . . . did he have that much imagination? She saw no signs of suspicion. It was astonishing how easily a man could be made to believe you when you were saying exactly what he wanted you to say, no matter how improbable it was. And she realized suddenly that before she had come here and lived among the Chornyak women she had not suspected that for an instant. She had learned that here, without even realizing that she was learning. Strange—and very welcome; perhaps this was part of the curriculum at the marital academies.
“Well, that’s more like it!” announced the head of the Klander family, swinging his legs around and sitting up, so that he could slap his thighs with his hands and gather himself together to leave this creepy place. “Maybe I was wrong, Jo,” he said. “Maybe having to live here with the Lingoes has given you some sense of what normal family feelings are like.” He looked around him, and grimaced. “I’d go crazy in this place! No wonder they call them Lingoe dens—hive would be more like it, the way you’re all crammed in here together.”
“I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Well. Nurses can get used to anything, right?” He reached over and patted her knee, willing to be pleasant now that he thought she was going to oblige him. “I appreciate your help, Jo-Bethany. And Melissa will be grateful, too. This is a great chance for Danny!”
A great chance for Danny. Jo-Bethany thought of how the children of the Lines lived, racing from one work site to another, always studying in every spare minute, trying to keep up, forced to fill adult roles when other children were still sucking their thumbs. Poor little Danny, if that happened to him.
“I’ll do my very best, Ham,” she said, putting into her voice all the warmth she felt for Melissa and Danny and Flowerette. “I’m glad you took the time to come point this out to me.” She resisted the temptation to warble “Silly little me!” and wave her hands around and twitch . . . surely that would have been too much? Although she’d seen Melissa do precisely that, many a time, and Ham had not appeared to find it too much. It might help to have long red hair and a pretty face.
“I’ve got to go, Sis,” he mumbled, looming over her, much too close. She wished he were only a hologram. “I’ve got a lot of work piled up.”
A lot of work. One button to push, every thirty minutes.
“I know you do, Ham,” she said sympathetically. “You go ahead—I’ll get right on this. And I’ll keep you posted; I’ll let you know exactly how it goes.” She lowered her lashes, trying to remember how Melissa did that, trying to feel like Melissa for just the necessary tiny bit of time. “It’s the men here who decide things, of course,” she said, all modest reluctance and timid flutters. “And I’m afraid of them.” She smothered her distaste, drew a timid little gasp of a breath, and said, “Ham—you don’t know what they’re like!”
It was the right flourish, apparently; he gave a grunt of sympathy, and reached down to give her a hug that made her skin crawl.
“I understand, Sis,” he said roughly. “You bet I do. And listen—if they give you any trouble . . . you know, if they try to push you around? Try to take advantage, just because you don’t have a husband to look after you? You just let me know, and I’ll punch their effing faces through the back of their heads. You get that, Jo-Bethany? You don’t have to take anything off the sons of bitches.”
“Thank you, Ham,” she said, extracting herself from h
is grip. “You’re—you’re very kind. It’s good to know that I have someone I can count on.”
She watched him from the window, going out to the flyer with the swagger that she knew he practiced in front of a mirror. She was crying, she noticed; her cheeks were wet with her tears. Why was she crying? She had pulled it off; she had gained herself time. She’d be able to get weeks, months perhaps, out of her Scared Maiden skit. It had been absurdly easy to do. Why was she crying?
And then she knew, and she put her hands up to scrub away the tears that were betraying her. It was because she would far rather have taken her chances in a bed with one of the AIRYs . . . she had no idea which one was male, but she assumed one must be . . . than with Ham Klander. Who was supposed to be her species. Blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, in some dim recess of pre-pre-history. A human man, as she was a human woman. Both of them, she and Ham, the descendants of Adam and of Eve.
Still. It was Ham Klander that Jo-Bethany found alien. Four arms, she could understand. They might even be useful. Ham Klander, on the other hand, was an absolute mystery. How could there be something like Ham Klander? And it survive, and flourish?
She hurried out the door and ran for Barren House, ran for her room, desperate to get out of her clothes and into a shower. To try to scrub from her skin the taint that came of just being near this man, of her own species. He would punch their faces through the back of their heads, he said. And he would, too. If somebody would hold them for him while he did it. He would name his daughter Flowerette, and he would punch their faces through the back of their heads with his meaty fists, and he was her own kind.
Barren House was not close enough; Jo-Bethany vomited, ignominiously, in the daylily beds beside the walkway.
II
Father Agar stood in front of the abbot’s worktable, bouncing cheerfully on his heels, and asked, “Does it seem to you that our nuns are more than usually enterprising lately, Dorien?”
Father Dorien frowned at him; he certainly hoped not. The last thing Mother Church needed was “enterprising” nuns.
“Explain, please,” he said. “In that way, enterprising?”
“Well, you know, it’s not just here.” Bounce, bounce.
“It’s not just here? What is that supposed to mean? What’s not? Not just here what? Lord, you’re irritating, Agar! You look like a child that needs to pee, you know that? The behavior of the nuns is not your responsibility—you’re perfectly safe reporting their outrages.”
“Oh, not outrages, I assure you.” The bouncing stopped. “In fact, I find it rather admirable, to be perfectly frank. I’m not sure I would have their courage.”
Dorien let his head drop into his hands, and closed his eyes. “Father,” he pleaded, “either tell me what you’re referring to, or go on about your business and let me get this program cleaned up. One or the other. Please.”
“Sorry,” Father Agar said. “It may be only a coincidence, of course.” When that provoked nothing from Dorien but a groan, he went on hastily, “I just meant that they tell me nuns all over the country are requesting transfer to the colonies, and I think that shows real pluck. To go from a cloister, out into space, to primitive conditions, all that hustle and bustle—or all that desolation and wilderness, depending—that takes a little something extra, Father, to my mind. Just imagine it!”
Dorien stared at him. “How many nuns, all over the country?”
“Oh . . .” Father Agar waved a vague arm. “Half a dozen or more, I’m told.”
Dorien’s eyebrows shot up, and he made an irreverent reference to several of the Apostles. “Good lord, Agar! I thought there were hundreds of them, all clamoring to desert us for the hinterlands, the way you were carrying on! Half a dozen!”
“I don’t remember any such requests in previous years,” Father Agar objecting, looking injured. “That’s a large jump, from zero to six!”
“Certainly! Six hundred percent. I can see the headlines now. Father Agar, six is only six. There are thousands of nuns in the United States alone—six of them hardly constitute a groundswell. What sort of nuns are these, according to the gossip that I assume is your source? Senior sisters? Major losses to their communities?”
“Oh, no,” Agar reassured him. “All quite young, and not in any way crucial to their houses. As I understand it, several of them happen to be illegitimates turned over to the Daughters Of Genesis and raised in the convents.”
“Well, that makes perfectly good sense. They’re probably finding the normal pathways for moving upward in the convents blocked, Agar.”
“Sister Miriam Rose was one of the illegitimates,” Agar noted, looking carefully at the wall behind Dorien’s right shoulder, “and it hasn’t held her back.”
“She’s hardly typical,” said Dorien, striving for patience. “She had exceptional qualifications, and I went out of my way to create an opportunity for her. That doesn’t usually happen.” He picked up the printouts he’d been poring over when Agar interrupted him, and held them in an ostentatious manner that the other man could not possibly fail to see, and added, “Let’s be frank, Agar—a sister who not only brings no dowry but is the product of fornication or adultery, a child of disgrace, is going to have a difficult time. There’s no way to keep a thing like that secret within a community. No one’s going to be openly unjust to the poor things, but they’re scarcely on the ladder of progress.”
“Uhuh. Uhuh.” He was bouncing again. “Naturally, it would occur to them that they might do better if they went out to the colonies, where their origins wouldn’t matter much. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Obviously,” sighed Father Dorien. And then he asked, struck by a sudden thought, “They aren’t asking for places like Arya, or Baron, or—god forbid—Gehenna, are they? It’s not some kind of mad idea of civilizing the barbarians with the gentle touch of the virgin?”
“No, no. Nothing like that, although that would be very interesting, wouldn’t it? I think . . . let me see . . . oh, yes, I remember. They’ve been asking for Horsewhispering, I believe, and for Strawberry Fields. And Harmony—two of them wanted to go to Harmony. Places with enough population and settlement to make the services of a nun desirable and useful, but far enough from Earth—and new enough—to give them a pretty open territory. I mean, now that you’ve pointed out what’s going on, I see the pattern.”
“Plenty of women at those locations,” Dorien commented, “and that’s the main thing. Perhaps some of our good sisters can manage to set an example for those ridiculous people on Strawberry Fields; I’d certainly approve of that.”
Agar looked blank. “There are so many colonies now,” he said mournfully. “It must have been so much simpler when there were only a dozen. What’s so ridiculous about the Strawberry Fielders, or Fieldites, or whatever they are?”
“They’re hippies, Agar, that’s what’s ridiculous. They could use a nun. If anybody asks for my vote, I’ll say by all means send them several nuns.”
“What’s a hippie?” Agar looked even blanker than before, and Father Dorien gave up trying to keep a Christian calm and smacked the worktable with his free hand.
“Damnation, Agar!” he roared. “Go read a history book! Try the infamous 1960’s! Don’t you know anything at all?”
“I resent—”
“And as for it being easier when the only colonies we had were the ones on Luna and Mars, that’s ridiculous! Before we even thought of colonies in space, people in this country couldn’t tell you where Denmark was, or if New Zealand was part of Africa! People—including you, Agar, know damn little, and nothing that doesn’t affect them personally! Now go on about your business and let me get on with mine, before I lose my temper!”
“It appears to me, Father Dorien, that you have already lost it,” remarked Agar with great dignity, and he folded his hands before him and strode stiffly from the office as if he were trying to balance a realbook on his head.
Dorien stared resignedly after him, regretting hi
s irritation; it wasn’t fair for him to deliberately choose nincompoops for colleagues and then torment them for being nincompoops. But the computer program he was trying to sort out was one of those projects that requires a man’s full attention, where every interruption means starting over from the beginning, and he was already late setting it to rights. Agar had caught him at a bad moment; he would apologize to him later, and explain.
He made a brief note on his wrist computer, reminding him to check in six months and be sure that the number of nuns wanting transfer into space remained as trivial as it was now. And then he put the matter out of his mind and settled down to work, praying for just one hour without interruptions. “Please, God,” muttered Father Dorien, “Occupy my beloved nincompoops with some sort of nonsense, just for sixty of your blessed minutes. Amen.”
CHAPTER 18
“Anything whatsoever that can be said in one human language can be said in every other human language; that is true. But a thing that can be said quickly and with ease in one tongue may require a great deal of time and many many words in another. As the centuries go by, and a language grows and changes, there may be a skewing of its development in one direction or another; certain parts of experience may become inconvenient and cumbersome to talk about. Not that they can’t be talked about, but just that it becomes so complicated to do so that it’s hard to find anyone willing to listen.
“There was English, for example, and then its development as Panglish. Suppose you were a speaker of Panglish and you wanted to talk about war, or killing or violence. There was no weapon, and no smallest variation on a weapon, that did not immediately receive its own convenient Panglish name, easy to pronounce and easy to remember. If there were fifty different subtle variations on the use of one’s hands to take a human life, you could be sure that Panglish would provide you with fifty different subtle manners of expressing those variations with speed and ease in conversation. But not all of life was so well provided for as were those parts most closely associated with violence. There was the word ‘love’; it was almost impossible in Panglish to say which of the many subtle and different kinds of love was the one you felt toward someone in less than ten minutes; if it was a man you were talking to, he would leave or fall asleep before you could finish what you were trying to say. (As for the act of love, there was not one single word for a woman’s part in that!) Panglish society found itself obliged to create a separate class of special persons who were paid by the hour, just to listen; and their work was considered so unpleasant that the standard fee for a therapist’s time as early as the year 2000 was one hundred twenty-five dollars an hour, a very large sum at that time.
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