The Judas Rose (39 page)

“Ham,” she said calmly, “that's just fine with me. Shall I go pack, while you tell Jonathan Asher Chornyak we're leaving?”

“God damn you to hell,” said Ham, his speech slurred by the whiskey he'd obviously added to the strange brew that served him for consciousness before he arrived here.

“Thank you, Ham,” Jo replied. “I'm sure I'm very fond of you, too.”

He wanted very much to hit her; she could see the lust for it in his eyes. But he was not on his home turf, and he couldn't be sure what would happen if he tried that here; it was against the law in the United States to hit a woman. He was
afraid
he would hit her, as he was afraid of so many things, and she too felt a kind of lust—to step closer and provoke him further, here where he would not dare even the kind of clumsy shoves that he'd had to make do with when she was under his roof. Her hatred for him was at the root of that lust, and she was ashamed of it; she put it under firm control, and reminded herself that tonight she must pray she would not feel it again.

She stepped back from him, then, and kept her face blank; if she annoyed him further he would take out his frustrations on Melissa, and Jo hated the idea of that. Damage done to a woman in the marriage bed, unless it was very unusual and extensive damage, was acceptable, since it was only “normal male passion” and an expected part of married life for any woman paired with a sufficiently lusty husband. Any old bull. Like this one, or any of his brothers. How did women bear it, she wondered?

For Melissa's sake, and mindful of the gratitude she should be feeling because she was not Melissa or any of those other
women, she made an effort to be polite to him. She asked him into the atrium around the Interface, where there were comfortable chairs and benches to sit on, and—for a linguist dwelling—reasonable privacy. He followed her sullenly, but without protest, and the way he stared at what was going on in the Interface convinced her that she had made a wise choice. It was possible that the exotic atmosphere there would make him forget his foul humor. It was one thing to watch the brief docuclips of Interfacing that the linguists now and then allowed on the newspapers; it was quite another to be there in person and see it happening right before your eyes. She was sure that the two Aliens-in-Residence now at Chornyak Household were humanoid, because the Lines accepted no AIRY who wasn't; but they were sufficiently bizarre in appearance, especially with the tufted tails whipping along in synchrony with their speech, and the four separate triple-jointed arms, to distract Ham Klander.

He stumbled over the edge of a bench, because he was looking at the Interface instead of watching where he was going, and he muttered at her. “They can't get out, can they, Sis?”

“Get out? Sit down, Ham, won't you, and make yourself comfortable. . . . Can what get out?”

Klander made a large vague gesture toward the Interface. “The whatsit—the AIRYs. What's it . . . I mean, what are
they
doing?”

Jo-Bethany turned her head to look. The AIRYs were sitting in what appeared to be some extraterrestrial variant of a lotus position, side by side on the floor in their half of the Interface; on the human side beyond the transparent barrier there was a row of four solemn infants. One was still fastened into a babypod; the others, old enough not to need such trappings, lay stretched out on their stomachs facing the AIRYs.

“I don't know exactly, Ham,” she said. “Maybe the AIRYs are telling the kids a story; maybe they're just talking to each other or to the kids. Whatever it is, they all seem happy enough. And no, Ham—the AIRYs can't get out. Not without special equipment being brought in. They'd die in Earth's atmosphere.”

Klander looked relieved, and turned unsteadily sideways so that he could stretch out his legs and put his feet up on the bench.

“Well, I wasn't worried about it,” he said.

“I'm sure you weren't, Ham,” said Jo-Bethany. He had been, of course, and he still was. In spite of the fact that every single day there were humanoid Aliens from all over known space carrying on business in the government buildings, with nothing
more unusual about the situation than the necessity for special environments and interpreters, and he knew that. Still, he was alarmed by the AIRYs. As much time as the Aliens spent on Earth, they were familiar to Terrans only as threedys or holos, because with few exceptions their problems with Earth's atmosphere restricted them to specially-equipped buildings and vehicles. You didn't run into them at your friendly neighborhood bar, or strolling down the city streets. And although the holos were faithful in every detail—you could look at a hologram of an Alien and be able to see it, hear it, and smell it—there was still a vast amount of information missing. Not only the entire sensory system of touch, but also the information from the less elementary senses; no amount of technological skill had been able to endow a hologram with “presence,” for example. So that even if you had money enough to buy the fanciest projectors and were looking at lifesize holo Aliens, there was no possibility that you could ever fail to distinguish them from the genuine article. Ham was looking at the genuine article—
two
of the genuine articles—and it was different. He didn't like it. An Alien in a holo was exotic; an Alien in the flesh was
alien
. Jo hoped he would have nightmares; she
knew
he would not only make up a story about his total indifference to the AIRYs, and about their horrid appearance that would have struck terror into the heart of an ordinary man but caused him not so much as a quiver, he would also manage to
believe
the tale he concocted. It was an astonishing skill.

Because AIRYs ordinarily stayed for a period of four to five years, the present pair were the only ones Jo-Bethany had seen, and she had gotten used to them. They were not
that
horrible.

“Ham?” she hazarded; perhaps he'd watched the Interfacing long enough for the novelty to wear off. “Do you want to tell me why you're here?”

He looked at her as if he didn't know who she was, and then his face cleared and he rewarded her with a lopsided bleary grin. Looking at him, she was surprised he'd been allowed in; he must have put on a pretty good performance for whoever was on the door this week.

“My mind,” he said. “It was wandering. You know. They're ugly.” He waved at the Interface again, and Jo-Bethany wondered how he would have reacted if he'd been with her the night she had accepted the family's invitation and gone down to the computer room to watch the display of what they called “the Album”—a series of holos of each and every AIRY that had occupied the Interfaces of the Lines since the beginning of the
process. Including the two nonhumanoid pairs that they'd accepted before they understood how dangerous that was for human infants. It had made her a little sick, and their Alienness didn't seem to get any less striking no matter how many you looked at or how often.

She tried again. “Ham, is everything all right at home? With Melissa and the children?”

“Oh, yeah. Melissa's fine, and the kids are okay. You oughta come home some Sunday and get to know your new nephew, Jo-baby. He's quite a boy.”

I'll bet he is
, she thought, and said, “Thank you, Ham, I'd like that. They keep me awfully busy here, but I'll certainly come home one of these days when I get a chance. Now maybe you'd like to tell me why you came to see
me?
”

He leaned forward a little, and studied her closely, as if he'd finally realized who she was, and she went on waiting, trying to avoid his breath. Finally he spoke to her, but without the usual bull-bluster; he was almost whispering.

“You're really in tight here, Jo-Bethany, aren't you?”

“I'm very satisfied, Ham, thank you.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean you're in
tight
. You're like part of the family. You've got some
clout
here, right?”

She looked at him, uneasy, and he grinned again and jabbed at her knee with the toe of one shoe.

“Come
on!
” he said. “Never mind the innocent act, Sis. You're not like Lissy, I
know
you. You'll have the effing Lingoes eating out of your hand by this time. Don't try fooling me, Jo; it won't work.”

“Ham—
what
do you want?”

He chuckled, and stretched his powerful arms, and folded his hands behind his head to lean on.

“I've got a plan,” he told her. “And I'm here to explain to you what you're going to do to help.”

“I see.”

“And I don't want a lot of shit out of you, Jo, you got that? You give me a hard time, I'll give you a hard time.
And
your precious baby sister.” He snickered. “It's just that simple. One, two, three, baby, down the track. Even
you
can follow my dust.”

“Ham, you haven't told me what I'm supposed to do. How do you know I won't be glad to cooperate?”

“Because you think you hate my guts,” he said comfortably. “You've got your little legs crossed so tight that you've cut off all the blood supply to your twat, you know? I'm
exactly
the
kind of man you need, Jo, but you haven't got enough guts to admit it, so you think you hate me.”

“Ham—”

“I'm talking to you! You'd never cooperate with me if you could get out of it, and it's just too effing bad for you that you're such a pussy where your baby sister is concerned. That gives me lots of leverage with Miss High-and-Mighty-Hard-Ass-Uppity Jo-Bethany Schrafft!” He slapped his thigh, delighted with himself and his wit. “You don't like hearing that, do you, Sis? No, you don't like hearing that one bit. Well, that's tough, Jo! My heart aches for you.”

Jo-Bethany knew what he was after right now. She'd seen him do this with Melissa so many hundreds of times—she knew what he wanted from her. He wanted her to do what Melissa would have done. She was supposed to plead with him, beg him to tell her what he'd come here for, while he teased, and pretended he wouldn't tell, and started to tell and then said, “Oh, never mind,” and so on, for however long it took until he got bored with it. She wasn't going to play that game with him unless he began to seem angry enough again to be a danger to Melissa. She sat quietly and smiled at him, fully attentive, waiting, but she said nothing at all.

“You're no fun, Jo-Bethany, you know that?” he said after a little while, his lower lip jutting in a sloppy pout.

“I do know that, Ham. I'm sorry.” It must be awkward, wanting to order a woman to do something that your manly image wouldn't allow you to admit you wanted.

“Well, I don't have all day. So I'm just going to tell you.”

“Good enough,” she said. “What is it?”

“You know this new deal they've got set up, Jo, where they put just ordinary babies from anyplace, just plain ordinary ones, into the Interfaces? Just like they do the Lingoe pups? The new government program?”

“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.”