Authors: Susan Squier Suzette Haden Elgin
Showard had thought he might feel nervous, but he didn’t. His white lab coat was the same one he wore at work. It wasn’t as if he had on a disguise. The corridors of the hospital were like the corridors of hospitals and laboratories everywhere; if it hadn’t been for the constant bustle and racket that went with changing shifts and visitors coming and going he could easily have been at G.W. The only concession he’d made to the fact that he was actually in this place to kidnap a living human child was the stethoscope that hung round his neck, and he had stopped being aware of it almost at once. People passing him mumbled, “Good evening, Doctor” automatically, without needing anything more than the antique symbol of his calling to identify him, even after he reached the maternity ward. Any other profession, they’d have switched a hundred years ago to something less grotesque then an entirely nonfunctional and obsolete instrument like the stethoscope—but not the doctors. No little insignia on a corner of the collar for them. No tasteful little button. They knew the power of tradition, did the doctors, and they never missed a beat.
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“Mmph,” said Showard.
Nobody was paying any attention to him. Women had babies at every hour of the day or night, and a doctor on the maternity floor at ten minutes to midnight was nothing to pay any attention to.
The call had come in twenty minutes ago—“A bitch Lingoe just whelped over at Memorial, about half an hour ago! Get your tail over there.” And here he was. It was no consolation at all to
him that the baby was a female, but he assumed Lanky would be pleased.
This was an old hospital, one of the oldest in the country. He supposed it must have fancy wards somewhere, with medpods that took care of every whim a patient had, with no need for the bumbling hands of human beings; but those wards were high in the towers that looked down over the river. With private elevators to make sure that the wealthy patients going up to them, and their wealthy visitors, didn’t have to be offended by the crudity of the rest of the buildings. Here in the public wards there was very little change from what a hospital had looked like when he’d had his appendix out at the age of six. For all he could tell, except for the nurses’ uniforms and the computers at every bedside, it looked just like hospitals had looked for the last century or so. And the maternity ward, since it served only women, would be the last place anybody would spend money on renovation.
A light over a booth at the end of the hall showed him where to go. The night nurse there was bent over her own computer, making sure the entries from the bedside units matched the entries on the charts. Very inefficient, but he supposed she had to have something to do to make the night go by.
He pulled the forged charge slip from his coat pocket and handed it to her.
“Here,” he said. “Where’s the Lingoe kid?”
She looked at him, ducked her head deferentially, and then looked at the charge slip.
BABY ST. SYRUS, it read. EVOKED POTENTIALS, STAT.
And the indecipherable scrawl that was the graphic badge of the real doctor of real medicine.
“I’ll call a nurse to bring you the baby, Doctor,” she said at once, but he shook his head.
“I haven’t got time to wait around for your nurses,” he told her. As rudely as possible, keeping up the doctor act. “Just tell me where the kid is, and I’ll get it.”
“But, Doctor—”
“I have sense enough, and training enough, to pick up one infant and carry it down to Neuro,” he snapped at her, doing his best to sound as if she were far less than the dirt beneath his valuable feet. “Now are you going to cooperate, or do I have to call a man to get some service around here?”
She backed down, of course. Well trained, in spite of being out in the big wide world of the ancient hospital. Her anxious
face went white, and she stared at him with her mouth half open, frozen. Showard snapped his fingers under her nose.
“Come on, nurse!” he said fiercely. “I’ve got patients waiting!”
Three minutes later he had the St. Syrus baby tucked securely into the crook of his arm and was safely in the elevator to the back exit that led out into a quiet garden of orange trees and miscellaneous ugly plants and a few battered extruded benches. One light glowed over the garden, and at midnight you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face out there—they’d checked that.
It was so easy to do that it was ridiculous. Out the door of the elevator, baby firmly tucked against him. “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Not at all, pardon
me
.” “Pardon me, Doctor.” “Good morning, Doctor.” They were very scientific in this place. Sixteen minutes past midnight and they were saying good morning.
Down the corridor, turn right. Another corridor. A small lobby, where another night nurse looked at him briefly and went back to her mindless fiddling with records. Another corridor. “Good morning, ‘Doctor.” An elderly man, carrying flowers. “God bless you, Doctor.” Almost bowing. Must be nice, being a medicoe and getting all that adoration. “Thank you,” Showard said curtly, and the man looked absurdly thrilled.
And then he was at the door. He felt a faint tingle at the back of his neck, walking toward it . . . if he were going to be stopped, if some alarm had already gone off and they were after him, this was where it would happen.
But nothing happened.
He opened the door, pulled the blanket up over the infant’s head, making sure it could still get enough air to breathe, and he was outside and headed for the flyer parked at the edge of the lot for him. With the Pink Cross/Pink Shield stickers on its doors.
It was, as they used to say, a piece of cake.
Oh, chiddies and chuddies, do you DO you want to come in out of the dark and cog ALL that’s happening? You do you DO! I know you do, you want to dip and cog the WHOLE waxball in its nicewrap, don’t you, my sweet chiddy-chuddy fans? OH YES! Well, here I have a little bit of something for your neurons to chomp, yes, I do . . . how about a Lingoe Story to start our mutual day, this mutual day? It’s not easy, getting into a Lingoeden, you know—but for you I’d go through fire and toxins, and I DID I DID and oh these eyes were data-saturated door to DOOR!
Did you know that every Lingoeden has as many servomechanisms as it has rooms, my luvvies? At 300 M-credits the unit? Well, that’s rational, that’s reasonable, that’s so no Lingoe ever has to bend over to pick up any least thingthang, you cog . . . might sprain the giant brain, and we can’t have THAT, oh woe no!
And did you know about the baths in the dens—oh, chiddies and chuddies, I SAW this, with my own taxpaying eyes, I saw it—every least knob and toggle and button and switch has the family crest outlined on it in seed pearls and solid gold . . . isn’t that QUARKY, luvaduvs? Have you checked your facility lately, luvaduvs? Just to see if maybe you’ve got a little gold horsey standing on its hind legs inside a circle of seed pearls? Maybe there’s one of those on YOUR waterswitch, hoy boy . . . why don’t you go look? And if you can’t find yours, why, you could just run next door to your friendly nabehood Lingoes’, could you NOT, and borrow yourself a cup of pearls and just a
smigwídgen of gold? And why NOT? Isn’t it your taxes, chiddies and chuddies, that fill up the Lingoe treasure vaults, way down WAY DOWN in their underground castles? You go right over there and ask . . . but WATCH IT! You have to get past the laser guns on the doors, like I did! Oh hoy hoy hoy, our aching backs, luvaduvs . . . our aching backs. . . .
(by Frazzle Gleam, comset popnews caster,
COMING AT YOU program,
August 28, 2179)
The message on the private line, all certified debugged and then scrambled and rescrambled because there was no such thing as a truly debugged line, and the codes changed daily because even if you did all that you couldn’t be sure—the message said, “Emergency meeting in DAT40, 1900 hours.” Room 40, Department of Analysis & Translation . . . that would be one of the soundproof rooms in the lowest of the sub-basements. He remembered it from other times. No air, either too much heat or too much cold, and no bathroom facilities closer than a good brisk five minute walk. Damn.
Thomas was tired, and he had work to do, and he’d had other plans for this evening if he’d managed to get that work done. It had by god better be an emergency, but there was no way to find out except by going over there. That was the whole point of the private line and the debugging and the scrambling and the code changes.
By the time he got there he was thoroughly irritated. He’d wasted thirty precious minutes circling over the flyerpad on the building’s roof, waiting for permission to land, and ten minutes more waiting for some fool visiting potentate complete with cameras to clear off so that it was safe for him to leave the flyer. He was tired, and he was cold, and he was hungry, and he had nine thousand things on his mind, and he charged into Room 40 in a way that made the two men in there already exchange swift looks and sit up straighter in their chairs.
“All right!” he said as he sat down. “What is it?”
“It’s an emergency,” said one of them.
“So you said,” said Thomas. And “I don’t suppose there’s coffee?”
“Scotch if you like,” said the other, before the first—who knew better—could stop him.
Thomas Blair Chornyak stared at the fellow as he stared at everything he couldn’t see any good excuse for.
“No man who needs the use of his mind drinks anything stronger than a very good wine,” said Thomas. “Now do you have coffee or not?”
“We have coffee,” said the first fellow, and he went and got it and set it down in front of Thomas. He knew better than to put it in anything but a real cup, and he knew better than to bring it any way but black. He also knew enough to hurry. Dealing with a man who was the absolute top dog linguist in the world and all its outposts, you hurried.
“There you are, sir,” he said. “Black. And now to business.”
“Please.”
“Sir, we have some difficult news.”
“And?”
“Sir, we want you to know that this action was taken very reluctantly—VERY reluctantly.”
“For the love of the gospels, man,” said Thomas wearily, “will you spit it out or let me go back to my work?”
It came out in a rush, because the government man was worried. They’d promised him there’d be no trouble about this, but he found that hard to believe. If it had been him there would have been trouble. A lot of trouble. And he wasn’t even somebody important.
“Sir, a baby of the Lines has been kidnapped from the maternity ward at Santa Cruz Memorial Hospital.”
Chornyak did not so much as blink. He might as well have said that the sun had come up that morning in the east.
“Federal kidnapping, I assume,” he said. And they nodded.
“Female or male?”
“Female, sir.”
“Mmhmm.”
The junior man looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye, signaling confusion and now-what and a bunch of other stuff; the senior official, who’d been at this a long time, paid no attention to him. They’d wait; and when the Lingoe godfather chose to speak, he’d choose to speak. And if he was going to raise hell, well, he’d raise hell. And there was not one thing anybody could do about it, except if he used the needle he had in his pocket, and he wasn’t sure he could do that.
“Explain,” said Thomas at last. “Please.”
He was being excruciatingly polite. If he were pulling out your toenails one at a time, he would be excruciatingly polite.
“My name is John Smith, Mr. Chornyak,” said the senior official.
“Yes. I’ve worked with you before.”
“I was instructed to explain to you that in the interests of our efforts to acquire the Beta-2 language of the primary Jovian lifeforms it became necessary for us to take temporary custody of one of the infants of St. Syrus Household . . . somewhat abruptly.”
“Became necessary.”
“Yes, Mr. Chornyak.”
“I don’t follow you, Smith.”
He told him. He told him about the dead infants, about the meeting with the technicians, about the final decision that it had to be a linguist baby the next time.
“You were supposed to be advised of this in advance,” Smith lied. “But when news came in of the baby’s birth in California there wasn’t time to talk to you first—we didn’t know when we’d get another chance like that, you see.”
“And where is the baby now?”
“In one of our safe houses, sir.”
“Your friend here—does he have a name?”
The junior man cleared his throat uneasily and said, “Yes, sir. I’m Bill Jones, sir.”
Thomas carefully entered that information on his wrist computer, and smiled at them. John Smith and Bill Jones. Sure. And they all lived happily ever after.
“And when does the baby go into the Interface?”
“In three weeks, Mr. Chornyak. We can’t wait any longer than that, in view of the current crisis.”
“Ah, yes. The current crisis. Which is?”
“We don’t know, sir. We aren’t told. You know how that is, Mr. Chornyak. Need to know.”
“All right, I’ll assume the existence of the current crisis for the moment—it’s that or stay here all night, obviously. Given that assumption, Smith, do you suppose you could just explain to me, without a lot of fluff and quaver, why this extraordinary crime has been authorized—no, that’s not strong enough—has been committed by the government of the United States? Against a Household of the Lines, to which this government owes much and from which it has suffered no injury? Kidnapping—” A corner of Thomas’ upper lip twitched, once. “—is a crime. It is not a trivial crime. It carries the death penalty. I suggest that you explain to me why an official of my government has felt justified in kidnapping one of my relatives.”