The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden Elgin Page A

to be soothed with the mindless construction of the List.
    The S.A.’s could have handled being hated. That would have been easy. Powerful men had always been hated; they fed on it the way infants fed on mothers’ milk. The satisfaction of being surrounded by people who hated you but would have to wait till you were dead to express that hatred was like the satisfaction of sex . . . it was wonderful to watch such people squirm, in all theinfinite variety of ways that such squirming could take place, while the slow pleasure spread through your loins. Hatred was an index of your power; the more truly powerful you were, the more intense the hatred. Only women wanted to be “liked.”
    But the Aliens didn’t hate them. Not at all. The Aliens thought they were cute.
    That was not easy to bear. Cute! It was a word you used for females, and children below a certain age, and small animals with the huge round eyes that human beings are hardwired to find appealing. Knowing that you, an adult human male, were considered “cute” . . . it was impossible to bear. But you didn’t have any choice, you had to bear it anyway.
    You knew what they were thinking, even when all you faced were their robot extensions and you didn’t know where the real Aliens were or what they might look like; among their technological tricks was that of making robot simulacra with magnificently authentic body language. Kony had stopped caring whether the amused tolerance he faced came from one of the Alien species able to function on its own in the asteroid’s canned environment or from a simulack—it was the very same amused tolerance, in either case.
    And you knew how you were being spoken to, nice little native that you were. “Good fella chop chop him talkee fine fine.” That kind of thing. No doubt the Alien went home at night to his spouse, or whatever Aliens had, and said, “Darling, I saw the cutest little Terran today! You wouldn’t believe how hard he was trying, poor little fellow . . . I had to really fight not to pick him up and cuddle him, just to let him know it was okay.” Or maybe, “Terrans are so damn cute when they’re mad!” That was also possible.
    You couldn’t speak the Alien languages, of course. You had to search desperately for the words you needed on your ring of phrase-chips, and then you had to key them into the portable speech synthesizer, which pronounced them in a flawless imitation of your own voice. (The idea behind that had been that you would hide the synthy on your person someplace and mouth the words along with it, fooling the Aliens into thinking your mouth was the source of the noises.) This had worked very well in the lab, and had seemed entirely convincing to the staff for whom it was demonstrated; the Aliens had thought it cuter than anything else the Terrans did, and Kony had abandoned it instantly when he saw that gleam in their eyes that meant, “Well, will you look at that dear little creature trying to play like it speaks Alien!” The experts told the men they were “anthropomorphizing”when they interpreted the Aliens’ reactions in that way; the experts had never been there.
    If the technique with the speech synthesizer failed you, you fell back on PanSig, semaphoring and posturing and flashing color cards and spraying odors . . . . Chop chop. Good fella not likee likee, too damn bad for good fella.
    Some of the Aliens you dealt with were polite; they would condescend to speak Standard Panglish at you. Flawlessly. Others were arrogant, and would not stoop to such an inadequate excuse for a language. The polite ones obviously found the behavior of the arrogant ones distasteful. But it was equally obvious that even to those whose courtesy was impeccable you were no more than a posturing child whose little feelings must never be hurt, lest it lose its little temper, and whose little sensibilities must never be startled,