The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Now that they found themselves at the next step of the plan, they had waited for her. And would indeed have waited a whole day, or a whole week, if that had been necessary. Whether it was genuinely crucial to have her with them for these sessions or not, they didn’t feel safe without her. I am a symbol, she thought. A talisman. And what will they do when I am gone?

  The youngest of the women there that morning, Quilla Hashihawa Chornyak, was in her seventies. Still she, like every other woman of the Lines, relied on the foolish mantra: What will we do when Nazareth is gone? Hush—Nazareth will not die till we can spare her. It made Nazareth cross just thinking about it, and she abandoned the subject of the daylilies and spoke up, to get her mind off her irritation.

  “Well, how are we getting along? Do we have a report from everybody now?” The constant fine tremor that she’d had for many years—and that the physicians could certainly have relieved her of, if the grim hatred she felt for all med-Sammys hadn’t prevented her from allowing them to do so—in no way interfered with the blinding speed of her crocheting. Her left hand, holding the battered old hook, was almost a blur. “Shall I start a mitten, or is this a light shawl meeting?”

  Quilla set an additional skein of lavender in Nazareth’s lap, to supplement her supply. “At least start the shawl,” she advised. “Unless you’d like to make several mittens.”

  Nazareth suspected that this camouflage of needlework was no longer necessary; since the men of the Lines had built the separate Womanhouses in 2218 and established the custom of summoning their wives to the main house by sending computer messages, men were as rare in the women’s buildings as green swans. But if you were a woman who still remembered the days when a man might come stomping into the parlor at any time, with no warning, demanding anything at all and its housecat, the camouflage was a comfort. And although their present plan was a pathetic little thing, the men could have stopped it with a single word if they’d taken it into their heads to do so, and it was the only plan they had. They didn’t choose to take chances with it. Furthermore, they were so accustomed to holding their meetings in these needlework circles that they would have felt awkward doing it any other way. Like meeting naked. Or under water.

  “Everything’s in place, ready to go,” said Sabyna. “They began last night at Jefferson Household, as we’d agreed, and the report came in this morning as a casserole I wouldn’t feed a dog. Everything went smoothly, it said, and so far as anyone could tell, the nurse didn’t notice a thing.”

  “No reason why she should have,” Nazareth noted.

  “No reason she shouldn’t have noticed that she was hearing Láadan instead of Panglish?” snapped Elizabeth, the words muffled by her struggle to sever a strand of yarn with her teeth. “That’s absurd!”

  “The woman’s not a linguist, Beth,” said Sabyna. “She knows Panglish, and I suppose she must know half a dozen bits of medical Latin, and that’s it. But she will notice.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Nazareth is sure of that,” Sabyna answered.

  “And so far, Nazareth has always been right.”

  “Just so.”

  They sat there a little space, saying nothing; and Nazareth wondered where the woman was—or better, where the women were, preferably several dozens of them, who would take over this ridiculous role for her, and wished that they would hurry up and volunteer themselves—and then Clea sighed so loudly that they all looked at her in surprise.

  “What on earth?” asked Sabyna.

  “I was just imagining,” Clea said.

  “Imagining?”

  “Imagining us, as the years go by. And every Thursday night in chapel, in every Womanhouse of the Lines, someone reads aloud the opening and closing pieces in Láadan. And none of the resident nurses ever notices. . . . And all the nurses die and are replaced, and we all die and are replaced, and nobody ever notices.”

  “Well, if that happens,” Nazareth stated firmly, “it will be time for Plan B.”

  “There isn’t any Plan B!” Clea objected.

  “Better work one up then, my dear. Because the idea of generations going by, and Láadan still being known only to the women of the Lines, as if it were an Alien language, distresses me greatly. If the dreary scenario you describe is a likely one, Clea, we need a Plan B. And perhaps a Plan C as well. And a D.” She looked down carefully at the knot-stitch she was working and added, “I know what—we could make a list.”

  They had made lists, fifty years ago. Endless lists. Provisions to be stored away in packs, ready to be seized and slung to their backs as they fled from the Households into the wilderness, each woman carrying an infant girl on her hip, with the men in hot pursuit. And similar nonsense.

  “Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness,” said Sabyna. “For shame.”

  Nazareth grinned, but she said nothing more until they insisted, and then she told them that she’d said it all a dozen times and wasn’t about to say it all again, and they sat there some more. Five uneasy women of advanced years, in the midst of a quandary.

  “All right,” said Sabyna at last against the counterpoint of clicking needles, “I surrender. I will say it all again. Clea, the nurses will come to care about the readings they hear in Láadan because it is a language worth caring about, and the readings are carefully chosen to seduce the ear. In time, they will notice. And they will ask us about it.”

  “How can we be sure of that? Never mind Nazareth—how can we be sure it’s not just a waste of time?”

  Sabyna laughed. “If we were sure of it, would we be sitting here listening to Natha tease us about lists? Of course we’re not sure of it, and can’t be sure of it, it’s just the only thing we’ve been able to think of to do. There are no other women except the nurses who are able to move freely between our Households and the outside world, to serve as contacts between us and other women—therefore we must work through the nurses. There is no other occasion, except for Thursday Night Devotionals at the Womanhouses, when we linguist women and the nurses are together on any sort of regular and reliable basis—therefore we must work through those chapel services. Those are the facts, you perceive. And all we can do, as Natha has so often and so accurately pointed out, is try it and see what happens.”

  “It will take a long time!” Clea stabbed at the embroidery with her needle, fiercely, and jabbed her middle finger instead. “Ouch!”

  “Everything does,” said Nazareth.

  “Well, is that all that was in the casserole recipe?” Clea asked. “Just ‘we began last night and the nurse didn’t notice’?”

  “Even with a casserole,” Quilla said, “a recipe doesn’t have room for elaborate detail.”

  “Seriously! Is that all it said?”

  “Just about.” Quilla was in charge of the recipe collections for Chornyak Barren House; she kept them, to the men’s great amusement, on file cards. In writing. “They started with the Twenty-third Psalm and ended with a benediction, it said, as agreed. And next Thursday the turn goes to Mbal Household. And that’s all there was, and all we could expect. We certainly didn’t anticipate that the nurse would leap from her seat in chapel shrieking, ‘What is that wonderful language, I have to know!’ Eventually, something will happen; eventually one of them will hear more than just noise.”

  It was to make that more certain that they’d decided to always begin with the Twenty-third Psalm, so that the nurses heard the same sequence over and over again, but to vary the closing selection on the off chance that that was the wrong decision. Hedging their bets. The good old Twenty-third had gone beautifully into Láadan, and had a wonderful sonorous roll to it; either that would cause the nurses to begin loving it and wondering what it was they loved, or it would lull them the way an incantation lulls and they’d never wonder. There was no way to find out which, except to try.

  “We’re next in line, then?” asked Quilla.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you imagine Jo-Bethany Schrafft finding the Twenty-th
ird Psalm in Láadan seductive?” It wasn’t a sarcastic question; she was serious.

  “It’s hard to say,” answered Sabyna. “We don’t know her yet. She’ll only have been here . . . what, six weeks? Seven, maybe? . . . when it’s our turn to begin. But she’s a human being, and she is a woman, and she hears normally; and that is all we can ask for in any of them.”

  “She is also devout,” put in Nazareth quietly.

  “Devout? Devout what?”

  “Baptist, I think; Protestant, certainly. No holy pictures or statues in her room, and she doesn’t cross herself, and if you come up behind her suddenly and startle her she doesn’t say ‘Holy Mary!’ or anything of that sort.”

  “Nazareth, how do you know she’s ‘devout,’ as you put it? You’ve barely met her.”

  Nazareth looked at them, her eyebrows raised, just for a moment, and then looked down at her work again, saying, “She has a Bible beside her bed, my friends.” She paused. “A printed Bible.”

  “In realbook? Or just hard copied?”

  “It’s realbook form,” Nazareth said. “And it’s not junk; it’s the whole Bible, and ordinary print, and decent paper.”

  That was significant. To own a printed Bible, a real book rather than a microfiche or a chiplet in a velvet case, and to do that on the money that an unmarried nurse earned—she would have to be devout. That would mean strenuous economies, over a long period of time.

  “Perhaps it’s a family heirloom,” Elizabeth suggested.

  “No,” said Nazareth. “I checked—it’s a recent edition.”

  “It’s a good sign, you think?”

  “Maybe. It means she will go to Thursday night chapel, even if it’s being held by Lingoe bitches, because not to do so would worry her. That’s a good point. But it also means she may find the Láadan disturbing. Or worse—she may find it blasphemous.”

  “Bomehelh!” said Sabyna, quite clearly.

  “Mercy. Now that’s blasphemous!” Quilla chuckled; at their ages, disrespectful remarks about penises were permissible.

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  “For instance?”

  “Well, is there something perhaps less blasphemous to translate than the Twenty-third Psalm? Something she might be less sensitive about?”

  “And throw a wild variable into the experiment? Really, Sabyna.”

  “I suppose that wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

  They shook their heads at her, unanimous in their agreement on that point. The variation was to be at the end of the service, not at the beginning, and weeks had been spent deciding on the Twenty-third Psalm as the proper opening, and they were not going to spoil any of that now. Sabyna had always had a weakness for the unscientific method, but they would see that she curbed it; this was no time for impulsive fiddling about.

  “We have to get this going,” said Clea. “It’s awful, hogging Láadan in the Lines the way we do. I don’t want to go to my grave still hogging it.”

  “We’re all on the defensive about that,” Nazareth said gently. “For centuries we linguists have been hated by all the peoples of Earth and all the peoples of Earth’s colonies. For our elitism, and our selfishness, and our shameful wealth, and our hoarded secrets—all of which is the most utter cowflop. Except for Láadan, which we have hoarded. It’s an awful feeling.”

  “As if we had food,” said Quilla bitterly, “and other women were starving all around us. And we not only didn’t share but tried to pretend that we were starving, too. It’s shameful.”

  “My dear, we have been over that and over that—it’s not shameful. It’s just the way that life is. We can’t move any faster than we are moving, and that’s all there is to it. It isn’t shameful to be human.”

  Nazareth wondered how many thousands of times that same ground would have to be plowed. Linguists, of all people, should know the perils of making haste. You cannot hurry the acquisition of language. A human child, given nothing in the way of language instruction but the ordinary vagaries of communication in its own home, would begin to speak its native language at about eighteen months and have the system under control by about age five. A human child, given intensive daily lessons in its native language from birth, by the most costly teachers, would begin to speak the language at about eighteen months and have the system under control by about age five. If the teachers were as skilled as they were expensive, the child who had the lessons would have a bigger vocabulary than the other child, but that would be the only significant difference. And it had taken the women of the Lines generations to move from the first resolve that a language for women should be constructed to the stage of beginning to speak it with the infant girls. And still, they kept fretting for a way to “speed things up”!

  “Do you remember,” she asked casually, “how it went when our distinguished scientists found a way to speed up the gestation of the human infant from nine months to five? Do you remember the monsters that came from the wombs of women before they closed that project down?”

  They didn’t answer her, but she knew they were remembering, and she drove the point home. “Anything forced to birth before its time will be a monster; and the houses of the Lines have been the womb of Láadan. Suppose we stop trying for a Caesarean, dearloves.”

  “We do it because we grieve for other women,” Clea protested.

  “No,” said Sabyna, saving Nazareth the trouble, “we do it because we feel guilty. Our own guilt is not a sufficient justification for ruining something so important. Nazareth is right.”

  Nazareth is right. She flinched, but the tremor hid it; only someone watching her with the specific purpose of analyzing her bodyparl would have seen it as flinching rather than tremor. It was tiresome, always being right, even about things that were loathsome. It caused her pain.

  Nazareth had been longing for death for ten years now, and would serenely have greeted its arrival. Except for the reluctance she felt at the idea of having it all to do over again. She was tired, she realized, and too cross to be useful.

  “Natha? Are you all right?”

  She stood up, tucking the strip of shawl into her pocket and handing the unused extra yarn back to its donor. “I’m fine,” she said, that being what was expected of her. “But we’re through here. There’s no reason to spend any more time belaboring the overpoweringly obvious. There wasn’t any reason to call a meeting to belabor it, for heaven’s sakes. Why didn’t you just send me a copy of the casserole recipe?”

  “It was only a one-mitten meeting?”

  “One thumb of one mitten. At the most. You overestimated.”

  “Are you sure we’re through?” asked Elizabeth plaintively, and Nazareth gave up being cross and started laughing instead, patting their cheeks all around as she abandoned them. She would, she decided, go back through the main house common room again, even though she wasn’t in a hurry this time. As a matter of principle. Perhaps she’d have an opportunity to speak to that young man personally. As a matter of principle.

  They let her go without a word of protest. But she knew what they would do now. They’d sit there for two more hours, going over it and over it. Saying the same things thirty-five times, in different ways and different languages. Wringing the last fragment of possible significance from the casserole recipe code message.

  She wasn’t going to do that with them. She would leave them to their dissecting. It eased their minds, and eased their frustration at not being able to do something more direct and obvious, but it did not ease her in any way at all. She had no tolerance for it, and only got in their way; better for them if she was gone, instead of staying there and getting more and more annoyed with them all the time for things that were in no way their fault or hers. She would go back to her thologys, to find out what was going on in the world.

  Nazareth knew what the family thought about that, of course. She was neither deaf nor blind nor numb, and she was well aware that they considered the time she spent with the comset news thologys a sign of
premature senility. Here she was, surrounded by all the wonders of modern technology, with the holomagazines at her fingertips; Chornyak Household subscribed to nearly a dozen of them. Nazareth, they would say to her, you don’t have to tune the holos in the way the children do; you don’t have to bring them in lifesize and at full volume, you have complete control of the display!

  For Christmas this year her sons had given her a new receiver of her own, the very latest thing. So small that she could hold it in the palm of her hand and watch the holograms present the news and the features and the dramas and all the rest of it. In perfect detail, but tiny. Not like inviting an entire troupe of people into the room to do live theater, the way the kids preferred it. This receiver had separate controls for each sensory modality; you could turn off the smells and the textures and the tastes and leave only the eye and ear inputs if you liked. Her sons were no doubt proud of themselves . . . she could imagine how they’d decided, over the Sunday morning mantalk; they would have convinced themselves that this, at last, would wean Mother from her embarrassing addiction to the primitive. Worth every credit it cost, she was sure they had said.