The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  And then he leaned back in his chair, turned off the Bach, folded his arms over his chest, and stared coldly at James Nathan Chornyak. “All right, Grandfather,” he said heavily. “That was my fault—I invited you to join this meeting. And I didn’t interfere, because your judgment has never failed us yet.”

  “That is why you invited me to join you,” his grandfather pointed out.

  “Correct. That and the fact that I didn’t want you to miss the fun.”

  “You’re too kind to a useless old man, Jonathan. Try to curb your mawkish sentimentality, will you?”

  “Mawkish sentimentality, my rosy butt!”

  “Is it? Rosy?”

  “Grandfather, I don’t have time for this crap.”

  “In that case, do not refer to business as ‘fun’; the semantics is too intricate for me. Please get on with it.”

  “I’ll be happy to. But I’m not sure where to begin, because I’m completely baffled.”

  “Well, Jonathan, my boy, if we had let him pay us—”

  “Grandfather,” Jonathan interrupted, grimly, “cut it out. Of course we don’t want his money. The last thing we want is to be involved with him in an employee relationship . . . or, sweet suffering Christ, to have him perceive himself as ‘renting’ our Interface. I understand that, and I am in full agreement with you—furthermore, you know that. What I don’t understand is why you agreed to do it on any terms.”

  “As I said at the time, Jonathan, why not?”

  “Grandfather, I don’t need to remind you that the livelihood of all thirteen of the Lines rests upon the maintenance of our monopoly. Do you have some kind of job training plan in mind for us, once you’ve handed over the only kind of work any of us knows how to do? I agree that Dow is likely to do unusual things; but when the word gets out on this—and I didn’t hear you adding any requirement of confidentiality to your list of conditions—you can’t tell me we won’t have dozens more eggdomes wanting to copy him and get their kiddies a piece of the power, too. We only have thirteen Interfaces, but we could add four or five lay infants to each of them without any strain. And then you’re talking about fifty lay linguists in competition with the Lines! I realize that we’re always being pushed to do more work than we can keep up with, but I don’t think that turning over the Alien language business to the general public is a solution to that problem.”

  James Nathan had listened to all this with an infuriating grin on his face, and it was still there after Jonathan stopped talking, so that he found himself adding stiffly that he would appreciate less humor and more information.

  “I’m a little surprised,” said the old man. “I always thought you were a man who saw straight to the heart of a situation. That’s why we made you Head.”

  “BEM-dung. I was made Head because I had sense enough to make use of the wisdom to be found all around me instead of trying to be an effing Emperor. I remember very well being told that we’d had too many Emperor types in a row and it was time for a correction in the curve. Now share your wisdom—and it had better be top grade.”

  James Nathan chuckled, and Jonathan ignored that.

  “Now, please, Grandfather,” he said. “I’m a busy man.”

  James Nathan liked the Bach fugues, and considered it cheap of his grandson to save them for visitors; he reached over and flipped them on to provide an accompaniment. And he proceeded to explain the situation. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Johnny,” he said indulgently, “so that you can stop fretting. And then you have my permission to apologize to me for being so goddamn slow to perceive the overpoweringly obvious.”

  And after a while, as the overpoweringly obvious took on a delightful clarity for him, it was Jonathan who was chuckling.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I sat there and I stared at that lovely child; Aquina’s descendant—named for her, and so like her in character that it made me doubt the principles of genetics. And I wondered. She had come so willingly, almost eagerly. I wondered if there were anything at all I could have asked her to do for the sake of Láadan that she would have said no to. If I had said, ‘Aquina, find a cliff and jump off, for the sake of Láadan,’ would she even have stopped to ask me why? I doubted it. I thought she would have just said, ‘Yes, Nazareth!’, and taken off at a run in search of an appropriate precipice. I remember that it was storming outside; that would not have slowed Aquina down at all.

  “She had exactly the set of characteristics I always looked for, and so very rarely found, in every girlchild of the Lines past puberty. She was the daughter of a widow not remarried, and was therefore free of a male parent’s close surveillance; she was herself both unmarried and unbetrothed, and seemed contented to be without a man’s attentions; she was intelligent and industrious and brave; she had the troublesome but absolutely crucial sense of mission that was required. And she had a mother I could manage with ease; without that, all of the rest would have been useless to me.

  “I sat there, studying her, thinking that fierce and passionate as she was, at seventeen she had more common sense than her great-grandmother had ever had. Still . . . that Aquina had grown up in a very different time. Before we began to speak Láadan. Before the building of the Womanhouses, when we still lived much of our lives with the men. Perhaps she would have been different, too, in different circumstances. Remembering how miserable her life had been, and how wasted, hardened my resolve. I ignored the reflex the girl provoked in me, that made me want to protect and shelter her, and I took the syringe from my needlework bag and laid it on the table between us.

  “ ‘Aquina,’ I said, ‘you’ll want to play close attention now to what I tell you. It isn’t complicated, but if it’s done wrong, it might as well not be done at all.’

  “She laughed at me, and at my serious face, and asked me, ‘What could go wrong? I wait outside the rendezvous room for Lara’s husband to leave her alone, I go into the room, I—’

  “ ‘Listen carefully all the same!’ I said sharply. ‘There are things that matter, names and addresses and facts that you must remember. That you must not write down, even in code.’ ”

  “She hushed at that, and I warned her again, before I went on. I have warned each one of the nine, and not one has let the warning hold her back, but there could always be a first time. I said, ‘Aquina, dearlove, stop and think. This will be very unpleasant and difficult and dangerous. It has consequences that will go on for all the rest of your life. Are you absolutely sure you want to go on with it?”

  “ ‘It’s for Láadan, isn’t it?’

  “ ‘Yes. Of course.’

  “ ‘Then I don’t care about any of that,’ she said. As calm and confident as if all she had to do was go get me a cup of tea.

  “They’ve all been like that—so calm, so serene, so sure of themselves. I am still waiting for the first one to fail.”

  (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

  The tour of the Chornyak Household, with every last closet and cranny opened for her inspection except the bachelor bedrooms, had clarified one thing for Jo-Bethany absolutely: the idea that the linguists of the Lines lived in luxury was a myth. Unless the Chornyaks were lying to her, and among the thirteen families there were exceptions, the linguists lived in a manner that most Americans would have considered appropriate only for the poor. It was a very elegant poverty, to be sure, and a poverty that was a matter of choice rather than necessity. But it was a lifestyle so different from the one portrayed for the Lines by the media that it was bewildering. Why would they want to distort the truth that way? Jo-Bethany had no idea, and she preferred not to think about it; the linguists themselves had proposed no explanation. And she had seen that although nothing in the Chornyak dwellings was luxurious, everything was sturdy and durable and in decent taste—clearly, they were not poor. It was odd, and baffling, and she had tried one very tentative question.

  “At first,” Dorcas Chornyak had answered, “during the time of the anti-linguist riots, we liv
ed very simply as a way of demonstrating to people outside the Lines that they had no reason to consider us some sort of robber barons. It was an important matter, for us.”

  “But it didn’t help!” Jo-Bethany had objected.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No, I don’t. You might just as well have gone ahead and installed the marble pools and diamond chandeliers and all the rest of it, so far as I can see. Because after all these years, all this deliberate low-budget living of yours, the public image is precisely what it always was. I can understand why you might have gone on as you did for a while, thinking that eventually things would change and people would come to realize the truth. But after you saw it wasn’t working, why didn’t you give it up?”

  Dorcas had smiled at her and said, “I suppose by then we’d lost our taste for luxury,” and Jo-Bethany could see that she didn’t intend to say anything more.

  Everyone was so busy that opportunities to explore the subject further didn’t present themselves naturally, and Jo-Bethany wasn’t sure she could have brought herself to try it even if they had. It was rude, somehow, and childish. Asking people: “But why do you do this? But why do you do that?” They might well have told her it was none of her business, and they would have been right. Still, it was irritating to live with so many puzzles. So irritating that Jo—to her amazement—found herself wishing she had Melissa there to talk to about it. It was an indication of the disorganized state of her mind; she could have talked more productively to a philodendron than to Melissa. And so she held her peace, and paid attention, and waited for revelation to dawn.

  Where the “potions” were concerned, it came swiftly; the concoctions of herbs that Dorcas produced were eccentric, but they were also helpful. The linguists raised their own herbs, free of chemicals and pollutants, with the children doing the gardening because it was good for their health; what would not grow in the climate of one Household was exchanged for what would grow in another, so that herbs from Africa went to Switzerland, and herbs from California went to Arkansas, and so on, with everything necessary being available to all thirteen families. The database on herbal medicine in the computers at Chornyak Barren House was awe-inspiring, and the women who put the potions together knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, Jo-Bethany envied them their skill, and intended to acquire it as a fringe benefit of her employment. She was shrewd enough to realize that the knowledge was valuable, and that training as a herbalist might one day be her ticket to some genuinely interesting nursing position.

  She also understood why the linguists had no medical pods. A patient sick enough to need a pod really should be in a hospital, and half a dozen superb facilities were within ten minutes of the Chornyaks by flyer. She would have been somewhat embarrassed to have to admit to Dorcas that in Ham Klander’s house, along with the robot Irish setter and the array of multipurpose servomechanisms, there had been one medpod for each member of the family and two spares for the use of guests. That, she realized, was ostentatious extravagance, as much as marble hot tubs would have been.

  But there were other things that bothered her. The chronic ward, for example . . . let them tell her all they liked that it was just a communal bedroom, she knew a chronic ward when she saw one. And the chronic ward at Chornyak Barren House was set up with nothing but beds and screens. On her first day on duty, with Dorcas still at her side to help her get her bearings in the job, she’d been taken to see those patients. Lying there like that, without even bedside healthies! It had been too much for her. She had asked: “Why do you do this?”

  “There are healthies in the storage room,” Dorcas had said. “If we had a guest in the house who got sick and asked for a healthy, we could provide one right away. If there should be a . . . oh, an epidemic, something that overwhelmed our usual medical regime . . . we could put the healthies into service on a moment’s notice. We have six, Nurse Schrafft, and we can certainly order more if six strikes you as inadequate emergency backup.”

  Jo-Bethany hadn’t known what to say. Even for new colonies, where the standard of living was necessarily nothing like that of Earth, one of the very first things shipped out was a cargo of healthies, along with the solar power units and the hydroponics equipment and the enzyme banks. To see patients without healthies was so strange that she hadn’t been able to think of a neutral comment to make—her instinct, as nurse in residence, had been to demand that every bed in the room be equipped with its own healthy before dinnertime, that the same thing be done for the beds in the isolation infirmaries, and that there be six spare units in the storage room to supplement those. And even that would have been a primitive arrangement, with nearly two hundred potential patients for her to look after! “I’m sorry. I really can’t approve of this,” she had said finally, hearing the hesitation obvious in her voice and hating it.

  Anywhere else she would not have hesitated. But one thing about the linguists that had turned out not to be a myth was their magnificent physical condition. When you were one of only three people on the planet who could speak some particular Alien language fluently, and that language was needed for a negotiation that had taken months to arrange and could not be postponed without serious consequences, it was literally a matter of planetary security for you to be in superb health. You had to always be able to go to the interpreting booth and carry out your duties; something as otherwise trivial as a cough ceased to be trivial when the import contracts for an essential mineral couldn’t be drawn up because you weren’t able to provide the simultaneous interpreting necessary to settle its terms. Every linguist child followed a diet and exercise regime tailored specifically to that child by experts that the Lines had on permanent retainer; every linguist still active in negotiations had a complete medical examination every six months, and the children were checked even more often. It didn’t make sense, under the circumstances, for them not to have healthies in this room!

  She had stood there, staring at the double row of beds, thinking that not to have healthies was barbaric, still hesitant; and then suddenly she had remembered something and her hesitation had vanished.

  “Oh, I understand!” she had declared then, making a contemptuous announcement out of it, folding her arms tightly across her chest, hugging her outrage to her. “It’s because they are old!”

  She had expected Dorcas Chornyak to be taken aback, and she wasn’t disappointed; the woman’s eyes widened and her mouth parted in astonishment. The two of them stood staring at one another, Jo-Bethany fuming with righteous indignation, and Dorcas looking ridiculous with sheer surprise. But then Dorcas had begun to laugh, instead of looking ashamed as Jo-Bethany had expected her to do, and that had been the last straw.

  “I don’t find it amusing!” she had blurted out. “And I think it’s disgusting! And completely inexcusable!”

  That scene had gotten much worse before it got any better. She’d gone on with her speech for quite a while. “The public knows that long before you people put all your women except the little girls into separate houses you used to banish any woman past childbearing age, or any woman who couldn’t have children for some other reason! We remember you doing that, you know . . . and calling the place you sent them to ‘Barren House’ to rub their noses in it! And now these women—” She had gestured dramatically toward the beds where the elderly women lay, with no privacy at all, hearing every word . . . “—they’re not just barren, they’re no use in your precious economy at all! So you just. . . .” She had struggled for the exact word, absolutely furious, out of control. “You just dump them here, without even minimal facilities, and you hire one licensed nurse to keep the authorities from coming along and taking them somewhere where they could be decently looked after! Well, I won’t stand for that, Miss Chornyak—I won’t stand for it one minute, and you might as well know it right now!” She had been shaking with rage before she got to the end of her oration.

  One of the old ladies in the two facing rows of beds had spoken up then in the silence, sh
arply. “Dorcas,” she’d said, her voice thin but strong, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself! That poor child!”

  “What poor child?” Jo-Bethany had demanded. “Do you have children in here, too?”

  “You, my dear,” the old one had answered. “You are the poor child in question! Being given the tour of the back wards, and no preparation whatsoever for the horrors therein. What you’ll say when you see our snakepits, I can’t imagine.”

  And that had sent everyone awake into gales of laughter, including the woman standing beside her, and had waked up those who’d been asleep. Dorcas had spoken through the laughter, chiding, “Benita, how can you be so wicked? You stop laughing and set this right, or I’ll send for . . . let’s see, which of the teenage males would you find most irritating?”

  The old lady’s hands had gone up instantly in a gesture of mock surrender, and the others had made an effort to get their hilarity under control, and Dorcas had touched Jo-Bethany’s hand, gently.

  “You’re trembling, Miss Schrafft,” she’d said, “and I’m sorry. Furthermore, Benita is right, though there’s no excuse for the way she chose to express herself. I should never have brought you here without first explaining it to you, so that you’d understand the situation. Please forgive me, if you can—it’s been so long since we had a new nurse that I’d forgotten how strange it all would seem to you. Like not having running water, I suppose. . . . Miss Schrafft, the reason we don’t have healthies at every bed—or at any bed—is not that we don’t care about these women, or that they’re old, or that they’re useless. We’d be in serious difficulties here at Chornyak Household without their expert services—you’ll see that for yourself before this week is over. But right now I want to make sure you understand one thing very clearly: the reason that we don’t have healthies in this room is because we don’t approve of them.”