The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Members of Heykus’ staff with sufficiently high clearance to know about the existence of the program considered its name an excellent joke. Putting a dependent program to launder slush monies inside a sedate file named “All Souls Mission” was, they thought, a stroke of genuine wit; it showed that although Heykus talked the approved Christian line, as was only prudent for any government official, he had a sense of humor. And he was always willing to agree with them that it was a fine joke, on those rare occasions when the subject came up.

  For Heykus, however, it was not a joke. One of the things that he knew for certain was that one God, his God, had created everything there was, no matter where it might be located. Another thing he knew for certain was that on this planet Earth anything that spoke a language had a soul that could be saved for the greater glory of God. And until he also knew for certain that any given living creature found on any other planet was without such a soul, he was taking no chances. First you learned how to talk to them; then you told them the Good News about the Son of God; that was what his life was about. Come the time he was convinced that the primates or the whales had true languages, Heykus was prepared to see that they were told the Good News, just in case; this was a situation in which he would always choose to make his errors on the broad side of the line. And “All Souls Mission” was the one and the only and the perfect name for that computer program.

  II

  Jessamin was at her post in the corner, behind the tall five-paneled screen that left her a full view of the girldorm’s rows of narrow beds and cribs but kept the small light of her reading lamp from waking the sleeping children. She was staring at a fiche that introduced an entire new set of lexical items . . . the vocabulary she would need, day after tomorrow. The Jeelods were offering to set up an entirely new kind of agricultural station, like a giant clothesline, with protein sheets hung out on it to be—She frowned at the data before her; what was it exactly that they were claiming you did? Protein sheets, hung on lines in geosynchronous orbits, that you—rolled up? Rolled up on what? The word was either an entirely new root, or it had an affix she’d never seen before, she couldn’t decide which. And she would have to know before she could begin interpreting.

  She was staring so fiercely at the baffling words on the fiche that she didn’t hear Nizhona come padding across the room to her, barefooted. When the girl grabbed her hand, her own hands like ice, Jessamin jumped; the noise she made was almost a whispered shriek.

  “Nizhona Maria Chornyak!” she fussed, as well as she could fuss without disturbing the sleepers. “Please, child—don’t ever grab like that, out of the air! What have I done to deserve such treatment at your hands—literally at your hands? Poor Jessamin, struggling all her life long with the Jeelods, does she deserve such a shockingly abrupt icy greeting from you, eh? And dearlove, how have your hands gotten so cold?”

  “Jessamin, Jessamin, guess what!” the girl whispered, her voice urgent with excitement. “Oh, Jessamin, guess!”

  Jessamin put her work aside, drew the youngster inside the shelter of the screen where she could see her a little better, and took the young face between her hands to study it, thinking that the skin was like velvet; she looked closely and carefully, and she thought hard. Nizhona’s eyes were bright, almost aglow, certainly dancing; she was terribly pleased about something. Her body was trembling with excitement. Twelve years old . . . three o’clock in the morning of an ordinary day, long before dawn . . . and here she was, saying, “Oh, Jessamin, guess!”

  There was only one single thing it could be.

  “Báa nahosháana ne?” she whispered, watching. And saw at once that she was right.

  “I woke up just now, Jessamin, and I discovered it! It’s not just a cut finger, there are little spots of blood on my nightgown!” Nizhona giggled, so very pleased with herself. “And on the floor, too, Jessa . . . I left a trail to you!”

  “Oh, Nizhona,” Jessamin breathed, “bless you, darling!” And she gathered her into her arms and rocked her, till the joyous trembling quieted and the girl relaxed against her to be stroked and patted, murmuring all the usual words suitable to the occasion.

  “I’ll bet I’m still leaving a trail,” Nizhona whispered, lazily, calm again. “I’ll bet I’m making a horrible mess, Jessa.”

  “Brag, brag, brag,” Jessamin teased. “One little quarter teaspoon of blood, and you think you’re an instrument of vast and splendid havoc!”

  “Yep,” said Nizhona, smug and content. “That is exactly right. Splendid scarlet havoc. Jessamin, shall I go sneak through the house like this? Maybe write my name on the floor in the diningroom?”

  Jessamin laughed, and gave the outrageous child a swift hug. “Would you accept a compromise?” she asked. “One that wouldn’t be quite so exotic?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I would. This happens only one time, you know, in my whole life. Why should I compromise?”

  “All right, then,” Jessamin told her. “You go up and see how long it takes you, dearlove, one little drop at a time, to write your whole name in menstrual blood on the diningroom floor. I can’t go with you, because I’m on duty; but I’ll come by in—oh, three hours, say, you should have it done by then—and I’ll put a coat of Permaglass over it so it will be preserved for all of time.”

  “Would it take that long?”

  “I expect so. The very first period you have? What do you think there’ll be, child, quarts and buckets and bathtubs full of blood? The very first time?”

  Nizhona sighed. “Shoot. . . . Maybe I’ll just. . . .” Her voice trailed off before she could outline her next plan, and she smiled. “Maybe I’ll just move to Womanhouse,” she proposed. “Right now!”

  “That,” Jessamin agreed, hugging her some more, “you may surely do, with my blessing. Most certainly. I’ll call Belle-Anne and tell her to go over to the Womanhouse kitchen and meet you for hot tea and something celebratory; she’ll be up, for sure, she always is. Pack quietly, though—the rest of the girls have nearly two hours’ sleep coming to them still, if you don’t crash and clank and lumber around hooting and thumping.”

  “I’ll only splash!” Nizhona declared. “I shall make small soft splashes, as I go.”

  Jessamin watched her fondly as she headed back across the room, moving as silently as she had come; for all her mischievous talk, she would not have stolen one minute of sleep from the others. And she punched in the call for Belle-Anne on her wrist computer. “Nizhona’s coming over,” she typed, “and she’s headed for the kitchen fit to burst . . . her first period woke her up and she is moving this very minute. A good thing she is, too—you should have heard the alternatives she was proposing! Can you go meet her, Belle-Anne?”

  “I’m on my way,” came the answer, and not a word from Belle-Anne about the project she would have to set aside. “I’ll be there before she is, Jessamin, and we’ll plan an Osháana Rejoicing to remember, I promise.”

  “She’ll talk you to death—she’s wound up like a top.”

  “Well, of course she is! Weren’t you?”

  Belle-Anne didn’t wait for the answer that any woman of the Lines could have supplied. The privilege of moving to the Womanhouse, out of the girldorms to join the women; the festivities of the Osháana Rejoicing party that would be fit into the hours of the coming day no matter what extraordinary reschedulings and cancelings and rearrangements had to be accomplished. Those were things you treasured forever. Jessamin remembered her own Rejoicing, and her eyes filled with the tears of memory joyfully welcomed; she knew now that her first period had arrived on as impossible a day for a celebration as could ever have been imagined, with almost every woman in Chornyak Household already scheduled for every last moment the whole day long. But they had held her Rejoicing, and they had never let on for an instant that heaven and earth and all the planets and asteroids had had to be moved about to fit it in.

  She saw Nizhona then, holding a bundle in her arms—she must have just wound everything up
in her bedsheet, the one with spots of blood, to be washed carefully in icewater and dried in early sunlight and folded away among her treasures. She stood in the dim outline of the door, waving goodbye to her. Jessamin waved back, and the girl disappeared—and then Jessamin remembered, and gasped, and dashed after her, just barely catching her at the foot of the staircase to tuck the pass into her nightgown pocket. “Mercy, girl!” she whispered. “Were you going to go the whole way without a pass?”

  “Nobody will be awake up there yet,” Nizhona scoffed. “It’s a non-problem, they’re all asleep!”

  “Maybe,” Jessamin said solemnly. “But that’s because they haven’t heard the splashing yet, as you go through the house. And I don’t want some fool man sending you back down here. Or dragging you along with him and waking up everybody in the room demanding an explanation, and me having to spend the rest of the night getting babies back to sleep instead of working . . . no thank you, dearlove. Your pass is in your pocket, if you need it. For my sake.”

  She set a kiss firmly on Nizhona’s mouth, and glanced at the floor; as she had expected, there was no trail of scarlet to be seen. Not this time.

  “Off you go now,” she said tenderly. “Belle-Anne’s waiting for you. And I’ll be over, first thing when everyone’s up, to get the fandangous festivities started. Hurry, now; and go in loving-kindness, Nizhona Maria!”

  The girl went up the stairs at a run, hugging the bundle, not even looking back at this place where she’d lived her whole life; and Jessamin watched her, contented, until she was out of sight and on her way down the corridor at the landing.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The World They Call Terra”

  “Sing me a song!” said the child in the garden.

  “Grandmother, sing! I’ll sit here by your side . . .

  Sing me a song of the world they call Terra,

  the world that you came from when you were a bride!”

  “Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields,

  out to the rim of the worlds that we know—

  child, I can’t sing you a song about Terra,

  for Terra was too many planets ago.”

  “Sing me a song!” said the child in the garden.

  “Grandmother, sing to me—tell me no lies!

  Sing me a song of the world they call Terra—

  I know you remember by the tears in your eyes!”

  “Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields!

  Child, I have left all my memories behind—

  child, I can’t sing you a song about Terra,

  for I have put Terra clear out of my mind . . .”

  “Grandmother, sing!” said the child in the garden.

  “I have learned all about stubborn from you—

  sing me a song of the world they call Terra,

  where the grasses grow green and the oceans are blue!”

  “Child, how you weary me, asking of Terra!

  You are no babe—you should understand why!

  We who left Terra forever and ever

  were those who could tell her forever goodbye!”

  “Child, I have journeyed all over the starfields,

  out to the rim of the worlds that we know—

  child, I can’t sing you a song about Terra,

  for Terra was too many planets ago . . .”

  (folksong, to the traditional tune, “Come in the Evening”)

  Benia stood at the round window, stubbornly ignoring the screams of the furious child on the plastic floor behind her, staring fixedly out at the landscape past the window as if it had some attraction to offer. In fact, it had none; it was a vast shelf of dark blue rock, stretching off to a horizon where she knew that to stand and look over the abrupt edge would only give you a view of still another vast shelf of dark blue rock. And so on, for miles and miles and miles. There were seventeen Indigo Steps, each as absolutely flat as if a giant laser had sliced them for a colossal staircase, and her house sat on the fourth one from the top. They led down, eventually, to a small and boring body of water called “Harry’s Pond”—somebody’s idea of a joke. Harry’s, maybe? Benia hadn’t bothered to ask. The water was no pond, it was a sea of sorts, as big as Earth’s Mediterranean. But the steps of rock that led off from it in all directions were so enormous, and the pitiful little splat of water so lost at the base of the funnel they made toward the sky, that it looked pondlike. Only when one of the rare boats happened to be on its surface was there anything to give it scale and perspective, and even then there was little by which to judge whether it was a liner or a fishingboat. Benia thought of the fish that swam in Harry’s Pond, and shuddered all over; she would stay with the hydroponics and the enzyme flats, thank you.

  She’d heard that looking out at the Indigo Steps long enough caused visions. Hallucinations of mountains and caravans and walled cities, and worse. She didn’t know anything about that, either, because she’d never had the patience to look for very long. It was boring, like the sea. Everything on Polytrix was boring. The bubble hut was boring, and the landscape was boring, and the squat plants with their geometric shapes were boring, and the thologys that came in for the tiny survival comset were boring, and god knew the baby was boring. He was supposed to be “company” for her, Daryl said. That had been the point of having him, that and the usual line about her duty to increase the colony’s population.

  Company! She sneered out the window, and her son screamed even louder behind her, as if he knew what she was thinking. Perhaps he did. Who knew what being born on Polytrix might do to the brain of an innocent baby? Polytrix. Daryl thought it was so funny. “It’s the name of a magic stone that makes all your hair fall out,” he’d told her when they were still just talking about this place. “Isn’t that crazy?” What was crazy was having come here. Marrying Daryl, and then coming here.

  If she’d been back on Earth right now, if they’d stayed, like her parents had begged them to—but no, Daryl wouldn’t even listen!—she could have gone to the Sparkle Club with the rest of the wives. And Bran, instead of screaming himself insane on the floor of this squalid hole that was the very best Polytrix had to offer, would have been in the Tender Room with the rest of the babies, having a wonderful time.

  She was going to have to pick Bran up pretty soon; his cries were getting that funny rhythm to them that meant he would be throwing up if she didn’t do something. But at least he would be exhausted enough by then to go to sleep and let her be miserable in peace. She had learned, by paying very careful attention, the exact amount of time she could let him scream, that would be enough to wear him out but not enough to make him vomit on the floor. What she would do when he got big enough to walk around in here she did not know; she had no capacity for imagining the stretch of time and tedium that lay between the endless day ahead of her and that day still weeks away, maybe months away, when Bran Daryl O’Fanion would struggle up onto his sturdy legs and begin to add his walking around to her torments.

  Daryl loved it here, just as he’d been sure he would. He loved being a forest ranger on Polytrix, where there were no forests. He was out all day six days a week in a two-man flyer with Andrew Felk; the two of them were like kids, laughing and telling jokes and making the flyer do stunts that set the onboard computer whooping alarms and the two men whooping with glee. Chasing the herds of lampa, stupid creatures like big striped goats, away from the agricultural stations. Taking photographs—not even holos, just plain photographs—to send to the so-called capital of this cursed lump in space, for the so-called archives. Watching for the telltale white streaks in the rock that meant deposits of beshokkite crystals, worth far more than gold for all that they were ugly things. “What do they do with them?” she had asked Daryl, the first time he’d brought one back with him, and he’d patted her rump fondly and grinned at her and said, “They use them in biogenetics, baby . . . it’s way over your head.” Biogenetics. That was boring, too.

  Expertly, not one second too late, she steppe
d backward and scooped the gulping baby up into her arms, laid him against her chest, and began rubbing him between his shoulderblades, making the soothing noises that the microfiche said she was supposed to make. He was drenched, dripping with a rank mixture of sweat and urine, and she was terribly afraid that she hated him. She had never suspected that a woman could hate her own baby, and if you’d asked her about it before she came here she’d have said without hesitation that such a woman was very very sick. Babies were lovely, and lovable; you put them in their Tender and smiled at them while the Tender cleaned them and oiled and powdered them and dressed them in fresh disposable clothing, blue for boys and pink for girls, and then you took them back out again and played with them. And of course you loved them!

  But Benia didn’t have a Baby Tender. There weren’t any on Polytrix. And there wouldn’t be any for a long time. Benia had seen the list posted in the window of the station, the sequence of orders for shipments out to the colony set up for years in advance; Baby Tenders weren’t even scheduled to be requisitioned yet, and it was a five year list. That was why a Gerber Microfiche was packed for every woman who came out here, so she could find out how babies had been looked after in the Dark Ages.

  “Not the Dark Ages, Benia,” Daryl had scolded her when she brought the subject up. “You know better than that, sweetie. All women took care of their own babies, just like it tells you on the fiche, clear up to the end of the 30’s. The Baby Tender wasn’t even invented until 2037, Benia. Dark Ages, for chrissakes!”

  Daryl always knew things like that. When things were invented, and who did it, and where things were located, and how long they’d been there. All those endless boring things that nobody cared about. So far as Benia was concerned, anything before the Baby Tender was the Dark Ages. And it showed how selfish men were, too, because a Tender wasn’t anything but a plain old ordinary healthy, like they’d had for sick people forever and ever; it just wasn’t as fancy as a healthy. Babies didn’t need tubes in their veins and up their noses, and they didn’t need something that could sew them up and give them pills. There could already have been Tenders twenty years before they came on the market, she’d told Daryl, and he had agreed with her emphatically and said that he only wished to hell he’d thought of it and made the millions of credits that Woo Hee had made. Benia wished so, too, and envied Woo Hee’s wife . . . no doubt Woo Hee was the man who had thought up the Baby Tender. She bet Mrs. Woo Hee wasn’t stuck off in a bare wasteland of purple rocks all by herself with a baby that stank.