“It is an interesting fact, linguistically, that the most common complaint of Panglish-speaking men toward women in conversation was this sharp question: ‘For god’s sake, will you get to the point?’ ”
(from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)
There were eleven nuns in the narrow room with Sister Miriam, lined up in two rows that faced the cubicle where Miriam herself worked; she could sit at her own computer and watch them through the arched door. Each one was bent over the primitive terminal that had been assigned to her, and each one was aware that it could have been much worse. There had been a time when they would have had to make do with typewriters, and not so very long ago, either. A vow of poverty was a vow of poverty after all.
It didn’t occur to Sister Marisol, the youngest nun present, that before typewriters there had been a time when the sort of work they were doing had been done by hand, with paper and ink, and that before that there had been parchment, and papyrus scrolls, and tablets of clay. . . . She was a devoted and industrious nun, and good at what she did, but her total education in the history of this world had been a series of fourteen mass-ed computer lectures titled “Great Events Through the Ages.” It had been strong on wars and kings and explorations and conquests; it had not taken up the matter of how people had managed to write things down in the ancient past.
If you had sat Marisol down and ordered her to think about it, she would have been reasonably prompt in saying that of course the Old Testament Prophets and the Early Christian Fathers had not typed the Bible; she was not stupid. But it wasn’t something she gave any thought to, any more than she thought, of her own initiative, about what life in the Bronze Age might have been like. Nudged a little, she would have remembered seeing monks portrayed in religious paintings, scrawling away on unknown surfaces with pens and inks, and she might have thought of that as romantic. She most emphatically did not consider the Apple 79R’s with which she and the other sisters had to make do romantic. Not in any way. She wished they could have had modern equipment to work with, and had twice been obliged to do penance for saying so.
Now she was keeping her eyes on her work, squinting at the screen, but all the rest of her senses were tuned to Sister Miriam. Marisol could see why Sister Miriam had been put in charge of this project—she was just the sort of person you would need, if you wanted a woman to be in charge of it. And as the good Father had said, it made no sense to put a man in charge of revising texts in a language constructed specifically for women. That was clear enough, and although no one had asked for her opinion she had been in full agreement. Nevertheless, she regretted it. Because it would have been so much easier to work under the supervision of a priest, who would always have been making allowances for the fact that you were only a woman. Sister Miriam made no allowances, not for gender or for anything else, not for herself or for any of the women whose work she was responsible for. She was made of stone and steel and plastics, and Marisol had twice been obliged to do penance for saying that.
She hated it when Miriam managed to sneak up behind her. There Marisol would be, craning her aching neck at the cursed old screen where the text was displayed, trying to make out what it was supposed to mean without having to call up the dictionary—because that would mean reducing the size of the letters even more to make room for it—and suddenly there’d be Sister Miriam at her left shoulder. Marisol would have heard not one sound . . . she wondered if Miriam went barefoot . . . and suddenly there would be that iron grip on her shoulders, bringing her bolt upright at her station and gasping with the surprise of it. And then the voice. More iron, and ice-cold iron at that, like the convent gates in February. How could any woman, allegedly filed with the love of God and of His Son and of the Blessed Mother, be so cold? Sister Miriam—Sister Miriam Rose, actually, though nobody could possibly look at her and think of roses, and Marisol had never heard her called anything but Sister Miriam—was a mystery. An enigma. Everyone agreed on that. Perhaps it was because she was a bastardess, born of wicked dissipation and scandalous lust; Marisol knew that she was not supposed to consider that Sister Miriam’s fault, except in the sense that original sin was Sister Miriam’s fault as it was everybody’s, but she couldn’t help it. And now she’d thought of it again, and she would have to confess it, and there’d be a penance again for her lack of charity; there was no end to the burdens Sister Miriam imposed on you, just by her skinny presence. It wasn’t fair.
Miriam was coming down the row now, and Marisol tensed, but she didn’t get that far, praise be. It was Sister Tamarah that had the rotten luck this time, and Marisol was sure she heard Tamarah’s shoulderbones crack under the other nun’s powerful hands. Give her a priest any time, thought Marisol, especially if he could be well into his sixties and a bit addled. She would not have enjoyed one of the young firebrand Fathers; but then nobody would have put a priest of that kind in charge of eleven nuns revising Bible translations.
“Display, Sister Tamarah!”
Sister Miriam’s voice cut the air right down the middle, if you could imagine air having a middle; listening to her, Marisol could.
The text went up on the big screen at the front corner of the room, left of the door, keyed from Tamarah’s terminal, and Miriam began at once to lecture them on its various inadequacies. That was all right. “Inadequacies” were easily handled. What made the nuns anxious, and sometimes more than anxious—because most of them were genuinely afraid of Sister Miriam—was when she began speaking of “excesses.” “Inadequacies” meant there was something you ought to have put in (or something the creaking old computer ought to have put in) that had not appeared. “Excesses,” on the other hand, meant you had put something in that neither you nor the computer had been authorized to insert.
When that happened, it usually happened for reasons of style. “Felicity of expression,” it was called. The style every one of the nuns was striving for would have been characterized by felicity of expression, and sometimes that led to difficulties you never would have foreseen. You would look at a passage from the materials that the linguist women had prepared, translated from the English—not even Panglish, but English!—into their “Láadan.” And the computer program would already have done all the automatic things to it. The series of masculine pronouns that Sister Miriam had added to the language would have replaced the sloppy genderless ones the women of the Lines had used, unless of course the reference was actually to a female, and then the computer would have put in that set. Everywhere that one of the multitude of words for “love,” each referring to a special kind of love, had been, the program would have substituted the neutral Láadan term Miriam had selected for that purpose. Places where “child of the Holy One” had replaced “Son of God” would have been corrected and restored to their earlier form; places where metaphors of battle had been tampered with would have been automatically restored. The program that did all this was named “Patriarch,” and Sister Miriam was said to have written it herself, apparently not the least bit disconcerted by having to do it in a computer language that had the same relation to contemporary ones that Middle English had to contemporary Panglish, or worse—and it worked very well, thank you. When it got through, you still had a Láadan text, but it was free of every single one of the routine blemishes of feminism.
But the result was not always felicitous. All those rules interacting, in the mindless way that was the best these old machines could manage, sometimes produced results that were free of feminist slant but were offensive for other reasons. And then the nuns were expected to fix the problem, which was where “excesses” originated. None of them knew Láadan; they had to make their alterations with the help of the dictionary and grammar in the computer’s memory. Their intentions were good, but their results all too often set Miriam off, as if they had done it on purpose to annoy her.
Marisol remembered a time when the offending “excess” had come from Sister Ann Martha . . . a Láadan word she had selected to replace a name of a female
animal had turned out to include in it somewhere a mystifying reference to “sexual congress with someone you dislike but have respect for.” And Sister Miriam had turned on them all, furious as they’d ever seen her, and had almost screamed at them: “Don’t any of you know anything about morphology?” They had stared at her, shocked into stillness the way rabbits are shocked by the sound of an eagle shrieking, and indeed Sister Miriam had reminded them of an eagle, standing the way she was with her arms spread wide in the long black sleeves and her eyes flaming in her face. And then she had shaken her head slowly and let the black sleeves fall and folded her hands over her heart, and said, “No . . . of course you don’t. I beg your pardon, sisters. You don’t even know what morphology is, do you?”
They didn’t know. And they had no reason to be ashamed of that. If it had been something a nun needed to know, they would have been taught about it. Marisol would have let it pass; but Ann Martha was still bruised at Miriam’s vehemence, and she had insisted that the senior nun explain morphology, if it was so important.
“It isn’t that important,” Miriam had said, with a gentleness that was unusual for her. “Please forgive me—I think perhaps I am a little overtired.”
Ann Martha was stubborn; she would not let it go. “Nevertheless,” she said, and stuck her chin out for emphasis. “We would prefer not to be . . . not to be ignorant, Sister. We would prefer not to be in a position where others can call us ignorant.”
She had looked at them, thinking it over, and then nodded very slowly.
“A morpheme,” she had said, in the cold voice that was her accustomed voice, “is the smallest piece of a language that has an independent meaning. The combination of morphemes into words is called morphology. It is morphology, sisters, that tells you the words ‘sign’ and ‘signature’ and ‘insignia’ have related meanings. The morphology of Láadan is so new that it is transparent. Think of ‘mid,’ which means ‘creature’, and ‘balin’, which means ‘old’. When you see that the Láadan word for a tortoise is ‘balinemid’ you have no trouble understanding the morphology. And if ‘woth’ means ‘wisdom’, finding the mule named ‘wothemid’ in Láadan tells us—through morphology—something about the way the women of the linguist families view the world.”
There had been a soft murmur among the nuns, moving round the terminals, because this was an interesting idea, and each one could see examples they had not seen before.
“I should have spoken to you about this when we began our work,” Sister Miriam had added. “It would have been helpful to you. But sisters—truly, I did not realize that you were unaware of these things.”
She let them hear that, and understand it, and then she was through being helpful. No doubt it had been a strain on her, being pleasant through four consecutive sentences.
“But now I have told you,” she snapped, “and the concept is clear, and if you see a Láadan morpheme that has a feminist taint lurking inside a word in future I shall expect you to recognize that and remove it! For example, sisters, I shall expect you to be alert to any words that may hide within them the morphemes for ‘water’ or ‘wet’ or ‘rain’—anything of that sort. They are all too often suspect, and frequently blasphemous. Is that clear?”
Up went Ann Martha’s hand, to ask if they might spend time studying the Láadan dictionary, so that relationships among the words and parts of words would come more readily to their minds.
“Absolutely not!”
“But, Sister—”
“It’s bad enough that you must be exposed to these foul writings! I am concerned for the welfare of your souls; I wish we could leave the entire task to computers, which have no souls to lose. You are absolutely not to add an additional source of contamination to what already endangers you! You are forbidden to study the dictionary or the grammar—the computer knows what they contain, and will provide you with what you absolutely must have to do your work. And that will suffice, sisters.”
“Sister, may I speak?” Young as she was, and frightened of Miriam as she was, Marisol still had wanted to point out that they were really not so feeble of faith that just looking at feminism could corrupt them. But Miriam had said only, “You may not!” and had left the room with a “God be praised” that sounded like a curse.
Her harsh manner surprised no one. She was known to be a hard taskmaster and a pitiless supervisor; it was expected of her. If she hadn’t been that way, the other nuns would have been disappointed in her. And it was not surprising that the program called Patriarch, written as it was in the outdated language, often provided results that were unsuitable for any church service. But there was something else, something that genuinely was surprising, something that perhaps went with Miriam’s prickly, unyielding personality but seemed inappropriate and inexplicable nevertheless—who would have suspected that Father Dorien’s precious Sister Miriam Rose would have a terrible tin ear? It was shocking, the way she would take a properly defeminized section, with a lovely ring to it when you read it aloud, and fool around with it until it went clanking and stumbling over the tongue, completely ruined.
She knew both Latin and Greek; she knew English of several periods, and could have read Shakespeare in twentieth-century texts; she knew French well; it was rumored that she knew Aramaic, and a little Japanese; a sister whose tongue was not as tightly attached as it ought to have been claimed to be certain that Sister Miriam knew and used Sign. Most curious of all, she sang like an angel. Trite; but true—like an angel! When she took the solos before the choir, and her voice soared with a magnificence and power that seemed entirely effortless, even the women who disliked her most held their breaths to listen. Given all that, how could she take something theologically correct, and lovely to say, and turn it into the sort of unreadable rackety clatter that she did? It was more than any of the nuns she supervised could comprehend.
“Perhaps she does it on purpose,” Sister Gloria John had muttered to the others, after one especially unpleasant sequence produced by Miriam’s tinkering had been entered into storage as a final version.
“Why? Why on earth?”
“Because,” Gloria said, “the longer she can keep us at this, the longer she can avoid doing any real work herself. And when the Fathers read the garbage she has produced, they’ll make her throw it all out and start over again from the beginning.”
“That’s a terrible thing to suggest!” Ann Martha protested, even though she secretly suspected that what she felt for Sister Miriam was not simply dislike but fullblown hatred. “Have you no charity at all?”
“So it is, and perhaps I don’t,” Gloria admitted. “But I tell you, uncharitable or not, I think I prefer it to the idea that she doesn’t even know when what she writes hurts everybody’s ears!”
Maybe. They hadn’t been able to decide which was worse, ignorance or sabotage. Neither alternative was acceptable. Because as much as they disliked and feared Sister Miriam, every single one of them respected her completely and without reservation.
“Maybe we should speak to one of the Fathers about it?”
“Gloria John!”
“Well? Isn’t it our duty?”
Sister Fiona, a sturdy woman of forthright habits and expression, had set both her arms akimbo in a gesture having not one feature of humility and demanded, “Are you out of your mind? Do you realize what Sister Miriam would do if one of us went to the priests and complained that her literary and liturgical style doesn’t meet our standards?”
It was a sobering thought, and one that kept them silent while Fiona embroidered on it.
“And do you have any idea what the priests would say back to a complaint such as that, if one of us was fool enough to make it?”
“We could all go together, in a group,” suggested Sister Gloria slowly. “We could tell them what we all agreed, so that they’d see it couldn’t just be spite, or one of us with a tin ear. Sisters—the things she does to these texts are . . . repulsive!”
“You will go without me, i
f you go,” declared Marisol instantly. “I do not wish to spend the rest of my days scrubbing plastic floors on a frontier planet, Sister!”
There had been a little additional muttering and fretting, making Marisol think of a poultry yard that had been a hobby of her mother’s. But eventually they had all hushed and gone back to their work, keeping to themselves the certainty that if they did it well they could rely on Sister Miriam to spoil it. It was the only safe thing they could do.
There was no lack of women to fill convents. A convent was one of the very few alternatives that a woman on today’s Earth had to a life of unrelenting silliness. If you thrived on silliness, that was all very well—you’d be treated to it in heaping portions. But if you were an intelligent and ambitious female, you suffered. If you’d been lucky enough either to be born Roman Catholic or to belong to a family that would allow you to become Roman Catholic, the convent was a compromise of sorts. Life there was not all excitement and danger—if that was what you wanted, you did your best to marry a man who would take you out to the colonies—but it was not totally absurd, either. And you didn’t have to spend every moment of your time catering to the whims of some human male. Catering to the whim of God had more appeal; if He made messes, they had grander scope.
The Judas Rose Page 30
