“Is there anything you do want, Philip?” Heykus asked, his voice rough with the very real affection he felt for this man, who had shared with him so much of his life but was clearly not going to share any more of his death than he absolutely had to. “Anything that I could get for you? Do for you?”
“Nothing at all. It’s all been done. The lawyers are hovering, with the angels and the undertakers. As for me, I’m taken care of here as if I were a priceless treasure—you needn’t worry.”
“How about my keeping an eye on the hovering lawyers?”
“Why? I have three younger brothers. All sane; all capable.”
Heykus made a mental note to keep an eye on the brothers, but he said nothing, and the nun cleared her throat softly in the stillness.
“Sister? Did you want to speak to me?” he asked, not certain that she could address him if he didn’t ask.
“Only a few more seconds, please, Director,” she answered, surprising him again. She knew who Heykus Joshua Clete was, then . . . that was odd. For all the power he had, his name was scarcely a household word.
“Philip?” He leaned over and touched the pod, near the sick man’s shoulder. “The nurse says I must go now—I’m sorry. I’d hoped we could talk a while. But I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I won’t be here tomorrow,” his friend said cheerfully. “I’ll be in the arms of God or whatever. You stay in your office, where you can be of some use.”
“Nonsense. I’ll see you again in the morning. And every morning, for so long as the Almighty lets us keep you with us, Philip.”
Cendarianis tried to smile, obviously very tired, and his eyes closed; Heykus stood a moment looking at him, memorizing the serene look of him, and then pressed the circle on the pod again to make it opaque and allow him privacy and rest. When it once again looked like the snow-white egg of a giant bird, and he was sure that Philip could not see him, he beckoned discreetly to the nun with one finger, hoping it was not too rude a gesture in these circumstances, asking her with his eyes to follow him to the door.
She nodded, and pressed a stud on her wrist computer, the long black sleeve falling away to show only more black fabric underneath; he supposed the stud must set the medpod’s alarm system to signal her if anything at all changed while she was away from her post. She looked at him again, directly, and her eyes held him, somehow; he felt taller, and stronger, and wiser. He gestured to show that he would follow her from the room, but she shook her head to indicate that he must go first, and he turned his back on her and led the way, uneasy with this Catholic concept of manners. He could feel her behind him, even when he could not see her; he thought that if a man had to die, he could do worse than die in the presence of this woman. What was she doing here, a woman like this? In a place like this?
She let the door to the room iris shut behind her when they were in the corridor, but she did not move one step farther, and Heykus respected her vigilance.
“Thank you, Sister,” he said. “I didn’t want to speak in front of him.”
“Yes, Director Clete,” she said. “Quickly, then—what may I do for you?”
“I just wanted to know. . . . Are you allowed to talk about his condition?”
“You are not just a casual visitor, Director. What may I tell you?”
“Philip says he won’t be here tomorrow. Is he right?”
“Oh, yes.”
“He doesn’t look that sick. He doesn’t look that weak.”
“The wonders of modern medicine,” she observed.
“But it’s only a heart attack, Sister.”
“Nevertheless. There is multiple system failure, Director.”
“And nothing can be done. He really will die, before tomorrow morning.”
“Sometime during the night, yes,” she said. “When the soul is most willing to leave and seek a respite.”
“I beg your pardon, Sister?”
“Please forgive a foolish woman her maunderings,” she said promptly, “for your friend’s sake. And now I must go to him.”
“He will die tonight?” Heykus knew how stupid he must sound, asking again, but it was so hard for him to believe. He was keeping her from her duties, perhaps obliging her to violate orders that she had been given; he would have to send her a note of thanks when he got back to the office.
“He will die,” she stated firmly. “In peace, and without pain. Surrounded by love.”
“I’ll come back then, this evening,” Heykus began, but she stopped him, almost touching his arm just at the wrist, a nurse’s gesture and without offense.
“The ambulance will be flying him home in just a few hours,” she said. “He chooses to be with his family.”
“Oh. . . . I see.” Heykus stood there struggling, not knowing what to say but unable to leave without saying it; he had the feeling that he must be opening and closing his mouth like a fish, but he didn’t know what the words he needed were.
She knew, however, and she answered the questions he could not ask. “The pod will go along with him in the ambulance, Director. He won’t have to be disturbed in any way—he’ll hardly know that he’s being moved, and there’ll be no discomfort at all, I promise you. And I will go, also.”
That caught Heykus’ attention, and freed him from his temporary speech impediment. “Is that customary, Sister?” he asked. “For you to go with him, when he goes home to die?”
“He has asked me to go, and I am pleased to be of service to him. I won’t disturb the family—they’ll find me a corner of the house where I can wait, and pray. They won’t even know I’m there.”
“They will know,” he heard himself objecting, “even if they leave you out in the street in front of the house.”
Her lips twitched, the least fraction, and he felt privileged; he knew that she need not have let her control slip even that much, and that it was a compliment paid to him. And then she was gone, with a soft murmur about having to return to her patient, and he was staring at the closed door of the room and feeling like a fool.
A contented fool, he realized. A serene, contented fool.
Something . . . there was something here he didn’t understand. Even through the closed door, through the solid wall, he was aware of her. Not as he was sometimes aware of women who for one reason or another brought lust stirring in his loins, annoying him mightily—at his age, and with great-grandchildren, and him a devout servant of the Lord, to still have that twitch of the devil about him!—but in quite a different way. If I were dying, he thought, and she stood beside me, I would feel that a strong hand sheltered me. I would feel safe. Even standing here outside this door, in this hateful place, I feel. . . . What do I feel? Welcome? Comforted? Both those things were part of it, but they were not all. There was something more, something that eluded him, that he couldn’t put a name to. He closed his eyes, to shut out the visual data that might be interfering with his perceptions . . . what was that feeling?
He recognized it then, suddenly, for what it was, and he backed away from the door as if it might blast him where he stood. What he felt, the warmth that was all around him like velvet against some unknown surface of his spirit, was the sensation of being blessed. He felt blessed.
By a woman. A Catholic, and a woman.
Heykus almost, not quite but almost, ran down the corridor to the elevator. Not even daring to look back.
His efforts to convince Philip’s doctors that the nurse must be dismissed were useless, as he had suspected they would be. He had known that before he tried, but he had felt compelled to try nonetheless. It wasn’t that he didn’t have sufficient power to get her removed—he did, and he surely would—but this was not the way to go about it, and the ways that were adequate would not be quick enough.
“Sister Miriam Rose is one of our finest nurses,” the med-Sammy said coldly. “The very idea of removing her is ridiculous.”
“She should be removed at once,” Heykus said back, far more coldly. He had forty years more practice speaking coldly than t
he arrogant young doctor. But he had no sensible reason to offer as support for his advice, and they wouldn’t listen to him. As for the family, they were shocked and annoyed. They loved Sister Miriam, Philip loved Sister Miriam, in the few days they’d known her she had become one of the family, and was Heykus completely out of his mind, or what?
Stiffly, feeling the cold sweat on his upper lip, glad that there were no mechanisms analyzing his physical status, he insisted that he had good reasons for what he was saying but was not at liberty to make them specific.
“Nonsense,” said one of the younger brothers. “What nonsense. At a time like this!” And he had hung up, leaving Heykus feeling old and weary and defeated. And more aware of Satan’s awesome power than he had been in many years. But he had had to try.
To ease the weight of his helplessness, he looked Sister Miriam up in the databanks. She was there, with her Federal Identification number and her blood type, her height and eye color and allergies; because she was a nun—born at the convent, he noted, and illegitimate, parents unknown—she had no possessions and no record of any earnings. No titles, no distinctions. Her immunizations were there. Her mass-ed summary score. All those things that he could have read from the tattoos in her armpits if he’d wished to remove all that black fabric she was swathed in, but nothing else. No infractions of any kind; apparently she had no driver’s or pilot’s license, had never been to any school outside the convent, had never undergone even minor surgery. A thoroughly unremarkable life. The life of almost any nun, for all he knew.
He sat reviewing the brief entry, dissatisfied with it and not sure why; something about it bothered him. He knew it would come to him, whatever it was, and he waited patiently for the necessary neurons to kick in.
Ah! He knew what it was. Parents unknown. Born at the Convent of St. Gertrude of the Lambs, parents unknown. That was the problem. It should have read only “father unknown,” if she had been born at the convent and not simply abandoned there. They would have had to know who the mother was, and the law required that it be reported. The nun he spoke to at St. Gertrude’s agreed with him, and she apologized profusely. These things happen. Disgraceful. A clerical error, so long ago. A computer stumbling on a tiny chunk of data, so long ago. We are only women, we make errors. Such a shame. And so on and so on, until he knew it was a dead end and gave it up.
He considered it briefly, and filed it away. Come a time when he was not busy, should such a time ever appear on his horizon, he would bring it out again and pursue it, and he would find out what lay behind this convenient little gap in the data. But not right now. Right now he had too many other urgent matters to deal with, and no time to waste on one odd nursing nun, who had taken advantage of his distress about a dying friend and unbalanced him in some way. It had already taken all the time he could spare, and he had done all he could do, and none of it would be any use to Philip. He let it rest.
CHAPTER 26
It was not that we were unaware that all change comes about by resonance; we knew that very well. Our problem was that so large a number of men seemed immune even to the most fundamental frequencies.
(From “The Discourse of the Three Marys”—author unknown.)
There is a silence that follows reports of great tragedies of nature. Earthquakes and hurricanes; raging fires that swallow hundreds of thousands of acres of forests; volcanoes and avalanches. It was that sort of a silence, and Father Joseph sat within it waiting for someone to break it, thinking that when it was broken it would sound like ice breaking on a great northern lake. But the fearsome crack that split the air sounded nowhere except inside his throbbing head. The words, when they did come, were little more than a whisper.
The Cardinal spoke to him, calling him none of the things that Joseph had expected to be called, saying only, “Joseph, this is all very difficult for us to believe. You must understand that.”
It echoed. How could a whisper echo? Perhaps you had to be a Cardinal, or perhaps it was this ancient cavernous room with its vaulted ceiling and its bare floors and uncurtained windows.
“I know that,” Joseph mumbled through the weight of his misery. “I know that, Your Eminence. But I am saying—truly—what was said to me. And it is true, Your Eminence.”
“It couldn’t be a hoax? Or delirium—a dying woman’s delirium? Surely, my son, it could be that.”
He shook his head. “The Bishop did not think so,” he said. “And I don’t think so. Your Eminence, I am familiar with deathbeds.”
“Why did they send you to tell us?”
Still that eerie whisper, echoing, drifting up into the dimness of the ceilings high above; outside, a seagull screamed.
Joseph prepared himself to answer, thinking that until now “I’ll never be a Cardinal” had been only something that modesty obligated him to say, not something he believed. Now it was a verdict passed on him; now it was a fact. Would they even let him continue to be a priest? He didn’t know, and his Bishop had told him it would have to be decided at the Vatican; he hadn’t known either.
“They sent me,” he said, faltering, stumbling over huge consonants and vowels that stretched off into vast distances, the sounds that came from his mouth seeming to have nothing to do with him, “because things could not be any worse for me. No one else wanted to bring you such news. I didn’t want to, either; the difference was that they had a choice.”
The Cardinal was getting very old, but he was in no way frail; the color was coming back into his face as he adjusted to the shock, and the others around the room, his advisors and most trusted associates, were recovering as well. For a few moments they had been frozen, motionless; they had been the ice Joseph was waiting to hear break. How many of them were there? He didn’t know, because he had not dared look. There might be hundreds, sitting back in corners and in alcoves, down stairwells, high on balconies. . . . No. Surely not. Surely only a handful would be allowed to know about this. He must keep his imagination under better rein; there was no one in the shadows. Except ghosts, perhaps. He could well imagine that there might be ghosts.
Now the Cardinal leaned forward in his chair; now, when he spoke, his voice was strong and deep and sure of where it went.
“My son,” he said, “I want to hear it all again.”
Joseph made a noise, not precisely a whimper, not precisely a moan. He said, “Your Eminence. Please. For the love of God.”
“For the love of God, my son. Exactly. For the love of God, you will tell it all again. This time we will be prepared; we will not be so stunned that we can’t hear you over our own foolish thoughts, roaring in our ears. You will begin again, Joseph.”
“I have told it so many times,” Joseph knew he sounded fretful, perhaps insolent; he did not care. It was hopeless. It no longer mattered what he did. He was a hopeless priest who had violated his most sacred vows, and it was a hopeless cruel exercise for him to sit here reciting it all again. He would do it because he was vowed to obedience, and because he was afraid to defy the Cardinal, and because he had no excuse to refuse. But it was awful. To say it all again. Horrible. Unbearable.
His mouth went on saying words, his tongue went on shaping them; the body simulated awareness. “There is a nun for whom I am—was—confessor. Her name was Maria. Sister Maria. I had been her confessor for more than ten years. She died two days ago . . . Wednesday, that would be, in the early evening. I was called to her to hear her final confession, and to perform the last rites.” He could still see the agony that had been on Sister Maria’s face when he had hurried into the room—he had turned in horror to the nurse standing in the door, to demand that something be given to still this pain, but she had assured him quietly that there was no physical pain. That had all been attended to. Whatever was troubling the nun cradled in the medpod, open now to give the priest access, it was not physical pain.
“Please go on, my son,” instructed the Cardinal sharply. “We are waiting.”
“Sister Maria was a humble woman, very ordin
ary. At least that’s what I always thought she was. She worked in the convent office. Doing correspondence for the Abbess, keeping the databases in order, that sort of thing. Sometimes she worked in the convent library; she was good at little things. Details. She was dying—she sent for me.” He drew a long breath, like a sob. “She told me that for nearly forty years she had been a kind of double agent. A kind of spy.”
“Must you use such a melodramatic vocabulary, Joseph?” the Cardinal asked him, testy, but kind.
“Eminence, what shall I call her, if I don’t? A liar? A traitor? A deceitful evil twisted fraud of a woman? Eminence, none of those is the right phrase, either. Eminence, she had posed forty years as a faithful ordinary little nun. And all that time, in every moment she could steal, what she was really doing. . . .”
His voice trailed off, and he saw that the Cardinal was no longer a real person. He was a flat cutout, garbed in red, perhaps braced by a stick in back. Joseph would have been afraid to look around behind him.
“Go on, my son. What she was really doing was?”
“She was making copies of the blasphemous King James translations prepared by the female perverts of the linguist families.” Very quickly, he told the cutout that, so that it would be over.
“Copies of the original translations, you mean. Not the revisions that were done by order of Bishop Dorien.”
“Yes, Eminence. And distributing those copies secretly to other sisters involved in the conspiracy.”
“Double agents! Conspiracies! Joseph, these are only women. Only nuns. We are not talking of warrior chieftains on the Planet Gehenna, we are talking of nuns!” The Cardinal’s voice thundered across the room toward him and Joseph crouched lower to be a less easy target for it.
“What do you want me to say?” he cried out, absurdly, panicked. “It’s not my fault! There aren’t any other words! What do you want me to say? Tell me, tell me and I will say it!”
The Cardinal stared at him; they would all be staring. You do not shout at a Prince of the Church.
The Judas Rose Page 41
