The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Jo-Bethany followed her silently, down stairs and along corridors painted beige, into a room lined with cupboards and cabinets and shelves. “Potions,” her employer had said, and Jo had expected the ordinary household medicines any housewife might keep, and perhaps a few drugs prescribed by physicians. There were a few prescriptions, each properly labeled, all the caps glowing to indicate that the substances inside were pure and safe and not too old for usage. But she had not expected what Dorcas showed her, which was in literal truth the stuff of potions in the ancient sense of the word. Herbs. Dried and fresh in hanging bunches and powdered, made into oils and extracts and teas and lozenges and salves. It smelled wonderful, it was magnificently organized, and it scared Jo-Bethany to death. There were sturdy locks everywhere, and the keys were around Dorcas’ neck; presumably the palm locks responded only to her touch. But many of the herbs she saw were dangerous; improperly handled, they would be fatal.

  She said nothing, because she had made up her mind that she would not criticize anything else in this bizarre place today, no matter what she saw. But she made a mental note to spend plenty of time reviewing her files on poisons and antidotes, and tomorrow she would see what she could find out about Dorcas Chornyak’s claim to be “superbly trained” in the preparation and use of all these substances.

  By the time she’d finished the tour, and unpacked her things and put them away, the day was gone and she was numb with exhaustion. Too numb to face the diningroom in the main house this first night. She went in search of the backup kitchen she’d been told was on the lower level at Womanhouse; there was hot soup, and a good dark bread, and plenty of fruit and nourishing drinks. She ate quickly, not sure she could even taste what she was swallowing, cleared up the minimal mess she’d made, and headed for her own room feeling desperately sleepy.

  And managed to get turned around, of course, in her fog of weariness. The women in the room she blundered into were reciting something or other aloud, and didn’t hear her; she hoped that only the one woman standing at the front of the room had seen her. She backed out fast, closing the door as quietly as she could, and stood there trying to get her bearings, looking at the women who were sitting around the single big room they called the “common room.” They were all busy, she could see that; she hated to interrupt them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally, to the room at large. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten myself lost. Which door goes to Barren House? I was looking for it, and I went in there by mistake . . . .” She gestured vaguely at the door behind her.

  “That’s the chapel,” said a woman sitting nearby with a microfiche reader and a lapful of fiches. “It’s all right. They’re only practicing, and you’re always welcome there.”

  Jo-Bethany shook her head. “Thank you,” she said, “but I just want to go to bed.”

  “In that case, let me show you,” said the woman. “You turned the wrong way at the head of the stairs, that’s all. I’ll see you home.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “Of course it’s not, but it’s a terrific excuse to get away from these damn tables of prefixes. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  She came over to Jo-Bethany and stood facing her, hands clasped in front of her, feet apart, a pair of amazingly long thick braids—some effect of the family potions, no doubt—swinging almost to her waist. She was taller than Jo-Bethany, and that was unusual; most women had to look up at the plainer of the two Schrafft girls. This one looked down, and clucked her tongue as if what she saw were deplorable.

  “Law, but you’re tired!” she said, fussing. “You’re worn out . . . too much for one day, and nobody with sense enough to look after you, obviously. You come along with me. I’ll see you to your room and I’ll tuck you in besides, nurse or no nurse. I’m Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak, named after the famous poisoner and lunatic.”

  It was the very last straw. Jo-Bethany gave up, and let herself be led away to bed, unresisting, one hand firmly gripped by the poisoner-and-lunatic’s namesake. If she was about to be poisoned, at least she’d get some rest; as for lunatic behavior, it would have to be spectacular indeed to impress her now.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Since I’ve been listening to the thologys, I understand why it is that although the toys and the gadgets change as frequently as they ever did, very little changes on this Earth. I might not understand it if I’d been observing it all along; but looking at a century as a whole piece, I can perceive the explanation. When I was a little girl, people would laugh about the way we were ‘trapped in the year 2000,’ and it was funny then, almost charming. But now, nearly a hundred years later, when we appear to have advanced no farther than the year 2010, it’s not so amusing any more.

  “It’s also no mystery. Just as a person of enormous wealth, comfortably insulated from life’s problems, always was able to grow old without being obliged to change, Earth has been able to molder along undisturbed in its comfortable rut. Pressures that would have meant inevitable change before the colonization of space are siphoned off now—we just export them to the stars. A new political ideology? A revolutionary movement? A radical shift in religion? A potentially disruptive element of any kind? We ship it off to the colonies, which proliferate endlessly. While Earth sits like a pampered old monarch, set in her ways, indulged and humored and surely the source of much nostalgic amusement elsewhere. . . .

  “Because our situation was new to human history, we didn’t become an empire except on paper. We never had to fight our way out to the frontiers; we never had to starve Earth to support the frontiers, or vice versa. The Aliens handed us space travel for a pittance, for the price of our defense budgets and the cashing in of a few missile systems. They handed us any other technology essential to our needs, at payments we were always able to manage. So that from the beginning the colonies were self-supporting. And they were much more than that! They were our magical solution to every problem. They took the populations of our prisons, they took our slum dwellers and our homeless; they accepted and welcomed all the enormous populations of refugees from war and famine and drought and disaster and poverty. All those hordes, screaming at the gates and demanding a fair share, went into space; sources of conflict were just removed, with little effort to us—what it may have meant for them, I don’t pretend to know.

  “The Palestinians, for example . . . given an entire planet of their own, to be their world, what did they care about a little scrap of the Middle East? Israel stayed here, and still sits, presiding in splendor over a desert. Jerusalem, the Holy City over which three great religions spilled so much blood, was preserved as a set of holograms before it was swallowed up by the Great Earthquake of 2009; now each of the faiths has its own Jerusalem, indistinguishable from the original, and where that first Jerusalem stood is a fissure like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. I suppose that when a devout Jew, or Muslim, or Christian, begins to argue that a hologram of a holy city is not as holy as the holy city itself was, they just export him. . . .”

  (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

  “She’s asleep, Delina.”

  “I don’t think so, Willow—I think she’s just watching the thologys.”

  “With her eyes shut? She can’t see the holos that way—” The younger child stopped and looked warily at her sister. It seemed unlikely that Delina would have made a semantic error of that kind. Unless it was a test. One of Delina’s responsibilities as older sister was the incessant testing of Willow’s linguistics skills; probably it was a test. If Willow missed it, poor Delina would be obliged to spend time explaining the error and providing examples and probing to be certain her little sister was acquiring the expertise expected of her. Willow spoke swiftly, to spare Delina all that bother.

  “Perhaps, Delina,” she said, “there’s a better choice for what Great-Grandmother Nazareth does with the thologys than the predicate ‘watch’. . . . Perhaps something should be chosen that does not require the use of sight.”

  Delin
a smiled and touched Willow’s hand, in reassurance. Yes. It had been a test.

  “And the mind’s eye?” she asked. “What about the mind’s eye?”

  “Hmmm.” Willow was still so young that she found it difficult to do anything complex without the tip of her tongue creeping out of her mouth, a phenomenon she would have to get under firm control before she could be trusted in the interpreting booths. She concentrated now on keeping the unruly tongue where it belonged, firming her lips as a barrier, keeping the signs of her concentration from showing on her face as best she could. A quick check of Delina’s expression showed her that she was doing well, and she dropped her eyes to make the thinking easier.

  “You might say it,” she said slowly. “You might. But I think there would have to be one of two things. Either you would have to have a context . . . somebody would already have to have been talking about mind’s eyes and so on . . . or you would have to make it open.”

  “Overt, Willow,” Delina prompted.

  “Or you would have to make it overt. You would have to say ‘I think she’s just watching the thologys with her mind’s eye.’ ” Then she stopped and looked at her sister. “Or is it just one eye, Delina? Why don’t people say ‘the mind’s eyes,’ plural?”

  “Well, think about it! Think how silly it would be, imagining the mind with a pair of little images side by side, and inverting them and merging them into one, and running all that back through the optic system . . . or maybe forward through the optic system, not that it matters. Eyes of the body, you perceive; eye of the mind.”

  “Thalehal wa!” Very nice. It was Nazareth’s voice, her eyes were open, and she was smiling at her great-granddaughters. “Wil sha, dearloves. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “To the men, Natha,” said Delina. “And to our bad manners, I guess. We’ve interrupted you.”

  Nazareth didn’t deny that, since it was obvious, but she held out her arms and gathered them both in, to lay her cheek against each small head in turn and to administer a firm welcoming hug.

  “I am happy to have you here, nevertheless,” she told them. “The thologys will wait, and there are always more of them.”

  “You do . . .” Willow began, and then she stopped again. “Shoot!” she said. “It’s a lexical gap, Delina. You can’t say it.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t say to Great-Grandmother, ‘You do watch the thologys with your eyes closed, don’t you?’ because it’s the wrong predicate. And I can’t use ‘listen’ if she’s doing it with her mind’s eye. Drat! Why hasn’t somebody fixed that?”

  “I have a suggestion,” said Delina.

  “What?”

  “Say, ‘You watch the thologys with your eyelids closed,’ and bypass the whole mess.”

  “No, Lina! That would still mean ‘perceive with the eyes,’ plural, to me. It’s still wrong.”

  Nazareth observed them, very pleased. They were going to make fine linguists; they had the necessary interest in the phenomena of speech. They weren’t just showing off for her; they had in fact forgotten all about her. “That will demonstrate to you,” she said, “one of the reasons why linguists find the predicate ‘perceive’ so very useful. It doesn’t drag in eyes and ears and tongue and nose and skin and so on.”

  “Still,” said Willow, disgusted for the moment with Panglish, “it spoils it all the same. Just listen to this, Natha.” She made a very formal prissy face. “Oh, Great-Grandmother, you are perceiving the thologys with your eyelids closed, aren’t you?” She made an exasperated noise. “Now that’s silly, Natha. It has completely the wrong . . . whatever it is.”

  “Tone.”

  “Yes. The wrong tone.”

  “Did you two come here,” asked Nazareth gravely, “to interrupt me for a lecture on subtleties of style? Or are you bringing a message?”

  “Oh, goodness,” said Delina. “We forgot.”

  “I thought you might have,” Nazareth observed, while the older child fumbled in her smock pocket and found the note she’d been sent to deliver.

  “Not for comset, eh? Or for wrist computer, either?”

  “No, Great-Grandmother. Hand delivery, they said.”

  “And-don’t-wait-while-she-reads-it,” muttered Willow urgently.

  Delina nodded. “I remember,” she said. “If you’ll excuse us, then, Natha, we’ll go talk to the aunts a while.”

  Talk to the aunts. There were not quite so many “aunts” at Chornyak Barren House these days as there used to be, Nazareth thought. They’d lost four of the old women confined to their beds in the past six months. It happened like that . . . one would leave them, and then in swift succession, as if they had all agreed, several more would follow. Still there were some aunts left for the little girls to pet and fuss over, and to practice their languages with. Presumably there always would be at least a few, and no doubt one of these days she herself would be among them. Although the nineties were treating her gently, and she had no intention of taking to her bed any time soon.

  “Certainly,” she said. “You go right on, dearloves, and I’ll deal with this, whatever it is. I’ll bet you it could just as well have come by computer instead of riding over in your pocket.”

  She was absolutely sure of that. Nothing so confidential that it could not be transmitted by the ordinary household communication systems would be written down on paper and trusted to the memory of a child. Not even a dependable child like ten-year-old Delina Meloren Chornyak. The point of the errand had been to provide the girls with an errand, and nothing more. She watched them run off toward the aunts’ room, loving them with all her heart, and then she unfolded the note.

  And said, “Oh, my goodness!” The note read, “Natha, dear Natha, why are you keeping us all waiting?” It was signed, solemnly, with many a formal flourish and curlicue, by the four other senior women of Barren and Womanhouse—all of whom knew quite well that she was keeping them waiting because she’d forgotten. And she had been chiding the children!

  Yes, the nineties were treating her gently, but her memory was definitely not what it once had been. She remembered calling up the display of her day’s schedule when she first woke up this morning, before she even got out of bed, and she remembered having seen the meeting listed. But she obviously had not set the alarm on her wrist computer, or the others would not be sitting waiting for her, patiently, right this minute. By the time she turned one hundred she would be among the aunts, if she went on in this fashion, and lucky if they’d have her!

  Hurry up, Nazareth, you antiquated old nuisance, she instructed herself sternly, and then almost fell trying to get out of her chair in a single motion like a girl. “Idiot!” she said aloud, thinking how much nonsense she would have had to put up with from Michaela if Michaela had been there to watch her deteriorate. Instead, it had been Nazareth’s dubious privilege to stand by helpless while Michaela sank ever more deeply into the drugged darkness prescribed for her at the prison hospital; it had been a relief to her when Michaela died, and not because—as the newspapes insisted on putting it—it had been a comfort to see her father’s murderess go at long last to face the justice of the Lord. Nazareth had no illusions about the debt that she and all the other women of the Lines owed to Michaela Landry. What would they have done, if Michaela hadn’t killed Nazareth’s father when he discovered the truth about them? Killed him themselves? Nazareth knew she could not have done that, and knew Michaela had spared her even the task of having to consider it.

  She cut straight through the common room in the main house, to make up some of the time she’d lost, her mind occupied with memories and the grim set of her mouth demonstrating that they were not pleasant. A foolhardy young man stood up at the sight of her and took one step in her direction, presumably intending to exercise his rights and demand that she explain her presence there; behind him, someone murmured quietly that if he wanted to be a perfect ass that was okay, but please wait till a larger audience could be brought in for the o
ccasion, and he sat down again and let her pass. With an elaborate air of not having noticed that she was there at all, of course. Nazareth ignored him, because she was in a hurry, and because she was reasonably sure that as soon as she was out of earshot his peers would explain to him about demanding house passes from women who’d been coming and going on Household business for ninety years.

  When she got to the parlor, much out of breath, she found the other women seated in their rockers, their fingers moving sedately to the rhythms of needlework they’d been doing so long that it was fully on automatic, with carefully composed faces. Chatting. They were talking about daylilies? Yes . . . daylilies. And Nazareth realized that she’d forgotten her needlework bag, which would have hurt the feelings of the nephews who’d given it to her, but they were all off at negotiations and would never know. And it didn’t matter, because she was always prepared. She reached into a deep pocket and pulled out a quarter-skein of yarn and a crochet hook. Her emergency kit. Lavender yarn, suitable for one’s nineties.

  “I am too sensible to waste your time saying that I’m sorry,” Nazareth observed, providing them with the contradictory figure free of charge. “After all, I’m only twenty minutes late. It could have been an hour.”

  “It could have been a day,” agreed Sabyna. “That would have been much worse.”

  “Or a week.” Quilla stared blandly at Nazareth, wisps of hair as always drifting out of her carefully constructed crown of braids in all directions. “In a week, though, we’d all have run out of yarn and given you up.”

  “I am sorry,” Nazareth admitted, drawing up another chair, and they all agreed that no doubt she was, not that that made it any better, and she agreed with that and made a comment about the daylilies.

  The meeting was not about daylilies. It was about the strategy for moving the womanlanguage Láadan out at last to women who were not members of the Lines. It had been Nazareth, just home from the hospital and barely moved in at Barren House, sitting on a plastic crate in the basement, who had first insisted that Láadan was ready to use. Time, she had said, for it to be spoken among the women, and learned by the girlbabies. Long past time! She had been furious with them that day, because they were still fooling about, claiming that the language wasn’t “finished” yet, making excuses. It had been Nazareth who had known—while the other women were wasting their energies in “contingency plans” against a list of potential reactions from the men, should they discover the existence of Láadan—that there was in fact nothing at all to do except wait and be ready. It had been Nazareth, and only Nazareth, who had truly understood that it wasn’t possible to make plans that obliged you to extrapolate from one reality to another. She had been the only one who understood that such planning had to be postponed until after the reality shift brought about by the language had taken hold, and who had stood firm and silent and watchful while they thrashed about, flatly refusing to be drawn into their fretful arguments. Always she had been there, difficult to love but impossible not to respect and rely upon, keeping them from making foolish choices for which they would pay dearly, but otherwise never interfering. Even when they pleaded with her to interfere.