The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “Leo,” Tom added, “this man here is not just the Head of the Chornyaks. This man is the Head of Heads. If he wants to read us the latest editorial on how many rows of lace the ladies prefer on their panties this spring, that’s his privilege.”

  It was partly a joke, and partly a game, and partly a serious warning. Jonathan was the Head of Heads, and if he cared to pull that rank he could make their morning very unpleasant. On the other hand, they all happened to know from many a solemn contest over the years that any one of them could pee a bigger circle in the snow than Jonathan could; if they cared to pull that kind of rank, they could ruin his morning. The silence got thicker, and they watched one another with narrowed eyes, while everybody considered the various possible moves and their probable consequences. And then, because it was the only Sunday morning they’d get for a whole week, Leo grinned in a swift flash of gleaming white teeth and raised his coffeemug in a good-natured hail to the chief, and the others immediately moved in to make it unanimous.

  “Go, Jonathan!” Conary said. “It’s not much of a floor, but you’ve got it.”

  “Okay,” he said, relaxed now that the moves were over and the points were his. “Your spirit of enthusiastic cooperation is duly et cetera et cetera. Now, this starts off with some stuff that’s not so bad, considering the source. What’s normal language; what’s not normal. Next step, the special nature of religious language—no need to read you any of that. Then Waythard makes a distinction that’s not quite as typical, between what is normal religious language and what’s not. Noting that whether it makes any sense isn’t one of the criteria, right? Stuff like ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’ is normal religious language; if there were a religion of the Pig In The Poke, he says, it would be normal religious language to say ‘in the name of the Pig, and of the Piglet, and of the Holy Poke.’ Et cetera, et cetera. He tries to explain what is not normal religious language . . . puts glossolalia in there, and some other stuff. None of it very well argued, but what the hell. And then we get to the good part. Listen, please, to this:

  ‘Recently, however, a unique case has arisen in this country which is not so easily classified as normal or abnormal, as religious language or as secular language. I refer to the phenomenon of Langlish (also know as Láadan) which had its origins with the women of the linguist families known as “the Lines” and is used for at least some portions of the liturgy in the religious cult called “Thursday Night Devotionals.”

  ‘The cult is itself interesting, as a cult sheltered within the framework of an accepted religion—usually one of the Protestant denominations of Christianity. And the language in question forms an interesting parallel, inasmuch as it is an artificial language sheltered within the framework of a real language. The sample of Langlish/Láadan which the Chornyak family was kind enough to supply to this researcher for examination is—however much the ladies may have convinced themselves that they have done something creative—quite transparently nothing more than a computer deformation of ordinary Panglish, with a few frills added to make it seem exotic. Now, the question is—’ ”

  “Hey! Hang on a minute!” Tom slammed his coffeemug down, skillfully spilling almost none on the table. “Just hold on!”

  “Problem?” Jonathan hadn’t expected to get this far before they ran out of patience and interrupted him. “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah, there’s a problem!” Tom said. “Our women have been doing that Thursday night piddling ever since the Womanhouses were built and somebody decided it would be good public relations to include a chapel in the floor plan. How in the name of Patrick the Perpetrator did that get transformed into a cult? Furthermore, how does anybody outside the Lines even know our women like to get together every Thursday night and play church?”

  “Well,” Jonathan explained, “as always, we are the last to know. Listen to this—

  ‘We cannot state precisely when it was that the Thursday Night Devotionals—which had until then been confined exclusively to linguist women—began spreading outside the Lines. The first recorded example we are able to verify took place in the women’s chapel of Mercy Hospital in Belleglade, Virginia, near Chornyak Household. Since that time, services have sprung up in hospital chapels and private homes all across the country, and have come to constitute a distinct religious movement.’ ”

  “Jesus H. galloping Christ,” breathed Leo, grabbing for more coffee as the gravytrain paused over their table. “It was started here? At Chornyak Household? Johnny, did you know about this?”

  “I knew about the services at the hospital. Of course. The women came and asked me for permission, and I saw no reason not to give it. It was a worship service in a hospital chapel, remember; they weren’t asking to go to a witches’ coven in a bosky dell! As I remember, it was the nurse—that Schrafft woman, you’ve seen her around the place—who was the reason for the request. She’d gotten interested in the Thursday night meetings at Womanhouse, and some other women she knew . . . her sister, I think, and some nurses, maybe some friends . . . had gotten interested from hearing her talk about it, and they all wanted to go to a service. But there was some problem about the other women’s husbands not being willing to let them travel over here at night. I saw no harm in it . . . I told them sure, they could go, as long as it wasn’t more than once or twice a year.”

  “It must have been more than that, to have turned into a cult, god damn it!”

  “I looked into it,” Jonathan answered steadily, “as soon as I read this. And our women have got nothing to do with it. I made absolutely sure. I’d told them twice a year, and twice a year is all it’s been. They went that first time, and they went again for a Christmas service. They’ve gone twice a year since. But our nurse, now—that’s another matter. She’s been holding a service on her own every Thursday night, apparently, and that’s what has turned into a cult. Our women aren’t involved any more deeply anywhere than they are here; I put in a conference call to every one of the Heads, and they have the same report I have. Their women go to nearby hospitals for the services that the nurses sponsor, once, twice, maybe three times a year—always with permission—and that’s it.”

  “But we get the blame, by christ!” Leo made another rude noise.

  “Well, what do you expect?” Jonathan asked him. “Some innocent nurses go to a pissant Thursday prayer meeting in a Lingoe den, and suddenly they’re ‘sweeping the country’ with an effing cult! Naturally we get the blame. Especially since Langlish got dragged into it. Let’s not forget the crucial fact that it’s Langlish—not the cult itself—that is the subject of this article.”

  “Oh lord . . . Langlish,” moaned Conary. “That pathetic monstrous pile of tangled offal. . . .”

  “Accurate,” Jonathan agreed. “Precise.”

  “Can you imagine a—what is it, this liturgy? Prayers? Hymns?”

  “It’s their eternal translations of the King James Bible, according to the article. Recited aloud, mind you. In chorus.”

  “Ah, shit,” said Leo. “How could you for chrissake make anything usable out of that mess?”

  The linguist men monitored Langlish routinely, as they monitored every activity their women were involved in. It had seventeen distinct verb tenses, each of which had to be assigned one of seventeen distinct verb aspects every time it was used. It had eleven separate noun declensions, without a single shared affix. It had enough stuff in it for a dozen ordinary languages, and a couple of dialects left over. It was a baroque travesty of what languages were really like, and it was exactly what you would expect a group of women to construct when left to fool around on their own without guidance. It was a disgrace, and if it hadn’t always seemed like a harmless diversion it would have been squelched long ago. The idea of it spreading outside the Lines was not something that had ever crossed their minds.

  Jonathan knew what they were thinking; it had been his first reaction, too. It had taken him a while to get past the kneejerk distaste he
felt for the women’s foolishness and see what really mattered here. He wanted them to see it, too, but he didn’t want to have to spell it out for them; he wanted them to see it themselves. It was so damn funny, once you saw it. It was more than just funny; it was a wonderful, magnificent, splendid hoax being perpetrated on the public, and the fact that it was an accident took away very little of its charm.

  “It is a mess,” he agreed, carefully keeping his face bland and unaware. “That’s the point. That’s what this Waythard is talking about. Here’s something that is ostensibly a real language—artificial, sure, but put together by honest to god linguists—and when you take a close look at it, it’s a godawful mess. Okay, Waythard wants to know: since it doesn’t mean a cursed thing, really, to the women who are saying it—I mean, they think they are saying a translation of the Twenty-third Psalm, but in reality you can’t translate the Twenty-third Psalm or the Twenty-third Telephone Book or anything else into Langlish, so what they’re really saying is equivalent to ‘Sasparilla please and thank you ring a lady, O!’ So, does this constitute normal religious language, he wants to know, or abnormal religious language? Or something else entirely?”

  They were frowning at him, but they still weren’t getting it; but then, they hadn’t read the article.

  “It’s an interesting question,” he went on, watching them. “It’s not like glossolalia, speaking in tongues, because the nice nursies and their lady friends from the wide-eyed public think they know what they’re saying. On the other hand, it doesn’t really mean that, so it’s like . . . Waythard suggests that it’s a little like a cargo cult. You know. The great gods fall out of the sky and they say ‘Have you people got a comset?’ and you think that ‘have you people got a comset’ has religious significance because the great gods said it.”

  “But holy shit, Jonathan, this isn’t the same thing at all. Our women didn’t fall out of the sky, and the other women aren’t savages—it’s not the same.”

  “He doesn’t claim it is; he’s just hunting for something in the same ball park. But it doesn’t matter how far off base he is. Perceive . . . you’ve got a ladies’ Thursday night religious meeting. With guest speakers. Everything that goes on is mostly plain old ordinary Protestantism. But it’s in a ritual Langlish frame. Now what is that, he asks? This is a very serious problem. This is maybe a dissertation topic. This is maybe a symposium topic. This is maybe the basis for a major grant proposal.”

  He felt the change, felt the loosening of the tension as it began to dawn on them, too, how funny it was.

  “Oh, god,” Leo said, almost whispering, “do you suppose the women did it on purpose?”

  “I wish I could think so,” Jonathan told him. “But I checked, remember? They genuinely have not been involved in this—they’re as innocent as babes. And come on—they aren’t capable of thinking up anything this elaborate, Leo. They’ve got no political savvy at all, and almost no sense of humor—it couldn’t be deliberate. But think about it, will you? So it’s an accident, a glorious miracle of an accident. So what? Does that make it any less beautiful?”

  He could feel them, pondering the question. All over this country, lay women had fallen for this. There were actually women, coast to coast, prattling memorized chunks of Langlish, that unspeakable—literally—monstrosity that the women of the Lines had been fooling with for more than a century. And it had assumed enough significance within the public reality consensus to inspire an article by a real professor, in a real scholarly journal. . . .

  The effect, when they finally got it, was everything he had hoped for. If there’d been any way a man could roll on the floor laughing without spoiling his Sunday suit, they’d have been polishing the tiles; as it was, they were roaring and wiping their eyes, and that drew more of the men over, demanding to be let in on the joke. Before it was over Jonathan had a good crowd, and an enthusiastic one.

  They were all in agreement; this was much too good to waste. It was a good thing, they decided, that the women had done it by accident, because this way you didn’t have to take it away from them—they didn’t know there was anything to be taken away, and that simplified matters. There wasn’t much time left before church, but they managed to map out a rough strategy, all talking at once, shouting one another down.

  The first step would be a letter of comment to the Journal of American Religious Ethnomethodology, responding to Waythard’s article. Something truly incomprehensible, but so full of linguistics jargon that the editors wouldn’t dare not print it. And then some responses to that from other linguists at other Households, working it up back and forth, until they suckered in a few professors. Papers on the subject at some annual conferences—parodies from the men of the Lines, naturally, and serious efforts from the real academics, who would never catch on to the parodies—that would come next. Leaks to the media . . . Leo knew somebody at Shawnessey Household in Switzerland who was tops at media-leak techniques.

  It was going to be one hell of a lot of fun, and Jonathan saw no reason why they couldn’t get two or three years out of it before they withdrew and left the scholars to discover that they’d been sandbagged. Maybe they’d get a little comset newspape going, pull in a few distinguished whatsits to serve on its editorial board . . . leave them sitting there with their asses waving in the wind when All Was Made Clear. God, it was beautiful. And it was only a matter of constructing perfect questions, that the academics would be unable to resist answering. Child’s play.

  “One day,” Jonathan proposed as they were trying to get out the door fast enough not to be late for church, “we are going to have to do something nice for the women, to pay them back for this.”

  “A fountain,” Conary suggested. “They’re always wanting a fountain, for the racket. We could put a brass plaque on it: ‘In Honor of Langlish.’ ” That set them off again, till they had to lean on the walls of the atrium for support while they laughed, and then they really had to hurry. The slidewalk was almost empty, a sure sign that the church was already full and the service about to start. The last thing they needed was for the men of the Lines, in a group, to come marching into church in the middle of the opening prayer or some such shit. Dignity didn’t allow them to actually run, not in their Sunday suits and with no obvious fire or flood or maiden-in-peril as an excuse, but they moved it up to the briskest walk that was plausible, and thought grim thoughts to restore some semblance of order to their faces before they had to meet the public view.

  “What about if we—” somebody began, ten yards from the church door.

  “Shut up,” Jonathan ordered. “Don’t even think about it. Think reverence. Think damnation. Think original sin. The mode, gentlemen, is grim—keep that thought firmly in your mind, and follow me.”

  II

  The Annual Caucus of the Encoding Project, which the women referred to among themselves as the Annual Circus, had been superfluous for at least fifty years. The task of the Encoding Project—to secretly construct the woman-language Láadan, using the ridiculous Langlish as a dummy inside which Láadan could be hidden—had been finished generations ago. But the women of the Lines could not have been made even to hint at that, not if you’d used thumbscrews. The only way they were able to obtain this one weekend in each year when women from all the linguist Households were allowed to travel to a single hotel, with no men other than the legally required escorts during the actual travel period, and to then be left in peace for the entire weekend without male supervision or constant interruption, was by the firm pretense that the Encoding Project still existed. There was a century of tradition behind the Caucus; permission for it had been granted at a time when the linguists were less busy than they were today, and at a time before the construction of the Womanhouses, when the men welcomed an excuse to get rid of all the women for a weekend. To forbid it now would be like canceling Christmas, or the Fourth of July—a shocking break with the established customs. But if the women were to give it up voluntarily, it would be the end of their p
recious respite from the normal routine—there was not the slimmest prayer of a chance that the men would let them substitute a similar meeting for some different purpose. They couldn’t spare the women now, not even for forty-eight hours, and nothing but tradition was protecting the disgraceful waste of time that the Caucus represented in the male eyes. They grumbled, letting it go on but fighting it from all directions, managing in the weekend hours involved to create vast messes that obliged all the women to go on double and triple untangling shifts on their return. The women ignored this guerrilla tactic, it being normal male behavior and entirely to be expected; it was a small price to pay for the two blissful days of conference time.

  However, keeping the men convinced that nothing had changed meant that a large bustling decoy conference had to be set up every year and run by the conference committee. With programming tracks. With panels and lectures and discussion groups and a banquet. With keynote speakers and workshops and plenary sessions and opening and closing ceremonies. All the trappings of a genuine old-fashioned conference, done well enough to fool even the expert male eye.

  It had not been easy. And it had been Nazareth who saved their skins, once again, when things had become not just difficult but desperate. They had revised Langlish and reformed it and reworked it until they’d run out of ideas. Human languages only offer a set of about seventy meaningful sounds to choose from; there are a multitude of possible noises, but only a finite number actually usable for linguistic purposes. And they were linguist women; their men would not have been fooled by a proposal that Langlish be revised to consist only of consonants, or any one of a number of other theoretically possible but pragmatically ridiculous alternatives. There are only six possible word orders that the elements subject/verb/object can take in a human language, and only a small number of mechanisms for indicating which is which; when you’ve exhausted all of those, what do you do next? For the women to be absurd was allowed, because it was expected; but if they had tried behaving like women ignorant of the characteristics of real languages, the men would instantly have been suspicious. It was a fine and perilous line to have to walk, and the necessity for continual changes within a web of absurdities made it very hard to keep track of what they were doing, much less what had already been done.