The Judas Rose

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Joseph had not thought of this possibility; Bishop Paul had not suggested it. It made his skin crawl to think that in the convents where women spent their lives in perpetual devotion there might be those who spent their lives in perpetual blasphemy.

  “Do you really think that could be happening?” he said, wonderingly. “Do you really—”

  “They are fanatics, my son,” the Cardinal interrupted, his voice grim and sorrowful. “You do not spend decades involved in a heretical conspiracy at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, without ever being suspected by anyone, unless you are the most intense sort of fanatic. I do most certainly believe they may be introducing the heresy into their devotions; I believe there might be separate heretical services held in secret; I believe—since this is possible at all—that almost anything is possible. Satan has never lacked for ingenuity; let us not underestimate the possibilities.”

  “We’ll need copies of the translations,” noted the assistant. “The original ones. For every priest on the list.”

  “We have those,” said the Cardinal.

  “We do?” Father Joseph was surprised; he had supposed they would have to go begging for them to the linguists.

  “Oh yes. Dorien always had the originals put into memory along with the revisions. I’ll have copies put on chiplets this very day, enough for at least one hundred good priests. I’ll need that hundred names from you, gentlemen. By tomorrow morning, at the latest.” And then he stopped, and a strange expression crossed his face, and he looked almost amused. “Oh, dear Lord,” he said softly. “I am such a foolish servant!”

  “Your Eminence?”

  “This has gone on sixty years or more. Think of it! Putting an end to it will surely take at least that long.” He shook his head, ruefully; his amusement was for his own absurdity. “And here I sit saying ‘do this today, do this this afternoon, do this at once,’ as if a day or a week or even a month would matter, in all those years. I’m an old imbecile.”

  “It’s quite natural, your Eminence,” murmured the men around him.

  “Yes. It is. But it’s a natural tendency which we must prepare ourselves to resist. Any haste, any rush, any feeling that we must hurry, and we’ll risk exactly what we must not let happen. Sister Miriam Rose, you will notice, knew better than to hurry—we must be no less canny. Ancient secrets, stretching into the future—that is what we are dealing with. And we must discipline ourselves to remember that. Or one of us—trying for efficiency and speed and all the rest of those modern virtues—will wreck the entire project. These women have hidden their work superbly, fiendishly well, for decades; let them have any warning that we’re on to them, that we’re searching them out, and they’ll find a way to hide everything from us for another century! They will already have their networks of communication, their contingency plans. . . . We’ll all be dead, and they’ll still be at their filthy tricks. We must not give in to a feeling that we have to rush this, gentlemen! You must impress that on everyone we bring into the search, in the strongest terms. We will put an end to the heresy—in the Lord’s good time—and no one will even know that it happened. That is how it must be done.”

  “Your Eminence?” Joseph asked hesitantly, when he was sure that the Cardinal was through speaking for a moment. “Might I ask a question?”

  “You may. Of course you may.”

  “I wonder if you have any idea . . . I wonder, where did this start?”

  “I don’t think I understand you, my son.”

  “How did it begin, Your Eminence? What could have started it off? I thought at first of the Lines, but that’s absurd. They’re not Catholic, they know nothing of nuns and convents and doctrine—those women wouldn’t even known that what they were doing is heresy.”

  “I agree. The men of the Lines, however, are another matter entirely. And how they do love the game of power! This is just the sort of enormous joke—that is how they would see it, Joseph—that they would revel in playing on the Church. Perhaps it came from them.”

  Joseph was nodding, slowly; it was possible. “But how did they get to Sister Miriam? A nun? Even if it was them, how?”

  “I don’t know, Joseph. Sister Miriam is said to have known a number of languages, isn’t that right? I’m sure I’ve heard Dorien remarking on that. Perhaps she had a linguist for a tutor, somewhere along the line? Perhaps she was allowed to correspond with linguists on points of grammar? I don’t know how it could have happened, and undoubtedly it was those men, with their wicked mischief, who arranged for it. But I have said before, and I will say again: Satan has never lacked for ingenuity. And it was Satan who inspired Sister Miriam, I am very much afraid, no matter what the human tools used for the purpose. Inspired her to a kind of evil, a scope of evil, rarely seen. There is no source that precedes the Devil Himself, when it comes to evil.”

  “And I . . . what am I to do now?” Always thinking of yourself, Joseph! He could hear the Bishop now. The whole church threatened, and he was thinking only of himself. But he was too weary and too battered to care about the niceties.

  “I will send instructions to Bishop Paul, my son,” said the Cardinal gently, “and he will see to all that. Put it out out your mind for now, and come with us, to have a good meal, and to share our good wines. It may be a very long time indeed before you have anything but bread and water again.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “I have been asked now and then—usually by one of our nuns, sometimes by a young woman suffering her way through the necessary episode of Romantic Love that will protect her against the nasty stuff thereafter—if it isn’t tragic that our men don’t share the faith that sustains us. It’s a good question, and a hard one, and over the years I’ve worked out an answer of sorts; but I keep longing for someone to provide a proper answer. Something that would be an improvement on my own verbal bumbling and blundering about; preferably something stunning in its absolute and glowing rightness! So that the questioner will say, “Oh, I see,” instead of murmuring at me politely while thinking that I am a cold and cruel woman without compassion.

  “We women provide the example, I always tell them. We haven’t taken our faith and gone off with it into isolation and hugged it to ourselves like hidden treasure; we have never given in to that temptation. We have continued to serve as the data sources from which the men may work out for themselves the grammar of our theology; that sort of analysis and discovery is a task at which they are, after all, highly skilled. Theoretically—by the principle of resonance—if we were able to provide them a perfect example it would cause the same note to sound in them that sounds in us, and they would begin of their own free will to live according to those principles by which we live. That we women can be seen as heartless is an excellent measure of how far we miss the target of the Perfect Example; but that doesn’t give us an excuse to abandon the effort.

  “And then there comes the next question: why don’t we simply tell them? Why don’t we just explain? I am always grateful then if the questioner is a linguist, because I can turn that straight back and ask a question of my own: would they propose that an infant could learn to speak a language if someone would simply have the kindness and the consideration to tell it how?”

  (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

  “There is no end to the wickedness of you women, is there?” Jonathan Chornyak asked her, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded across his chest, the delighted laughter in his eyes serving more than adequately to cancel the stern tones of his voice. “And as for your own particular personal wickedness, what am I supposed to say? That the infinite nature of your personal wickedness is even more infinite than the infinite nature of the wickedness of all of you collectively? I do not intend to be trapped into saying that, Nazareth, however superficially appealing it may be.”

  Nazareth smiled at him, gently, leaning her chin on her cane, and she waited. She didn’t intend to be trapped into answering the rhetorical questions, either, if she could help it.
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  “Nazareth,” he chided her, “please. Help me. Don’t just lurk there like that. I didn’t call you in here to admire your beauty.”

  “I was never a beauty, my dear,” she said. “Most of my life I was quite frankly ugly, and no one minded telling me so. It’s only now that I’m so old, and nobody expects me to look like a fairy princess any longer, that the matter even comes up.”

  Jonathan was disgracefully fond of Nazareth, and much ashamed of the fondness; to cover it up, he felt obligated to be stern with her even when the two of them were alone. He spoke to her now as he would have spoken to an obstreperous but much-loved child.

  “Nazareth,” he said, “I’m serious. Is there no end to the wickedness of you women, and the wickedness of you personally? Answer me, please.”

  She pretended to think it over, and the corners of her mouth twitched while her eyes stayed bland as any pond.

  “There is no end to the wickedness of anything,” she told him gravely, after awhile. “Because it is a cyclic rather than a linear phenomenon. To regret one’s wickedness is to dwell on it, which is wicked; not to regret one’s wickedness is to ignore it, which is wicked; to glory in one’s wickedness is to perpetuate it, which is wicked. There is no end to wickedness, Jonathan Asher, at all. No matter whose you wish to specify.”

  Jonathan chuckled; he loved it when the old lady played at abstract thought and philosophizing. It was often very nearly poetry, the stuff she prattled, and when he wasn’t busy he could listen to it endlessly, the way he would have listened to music.

  “You’re a holy terror, Aunt Natha,” he said. “And this time, by god, you’ve outdone yourself. Do you know who came to see me today?”

  She did know. She’d seen the ecclesiastical flyer arrive and the prelate flow over the lawn with minions scampering after him. But it is superfluous unkindness and discourtesy to spoil another person’s tale-telling, and she only widened her eyes a bit and said, “No, Jonathan—who?”

  “The Bishop of this diocese, that’s who.”

  “My goodness!” Nazareth declared, her voice carefully pitched for just enough awe and a pinch of curiosity she didn’t feel but was willing to fake. This boychild who sat here before her, Head of the Chornyak Line, and Head of all the Lines together, had never done her any personal harm other than through ignorance.

  “Your goodness,” Jonathan echoed. “Your goodness, indeed. We began this conversation by specifying that its topic was your wickedness, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness. Please keep that in mind.”

  Nazareth relaxed and let him tell her all about it, throwing in the occasional “Really?” and “Oh, dear!” and “Heavens!” and “Then what?” that he needed in order to organize his narrative. He was tickled to death, which was far better than Nazareth had dared hope. That he would find out someday had probably been inevitable; they’d been lucky an incredibly long time. She had hoped he would be only annoyed when it happened, rather than furious; that he was pleased was a wonderful and unanticipated event.

  “It seems,” he began, “that the Roman Catholic Church finds itself in a theological pickle of massive size and scope, Nazareth. It seems that some years ago a group of its nuns were invited to be guest speakers at a series of religious meetings held on Thursday nights around the country . . . I’m sure, Aunt Nazareth, that you will know to what series of meetings I refer. And it seems that the nuns were definitely shocked at what they heard at those meetings—shocked enough to go back and report to their male superiors that they felt something ought to be done. After all, the women who had started the meetings had managed somehow to interest large numbers of nurses in their so-called devotions, and the nurses were spreading the practice all over the country, and who knew what might not happen next?”

  He stopped and grinned at her. “Nurses,” he said softly. “You clever little old females. . . . There you were with your silly ‘woman’s language,’ all verbed up and no place to go. No way to get it out beyond the Lines. And then you remembered nurses—the only women who come and go freely between the Lines and the public, the only women who have the opportunity to talk to all sorts and kinds of people, and—coincidentally—women who had access to the hospital chapels. All you had to do was seduce the resident nurses from each of the Lines into your cozy little Thursday night meetings in the Womanhouses, and convince them that your Langlish twaddle was romantic and exotic and terribly terribly mysterious and exciting, and they would take it straight out into the world for you. And damned if they didn’t fall for it!”

  He threw back his head and laughed, while Nazareth waited patiently and watched the small golden fishes in the aquarium that was set into the wall behind him. He had added the aquarium because it distracted people talking to him; he had a screen he pulled over it when he didn’t want them distracted. And when he looked at her again she was not looking at the fish but giving him her full courteous attention.

  “It was all your idea, wasn’t it?” he demanded.

  “I’m sure I don’t remember, my dear,” she answered vaguely. “It’s been such a long time ago. I suppose I may have had something to do with it.”

  He snorted. “You old fraud,” he said.

  “Thank you kindly, I’m sure, Jonathan.”

  “The priests were alarmed at what they heard,” he went on, “and they seriously considered forbidding their women to take part in these shenanigans. But that would have meant passing up their golden opportunity, you perceive. Here were all these plump little round womanly souls, just waiting to be plucked and gathered in to the ample bosom of the church . . . it was much too good to pass up. So they set up an entire project, headed by a senior nun, to do nothing but fix up the Langlish Bible translations so they weren’t offensive to Catholic sensibilities, and they churned the stuff out for years, Nazareth! All of it submitted in turn to a head honcho for approval, and certified squeaky-Catholic-clean, and authorized for use in church. And they sent their nuns back out into the cities and towns to spread the sanitized word across the land. . . .” He stopped and steepled his hands and peered at her over his fingertips. “Nazareth Chornyak—you wretched women had an entire regiment of innocent nuns employed in the furthering of your plan to spread Langlish beyond the lines. Or Láadan, if you prefer—the Bishop wasn’t entirely clear on that, not that it matters. You have had working for you, for free, a crew of holy sisters and an actual Bishop! Nazareth, you perceive me before you stunned.”

  “Well,” Nazareth murmured, “we tried, dear.”

  “You tried!” He pinned her in her chair with his eyes, and she looked startled, and let her tremor get just a tad worse. “You tried! You succeeded! How in the name of all the bleeding saints—especially appropriate in this instance—did you women pull that off? Nazareth, the Roman Catholic Church is not a little country chapel out on a frontier somewhere! We are talking of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. I understand why it had to be them . . . they were the only ones with women living all together in isolation from men, and they were the only ones with the necessary lines of communication. But damned if you didn’t suck them in just as slick as smoke! God damn, Aunt Natha!”

  “You’re angry, Jonathan,” Nazareth suggested, so that he could make his point.

  “I certainly ought to be. Don’t you think I ought to be?”

  “Now how would I know that?” she objected. “I have never in all my life understood the workings of a man’s mind, or what makes them angry, or what consumes them with bliss, for that matter. You are asking that question of the wrong person, Jonathan.” And there had been a time when that was all true, and she had spent her life butting her head against the walls of maleness, tied to a husband she detested and subject to a houseful of other males she despised. But over the course of a hundred years she had learned a thing or two; she still understood very little about why men did things, but she had come to have a reasonable competence in predicting what they would do in response to a particular stimulus.

  “Consider it a
s an abstract question, Nazareth,” he said. “Shouldn’t I be angry?”

  “Well, are you?”

  “No!” he declared, giving the old desk a brisk punch and sending files flying to the floor. “Never mind that I ought to be! The very idea of the women of the Lines suckering all those pious old potentates—how can I be angry?”

  “We didn’t ask if we could do it,” she pointed out.

  “No, you didn’t. Because if you had asked, we would have said no, and you knew that.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And so you did an end run around us—with the help of the nurses of America assembled, and the Catholic Church—and you wreaked glorious havoc! Bless your nefarious little hearts and whatever passes for your brains!”

  Nazareth allowed herself a soft noise somewhere between a chuckle and a giggle, an old-woman sort of smothered noise, and Jonathan beamed at her, vastly satisfied. He had forgotten again about being stern.

  “I would have said no,” he repeated. “Damn right I would. I would have forbidden it absolutely, from the beginning. But since you didn’t ask, and since I didn’t say you couldn’t do it, let me tell you that I think you women should get a medal for it.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Jonathan,” she said.

  “Mmhmm. Hypocrite, as well as fraud. But Nazareth, old dear, it gets better. It gets much better. You’ve only heard the very beginning.”

  “Really?” Nazareth frowned, and bit her lip.

  “Really.”

  “Why, what else could there be? I don’t believe there could be more, my dear. Nor do I see why the bishop bothered to come talk to you, because that silly fad died out long long ago. Wasn’t he a little late to be complaining?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he ran one thumbnail back and forth across his lower lip, grinning at her, a narrow grin that matched the eyes. This was what he’d actually called her in for, she saw, but he had had it in mind to tease her awhile before he shared the news, whatever it was.