The Judas Rose (13 page)

“She is also devout,” put in Nazareth quietly.

“Devout? Devout what?”

“Baptist, I think; Protestant, certainly. No holy pictures or statues in her room, and she doesn't cross herself, and if you come up behind her suddenly and startle her she doesn't say ‘Holy Mary!' or anything of that sort.”

“Nazareth, how do you know she's ‘devout,' as you put it? You've barely met her.”

Nazareth looked at them, her eyebrows raised, just for a moment, and then looked down at her work again, saying, “She has a Bible beside her bed, my friends.” She paused. “A
printed
Bible.”

“In realbook? Or just hard copied?”

“It's realbook form,” Nazareth said. “And it's not junk; it's the whole Bible, and ordinary print, and decent paper.”

That was significant. To own a printed Bible, a real book rather than a microfiche or a chiplet in a velvet case, and to do that on the money that an unmarried nurse earned—she would have to be devout. That would mean strenuous economies, over a long period of time.

“Perhaps it's a family heirloom,” Elizabeth suggested.

“No,” said Nazareth. “I checked—it's a recent edition.”

“It's a good sign, you think?”

“Maybe. It means she
will
go to Thursday night chapel, even if it's being held by Lingoe bitches, because not to do so would worry her. That's a good point. But it also means she may find the Láadan disturbing. Or worse—she may find it blasphemous.”

“
Bomehelh!
” said Sabyna, quite clearly.

“Mercy. Now
that's blas
phemous!” Quilla chuckled; at their ages, disrespectful remarks about penises were permissible.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“For instance?”

“Well, is there something perhaps less blasphemous to translate than the Twenty-third Psalm? Something she might be less sensitive about?”

“And throw a wild variable into the experiment? Really, Sabyna.”

“I suppose that wouldn't be such a good idea.”

They shook their heads at her, unanimous in their agreement on that point. The variation was to be at the
end
of the service, not at the beginning, and weeks had been spent deciding on the Twenty-third Psalm as the proper opening, and they were not
going to spoil any of that now. Sabyna had always had a weakness for the unscientific method, but they would see that she curbed it; this was no time for impulsive fiddling about.

“We have to get this going,” said Clea. “It's awful, hogging Láadan in the Lines the way we do. I don't want to go to my grave still hogging it.”

“We're all on the defensive about that,” Nazareth said gently. “For centuries we linguists have been hated by all the peoples of Earth and all the peoples of Earth's colonies. For our elitism, and our selfishness, and our shameful wealth, and our hoarded secrets—all of which is the most utter cowflop. Except for Láadan, which we
have
hoarded. It's an awful feeling.”

“As if we had food,” said Quilla bitterly, “and other women were starving all around us. And we not only didn't share but tried to pretend that we were starving, too. It's shameful.”

“My dear, we have been over that and over that—it's not shameful. It's just the way that life is. We can't move any faster than we are moving, and that's all there is to it. It isn't shameful to be human.”

Nazareth wondered how many thousands of times that same ground would have to be plowed. Linguists, of all people, should know the perils of making haste. You cannot hurry the acquisition of language. A human child, given nothing in the way of language instruction but the ordinary vagaries of communication in its own home, would begin to speak its native language at about eighteen months and have the system under control by about age five. A human child, given intensive daily lessons in its native language from birth, by the most costly teachers, would begin to speak the language at about eighteen months and have the system under control by about age five. If the teachers were as skilled as they were expensive, the child who had the lessons would have a bigger vocabulary than the other child, but that would be the only significant difference. And it had taken the women of the Lines generations to move from the first resolve that a language for women should be constructed to the stage of beginning to speak it with the infant girls. And
still
, they kept fretting for a way to “speed things up”!

“Do you remember,” she asked casually, “how it went when our distinguished scientists found a way to speed up the gestation of the human infant from nine months to five? Do you remember the monsters that came from the wombs of women before they closed that project down?”

They didn't answer her, but she knew they were remembering,
and she drove the point home. “Anything forced to birth before its time will be a monster; and the houses of the Lines have been the womb of Láadan. Suppose we stop trying for a Caesarean, dearloves.”

“We do it because we grieve for other women,” Clea protested.

“No,” said Sabyna, saving Nazareth the trouble, “we do it because we feel guilty. Our own guilt is
not
a sufficient justification for ruining something so important. Nazareth is right.”

Nazareth is right
. She flinched, but the tremor hid it; only someone watching her with the specific purpose of analyzing her bodyparl would have seen it as flinching rather than tremor. It was tiresome, always being right, even about things that were loathsome. It caused her pain.

Nazareth had been longing for death for ten years now, and would serenely have greeted its arrival. Except for the reluctance she felt at the idea of having it all to do over again. She was tired, she realized, and too cross to be useful.

“Natha? Are you all right?”

She stood up, tucking the strip of shawl into her pocket and handing the unused extra yarn back to its donor. “I'm fine,” she said, that being what was expected of her. “But we're through here. There's no reason to spend any more time belaboring the overpoweringly obvious. There wasn't any reason to call a meeting to belabor it, for heaven's sakes. Why didn't you just send me a copy of the casserole recipe?”

“It was only a one-mitten meeting?”

“One
thumb
of one mitten. At the most. You overestimated.”

“Are you
sure
we're through?” asked Elizabeth plaintively, and Nazareth gave up being cross and started laughing instead, patting their cheeks all around as she abandoned them. She would, she decided, go back through the main house common room again, even though she wasn't in a hurry this time. As a matter of principle. Perhaps she'd have an opportunity to speak to that young man personally. As a matter of principle.

They let her go without a word of protest. But she knew what they would do now. They'd sit there for two more hours, going over it and over it. Saying the same things thirty-five times, in different ways and different languages. Wringing the last fragment of possible significance from the casserole recipe code message.

She wasn't going to do that with them. She would leave them to their dissecting. It eased their minds, and eased their frustration at not being able to do something more direct and obvious, but it did not ease her in any way at all. She had no tolerance for
it, and only got in their way; better for them if she was gone, instead of staying there and getting more and more annoyed with them all the time for things that were in no way their fault or hers. She would go back to her thologys, to find out what was going on in the world.

Nazareth knew what the family thought about that, of course. She was neither deaf nor blind nor numb, and she was well aware that they considered the time she spent with the comset news thologys a sign of premature senility. Here she was, surrounded by all the wonders of modern technology, with the holomagazines at her fingertips; Chornyak Household subscribed to nearly a dozen of them. Nazareth, they would say to her, you don't have to tune the holos in the way the children do; you don't have to bring them in lifesize and at full volume, you have complete
control
of the display!

For Christmas this year her sons had given her a new receiver of her own, the very latest thing. So small that she could hold it in the palm of her hand and watch the holograms present the news and the features and the dramas and all the rest of it. In perfect detail, but tiny. Not like inviting an entire troupe of people into the room to do live theater, the way the kids preferred it. This receiver had separate controls for each sensory modality; you could turn off the smells and the textures and the tastes and leave only the eye and ear inputs if you liked. Her sons were no doubt proud of themselves . . . she could imagine how they'd decided, over the Sunday morning mantalk; they would have convinced themselves that this, at last, would wean Mother from her embarrassing addiction to the primitive. Worth every credit it cost, she was sure they had said.

They had sent a granddaughter with it to demonstrate all the new toy's dials and frills and features and whatnots, under strict orders to be sure that she fully understood every last item, doddering though she was. And the poor thing had been so sorry to bother Nazareth that way.

“‘Natha, darling,” Demarest had said, looking at her feet, “I am
so
sorry—but they insisted.”

Nazareth had smiled and told her to go right ahead by all means and run the silly gadget through its paces so that when she was called in to the office she could report that yes indeed Demarest
had
shown her absolutely and to its fullest complexity how superior this toy was to her thologys.

“I am instructed to say, Natha, that there is now no excuse for you to sit and listen to a stupid newscaster droning away hour
after hour, with nothing but flat visuals on a screen to back him up. Please be advised that I have quoted
exactly
the statement your sons specified, Grandmother—I have not left out one single word.”

“Duly noted, child,” she had replied. “Then what did they say?”

“Next. Nobody in full possession of her faculties would listen to the thologys, which are intended only for the frontier colonies where nothing else is available
but
the thologys. I am so sorry to have to say such a rude thing to you, Grandmother. And there was one more thing, which you will be able to guess without my having to say it.”

“Ah, yes,” Nazareth had said. “The one more thing was that the only
real
reason I listen to the thologys is to get attention.”

“Men,” signed her granddaughter. The sign for “male” is a hypothetical tug at the hypothetical bill of a hypothetical cap, but Demarest was inventive; she made it large and elaborate and with overtones of tremendous burdens, so that the only possible image was of these poor creatures hauling about great ponderous penises that hung swollen from their aching foreheads.

Nazareth thought it was hilarious, and Demarest kept it up until they were both weak from laughing. She signed a pitiful man with the recalcitrant phallus straight ahead down his nose, so that his eyes crossed, and another like a deformed rhinoceros, but triumphant at his good management of the appendage, and it was clear to Nazareth that she was only just getting warmed up and must be stopped.

“Demarest, do
please
quit,” she begged, wiping her eyes; she had no penis to lug about, and thanks to the economies of her male relatives no breasts either, but her ribs were still with her and they ached even when left entirely alone. Battered with waves of hilarity, they were screaming for mercy.

Demarest stopped instantly; she was a kind young woman, and she would have walked through fire for Nazareth. And Nazareth asked her weakly, “Is that all now, I hope? I can go and turn on the thologys now and listen to them in peace? You've carried out every last instruction?”

“Almost.”

“Almost? Whatever more could there be?”

“Grandmother, I am instructed to bring back a complete account of your reaction. ‘Exactly what she says—every word,' is the way it was put.”

“I perceive. Well, then, please get ready, because here comes my reaction. Are you ready? REACTION: ‘How
very
kind and
thoughtful my sons are! How did they ever
guess
that I had been wanting one of
these!'
There. Do you have it?”

“Every word,” said Demarest gravely.

“Can you remember it?”

“Oh, yes. But I am shocked to discover that you would deliberately lie to your own sons.”

“Your delicate sensibilities . . .”

“Yes, Grandmother. After all, you're supposed to set me an example.”

“But I haven't lied, Demarest, and you needn't be shocked. I
have
been wanting one of these.”

“Really?” Demarest looked at her, astonished, because Nazareth was known to hate gadgets, especially expensive gadgets.

“Oh, yes. You see how beautifully it's made, and how well balanced? It is just
exactly
what I need, to set my cup of tea down on so it won't mark the surface of the table. The perfect size, the perfect shape, and not tippy at all. Perceive!”