The Judas Rose (41 page)

“What's a hippie?” Agar looked even blanker than before, and Father Dorien gave up trying to keep a Christian calm and smacked the worktable with his free hand.

“Damnation, Agar!” he roared. “Go read a history book! Try the infamous 1960's! Don't you know anything at
all?
”

“I resent—”

“And as for it being easier when the only colonies we had were the ones on Luna and Mars, that's ridiculous! Before we even
thought
of colonies in space, people in this country couldn't tell you where Denmark was, or if New Zealand was part of Africa! People—including you, Agar, know damn little, and nothing that doesn't affect them personally! Now go on about your business and let me get on with mine, before I lose my temper!”

“It appears to me, Father Dorien, that you have already lost it,” remarked Agar with great dignity, and he folded his hands before him and strode stiffly from the office as if he were trying to balance a realbook on his head.

Dorien stared resignedly after him, regretting his irritation; it wasn't fair for him to deliberately choose nincompoops for colleagues and then torment them for being nincompoops. But the computer program he was trying to sort out was one of those projects that requires a man's full attention, where every interruption means starting over from the beginning, and he was already late setting it to rights. Agar had caught him at a bad moment; he would apologize to him later, and explain.

He made a brief note on his wrist computer, reminding him to check in six months and be sure that the number of nuns wanting transfer into space remained as trivial as it was now. And then he put the matter out of his mind and settled down to work, praying for just one hour without interruptions. “Please, God,” muttered Father Dorien, “Occupy my beloved nincompoops with some sort of nonsense, just for sixty of your blessed minutes. Amen.”

CHAPTER 18

“Anything whatsoever that can be said in one human language can be said in every other human language; that is true. But a thing that can be said quickly and with ease in one tongue may require a great deal of time and many many words in another. As the centuries go by, and a language grows and changes, there may be a skewing of its development in one direction or another; certain parts of experience may become inconvenient and cumbersome to talk about. Not that they
can't
be talked about, but just that it becomes so complicated to do so that it's hard to find anyone willing to
listen.

“There was English, for example, and then its development as Panglish. Suppose you were a speaker of Panglish and you wanted to talk about war, or killing or violence. There was no weapon, and no smallest variation on a weapon, that did not immediately receive its own convenient Panglish name, easy to pronounce and easy to remember. If there were fifty different subtle variations on the use of one's hands to take a human life, you could be sure that Panglish would provide you with fifty different subtle manners of expressing those variations with speed and ease in conversation. But not all of life was so well provided for as were those parts most closely associated with violence. There was the word ‘love'; it was almost impossible in Panglish to say which of the many subtle and different kinds of love was the one you felt toward someone in less than ten minutes; if it was a man you were talking to, he would leave or fall asleep before you could finish what you were trying to say. (As for the
act
of love, there was not one single word for a woman's part in that!) Panglish society found itself obliged to create a separate class of special persons who were paid by the hour
, just to listen;
and their work was considered so unpleasant that the standard
fee for a therapist's time as early as the year 2000 was one hundred twenty-five dollars an hour, a very large sum at that time.

“It is an interesting fact, linguistically, that the most common complaint of Panglish-speaking men toward women in conversation was this sharp question: ‘For god's sake, will you get to the
point?' ”

(from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)

There were eleven nuns in the narrow room with Sister Miriam, lined up in two rows that faced the cubicle where Miriam herself worked; she could sit at her own computer and watch them through the arched door. Each one was bent over the primitive terminal that had been assigned to her, and each one was aware that it could have been much worse. There had been a time when they would have had to make do with typewriters, and not so very long ago, either. A vow of poverty was a vow of poverty after all.

It didn't occur to Sister Marisol, the youngest nun present, that before typewriters there had been a time when the sort of work they were doing had been done by hand, with paper and ink, and that before that there had been parchment, and papyrus scrolls, and tablets of clay. . . . She was a devoted and industrious nun, and good at what she did, but her total education in the history of this world had been a series of fourteen mass-ed computer lectures titled “Great Events Through the Ages.” It had been strong on wars and kings and explorations and conquests; it had not taken up the matter of how people had managed to write things down in the ancient past.

If you had sat Marisol down and ordered her to think about it, she would have been reasonably prompt in saying that of course the Old Testament Prophets and the Early Christian Fathers had not typed the Bible; she was not stupid. But it wasn't something she gave any thought to, any more than she thought, of her own initiative, about what life in the Bronze Age might have been like. Nudged a little, she would have remembered seeing monks portrayed in religious paintings, scrawling away on unknown surfaces with pens and inks, and she might have thought of that as romantic. She most emphatically did
not
consider the Apple 79R's with which she and the other sisters had to make do romantic. Not in any way. She wished they could have had modern equipment to work with, and had twice been obliged to do penance for saying so.

Now she was keeping her eyes on her work, squinting at the screen, but all the rest of her senses were tuned to Sister Miriam. Marisol could see why Sister Miriam had been put in charge of this project—she was just the sort of person you would
need
, if you wanted a woman to be in charge of it. And as the good Father had said, it made no sense to put a man in charge of revising texts in a language constructed specifically for women. That was clear enough, and although no one had asked for her opinion she had been in full agreement. Nevertheless, she regretted it. Because it would have been so much easier to work under the supervision of a priest, who would always have been making allowances for the fact that you were only a woman. Sister Miriam made no allowances, not for gender or for anything else, not for herself or for any of the women whose work she was responsible for. She was made of stone and steel and plastics, and Marisol had twice been obliged to do penance for saying
that.

She hated it when Miriam managed to sneak up behind her. There Marisol would be, craning her aching neck at the cursed old screen where the text was displayed, trying to make out what it was supposed to mean without having to call up the dictionary—because that would mean reducing the size of the letters even more to make room for it—and suddenly there'd be Sister Miriam at her left shoulder. Marisol would have heard not one sound . . . she wondered if Miriam went barefoot . . . and suddenly there would be that iron grip on her shoulders, bringing her bolt upright at her station and gasping with the surprise of it. And then the voice.
More
iron, and ice-cold iron at that, like the convent gates in February. How could any woman, allegedly filed with the love of God and of His Son and of the Blessed Mother, be
so cold?
Sister Miriam—Sister Miriam
Rose
, actually, though nobody could possibly look at her and think of roses, and Marisol had never heard her called anything but Sister Miriam—was a mystery. An enigma. Everyone agreed on that. Perhaps it was because she was a bastardess, born of wicked dissipation and scandalous lust; Marisol knew that she was not supposed to consider that Sister Miriam's fault, except in the sense that original sin was Sister Miriam's fault as it was everybody's, but she couldn't help it. And now she'd thought of it again, and she would have to confess it, and there'd be a penance again for her lack of charity; there was no end to the burdens Sister Miriam imposed on you, just by her skinny presence. It wasn't fair.

Miriam was coming down the row now, and Marisol tensed,
but she didn't get that far, praise be. It was Sister Tamarah that had the rotten luck this time, and Marisol was sure she heard Tamarah's shoulderbones crack under the other nun's powerful hands. Give her a priest any time, thought Marisol, especially if he could be well into his sixties and a bit addled. She would not have enjoyed one of the young firebrand Fathers; but then nobody would have put a priest of that kind in charge of eleven nuns revising Bible translations.

“Display, Sister Tamarah!”

Sister Miriam's voice cut the air right down the middle, if you could imagine air having a middle; listening to her, Marisol could.

The text went up on the big screen at the front corner of the room, left of the door, keyed from Tamarah's terminal, and Miriam began at once to lecture them on its various inadequacies. That was all right. “Inadequacies” were easily handled. What made the nuns anxious, and sometimes more than anxious—because most of them were genuinely afraid of Sister Miriam—was when she began speaking of “excesses.” “Inadequacies” meant there was something you ought to have put in (or something the creaking old computer ought to have put in) that had not appeared. “Excesses,” on the other hand, meant you had put something in that neither you nor the computer had been authorized to insert.

When that happened, it usually happened for reasons of style. “Felicity of expression,” it was called. The style every one of the nuns was striving for would have been
characterized
by felicity of expression, and sometimes that led to difficulties you never would have foreseen. You would look at a passage from the materials that the linguist women had prepared, translated from the English—not even Panglish, but English!—into their “Láadan.” And the computer program would already have done all the automatic things to it. The series of masculine pronouns that Sister Miriam had added to the language would have replaced the sloppy genderless ones the women of the Lines had used, unless of course the reference was actually to a female, and then the computer would have put in
that
set. Everywhere that one of the multitude of words for “love,” each referring to a special kind of love, had been, the program would have substituted the neutral Láadan term Miriam had selected for that purpose. Places where “child of the Holy One” had replaced “Son of God” would have been corrected and restored to their earlier form; places where metaphors of battle had been tampered with would have been automatically restored. The program that did all
this was named “Patriarch,” and Sister Miriam was said to have written it herself, apparently not the least bit disconcerted by having to do it in a computer language that had the same relation to contemporary ones that Middle English had to contemporary Panglish, or worse—and it worked very well, thank you. When it got through, you still had a Láadan text, but it was free of every single one of the routine blemishes of feminism.

But the result was not always
felicitous
. All those rules interacting, in the mindless way that was the best these old machines could manage, sometimes produced results that were free of feminist slant but were offensive for other reasons. And then the nuns were expected to fix the problem, which was where “excesses” originated. None of them knew Láadan; they had to make their alterations with the help of the dictionary and grammar in the computer's memory. Their intentions were good, but their results all too often set Miriam off, as if they had done it on purpose to annoy her.

Marisol remembered a time when the offending “excess” had come from Sister Ann Martha . . . a Láadan word she had selected to replace a name of a female animal had turned out to include in it somewhere a mystifying reference to “sexual congress with someone you dislike but have respect for.” And Sister Miriam had turned on them all, furious as they'd ever seen her, and had almost screamed at them: “Don't any of you know
anything
about morphology?” They had stared at her, shocked into stillness the way rabbits are shocked by the sound of an eagle shrieking, and indeed Sister Miriam had reminded them of an eagle, standing the way she was with her arms spread wide in the long black sleeves and her eyes flaming in her face. And then she had shaken her head slowly and let the black sleeves fall and folded her hands over her heart, and said, “No . . . of course you don't. I beg your pardon, sisters. You don't even know what morphology
is
, do you?”

They didn't know. And they had no reason to be ashamed of that. If it had been something a nun needed to know, they would have been taught about it. Marisol would have let it pass; but Ann Martha was still bruised at Miriam's vehemence, and she had insisted that the senior nun
explain
morphology, if it was so important.

“It isn't that important,” Miriam had said, with a gentleness that was unusual for her. “Please forgive me—I think perhaps I am a little overtired.”

Ann Martha was stubborn; she would not let it go. “Nevertheless,” she said, and stuck her chin out for emphasis. “We would
prefer not to be . . . not to be ignorant, Sister. We would prefer not to be in a position where others can
call
us ignorant.”