The Judas Rose (59 page)

“It will take forever.”

“That is the advantage of being a church,” the Cardinal said mildly. “We
have
forever. And it must be done, if it takes forever twice over. We must begin at once. You will go at once, each of you, and prepare a list for me. I need the names of priests you would trust with this task—men who can be relied on. Men who can be tactful. Men with the patience to let a cunning woman betray herself, and not move so soon that she is given time to alert the others. Men who can resist the temptation to flaunt their knowledge and administer punishment. Men with the sort of ear that hears the most minute taint, eyes that see the most nearly invisible contamination, even hidden away in the midst of what seems to be flawless devotion. Men who do not gossip,
ever
. Do you understand?”

“You aren't suggesting that they—” The Cardinal's assistant cleared his throat, and began again. “Your Eminence, are you suggesting that these women might be
practicing
their blasphemies?”

“It would be easy enough,” the Cardinal responded. “Who pays attention to exactly what a silly nun's lips are mumbling when she is at prayer? Who would know if the words were just a little bit different from those that the other nuns were using? Certainly, it's quite possible that that
is
going on. And by this time, of course, those nuns will be feeling safe in their perversions; it's been such a long time, and no one has ever become suspicious in all these long years.”

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.

“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?”