The Judas Rose (12 page)

Hurry up, Nazareth, you antiquated old nuisance, she instructed herself sternly, and then almost fell trying to get out of her chair in a single motion like a girl. “
Idiot!
” she said aloud, thinking how much nonsense she would have had to put up with from Michaela if Michaela had been there to watch her deteriorate. Instead, it had been Nazareth's dubious privilege to stand by helpless while Michaela sank ever more deeply into the drugged darkness prescribed for her at the prison hospital; it had been a relief to her when Michaela died, and not because—as the newspapes insisted on putting it—it had been a comfort to see her father's murderess go at long last to face the justice of the Lord. Nazareth had no illusions about the debt that she and all the other women of the Lines owed to Michaela Landry. What would they have done, if Michaela hadn't killed Nazareth's father when he discovered the truth about them? Killed him themselves? Nazareth knew she could not have done that, and
knew Michaela had spared her even the task of having to
consider
it.

She cut straight through the common room in the main house, to make up some of the time she'd lost, her mind occupied with memories and the grim set of her mouth demonstrating that they were not pleasant. A foolhardy young man stood up at the sight of her and took one step in her direction, presumably intending to exercise his rights and demand that she explain her presence there; behind him, someone murmured quietly that if he wanted to be a perfect ass that was okay, but please wait till a larger audience could be brought in for the occasion, and he sat down again and let her pass. With an elaborate air of not having noticed that she was there at all, of course. Nazareth ignored him, because she was in a hurry, and because she was reasonably sure that as soon as she was out of earshot his peers would explain to him about demanding house passes from women who'd been coming and going on Household business for ninety years.

When she got to the parlor, much out of breath, she found the other women seated in their rockers, their fingers moving sedately to the rhythms of needlework they'd been doing so long that it was fully on automatic, with carefully composed faces. Chatting. They were talking about daylilies? Yes . . . daylilies. And Nazareth realized that she'd forgotten her needlework bag, which would have hurt the feelings of the nephews who'd given it to her, but they were all off at negotiations and would never know. And it didn't matter, because she was always prepared. She reached into a deep pocket and pulled out a quarter-skein of yarn and a crochet hook. Her emergency kit. Lavender yarn, suitable for one's nineties.

“I am too sensible to waste your time saying that I'm sorry,” Nazareth observed, providing them with the contradictory figure free of charge. “After all, I'm only twenty minutes late. It could have been an hour.”

“It could have been a day,” agreed Sabyna. “That would have been much worse.”

“Or a week.” Quilla stared blandly at Nazareth, wisps of hair as always drifting out of her carefully constructed crown of braids in all directions. “In a week, though, we'd all have run out of yarn and given you up.”

“I
am
sorry,” Nazareth admitted, drawing up another chair, and they all agreed that no doubt she was, not that that made it any better, and she agreed with
that
and made a comment about the daylilies.

The meeting was not about daylilies. It was about the strategy for moving the womanlanguage Láadan out at last to women who were not members of the Lines. It had been Nazareth, just home from the hospital and barely moved in at Barren House, sitting on a plastic crate in the basement, who had first insisted that Láadan was ready to use. Time, she had said, for it to be spoken among the women, and learned by the girlbabies.
Long past
time! She had been furious with them that day, because they were still fooling about, claiming that the language wasn't “finished” yet, making excuses. It had been Nazareth who had known—while the other women were wasting their energies in “contingency plans” against a list of potential reactions from the men, should they discover the existence of Láadan—that there was in fact nothing at all to do except wait and be ready. It had been Nazareth, and only Nazareth, who had truly understood that it wasn't possible to make plans that obliged you to extrapolate from one reality to another. She had been the only one who understood that such planning had to be postponed until after the reality shift brought about by the language had taken hold, and who had stood firm and silent and watchful while they thrashed about, flatly refusing to be drawn into their fretful arguments. Always she had been there, difficult to love but impossible not to respect and rely upon, keeping them from making foolish choices for which they would pay dearly, but otherwise never interfering. Even when they pleaded with her to interfere.

Now that they found themselves at the next step of the plan, they had waited for her. And would indeed have waited a whole day, or a whole week, if that had been necessary. Whether it was genuinely crucial to have her with them for these sessions or not, they didn't feel safe without her. I am a symbol, she thought. A talisman. And what will they do when I am gone?

The youngest of the women there that morning, Quilla Hashihawa Chornyak, was in her seventies. Still she, like every other woman of the Lines, relied on the foolish mantra:
What will we do when Nazareth is gone? Hush—Nazareth will not die till we can spare her
. It made Nazareth cross just thinking about it, and she abandoned the subject of the daylilies and spoke up, to get her mind off her irritation.

“Well, how are we getting along? Do we have a report from everybody now?” The constant fine tremor that she'd had for many years—and that the physicians could certainly have relieved her of, if the grim hatred she felt for all med-Sammys hadn't prevented her from allowing them to do so—in no way interfered with the blinding speed of her crocheting. Her left
hand, holding the battered old hook, was almost a blur. “Shall I start a mitten, or is this a light shawl meeting?”

Quilla set an additional skein of lavender in Nazareth's lap, to supplement her supply. “At least
start
the shawl,” she advised. “Unless you'd like to make several mittens.”

Nazareth suspected that this camouflage of needlework was no longer necessary; since the men of the Lines had built the separate Womanhouses in 2218 and established the custom of summoning their wives to the main house by sending computer messages, men were as rare in the women's buildings as green swans. But if you were a woman who still remembered the days when a man might come stomping into the parlor at any time, with no warning, demanding anything at all and its housecat, the camouflage was a comfort. And although their present plan was a pathetic little thing, the men could have stopped it with a single word if they'd taken it into their heads to do so, and it was the
only
plan they had. They didn't choose to take chances with it. Furthermore, they were so accustomed to holding their meetings in these needlework circles that they would have felt awkward doing it any other way. Like meeting naked. Or under water.

“Everything's in place, ready to go,” said Sabyna. “They began last night at Jefferson Household, as we'd agreed, and the report came in this morning as a casserole I wouldn't feed a dog. Everything went smoothly, it said, and so far as anyone could tell, the nurse didn't notice a thing.”

“No reason why she should have,” Nazareth noted.

“No reason she shouldn't have noticed that she was hearing Láadan instead of Panglish?” snapped Elizabeth, the words muffled by her struggle to sever a strand of yarn with her teeth. “That's absurd!”

“The woman's not a linguist, Beth,” said Sabyna. “She knows Panglish, and I suppose she must know half a dozen bits of medical Latin, and that's it. But she
will
notice.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Nazareth is sure of that,” Sabyna answered.

“And so far, Nazareth has always been right.”

“Just so.”

They sat there a little space, saying nothing; and Nazareth wondered where the woman was—or better, where the women were, preferably several dozens of them, who would take over this ridiculous role for her, and wished that they would hurry up and volunteer themselves—and then Clea sighed so loudly that they all looked at her in surprise.

“What on earth?” asked Sabyna.

“I was just imagining,” Clea said.

“Imagining?”

“Imagining us, as the years go by. And every Thursday night in chapel, in every Womanhouse of the Lines, someone reads aloud the opening and closing pieces in Láadan. And none of the resident nurses
ever
notices. . . . And all the nurses die and are replaced, and
we
all die and are replaced, and nobody ever notices.”

“Well, if that happens,” Nazareth stated firmly, “it will be time for Plan B.”

“There isn't any Plan B!” Clea objected.

“Better work one up then, my dear. Because the idea of generations going by, and Láadan still being known only to the women of the Lines, as if it were an Alien language, distresses me greatly. If the dreary scenario you describe is a likely one, Clea, we
need
a Plan B. And perhaps a Plan C as well. And a D.” She looked down carefully at the knot-stitch she was working and added, “I know what—we could make a list.”

They had made lists, fifty years ago. Endless lists. Provisions to be stored away in packs, ready to be seized and slung to their backs as they fled from the Households into the wilderness, each woman carrying an infant girl on her hip, with the men in hot pursuit. And similar nonsense.

“Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness,” said Sabyna. “For
shame
.”

Nazareth grinned, but she said nothing more until they insisted, and then she told them that she'd said it all a dozen times and wasn't about to say it all again, and they sat there some more. Five uneasy women of advanced years, in the midst of a quandary.

“All
right
,” said Sabyna at last against the counterpoint of clicking needles, “I surrender.
I
will say it all again. Clea, the nurses will come to care about the readings they hear in Láadan because it is a language worth caring about, and the readings are carefully chosen to seduce the ear. In time, they will notice. And they will ask us about it.”

“How can we be sure of that? Never mind Nazareth—how can we be sure it's not just a waste of time?”

Sabyna laughed. “If we were sure of it, would we be sitting here listening to Natha tease us about lists? Of course we're not sure of it, and can't be sure of it, it's just the only thing we've been able to think of to do. There are no other women except the nurses who are able to move freely between our Households and the outside world, to serve as contacts between us and other women—therefore we must work through the nurses. There is no
other occasion, except for Thursday Night Devotionals at the Womanhouses, when we linguist women and the nurses are together on any sort of regular and reliable basis—therefore we must work through those chapel services. Those are the
facts
, you perceive. And all we can do, as Natha has so often and so accurately pointed out, is
try
it and see what happens.”

“It will take a long time!” Clea stabbed at the embroidery with her needle, fiercely, and jabbed her middle finger instead. “Ouch!”

“Everything does,” said Nazareth.

“Well, is that all that was in the casserole recipe?” Clea asked. “Just ‘we began last night and the nurse didn't notice'?”

“Even with a casserole,” Quilla said, “a recipe doesn't have room for elaborate detail.”

“
Seriously!
Is that all it said?”

“Just about.” Quilla was in charge of the recipe collections for Chornyak Barren House; she kept them, to the men's great amusement, on file cards. In writing. “They started with the Twenty-third Psalm and ended with a benediction, it said, as agreed. And next Thursday the turn goes to Mbal Household. And that's all there was, and all we could expect. We certainly didn't anticipate that the nurse would leap from her seat in chapel shrieking, ‘What
is
that wonderful language, I
have
to
know!
' Eventually, something will happen; eventually one of them will hear more than just noise.”

It was to make that more certain that they'd decided to always begin with the Twenty-third Psalm, so that the nurses heard the same sequence over and over again, but to vary the closing selection on the off chance that that was the wrong decision. Hedging their bets. The good old Twenty-third had gone beautifully into Láadan, and had a wonderful sonorous roll to it; either that would cause the nurses to begin loving it and wondering what it was they loved, or it would lull them the way an incantation lulls and they'd never wonder. There was no way to find out which, except to try.

“We're next in line, then?” asked Quilla.

“Yes.”

“Can you imagine Jo-Bethany Schrafft finding the Twenty-third Psalm in Láadan seductive?” It wasn't a sarcastic question; she was serious.

“It's hard to say,” answered Sabyna. “We don't know her yet. She'll only have been here . . . what, six weeks? Seven, maybe? . . . when it's our turn to begin. But she's a human
being, and she is a woman, and she hears normally; and that is all we can ask for in any of them.”