The Judas Rose (42 page)

She had looked at them, thinking it over, and then nodded very slowly.

“A morpheme,” she had said, in the cold voice that was her accustomed voice, “is the smallest piece of a language that has an independent meaning. The combination of morphemes into words is called morphology. It is morphology, sisters, that tells you the words ‘sign' and ‘signature' and ‘insignia' have related meanings. The morphology of Láadan is so new that it is transparent. Think of ‘mid,' which means ‘creature', and ‘balin', which means ‘old'. When you see that the Láadan word for a tortoise is ‘balinemid' you have no trouble understanding the morphology. And if ‘woth' means ‘wisdom', finding the mule named ‘wothemid' in Láadan tells us—through morphology—something about the way the women of the linguist families view the world.”

There had been a soft murmur among the nuns, moving round the terminals, because this was an interesting idea, and each one could see examples they had not seen before.

“I should have spoken to you about this when we began our work,” Sister Miriam had added. “It would have been helpful to you. But sisters—truly, I did not realize that you were unaware of these things.”

She let them hear that, and understand it, and then she was through being helpful. No doubt it had been a strain on her, being pleasant through four consecutive sentences.

“But now I
have
told you,” she snapped, “and the concept is clear, and if you see a Láadan morpheme that has a feminist taint lurking inside a word in future I shall expect you to recognize that and remove it! For example, sisters, I shall expect you to be alert to any words that may hide within them the morphemes for ‘water' or ‘wet' or ‘rain'—anything of that sort. They are all too often suspect, and frequently blasphemous. Is that clear?”

Up went Ann Martha's hand, to ask if they might spend time studying the Láadan dictionary, so that relationships among the words and parts of words would come more readily to their minds.

“Absolutely not!”

“But, Sister—”

“It's bad enough that you must be exposed to these foul writings! I am concerned for the welfare of your souls; I wish we could leave the entire task to computers, which have no souls to lose. You are
absolutely
not to add an additional source of contamination to what already endangers you! You are forbidden
to study the dictionary
or
the grammar—the computer knows what they contain, and will provide you with what you absolutely must have to do your work. And
that will suffice
, sisters.”

“Sister, may I speak?” Young as she was, and frightened of Miriam as she was, Marisol still had wanted to point out that they were really not so feeble of faith that just looking at feminism could corrupt them. But Miriam had said only, “You may
not!
” and had left the room with a “God be praised” that sounded like a curse.

Her harsh manner surprised no one. She was known to be a hard taskmaster and a pitiless supervisor; it was expected of her. If she hadn't been that way, the other nuns would have been disappointed in her. And it was not surprising that the program called Patriarch, written as it was in the outdated language, often provided results that were unsuitable for any church service. But there was something else, something that genuinely
was
surprising, something that perhaps went with Miriam's prickly, unyielding personality but seemed inappropriate and inexplicable nevertheless—who would have suspected that Father Dorien's precious Sister Miriam Rose would have a terrible tin ear? It was shocking, the way she would take a properly defeminized section, with a lovely ring to it when you read it aloud, and fool around with it until it went clanking and stumbling over the tongue, completely ruined.

She knew both Latin and Greek; she knew English of several periods, and could have read Shakespeare in twentieth-century texts; she knew French well; it was rumored that she knew Aramaic, and a little Japanese; a sister whose tongue was not as tightly attached as it ought to have been claimed to be certain that Sister Miriam knew and used Sign. Most curious of all, she sang like an angel. Trite; but true—like an angel! When she took the solos before the choir, and her voice soared with a magnificence and power that seemed entirely effortless, even the women who disliked her most held their breaths to listen. Given all that, how
could
she take something theologically correct, and lovely to say, and turn it into the sort of unreadable rackety clatter that she did? It was more than any of the nuns she supervised could comprehend.

“Perhaps she does it on purpose,” Sister Gloria John had muttered to the others, after one especially unpleasant sequence produced by Miriam's tinkering had been entered into storage as a final version.

“Why? Why on earth?”

“Because,” Gloria said, “the longer she can keep us at this,
the longer she can avoid doing any real work herself. And when the Fathers read the garbage she has produced, they'll make her throw it all out and start over again from the beginning.”

“That's a terrible thing to suggest!” Ann Martha protested, even though she secretly suspected that what she felt for Sister Miriam was not simply dislike but fullblown hatred. “Have you no charity at all?”

“So it is, and perhaps I don't,” Gloria admitted. “But I tell you, uncharitable or not, I think I prefer it to the idea that she doesn't even
know
when what she writes hurts everybody's ears!”

Maybe. They hadn't been able to decide which was worse, ignorance or sabotage. Neither alternative was acceptable. Because as much as they disliked and feared Sister Miriam, every single one of them respected her completely and without reservation.

“Maybe we should speak to one of the Fathers about it?”

“Gloria John!”

“Well? Isn't it our duty?”

Sister Fiona, a sturdy woman of forthright habits and expression, had set both her arms akimbo in a gesture having not one feature of humility and demanded, “Are you out of your mind? Do you realize what Sister Miriam would do if one of us went to the priests and complained that her literary and liturgical style doesn't meet our standards?”

It was a sobering thought, and one that kept them silent while Fiona embroidered on it.

“And do you have any idea what the priests would say
back
to a complaint such as that, if one of us was fool enough to make it?”

“We could all go together, in a group,” suggested Sister Gloria slowly. “We could tell them what we all agreed, so that they'd see it couldn't just be spite, or one of
us
with a tin ear. Sisters—the things she does to these texts are . . . repulsive!”

“You will go without me, if you go,” declared Marisol instantly. “I do not wish to spend the rest of
my
days scrubbing plastic floors on a frontier planet, Sister!”

There had been a little additional muttering and fretting, making Marisol think of a poultry yard that had been a hobby of her mother's. But eventually they had all hushed and gone back to their work, keeping to themselves the certainty that if they did it well they could rely on Sister Miriam to spoil it. It was the only safe thing they could do.

There was no lack of women to fill convents. A convent was
one of the very few alternatives that a woman on today's Earth had to a life of unrelenting silliness. If you thrived on silliness, that was all very well—you'd be treated to it in heaping portions. But if you were an intelligent and ambitious female, you suffered. If you'd been lucky enough either to be born Roman Catholic or to belong to a family that would allow you to become Roman Catholic, the convent was a compromise of sorts. Life there was not all excitement and danger—if that was what you wanted, you did your best to marry a man who would take you out to the colonies—but it was not totally absurd, either. And you didn't have to spend every moment of your time catering to the whims of some human male. Catering to the whim of God had more appeal; if He made messes, they had grander scope.

But you could be expelled from the convent, your place given to some other eager woman, for nothing at all. At the whim of any priest who chose to denounce you, for whatever infraction, however trivial, or even imaginary. There was no real appeal, if a priest decided that he didn't wish to tolerate your presence in a convent for which he was advisor, although of course there was a paper appeal that you could waste your time going through if you were so inclined. And then what did you do? If you had spent all your life in a convent, what did you do, out in the world of men?

Sister Miriam's revisions bruised the ears of the other nuns, who were accustomed to magnificent ritual language, and they winced as they entered them in the files; but they would keep their esthetic judgments to themselves.

CHAPTER 19

TO: All Homeroom Teachers, Grades 1–12

FROM: United States Department of Education, Curriculum Division, Subsection Four

Please be advised that no further requests for deviations from the established schedule of official Holiday Observances will be tolerated by this department. The current calendar of one Holiday Observance per week constitutes maximum efficiency coupled with maximal educational opportunity, and the recent agitation regarding the Fourth of July Observance must be the
last
such episode. No competent Homeroom Teacher should have any difficulty explaining to his students the appropriateness of celebrating the Fourth of July in January, since:

       
1.
  
Homeroom is not in session during July;

       
2.
  
January, like July, begins with the letter “J”;

       
3.
  
No other month of the school year begins with “J”.

Student proposals in this regard are to be
firmly
ignored; students who persist in efforts to have established HO's removed from the calendar, or their official dates changed—or who attempt to add unauthorized observances to the list!—are to be assigned Penalty Essays in one-thousand word increasing increments until they understand the futility of their efforts. (NOTE: Any Homeroom Teacher who allows a student to wangle an expulsion from Homeroom by such transparent tactics will receive a single warning; a second such incident shall be grounds for immediate dismissal without appeal. Such naiveté in teachers is
not
acceptable.)

Homeroom Teachers are reminded that the vigorous and enthusiastic
observance of our national holidays during Homeroom is crucial to the social development of the American child. Neglect of this principle has repeatedly been proved (see Hynderson & Whiplash 2026, Volume III, pp. 1349–1477) to represent a major barrier to normal cultural functioning. The list of the thirty-six official holidays for in-class observance during the school year is attached to this memorandum, together with the latest chart of suggested holiday-coordinated classroom activities.

G.R.E.

TEACHERS! DO YOU HAVE A NEW AND ZAPIPPY IDEA FOR HOLIDAY CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES? A SPECIAL WAY TO TIE IN GEOGRAPHY WITH EASTER? A UNIQUE CRAFT IDEA LINKING SOCIAL STUDIES WITH REAGAN'S BIRTHDAY? A NEW HISTORICAL SKIT FOR THANKSGIVING? SEND IT TO SUBSECTION FOUR TO BE SHARED WITH OTHER TEACHERS, FOR PUBLICATION IN THE MONTHLY ACTIVITIES BULLETIN! YOU WILL BE CREDITED WITH ONE DAY'S BONUS PAY FOR EACH SUGGESTION ACCEPTED AND PUBLISHED! (THE DEPARTMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO EDIT YOUR SUGGESTIONS, FOR LENGTH AND FOR STYLE.)

The room would not be appearing in the Terran Homes section of
Planet & Asteroid
. It did not have warmth, it did not have charm, and it was difficult to believe that it was intended for human occupation. It looked like the inside of a giant egg, emptied and scrubbed. High on the rear wall (in the sense that it was the surface farthest from you as you came in through the door) was a desk; like the room, it was absolutely white, and shaped like an egg. The curving walls were punctuated seemingly at random by niches, in which were stowed realbooks, microfiches, electronic gadgets, and a few personal items. The niche locations were in fact not random, but computer-generated according to an optimum equation for the purpose; Macabee Dow did not do anything randomly if he had control of the situation, and he had had total control of the construction and arrangement of this room. It was his study, and he cared nothing at all for the fact that it was spine-chillingly unwelcoming. So was he. The colleague foolish enough to suggest to him that what he was after in both study and desk was a womb had been informed that that was imbecilic, that wombs were dark red inside and their walls lined much of the time with blood, that it
was pitch dark inside a womb, that the interior surface of a womb was soft rather than hard, and that the inspiration for the room was the number nine. As Macabee
Dow
visualized the number nine.

Macabee was not bothered by the fact the floor was not flat; he never used it, and the ultrasonics that kept the study spotless cared nothing for the shape of what they cleaned. There was no “decoration” of any kind, not so much as a print or a flower or a holo; there were no lights or lamps, because the walls were translucent glow-sandwiches and the light came from everywhere. The indispensable blackboard (which was of course not black), the comset screen, anything that might have interrupted the smooth flow of glowing white, all were safely inside the desk where they could not offend the eye. As was Macabee, most of the time.