The Judas Rose (57 page)

Stiffly, feeling the cold sweat on his upper lip, glad that there were no mechanisms analyzing
his
physical status, he insisted that he had good reasons for what he was saying but was not at liberty to make them specific.

“Nonsense,” said one of the younger brothers. “What nonsense. At a time like this!” And he had hung up, leaving Heykus feeling old and weary and defeated. And more aware of Satan's awesome power than he had been in many years. But he had had to try.

To ease the weight of his helplessness, he looked Sister Miriam up in the databanks. She was there, with her Federal Identification number and her blood type, her height and eye color and allergies; because she was a nun—born at the convent, he noted, and illegitimate, parents unknown—she had no possessions and no record of any earnings. No titles, no distinctions. Her immunizations were there. Her mass-ed summary score. All those things that he could have read from the tattoos in her armpits if he'd wished to remove all that black fabric she was swathed in, but nothing else. No infractions of any kind; apparently she had no driver's or pilot's license, had never been to any school outside the convent, had never undergone even minor surgery. A
thoroughly unremarkable life. The life of almost any nun, for all he knew.

He sat reviewing the brief entry, dissatisfied with it and not sure why; something about it bothered him. He knew it would come to him, whatever it was, and he waited patiently for the necessary neurons to kick in.

Ah! He knew what it was.
Parents unknown. Born at the Convent of St. Gertrude of the Lambs, parents unknown
. That was the problem. It should have read only “father unknown,” if she had been born at the convent and not simply abandoned there. They would have had to know who the mother was, and the law required that it be reported. The nun he spoke to at St. Gertrude's agreed with him, and she apologized profusely. These things happen. Disgraceful. A clerical error, so long ago. A computer stumbling on a tiny chunk of data, so long ago. We are only women, we make errors. Such a shame. And so on and so on, until he knew it was a dead end and gave it up.

He considered it briefly, and filed it away. Come a time when he was not busy, should such a time ever appear on his horizon, he would bring it out again and pursue it, and he would find out what lay behind this convenient little gap in the data. But not right now. Right now he had too many other urgent matters to deal with, and no time to waste on one odd nursing nun, who had taken advantage of his distress about a dying friend and unbalanced him in some way. It had already taken all the time he could spare, and he had done all he could do, and none of it would be any use to Philip. He let it rest.

CHAPTER 26

It was not that we were unaware that all change comes about by resonance; we knew that very well. Our problem was that so large a number of men seemed immune even to the most fundamental frequencies.

           
(From “The Discourse of the Three Marys”—author unknown.)

There is a silence that follows reports of great tragedies of nature. Earthquakes and hurricanes; raging fires that swallow hundreds of thousands of acres of forests; volcanoes and avalanches. It was that sort of a silence, and Father Joseph sat within it waiting for someone to break it, thinking that when it was broken it would sound like ice breaking on a great northern lake. But the fearsome crack that split the air sounded nowhere except inside his throbbing head. The words, when they did come, were little more than a whisper.

The Cardinal spoke to him, calling him none of the things that Joseph had expected to be called, saying only, “Joseph, this is all very difficult for us to believe. You must understand that.”

It echoed. How could a whisper echo? Perhaps you had to be a Cardinal, or perhaps it was this ancient cavernous room with its vaulted ceiling and its bare floors and uncurtained windows.

“I know that,” Joseph mumbled through the weight of his misery. “I know that, Your Eminence. But I am saying—truly—what was said to me. And it is true, Your Eminence.”

“It couldn't be a hoax? Or delirium—a dying woman's delirium? Surely, my son, it could be that.”

He shook his head. “The Bishop did not think so,” he said.
“And I don't think so. Your Eminence, I am familiar with deathbeds.”

“Why did they send
you
to tell us?”

Still that eerie whisper, echoing, drifting up into the dimness of the ceilings high above; outside, a seagull screamed.

Joseph prepared himself to answer, thinking that until now “I'll never be a Cardinal” had been only something that modesty obligated him to say, not something he believed. Now it was a verdict passed on him; now it was a
fact
. Would they even let him continue to be a priest? He didn't know, and his Bishop had told him it would have to be decided at the Vatican; he hadn't known either.

“They sent me,” he said, faltering, stumbling over huge consonants and vowels that stretched off into vast distances, the sounds that came from his mouth seeming to have nothing to do with him, “because things could not be any worse for me. No one else wanted to bring you such news. I didn't want to, either; the difference was that
they
had a choice.”

The Cardinal was getting very old, but he was in no way frail; the color was coming back into his face as he adjusted to the shock, and the others around the room, his advisors and most trusted associates, were recovering as well. For a few moments they had been frozen, motionless; they had been the ice Joseph was waiting to hear break. How many of them were there? He didn't know, because he had not dared look. There might be hundreds, sitting back in corners and in alcoves, down stairwells, high on balconies. . . . No. Surely not. Surely only a handful would be allowed to know about this. He must keep his imagination under better rein; there was no one in the shadows. Except ghosts, perhaps. He could well imagine that there might be ghosts.

Now the Cardinal leaned forward in his chair; now, when he spoke, his voice was strong and deep and sure of where it went.

“My son,” he said, “I want to hear it all again.”

Joseph made a noise, not precisely a whimper, not precisely a moan. He said, “Your Eminence. Please. For the love of God.”

“
For the love of God
, my son. Exactly. For the love of God, you will tell it all again. This time we will be prepared; we will not be so stunned that we can't hear you over our own foolish thoughts, roaring in our ears. You will begin again, Joseph.”

“I have told it so many times,” Joseph knew he sounded fretful, perhaps insolent; he did not care. It was hopeless. It no longer mattered what he did. He was a hopeless priest who had violated his most sacred vows, and it was a hopeless cruel
exercise for him to sit here reciting it all again. He would do it because he was vowed to obedience, and because he was afraid to defy the Cardinal, and because he had no excuse to refuse. But it was awful. To say it all again. Horrible. Unbearable.

His mouth went on saying words, his tongue went on shaping them; the body simulated awareness. “There is a nun for whom I am—was—confessor. Her name was Maria. Sister Maria. I had been her confessor for more than ten years. She died two days ago . . . Wednesday, that would be, in the early evening. I was called to her to hear her final confession, and to perform the last rites.” He could still see the agony that had been on Sister Maria's face when he had hurried into the room—he had turned in horror to the nurse standing in the door, to demand that something be given to still this pain, but she had assured him quietly that there was no
physical
pain. That had all been attended to. Whatever was troubling the nun cradled in the medpod, open now to give the priest access, it was not physical pain.

“Please go on, my son,” instructed the Cardinal sharply. “We are waiting.”

“Sister Maria was a humble woman, very ordinary. At least that's what I always
thought
she was. She worked in the convent office. Doing correspondence for the Abbess, keeping the databases in order, that sort of thing. Sometimes she worked in the convent library; she was good at little things. Details. She was dying—she sent for me.” He drew a long breath, like a sob. “She told me that for nearly forty years she had been a kind of double agent. A kind of spy.”

“Must you use such a melodramatic vocabulary, Joseph?” the Cardinal asked him, testy, but kind.

“Eminence, what
shall
I call her, if I don't? A liar? A traitor? A deceitful evil twisted fraud of a woman? Eminence, none of those is the right phrase, either. Eminence, she had posed forty years as a faithful ordinary little nun. And all that time, in every moment she could steal, what she was really doing. . . .”

His voice trailed off, and he saw that the Cardinal was no longer a real person. He was a flat cutout, garbed in red, perhaps braced by a stick in back. Joseph would have been afraid to look around behind him.

“Go on, my son. What she was really doing was?”

“She was making copies of the blasphemous King James translations prepared by the female perverts of the linguist families.” Very quickly, he told the cutout that, so that it would be over.

“Copies of the
original
translations, you mean. Not the revisions that were done by order of Bishop Dorien.”

“Yes, Eminence. And distributing those copies secretly to other sisters involved in the conspiracy.”

“Double agents! Conspiracies! Joseph, these are only women. Only
nuns
. We are not talking of warrior chieftains on the Planet Gehenna, we are talking of
nuns!
” The Cardinal's voice thundered across the room toward him and Joseph crouched lower to be a less easy target for it.

“What do you want me to say?” he cried out, absurdly, panicked. “It's not my fault! There aren't any other words! What do you want me to say?
Tell
me, tell me and I will
say
it!”

The Cardinal stared at him; they would all be staring. You do not shout at a Prince of the Church.

You do not betray the sanctity of the confessional, either, and he had done that. You do not spend ten years hearing the innermost secrets of a woman rotted with perversion without ever suspecting, without ever noticing that help is desperately needed, either, and he had done that. His contempt for himself was greater, far greater, than his contempt for Sister Maria. He had failed her in life; and then he had failed her in death. How could he not have known? His Bishop had said, “I should think you would have been able to
smell
her!” He hadn't been; he hadn't guessed a thing; he had been her easy dupe, for more than ten years.

Wearily, he finished it. “She told me—Sister Maria told me—that the . . . that the
group
of nuns involved had been gathered together, recruited, by Sister Miriam of St. Gertrude's.”

“The woman that Bishop Dorien put in charge of revising those translations so that they would be theologically pure,” said the Cardinal wonderingly. “The same woman!”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“How many copies? How many are involved? How many of our nuns have been corrupted by this Judas?”

This Judas, thought Father Joseph. It was apt, and it would be the first phrase on every priest's lips. The Cardinal had not known Sister Miriam, of course, had not experienced her commanding beauty nor the extraordinary presence that was like a garment she put on or took off, just as she chose. But Joseph's bishop had known her, and had known that her name was Miriam Rose, and had said a little more. He had called her “the Judas Rose.” Judas for her treachery; Rose for her false perfection. Rose with a worm at its heart, a venomous worm; rose with poison tipping its thorns.

“She is the Judas Rose,” he said aloud.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bishop Paul said it. He said, ‘We have all been betrayed by that Judas Rose of Dorien's.' ”

“How
many?
” the Cardinal insisted, urgently, waving his hand with its heavy ring to indicate how little interest he had in Bishop Paul's flights of fancy. “We need numbers, my son.”

“Your Eminence, I don't have any numbers to give you. Sister Maria died before I could question her properly. We tried the most powerful stimulants—I sent for a doctor—but she was gone, it was too late. I know only what I have already told you: Sister Maria said that the copies were sent to sisters ‘all over the world.' ”

“All over the world. It could be ten. Or a thousand.”

“Surely not a thousand, Eminence! Each copy had to be made by hand—can you imagine that? By hand? Because of course the convents keep strict accounting of every hard copy from the comsets and the old copying machines that some of them still use. A sister can't just go run off a breviary for herself whenever the whim takes her, not on a poverty budget.”

“Do you mean to say that ‘made by hand' means
written by hand?
Actually written out in longhand script?”

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

The Cardinal was nodding, his mind focused on the problem. He said nothing for a long time, and then he asked, “Did your Sister Maria tell you whether this blasphemy had been sent out into the colonies? To carry its evil
beyond
this world?”