The Judas Rose Read online

  “I’m sorry, Sisters,” she said gravely. “I don’t understand why you’ve called me.”

  “Please, Antonia,” said Ruth. “It’s time for another pain—please watch.”

  Antonia nodded, and looked again at the woman on the bed. She saw the great belly gather, clench, and ripple under the force of a major contraction; she must be far advanced, the birth near.

  “How close together?” she demanded.

  “Less than a minute now. And good long ones.”

  “And she’s been like this all along?”

  “Exactly like this.”

  Antonia waited through one more pain, to be sure, and then she went straight out the door to the staircase and pressed the alarm that would bring the Mother Superior at once. Mother would be a bit startled when her wrist computer told her where the alarm was coming from, but that would not delay her.

  “Do you think—” Claudia began, but Sister Antonia shook her head, saying, “We’ll wait for Mother, Sisters.”

  Dorothea Luke, Mother Superior of this convent for forty years and a Sister Of Genesis for nearly sixty, reached them in minutes, and when Sister Antonia had explained she did not wait to verify what she was told. “Sister Ruth! Sister Claudia!” she said. “Leave us at once, both of you!”

  They turned startled eyes to her, and she said again only, “At once!”, and they hurried away looking troubled, but without offering either objections or questions. Dorothea Luke closed the door after them, sighing heavily, wishing this were not happening under her roof, and she and Antonia went to the bed where the woman lay. They bent over her together, urgently.

  “You must scream, my child,” said the Mother Superior tenderly. She leaned close, and spoke directly into the young woman’s face, because it would not be easy to get her attention at this stage. “Jane! It’s Mother Dorothea Luke. Sister Antonia and I are here to help you. Listen to me, child—you must scream! For the sake of your immortal soul, my dear child . . . you must.”

  Not a sound. The fierce contractions, almost continuous now, wracked her body, but except for the rough animal panting she was absolutely silent. According to the other nuns, she had not so much as whimpered, in all this time. Not a word of complaint. She should have been shrieking by now, begging for mercy, begging them to free her from her agony, but she was doing nothing of the kind. She was working; she was laboring; but she made no outcry. She was not even weeping. And that would not do. In the Book of Genesis it was decreed: a woman must bring forth her children in sorrow, that she might be cleansed of the guilt of tempting Adam and causing the Fall of all humankind. This woman knew that, must know that; however empty her own faith, she’d spent almost every Sunday morning of her life in a church. There was no chance that she had not heard the verses that applied to her condition.

  “Jane! Jane Jefferson! For your soul’s sake, you must scream!”

  Nothing! Nothing but the panting; and now the deeper sounds that meant the moment was upon them.

  There was no time for discussion. There was only one thing to be done, and by a quick jerk of her head the Mother Superior authorized it. They were older women, she and Antonia, but they were as strong as most men; they had spent their lives lifting and turning and hauling and tending. Antonia went to the other side of the bed; and she and Dorothea Luke, moving as one, threw their bodies with full strength upon Jane’s, holding her thighs tight together in a grip that even the frenzy of birth would not be able to loose.

  “Now,” said the Mother Superior, she, too, panting with effort, “now, my child, we will explain to you. And you will listen to us, because we will hold you, exactly like this, until you do. We ask your forgiveness, Jane, for what will seem to you to be cruelty—we are not cruel, dear child, we are doing what we must do if you are not to spend all eternity in the depths of Hell.” And she and Antonia together, never for an instant weakening the hold they had on Jane and on the infant struggling to come into the world, began murmuring the appropriate verses of Genesis. Tenderly, with infinite love, they explained the case to Jane.

  She did scream, before they were through. She screamed quite satisfactorily, bringing smiles of relief and gratitude to the faces of both the women tending her, before it was over.

  The other nuns had no respect for little Sister Carapace, and she knew that. She was so low in their estimation that she had nothing to lose; it was an attitude she went to great pains to cultivate in them. It was Carapace who came into the cellar room that afternoon, when the dusk had begun to fall and it was easy to tuck a newborn infant into the bottom of a basket and spread a light cloth over it to hide the nature of her burden. She went through the door, and she locked it behind her, which was strictly forbidden; if she were caught, if she were asked why she had done that, she would say that she had been confused, and she would be believed. She was only silly Sister Carapace, almost always confused.

  She went over to the narrow bed, where the young woman lay with huge eyes in an ashen face, staring at the ceiling in the way that victims of any torture do stare, and she reached out to gather the rigid body into her arms. When Jane resisted, Carapace was prepared for that; she reached into the deepest pocket of her skirt and took out a small wreath of wild vines no bigger than her palm, and she laid it in the other woman’s hand. She waited until the tormented face cleared, and understanding showed in the eyes, and then she tried again. “Dear child,” she said softly, and kissed her forehead, and this time the girl came to her willingly and let herself be comforted. Carapace set two plump pillows behind Jane’s back and helped her to sit up on them, and smoothed her wet hair. And then she took the infant from the basket on the floor and put it to its mother’s breast and saw the tiny mouth first fumble and then grip tightly on the nipple.

  No milk there yet, of course, but substances necessary to the well-being of this baby, made by the mother’s body through the infinite generosity of the Blessed Lord. It never ceased to astonish Carapace—that generosity, embodied in women. Every month for most of her life, a woman’s body prepared wholesome life-sustaining food. In abundance, always made new each four weeks, just in case. Just in case! In case some child, male or female, might have need of it. It was a miracle, though it was a miracle a woman was obliged to hide away as if it were a mark of shame instead of a mark of God’s grace. And then there were these substances of birth, first the colostrum with its powerful medicines against illness, and then the good pure milk . . . more miracles! It was just such miracles that had drawn Carapace into the Sisters Of Genesis and sustained her through the rigors of its novitiate, in spite of every obstacle placed before her; and when she found herself in a situation like this present one she was very glad that she had not given up.

  “Dear child,” she said briskly, because nothing would be gained by maudlin sympathizing, “it’s over. There won’t be any more pain, and no one will torment you any longer, for any reason. Here’s your sweet babe, Jane—such a lovely little baby girl! Look, Jane, look at how beautiful her little face is; look at the perfect little eyebrows and eyelashes! I don’t know how many newborns I’ve seen that seemed to have no brows or lashes at all, but just look at this one! Isn’t she beautiful, Jane?” As she talked, she took the vine wreath gently from the girl’s hand and dropped it back into the depths of her pockets.

  She went on like that a while. A flow of the sort of empty soothing nonsense that was just what was needed right now. Until the awful rigidity left the pale face, and a shadow of a smile tugged at the corners of the bloodied lips.

  “Who are you, Sister?” It was only a whisper, but it was a return to the world beyond shock and terror, and it gladdened Sister Carapace to hear it. “I was told . . . the other nuns told me I wouldn’t be allowed to see my baby, not even once. May I know your name, Sister?”

  “I’m only Sister Carapace,” said the nun, who had been born a Doris and had been “only Doris” until she took her vows. “And if the other sisters learn that I’ve brought you your child, they
will expel me from the Order. I’m not afraid of that; there’s plenty of work to do out in the world. But if I’m not here, there’ll be no one to help when someone like you needs me. And so you will be very careful not to betray me, sweet little Jane of the Lines, won’t you?” She kissed Jane again, and kissed the top of the baby’s head where the blood pulsed, and repeated her warning. “There’s no one else here, except me, Jane.”

  Jane Jefferson’s voice was weary, but it was not weak. “Sister Carapace,” she said, “they must have told you what happened here—you must know what was done to me.”

  “Yes,” said the nun, her voice heavy with pity. “Mother told us, and told us why. And it’s a very good thing I wasn’t here then, because I would have fainted and then I would have been in trouble with Mother. Yes; they told us all.”

  “Well, then . . . consider what it took to make me cry out, Sister Carapace. What do you think it would take to make me betray you?”

  The nun smiled at her, and laid one hand against her cheek.

  “Thank you, Jane,” she said. “I always wonder.”

  “You don’t need to wonder, not this time. And Sister—my name is Aquina. After my great-grandmother Aquina.”

  Sister Carapace stayed a few minutes longer, sitting quietly on the bench against the wall that had been brought in for this birthing, watching the mother and baby with silent satisfaction, listening for the rustle of a heavy skirt on the steps outside the door. And then she stood up and said, “I have to take her away now, child. I’m so sorry. But she’ll be missed if we stay longer—or I will.”

  She thought the mother might plead for just another minute; many would have, and it was natural. But Aquina didn’t do that. Without a word, she took her baby gently from her breast and handed her to Sister Carapace to be fit back into the basket. Sound asleep, the baby would be returned with less hazard of discovery than it had been brought.

  As she left the room, promising to bring the child again the next day as soon as it could be managed, Sister Carapace blundered into the doorframe. She had reacted instantly to shield the baby from the blow, slight as it was; and she stopped to apologize to the doorframe.

  “I am so sorry,” said foolish Sister Carapace.

  Behind her, Aquina laughed in spite of her raw throat.

  Later, when she told Nazareth Chornyak Adiness what had happened, the old woman made a soft distressed noise. “I told you to scream, you stubborn foolish child,” she fussed. “I warned you! Why didn’t you? Or at least a few dramatic moans . . . that would have satisfied them, I expect.”

  “I didn’t want to,” said Aquina, firming her mouth. “It’s nothing to scream about, Nazareth. Such silly ignorant superstition!”

  Nazareth turned her head to hide her smile, and murmured that she was her great-grandmother all over again.

  Which pleased Aquina mightily.

  The baby was named Miriam Rose—a suitably simple name—and she kept that name when she entered the novitiate of the Order of Saint Gertrude of the Lambs at the age of thirteen, becoming Sister Miriam. Still simple. Through those thirteen years she was smuggled out of the building and smuggled back in in a few reliable ways; like her mother, Miriam knew how to keep her mouth shut. It wasn’t always easy, but everyone was very busy and nobody paid much attention to what one silly woman did, and Sister Carapace managed. Sometimes it was the mother she smuggled in and out, disguised as a nun heavily veiled or cloaked or hooded. But she managed, always, so that until Miriam entered the novitiate, where close supervision made it truly impossible, she and Aquina had time enough together.

  In the care of the good sisters, Miriam began speaking Panglish like any other American child. From her mother, she learned Sign, so that even at the most dangerous of times they could still communicate. From both her mother and Sister Carapace, she learned Láadan, the womanlanguage constructed by the women of the Lines. All of these were valuable to her, and she made good use of them.

  But they were not what mattered most, and Aquina and Sister Carapace made sure she understood that. What mattered most, and what she worked at with almost fanatic dedication, was the skill they taught her of using her voice and her body in communication as the linguists did—like exquisitely tuned instruments, responsive to the smallest scrap of data, instantly adjustable to the needs of every language interaction. If she’d had nothing but that skill and Panglish, she could have done what she was in this world to do. The rest was just so much gingerbread, so much trimming, helpful and delightful. But not crucial to her task, which was deception.

  Miriam understood that perfectly.

  CHAPTER 3

  “It was only coincidence that every Alien civilization we encountered was so advanced beyond the civilizations of Earth that we looked like pathetic savages scrabbling in the dirt by comparison. I knew that, of course; I understood the laws of probability. And I knew that in time, of all the inhabited worlds there were, we would begin to come upon the many whose peoples were far behind or at best equal to ours.

  “It is impossible for Earth to be the most backward inhabited planet in the known universe, the proof of that being overpoweringly obvious: it is to Earth that God sent His only begotten Son with the gift of eternal life, and it is Earth that God entrusted with the mission of spreading the Good News to every other world. God does not make errors, and I was in no way disturbed as we discovered world upon world with fancier gadgets than ours. However, the average man in the street does not always have my faith, even when he understands the principles of science. And I knew—all of us at the top knew—what would happen if the apparent skew toward Alien “superiority” were to become known to the Terran populations. That way lay hysteria and panic, or worse; that way lay the fate of the dinosaurs, or perhaps the lemmings.

  “The holding action we decided upon was therefore absolutely necessary; it was in fact crucial to the survival of our species and to the work of God. The policy of total deception was implemented at the highest levels, with the full understanding that anyone showing the smallest sign of a potential for betraying the situation would be killed at once and without remorse; there would be no exceptions, not even in the White House. That is the sort of killing that God not only permits, but endorses. And it seemed to me that here was the full explanation of the story of the Tower of Babel. If communication with the Aliens had not been limited by the difficulty of learning their languages—if ordinary citizens could have had casual and unsupervised conversations with Aliens—I doubt very much that we would have been able to restrict the flow of information to just those items it was safe for the general public to know. It was a barrier that gave the linguists an excessive amount of power; on the other hand, it was a barrier that made control of the public’s knowledge possible, and was therefore to be welcomed rather than deplored. Like the enmity between the linguists and the pubic—because a careless word let slip to a linguist by an Alien would then be unlikely to go beyond the linguist Households—it was unpleasant, but absolutely essential. I never felt the least twinge of guilt about all this, though I felt deep regret. And I have seen God’s divine hand in the convenient fact that the aliens have without exception been as anxious to keep the secret as we have.

  “We knew that the situation, infuriating as it was, was temporary, and that our turn would come as surely as the luck of the gambler shifts from player to player when the dice are flung. But in the meantime, we were in unanimous accord. WHATEVER HAD TO BE DONE TO KEEP THE PEOPLE OF EARTH FROM KNOWING, IT WOULD BE DONE. We had no higher human directive than that one.”

  (from the private papers of Heykus Joshua Clete, with instructions that they be made public only “subsequent to the implementation of Condition Golden” . . .)

  Kony had had a number of ideas about the best way to spend the night before the session. He’d made a list. There was the trip to the Ho Do Da Casino Complex, where he would gamble away at least one million credits, awing everyone at the tables with his total disdain for his losses
and his indifference to his winnings. There was the one where a dozen expensive go-come girls were delivered to his room and he exhausted the entire dozen, with every sound and movement preserved on holotape, and then had fifty copies made and sent out by special messenger to all his friends. Not that he had fifty friends, but he could have sent some of them a matched set. There was the one where he strolled casually down to the port district and cleaned out bar after bar, systematically, leaving a trail of battered and bleeding males behind him, and not one mark on his brawny brutal self. There was the one with the massive three-horned killer bulls of Planet Blair-Edna, that ended with him swinging a pair of the poisonous central horns around his head like batons and roaring his laughter into the respectful crowds that watched him.

  It was getting to be a long list. As was reasonable, since what he actually did before each session was spend the night polishing and perfecting and expanding the list. In his head, it was titled “WAYS TO EXHIBIT MY AWESOME PERSONAL POWER”; on the paper, it was titled simply “List.”

  Antony Fordle, who sat beside Kony in the tiny compartment, had spent his night the same way, making the same sort of list, in the same sort of excruciating detail. It was what they had been trained to do. It was what every one of the D.A.T. Special Ambassadors had been trained to do, on the careful advice of the supershrink hired by Government Work to solve the problem. Who perhaps had actually died almost immediately thereafter of a heart attack, as reported in the tasteful obituary.

  None of them would actually do any of the things on the list. Not before the session; not after. Another of the things they were trained to do was be inconspicuous. A trail of battered and bleeding toughs . . . a trail of battered and bleeding three-horned killer bulls . . . it would not do. Even a trail of glowing satiated go-come girls would not do. The list wasn’t for actual planning purposes. The list was to pump up your ego to such monstrous inflated proportions that it would carry you through the session. The supershrink, like any med-Sammy, had been sure he was right; he had insisted that it would do that very well.