The Judas Rose (20 page)

Where the “potions” were concerned, it came swiftly; the concoctions of herbs that Dorcas produced were eccentric, but they were also helpful. The linguists raised their own herbs, free of chemicals and pollutants, with the children doing the gardening because it was good for their health; what would not grow in the climate of one Household was exchanged for what would grow in another, so that herbs from Africa went to Switzerland, and herbs from California went to Arkansas, and so on, with everything necessary being available to all thirteen families. The database on herbal medicine in the computers at Chornyak Barren House was awe-inspiring, and the women who put the potions together knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, Jo-Bethany envied them their skill, and intended to acquire it as
a fringe benefit of her employment. She was shrewd enough to realize that the knowledge was valuable, and that training as a herbalist might one day be her ticket to some genuinely interesting nursing position.

She also understood why the linguists had no medical pods. A patient sick enough to need a pod really should be in a hospital, and half a dozen superb facilities were within ten minutes of the Chornyaks by flyer. She would have been somewhat embarrassed to have to admit to Dorcas that in Ham Klander's house, along with the robot Irish setter and the array of multipurpose servomechanisms, there had been one medpod for each member of the family and two spares for the use of guests.
That
, she realized,
was
ostentatious extravagance, as much as marble hot tubs would have been.

But there were other things that bothered her. The chronic ward, for example . . . let them tell her all they liked that it was just a communal bedroom, she knew a chronic ward when she saw one. And the chronic ward at Chornyak Barren House was set up with nothing but beds and screens. On her first day on duty, with Dorcas still at her side to help her get her bearings in the job, she'd been taken to see those patients. Lying there like that, without even bedside healthies! It had been too much for her. She
had
asked: “
Why do you do this?
”

“There are healthies in the storage room,” Dorcas had said. “If we had a guest in the house who got sick and asked for a healthy, we could provide one right away. If there should be a . . . oh, an epidemic, something that overwhelmed our usual medical regime . . . we could put the healthies into service on a moment's notice. We have six, Nurse Schrafft, and we can certainly order more if six strikes you as inadequate emergency backup.”

Jo-Bethany hadn't known what to say. Even for new colonies, where the standard of living was necessarily nothing like that of Earth, one of the very first things shipped out was a cargo of healthies, along with the solar power units and the hydroponics equipment and the enzyme banks. To see patients without healthies was so strange that she hadn't been able to think of a neutral comment to make—her instinct, as nurse in residence, had been to demand that every bed in the room be equipped with its own healthy before dinnertime, that the same thing be done for the beds in the isolation infirmaries, and that there be six spare units in the storage room to supplement
those
. And even that would have been a primitive arrangement, with nearly two hundred potential patients for her to look after! “I'm sorry. I really can't
approve of this,” she had said finally, hearing the hesitation obvious in her voice and hating it.

Anywhere else she would not have hesitated. But one thing about the linguists that had turned out not to be a myth was their magnificent physical condition. When you were one of only three people on the planet who could speak some particular Alien language fluently, and that language was needed for a negotiation that had taken months to arrange and could not be postponed without serious consequences, it was literally a matter of planetary security for you to be in superb health. You had to always be able to go to the interpreting booth and carry out your duties; something as otherwise trivial as a cough ceased to be trivial when the import contracts for an essential mineral couldn't be drawn up because you weren't able to provide the simultaneous interpreting necessary to settle its terms. Every linguist child followed a diet and exercise regime tailored specifically to that child by experts that the Lines had on permanent retainer; every linguist still active in negotiations had a complete medical examination every six months, and the children were checked even more often. It didn't make
sense
, under the circumstances, for them not to have healthies in this room!

She had stood there, staring at the double row of beds, thinking that not to have healthies was barbaric, still hesitant; and then suddenly she had remembered something and her hesitation had vanished.

“Oh,
I
understand!” she had declared then, making a contemptuous announcement out of it, folding her arms tightly across her chest, hugging her outrage to her. “It's because they are
old!
”

She had expected Dorcas Chornyak to be taken aback, and she wasn't disappointed; the woman's eyes widened and her mouth parted in astonishment. The two of them stood staring at one another, Jo-Bethany fuming with righteous indignation, and Dorcas looking ridiculous with sheer surprise. But then Dorcas had begun to laugh, instead of looking ashamed as Jo-Bethany had expected her to do, and that had been the last straw.

“I don't find it amusing!” she had blurted out. “And I think it's disgusting! And completely inexcusable!”

That scene had gotten much worse before it got any better. She'd gone on with her speech for quite a while. “The public
knows
that long before you people put all your women except the little girls into separate houses you used to
banish
any woman past childbearing age, or any woman who couldn't have children for some other reason! We remember you doing that, you know
. . . and calling the place you sent them to ‘Barren House' to rub their noses in it! And now
these
women—” She had gestured dramatically toward the beds where the elderly women lay, with no privacy at all, hearing every word . . . “—they're not just barren, they're no use in your precious economy at all! So you just. . . .” She had struggled for the exact word, absolutely furious, out of control. “You just
dump
them here, without even minimal facilities, and you hire one licensed nurse to keep the authorities from coming along and taking them somewhere where they could be decently looked after! Well, I won't stand for that, Miss Chornyak—I won't stand for it one
minute
, and you might as well know it right now!” She had been shaking with rage before she got to the end of her oration.

One of the old ladies in the two facing rows of beds had spoken up then in the silence, sharply. “Dorcas,” she'd said, her voice thin but strong, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself! That poor child!”

“What poor child?” Jo-Bethany had demanded. “Do you have children in here,
too?
”

“
You
, my dear,” the old one had answered. “
You
are the poor child in question! Being given the tour of the back wards, and no preparation whatsoever for the horrors therein. What you'll say when you see our snakepits, I can't imagine.”

And that had sent everyone awake into gales of laughter, including the woman standing beside her, and had waked up those who'd been asleep. Dorcas had spoken through the laughter, chiding, “Benita, how can you be so wicked? You stop laughing and set this right, or I'll send for . . . let's see, which of the teenage males would you find most irritating?”

The old lady's hands had gone up instantly in a gesture of mock surrender, and the others had made an effort to get their hilarity under control, and Dorcas had touched Jo-Bethany's hand, gently.

“You're trembling, Miss Schrafft,” she'd said, “and I'm sorry. Furthermore, Benita is right, though there's no excuse for the way she chose to express herself. I should never have brought you here without first explaining it to you, so that you'd understand the situation. Please forgive me, if you can—it's been so long since we had a new nurse that I'd forgotten how strange it all would seem to you. Like not having running water, I suppose. . . . Miss Schrafft, the reason we don't have healthies at every bed—or at
any
bed—is not that we don't care about these women, or that they're old, or that they're useless. We'd be in serious difficulties here at Chornyak Household without
their expert services—you'll see that for yourself before this week is over. But right now I want to make sure you understand one thing very clearly: the reason that we don't have healthies in this room is because we don't approve of them.”

“You don't approve of them,” Jo-Bethany had echoed stupidly. It was
like
not approving of running water! Not approving of soap.

“That's right. If we'd been given the chance to name them, Miss Schrafft, we would have called them
un
healthies. And any woman here who wants one may have one, of course.” She turned to the women in the beds and asked them, “Anybody here want a healthy installed at your bed?”

There was no ambiguity about the resounding chorus of refusals. Or about the laughter that accompanied the chorus. Jo-Bethany, confused past bearing, humiliated, sure she was in the right, with everyone laughing at her, had burst into tears. To her absolute horror. As if she had been Melissa!

The reaction to her distress had amazed her. She had stood with her hands over her face, tears dripping through her fingers, expecting to be ordered to leave at once and not return until she could behave decently—in their place, that is what she would have considered proper. She would not have been surprised to hear herself told to report to the Head, or to pack her things and go home in disgrace, permanently discharged without a recommendation. Instead, women had materialized out of nowhere, half a dozen of them, as if they'd sprung from the floor beneath her feet. Three had gone swiftly to soothe the elderly women, and to settle back on their pillows a few who had apparently decided they had to get up and go to Jo-Bethany's rescue themselves. Dorcas and another three had bustled Jo-Bethany off to a small empty bedroom on the floor below, installed her in a comfortable chair, and settled themselves on the floor around her feet as if to wait for wisdom to drop from her lips. And someone else had brought strong hot tea and fresh-baked spice bread almost instantly. Not until she'd had the tea and the spice bread and the combined soothing and stroking of all five women present (who certainly had had much more important things to do!) had they allowed her to try to talk about the matter that had set her off. And then they had listened to her with their whole attention, nodding once in a while to encourage her, never once interrupting, until she'd said every single narrow-minded bigoted word she had to say. Only when they were sure she'd spoken what passed for her mind did they begin to explain.

The linguists didn't use healthies, they told her then, because
they were convinced that the touch of human hands, the nonverbal communication of live hands doing the tending, was absolutely essential to the care of the sick. They were willing to pay what it cost to have that tending done by human hands, and to provide much of it themselves, with their
own
hands. Only when there was no human being available to tend a patient, or when the only human being available would have been unkind or uncaring, did they consider healthies appropriate, and within the Lines those situations did not exist. They might have been wrong in their belief that the mechanical nursing was bad for the patient—certainly the physicians who had taught Jo's class at nursing school would have considered that not only scientifically incorrect but superstitious, and the evidence for the medical position was overwhelming. But the women of Chornyak Barren House were
not
without healthies because they were old, or because they were not loved. The women had made sure Jo-Bethany understood that, and they had done it without shaming her.

“How could you have known?” they had asked her. “There was no way you could have known.”

“And, Miss Schrafft,” one said to her firmly, “we think it's very important for you to know that women were never ‘banished' to the Barren Houses.”

“Everyone knows they were,” Jo-Bethany had heard herself say, almost in a whisper, as if she had not learned anything at all that day. “The mass-ed computers, in the lessons about the linguists. . . .” She stopped, finally remembering some of the other things she'd heard in those lessons, that had turned out to be nonsense.

“Everyone ‘knows' all sorts of things, Miss Schrafft. Everyone knows that the world holds still beneath their feet except during earthquakes; that does not keep it from turning around, or from traveling through space at many thousands of miles an hour. Everyone knows a great deal of
garbage
, my dear. And that banishing business . . . that's garbage. It's possible that some of the men did think they were ‘banishing' women to the Barren Houses—that is possible. But the women themselves . . . they did not feel banished. The women could hardly wait.”

“Being sent out of their home? Being—”

“Miss Schrafft . . . Jo-Bethany . . . please. Look at me.”

It was Dorcas, and Jo-Bethany did look, obediently responding to the tone of voice in spite of her reluctance to look anywhere but at the floor.

“Jo-Bethany, have you lived in a house with a man recently? Just one man?”