The Judas Rose (22 page)

“Why in the world not? You're a woman, aren't you? You're literate? Your vocal tract works normally? Of course you could.”

“I wonder.”

“We'll help you,” said the old woman.

“Pardon me?” Jo-Bethany's hands stopped straightening the shelf at the head of the bed; she listened carefully, realizing that this mattered to her. More than she wanted anything to matter. The way Melissa mattered was enough.

“I said, we'll help you. We old doddering ladies, here in this room. We have time. You go to Dorcas Chornyak and you tell her that Letha said to give you copies of some of the readings you like best—short ones, to start with. And you bring them up here and let us help you learn to do them properly.”

“You'd do that?”

“We'd do that. We'd be
pleased
to do that.”

Jo-Bethany knew she had a silly smirk of delight on her face; she could see it in the eyes of the other women as she looked around her. But she didn't care. They were a tolerant bunch, and it took more than a silly smirk to distract them in any serious way. So confident was she of that tolerance that she clapped her hands for pure pleasure. And they all told her, yet one more time, that she was a good child.

CHAPTER 9

“
But
why?”
asked the child. “Why choose a wild vine wreath? With the whole world full of lovely things to choose from?”

“It was the best choice,” said the very old woman. “The very best choice of all.”

The child was stubborn; she stood there frowning, and shaking her head, and tapping one foot, and she began listing what
she
perceived as proper symbols of a faith. “A star,” she said firmly. “A lotus. A wooden cross. An elephant. A rose. A coiled serpent, with wings and feathers. A round perfect sun. A crescent moon. A pearl that has no flaw. A—”

The great-grandmother reached out and touched the child's hand, gently. “I do know that list, dearlove,” she reminded her.

“Well . . . those things are more suitable!” the child declared. And then she saw the look in the old woman's eyes in their nest of tiny wrinkles, and she added quickly, “In
my
opinion, that is.”

“If I tell you why the wild vine wreath is ‘suitable,' as you put it, are you old enough to listen, and not interrupt?”

“Yes, ma'am!” said the child.

The very old woman leaned forward with both her hands clasped tightly on her cane. “First,” she said, “the wild vine is always right at hand, even in a wilderness; even in a city, if you look a bit. Unlike elephants. It doesn't cost a penny, the wild vine doesn't; you can be very poor indeed, and still, you can have yourself a wild vine wreath.”

“Unlike elephants,” said the child.

“I could have sworn I heard you say you would not interrupt.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the child admitted. “And I forgot. But I won't again.”

“Going on,” the old woman said, “the wild vine wreath is a
circle moving ever toward perfection, round and round and round and round again. But it is
real!
It's a circle with bumps and jogs and rough patches and curlicues and the occasional sharp point—and that is what a human life is like, as
it
moves ever toward perfection, round and round and round and round again. Third, it does not draw attention to itself. A woman can carry a tiny one in her pocket or hang it on a nail or slip it over the strap of her purse; she can toss a bigger one over a fencepost or lean it against a wall or hang it in a tree; and nobody that's not looking for one will see it for weeks or months or years. Or if they do, and they throw it away . . . well, it's always easy to make another one. Or suppose a woman has no out-of-the-way place for it, she can always tie on a ribbon and some trinket and put it up boldly, and the men will remark on what silly things women find pretty and then they'll never think of it again. Are you still listening, child?”

“Yes, Great-Grandmother.”

“Then there's the fact that the wild vine wreath is strong, and forgiving, and it endures. When you wind one, you can feel it take its own sturdy shape in your hands, helping you out, and settling into it for the long haul. Break it somewhere, cut it somewhere, wear it out somewhere, no matter; a woman just tucks in the broken piece among the others, and they keep it whole. It's easy to carry and hard to damage, and it takes no special training to make or to preserve. It can be put to use as well as to ornament; and when it is useful it is still an ornament, and when it is ornamental it stays useful, and there is no separation between ornament and use. Do you begin to understand, child?”

“Yes, Great-Grandmother.”

“Going on, every wild vine wreath is known at once for what it is—you couldn't mistake it for anything else—but no two are exactly alike, or ever will be
. Suitable,
child, to the human condition! In every way. And that is all the reasons I am inclined to spell out for you. You go observe a wild vine wreath, with your own good mind, and many another reason will come to you. You look at it, and you hold it in your hands, and you smell it all over; press it hard, bend it a little, and listen to the sound it makes. Go make yourself a new one of your very own, dearlove, and pay it close attention as you go along—the wild vine wreath is a fine and patient teacher.”

“Unlike an elephant.”

“Oh,” said the old woman, “the elephant is a fine and patient teacher, too! You come upon one, you observe it well, child.
There's much to be learned from elephants, and stars, and roses, and every one of those things you were mentioning.”

“But the wild vine is always right at hand,” said the child, and the very old woman laughed, and stood up slowly. “There,” she said to the child, “you see? There you are, learning already! Gone full circle and coming around again. . . .”

(a teaching story, much loved by the women of the Lines)

Heykus Clete was an old-fashioned man; he had old-fashioned tastes. If there'd been any way he could have done it without spaceflight, he would have eagerly become a citizen on a frontier planet where even the wealthiest homes and businesses still had computers that could only be activated from keyboards, and where travel by personal flyer rather than ground car was a goal far down on the list of priorities. He could well imagine himself being perfectly happy in the primitive bubble huts, robot-packed at NASA in small cartons, that settlers carried out to the colonies and called home. He could imagine living without a single servomechanism; he could imagine being obliged to clean everything—including his body—with water; he could even imagine living with weather so uncontrolled that you could never really make plans with any certainty. He could imagine all those things without a twinge, although the thought of tornadoes and earthquakes and similar cataclysms happening in populated areas was a little unsettling.

But his terror of leaving Earth's atmosphere—very unlike the abstract uneasiness that comes of knowing there may be tornadoes—had kept him bound to Earth, and there was nowhere on Earth that a man could escape technology. For groups like the Amish, this was a serious matter, a permanent spiritual crisis. They found it almost impossible to carry out their daily lives without interacting with the gadgetry their faith called evil; but that same faith forbade them to use the spacecraft that would have let them emigrate to colonies where a simple life was still at least achievable in theory. It made them a denomination in serious danger of going the way of the Shakers, into extinction; they held prayer vigils that went on for days at a time, praying for a revelation that would let them live without violating their beliefs. Heykus was sorry for them in their trouble, and impatient with them for not simply accepting the obvious rightness of the mainstream Protestant denominations, but he envied them, too; because what bound them to this planet was
faith
, not a
shameful womanish cowardice. Heykus was far more afraid of the daily moonshuttle than he was of any weather, tame or wild, and that limited his options.

There was no way to do anything in an old-fashioned way on Terra anymore. It was a sad thing, to Heykus' way of thinking. You couldn't say, “I won't order my groceries by comset, I'll go to the grocery store,” because there weren't any grocery stores left. The infrastructure of roads and trucks and docks that had supported the grocery stores was long gone. You could
play
at having a grocery store, and find a handful of others to play at it with you (that was what the Amish did), but you knew it was a game and you knew it would have to end one of these days. People who hated modern conveniences were like people who thrived on violence and danger; they had tremendous value to society because they were so badly needed on the frontiers. The government had no intention of providing them with facilities that would make them less frustrated with the system on Earth. If they didn't see for themselves that the attitudes which made them misfits here made them potential leaders in the spaceboonies, there were plenty of colony scouts always on the stalk ready and able to point it out to them and move them on out.

But you had to travel through space. There wasn't any other way to get out there. Heykus was personally convinced that the Aliens who interacted routinely with Earth did have matter transporters, in the old science fiction sense. Gadgets that would get you and all the gear you could carry from Point A to Point C, without having to go through the intervening expanse represented by B. He was not alone in his suspicions, and one of the questions that was posed to every Alien at decent intervals had to do with those matter transporters. But the Aliens weren't telling; when asked, they would just assume whatever expression signified mild surprise for their particular Alien face, and suggest that it was time for the next question. Faster than light travel they had shared with no hesitation, and for a ridiculously low price. But it was still travel; you still had to go through B, even if you did it at speeds previously unimaginable.

Heykus couldn't face it; he would wait for the matter transporters, and if they didn't come along in his lifetime he would die on this Earth as he had been born on this Earth, innocent of any other planetary experience. He wasn't sure exactly what it was that he was afraid of. Not dying, certainly. There was an old joke about the woman who explained her terror of travel by saying that she wasn't afraid of dying, she was afraid of
crashing
—perhaps it was something like that. Perhaps it had to do with
never knowing exactly what would happen if you
did
crash, out in space, showing light you could outrun it. It couldn't be claustrophobia, because the long hours he spent enclosed in his desk never bothered him. Whatever it was, it kept him right here, and he was grateful to the Lord for not having instructed the angel to order him out into space. He was not at all sure he would have been able to obey; no doubt the Lord had known that.

Once in a while, when there was something going on that he would really have enjoyed being part of—the major interplanetary theological conferences, for example—he would hit the database again for the latest statistics on suspended animation. That way, you wouldn't have to
know
you were going through B; the Aliens had been very obliging about helping Earth's scientists get out most of the wrinkles in the process. But it wasn't good enough. Whether you did it with the drugs that moved the metabolism down to just this side of Off, or you used freeze-and-thaw, or you used electrochemical pseudosplice, the failure rate of fourteen percent that the technicians were so proud of was unacceptable to Heykus. He had work to do, and it was important work; he couldn't do it as a vegetable in a medpod, maintained as a ward of the government.

Heykus shuddered, and he wished for the ten thousandth time that Baptists had a good analogue to the Roman Catholic ritual of crossing yourself. Something you could do when that kind of shudder ran down your spine.

He was disgusted with himself. It was womanish enough to be afraid of space travel, something that other men did as casually as he himself took the elevator to his office; it was more womanish still to be standing here staring out the window, spinning fantasies of himself brain-damaged, pod-tended. And this self-indulgence was nothing more than a futile attempt to put off yet one more experience he was afraid of!

Men were not supposed to be afraid of ordinary things; most especially, a man whose trust was in the Lord of Hosts was not supposed to be. He would have been deeply ashamed if his son had ever shown signs of such weakness. And yet here he stood, ten minutes gone by since the courier had brought the chip in, still holding it in his palm as if it would go away if he only ignored it. Doddering over nonsense; trying to put off what he had to do. Next he'd be reminiscing about his childhood, or his wedding night, that had been his first time with a woman. Him with his unshakable standards for other people—what if some of those he'd sent packing knew how he was behaving now?

That was enough, at last, to shake him out of it. He straightened his back, firmed his mouth, went inside his desk and sat down, leaned back and closed his eyes, and inserted the chip into the cognisocket high in his right nostril. Maybe it
would
be a Takeover Chip, sure; it was a hazard you lived with, the way your ancestors had had to live with tornadoes and tetanus. No matter how many and how elaborate the security measures, there was no way to know except to run it, and if it
was
a TC there wouldn't be one thing you or anybody else could do about it; and if you didn't like that risk, you belonged in some other line of work, and that was the way it was. The Takeover Chips had their good side . . . how would you manage mental patients humanely without them, for example? He pressed the chip home with a steady thumb, and he waited.