The Judas Rose (6 page)

“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.

He had been wrong. The ego jolt never lasted even through the short flight up to the asteroid's well-camouflaged dock. It might happen that you'd take your seat thinking serenely, I AM ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL MEN IN THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM, I HAVE EXTY MILLION MEGACREDITS IN MY SECRET ACCOUNT, I OWN A PRIVATE ASTEROID WHERE I AM KING AND POPE AND SULTAN AND MAGUS AND THERE IS NO OTHER POWER BEFORE ME. That could happen. But it leaked out fast. You sat in the cramped passenger compartment of the tiny automatic Air Force flyer and watched the digits on the left-to-go spot get smaller and smaller; and while you watched, your ego got smaller and smaller, too. Long before the tone sounded to tell you that the flyer had docked and that you could enter the corridor in the conference room where the Aliens were waiting, the last of it had evaporated and you were wishing they had chosen you for something else.
Anything
else. Never mind the exty million megacredits and all the rest; you would rather have been a servomechanism supervisor on a tourist asteroid than a member of the elite corps
of seven handpicked men to which you actually belonged. It was only an elite corps while you had your feet firmly on the surface of the Earth, or some colony of Earth, and could revel in the idea that nobody around you knew the wondrous secrets you knew or had all the wondrous goodies you had or had seen all the wondrous sights you'd seen. You were a man who could call up the President of the United States and give him
orders
, for example; that was a tremendous consolation while you were on Earth and made up for many disadvantages. But it was no use to you when you actually set out, twice a year, to do the job for which you had been so painstakingly selected. Kony would have given up making the sillyass list, it was so useless, except then how
would
he have spent the nights before the sessions?

He was always afraid to go to sleep. Even with drugs to make sure the sleep was dreamless, he was afraid. And if you were awake, the seconds crawled toward eternity. So. He kept on making the list called “List.” Maybe the shrink had known a little bit more than they gave him credit for? Naah . . . the poor simple bastard. How could he possibly not have realized that once he'd done his task he could not be allowed to keep walking around the world, carrying the information he carried? Heart attack, my sweet ass, Kony thought. Anybody who cared to take a look at the statistics about mental illness, nervous collapse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and general status tapioca-brain and free-flowing mouth among shrinks would have known that a heart attack was the next thing on the poor guy's schedule after he was handed his generous fee for services rendered. Poor simple bastard.