The Judas Rose (28 page)

“Poor things,
I say again! They were like small children, who so desperately want to believe in Santa Claus. They wanted, desperately, to believe in the ABRACADABRA! approach to reality. And what could be more natural? After all, it was the
words
of misguided and overindulgent men that had ‘turned them
into' doctors and professors and scientists and corporate executives and even—horrifying as it seems to us today—religious officials. Naturally, like those same small children, they believed that when someone put ‘Ph.D.' or ‘M.D.' or ‘CEO' after a woman's name she was thereby magically endowed with the
abilities
necessary to carrying out those functions. The fate of those women was not pretty. Their panic and disarray, their suicides, their nervous breakdowns, their endless personal tragedies, inspired compassion even in those who had tried hardest to convince them of their folly beforehand. And I am not ashamed to admit that I feel that same compassion now, even at this historical distance. One does not expect a legless person to become a figure skater, and it would be disgustingly cruel to do so; the situations are painfully similar.

“Today, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis lies buried beside the Flat Earth Hypothesis, where it most assuredly belongs, and the dear ladies have been restored to their proper place in the world, allowing us all to both work and rest in peace. It therefore becomes possible at last to turn to the systematic examination of the linguistic phenomena associated with the so-called ‘Women's Liberation Movement' purely
as
linguistic phenomena, and to subject them to historical analysis, free of the unfortunate emotionalism with which they were heretofore associated. For the sake of historical accuracy, I will begin with the rather silly topic usually referred to as ‘the pronoun question' and dispose of it promptly; we will then move on to less trivial aspects of the subject.”

           
(from a paper presented at the annual Exotica Colloquium of the Department of Language Sciences, California Multiversity - La Jolla Campus, by Associate Professor John “Norm” Smith of Stanford University)

If you were a linguist, you lived at a pace unknown to the rest of Earth's population. You were up every morning at five; you were at some negotiation or meeting by eight; you were lucky to be home by dinner time; and there was still a schedule to deal with after dinner was over. If you were a child, there was homework to be done for the mass-ed computer courses, followed by private lessons in as many foreign languages as the family could manage to squeeze into your head. If you were older, there was always preparation for an upcoming job, or there was practice in the language for which you served as the backup interpreter. Or there were Household business meetings.
The daily work schedules were now so crowded that almost everything to do with internal business had to be postponed for meetings that began after dinner and lasted until midnight or later.

If you were a man, there was occasionally time to send for your wife to come from the Womanhouse and join you in a rendezvous room for at least part of an evening, if you had energy enough left for such things.

And it went on six days a week. There were so many different religions on Earth and on the planets with which Earth interacted—there was no day that wasn't a sacred holy day for
some
body. The intricate interweaving of the schedules (done by the computers, thank all the various gods involved) demanded six of the seven days of the Terran week. Which made Sunday—
their
holy day—precious to the linguists of the Lines, even encumbered as it was by the obligatory morning trek to church.

That religion was necessary for women was something the men had no doubts about; it was the single most reliable way to maintain in women not just a decent awareness of their proper role but a serene satisfaction in that role. It was
doubly
necessary for linguist women, whose work as government interpreters and translators might otherwise have bred in them a dangerous tendency toward unwomanly independence and arrogance. The children had to go to church because church was one of the very few areas of their life in which they could function within their culture in the same way that other children did. And if the women and children must go, the men had no plausible excuse not to; you couldn't insist that your sons pay attention to what they heard from the preachers, including the necessity for being there every Sunday, and not put in an appearance yourself.

But
before
church, there was a luxurious chunk of real leisure time that every linguist male treasured. Church didn't start until eleven, breakfast wasn't served in the diningroom until eight-thirty—you could legitimately sleep past seven, and that was bliss. If you were sufficiently enterprising to get yourself decked out for church before you went to breakfast, you could spend as much as two full hours lounging around. Doing things that had no connection with languages or politics or business. Talking to your buddies—plain oldfashioned mantalk, that could recharge you for the whole blazing week ahead. The women insisted on rushing through Sunday breakfast and being gone before nine, to do god only knew what mysterious female things between nine and eleven, and the children always seized that time to watch trash on the comsets that they weren't allowed to look at any
other time. Eight-thirty to nine in the diningrooms was like eating in the middle of a six-way groundcar intersection with three lanes of flyer traffic overhead. But at nine, like magic, the women and the children were gone, vanished, and the men had the place to themselves. They could lean back and relax and enjoy one another . . . you looked forward to it all week long.

This Sunday morning's stampede was over, leaving behind it the usual extraordinary silence. That silence, to Jonathan's way of thinking, contained more genuine reverence than any silence he'd ever experienced in any church. A genuine, heartfelt, soul-nourishing, “Thank God, they're gone at last!” reverence, that could be recognized as a valid religious emotion by every man in the room. He had once told Nazareth that if he could find a church that would give him the kind of peace and satisfaction he experienced every Sunday morning in the diningroom during those two hours, he would volunteer for its priesthood—or whatever it had of the kind—instantly. It was the sort of thing you could safely say to Nazareth; she never gossiped, and she never asked stupid questions. She had smiled at him, her eyes dancing with a pleasure he didn't understand but that he knew was no threat to him, and had said, “Ah, yes, my dear. Brotherhood with a capital B! Fellowship with a capital F! Than which there are few things more seductive . . . with a capital S!” He remembered that there had also been a look of approval on her face, which was rare; she'd gotten to be a crochety old thing.

He realized then that he must have a foolish expression on
his
face, from the way the three other men were looking at him and exchanging significant glances with one another. They had the best spot in the room. The corner table against the wall, from which you could see everybody else and watch their comings and goings, but where nobody could get behind you. And they were grinning at him, waiting for him to snap out of it, nobody having the decency to say something that might hurry him along. Bastards, he thought fondly; while he was at it, he said it aloud.

“Bastards! All three of you.”

“Are we? You've got balls, Jonathan, sitting there smirking to yourself like a baby at the tit, and calling
us
foul names.”

Jonathan chuckled. “A baby at the tit, as you so elegantly put it, does not smirk. It cannot smirk, Leo, because if it did there would be no suction produced, and all the nice milk would
stay
in the tit. If you'd get married and fulfill your responsibilities by producing some offspring for us, you'd know these basic facts.”

“I'd rather be shot,” Leo declared flatly. “Much rather.”

“Makes no difference.” Conary Lopez, who had married one of Jonathan's most spectacular younger sisters and had no regrets, was always willing to put in a good word for the married condition. “You'll have to do it eventually, and you won't be allowed to choose shooting instead. Duty is duty, Leo.”

“I don't want to talk about duty this morning,” Jonathan announced.

“How about talking about whatever it was you were thinking about before you regained consciousness?”

“No—you wouldn't find that interesting, I give you my word.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a hard copy, folded three ways, and slapped it down on the table in front of him. “
This
is what I want to talk about! You've got to hear this, my friends . . . I'm going to read it aloud to you. For free. Gratis.”

Because he was Head, they didn't get up and move to another table; but because all but Conary had lived their whole lives in this house with him, they didn't bother hiding their disapproval. His cousin Tom provided a skilled raspberry, Conary and Leo jointly seconded the motion, and Leo stated firmly that they had not come to his table to be read to, unless it was something dirty, in which case he had no business making a hard copy and carrying it in his Sunday suit jacket.

“It's worth your time,” Jonathan insisted. “Would I be bringing it up if it weren't? Would I spoil Sunday morning? Where's your faith, for christ's sakes? This is going to brighten your day.”

“And the corner where we are.”

“I solemnly swear it. You wait till you hear this. I almost missed it, myself.” Jonathan paused and looked at each of them, and then he tied it off. “I don't spend a lot of time reading the
Journal of American Religious Ethnomethodology
.”

That brought the protests he was expecting, and hadn't been able to resist provoking, and he wigwagged at them with both hands and went on talking, drowning out their objections. “It was one of the automatic datasweeps that flagged it!” he shouted over their racket. “I never would have seen it otherwise. Shut up and listen, will you? This thing is called . . . get ready . . . ‘Liturgical Language in an American Religious Cult: A Unique Development.' By . . . let me see here . . . by Searcy Waythard, Ph.D.”

Leo Chornyak was not going to let this be easy. He leaned toward the others, elbows solidly on the table, and asked them if they knew that professors used to be called doctors.

“What?”

“Shit!” Tom laughed, and punched Leo's shoulder. “You'd know that kind of thing wouldn't you? That's why you're always screwing up your honorifics, your mind is full of junk like that.”

“It's true. You had doctors of medicine, you had doctors of zoology, you had doctors of literature—”

“How the effing BEMdung could there be a doctor of literature? What's to doctor? That's ridiculous. That's the—”

Leo cut him off in mid-sentence. “Exactly,” he said. “Exactly! And that is why, instead of a semantic mess, doctors are now doctors and professors are now professors.”

“And assholes,” Jonathan noted, “are still assholes.”

“What?” asked Conary again.

Jonathan laid the hard copy down in front of him, patted it smooth with elaborate ceremony, poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from the gravytrain, and folded his arms across his chest.

“You've got a choice,” he said calmly. “You can listen to me read this, without any more interruptions, or any more attempts to change the subject—as if anybody gives a slim pallid odiferous shit for the historical tidbits Leo is expounding for us—or you can go sit someplace else. Because I
am
going to read this out loud.”

“To an audience of nobody but your elbow?”

Jonathan's voice was soft, and his eyes were locked with Leo's. “The microphones in this room are programmed to respond to just two signal inputs,” he crooned. “Anybody's pronunciation of the words
emergency alert
. And the sound of my voice. If you'd like me to share this with the entire room, I can manage that.”

“Leo,” Tom added, “this man here is not just the Head of the Chornyaks. This man is the Head of Heads. If he wants to read us the latest editorial on how many rows of lace the ladies prefer on their panties this spring, that's his privilege.”

It was partly a joke, and partly a game, and partly a serious warning. Jonathan
was
the Head of Heads, and if he cared to pull that rank he could make their morning very unpleasant. On the other hand, they all happened to know from many a solemn contest over the years that any one of them could pee a bigger circle in the snow than Jonathan could; if they cared to pull
that
kind of rank, they could ruin
his
morning. The silence got thicker, and they watched one another with narrowed eyes, while everybody considered the various possible moves and their probable consequences. And then, because it was the only Sunday morning they'd get for a whole week, Leo grinned in a swift
flash of gleaming white teeth and raised his coffeemug in a good-natured hail to the chief, and the others immediately moved in to make it unanimous.

“
Go
, Jonathan!” Conary said. “It's not much of a floor, but you've got it.”

“Okay,” he said, relaxed now that the moves were over and the points were his. “Your spirit of enthusiastic cooperation is duly et cetera et cetera. Now, this starts off with some stuff that's not so bad, considering the source. What's normal language; what's not normal. Next step, the special nature of religious language—no need to read you any of that. Then Waythard makes a distinction that's not quite as typical, between what is normal
religious
language and what's not. Noting that whether it makes any sense isn't one of the criteria, right? Stuff like ‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost' is normal religious language; if there were a religion of the Pig In The Poke, he says, it would be normal religious language to say ‘in the name of the Pig, and of the Piglet, and of the Holy Poke.' Et cetera, et cetera. He tries to explain what is
not
normal religious language . . . puts glossolalia in there, and some other stuff. None of it very well argued, but what the hell. And then we get to the good part. Listen, please, to this: