The Judas Rose Read Online Free PDF Page B

gone on to rub salt in the wounds, because it was her duty.
    â€œSister Carapace,” she had said, the words stern and cold, even their tone a rebuke, “you will give me your word, now , on the Blessed Virgin, that you will not speak of this young mother, nor of her origins, nor of her condition, nor of anything else about her whatsoever, without first receiving permission from me or from Mother to do so. Not even in the confessional , Sister Carapace.”
    That had sufficed; the ethical problems it presented had distracted Sister Carapace from her determination to tell everything she knew and much she only suspected, and she had in time come to the end of her drivel and given her word. While Sister Antonia shouldered yet one more sin and was grateful that the Blessed Virgin, being a mother herself, would understand and intercede for her.
    The priests would want to know, indeed! They certainly would. And if they had known that a linguist woman was under this roof and pregnant, and here without the knowledge of any male relative, what would they have done? It turned Sister Antonia’s stomach just to think of the meetings they would have held, the planning and scheming and wrangling over strategy, the brazen attempts to decide what best use could be made of this tidbit of power to further the ends of Mother Church. Sometimes, disobedientthough it might be, Sister Antonia wondered at the extraordinary patience of the Lord, Who tolerated such antics among men who were allegedly models of holiness. Instead of striking them all deaf and dumb, or afflicting them with salutary cases of boils resistant to all current antibiotics, as seemed appropriate to her . She had absolutely no intention of abandoning the woman in her care, be she godless linguist or no godless linguist (Sister Antonia would never have used or even thought the coarse word “Lingoe”), to the strange proclivities of the priests. They would have seen her as a pawn, to be put into play in their struggle against the Protestants, or against the government, or against whoever happened to be in this week’s most prominent opponent; Sister Antonia saw her as a body and soul in her charge. She would do right by the woman. And that meant seeing her through to term, caring for her through labor and its aftermath, and accepting responsibility for the infant she would leave behind to be raised there at the convent. That done, Antonia could send the creature packing, and give her an extensive piece of her mind as she left, and she was looking forward to it. Until then, she would do the very best she could to nurture and to protect her.
    How in the name of the good green Earth an unmarried linguist woman could have become pregnant, Sister Antonia absolutely could not imagine. It seemed to her that it ought to have been impossible. The linguists’ children were educated privately except for their obligatory participation in the two-hour daily sessions of Homeroom required by law for every American youngster—except of course when they were excused from Homeroom because they were needed as interpreters—and every moment of Homeroom is spent under the watchful eyes of a teacher. They had no leisure time; it was not unusual for a child of the Lines to already be working many hours each day in official delegations between Earth delegations and Alien delegations by the age of eight or nine, and that was true six days of the week. Leftover time went to household duties and to the endless study of the many languages the poor little things were required to master . . . and then on Sunday the family went like a platoon to church and returned like a platoon home. Where, as Antonia understood it, the children were required to take part in various sorts of “recreation” rigidly supervised by adults every instant. They were never, so far as she knew, allowed to simply play; and although the boys could go about unattended once they were in their