The Judas Rose by Suzette Haden Elgin Page A

enough to look after you, obviously. You come along with me. I’ll see you to your room and I’ll tuck you in besides, nurse or no nurse. I’m Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak, named after the famous poisoner and lunatic.”
    It was the very last straw. Jo-Bethany gave up, and let herself be led away to bed, unresisting, one hand firmly gripped by the poisoner-and-lunatic’s namesake. If she was about to be poisoned, at least she’d get some rest; as for lunatic behavior, it would have to be spectacular indeed to impress her now.

CHAPTER 5
    â€œSince I’ve been listening to the thologys, I understand why it is that although the toys and the gadgets change as frequently as they ever did, very little changes on this Earth. I might not understand it if I’d been observing it all along; but looking at a century as a whole piece, I can perceive the explanation. When I was a little girl, people would laugh about the way we were ‘trapped in the year 2000,’ and it was funny then, almost charming. But now, nearly a hundred years later, when we appear to have advanced no farther than the year 2010, it’s not so amusing any more.
    â€œIt’s also no mystery. Just as a person of enormous wealth, comfortably insulated from life’s problems, always was able to grow old without being obliged to change, Earth has been able to molder along undisturbed in its comfortable rut. Pressures that would have meant inevitable change before the colonization of space are siphoned off now—we just export them to the stars. A new political ideology? A revolutionary movement? A radical shift in religion? A potentially disruptive element of any kind? We ship it off to the colonies, which proliferate endlessly. While Earth sits like a pampered old monarch, set in her ways, indulged and humored and surely the source of much nostalgic amusement elsewhere. . . .
    â€œBecause our situation was new to human history, we didn’t become an empire except on paper. We never had to fight our way out to the frontiers; we never had to starve Earth to support the frontiers, or vice versa. The Aliens handed us space travel for a pittance, for the price of our defense budgets and the cashing in of a few missile systems. They handed us any other technology essential to our needs, at payments we were always able to manage. So that from the beginning the colonies wereself-supporting. And they were much more than that! They were our magical solution to every problem. They took the populations of our prisons, they took our slum dwellers and our homeless; they accepted and welcomed all the enormous populations of refugees from war and famine and drought and disaster and poverty. All those hordes, screaming at the gates and demanding a fair share, went into space; sources of conflict were just removed, with little effort to us—what it may have meant for them, I don’t pretend to know.
    â€œThe Palestinians, for example . . . given an entire planet of their own, to be their world, what did they care about a little scrap of the Middle East? Israel stayed here, and still sits, presiding in splendor over a desert. Jerusalem, the Holy City over which three great religions spilled so much blood, was preserved as a set of holograms before it was swallowed up by the Great Earthquake of 2009; now each of the faiths has its own Jerusalem, indistinguishable from the original, and where that first Jerusalem stood is a fissure like the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. I suppose that when a devout Jew, or Muslim, or Christian, begins to argue that a hologram of a holy city is not as holy as the holy city itself was, they just export him. . . .”
    (from the diaries of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness)
    â€œShe’s asleep, Delina.”
    â€œI don’t think so, Willow—I think she’s just watching the thologys.”
    â€œWith her eyes shut? She can’t see the holos that way—” The younger child