Native Tongue

Chapter Thirteen

Rachel heard the words, but it was as if they were in a language she had never studied; she could not process them. He must have seen that on her face, because he said them again, slowly and clearly. And then, when she understood, the stimulus finally overriding the shock, she curled her hands tightly into fists so that they wouldn’t tremble and told herself that she must be very very careful. But it was no good, she wasn’t able to be careful.

“Oh, no, Thomas!” It was the best and the worst she could manage. “Oh, she is too young!”

“Nonsense.”

“The child is only fourteen years old, Thomas! Oh, you can’t be serious — I don’t believe it.”

“I am totally serious; this isn’t a joking matter. And the ‘child’ will be fifteen when the marriage takes place, Rachel. I’ve scheduled it for her fifteenth birthday.”

Rachel struck her clenched fists together and pressed them to her chest; before she could stop, she had bent forward as a woman does in the sudden pain of labor, and a low mourning croon had come from her lips. It was a sound she had not known she knew how to make; it was a sound Thomas was certain to dislike.

“My God,” he said, his voice heavy with distaste. As she was aware, he despised that sort of female noise, and the obvious fact that it had been involuntary, a reflex response to pain, did not make him any less disgusted. “You sound precisely like a bawling cow, Rachel. An elderly bawling cow.”

The callousness was just what Rachel needed; it pulled her back instantly from her state of emotional disarray, and when she spoke again it was calmly, and in her ordinary cool tones.

“What,” she asked him, “will you men do next? First the girls married at eighteen. Then it was sixteen. Now you are prepared to see Nazareth marry at just barely fifteen… thirty seconds past, if I understand you correctly. Why not just move the marriage date to puberty and be done with it, Thomas?”

“It isn’t necessary,” he answered. “The present system, with marriage at sixteen, allows the husband to space his children three years apart and still see that the woman bears eight infants before the age of forty. Eight is quite enough, whatever the government may think about the matter, and we don’t feel that a woman much past forty should go through pregnancy. There’s no need for any such radical change as you are proposing.”

“Thomas — ”

“Furthermore, Rachel, despite your histrionics you know I have not suggested that all girls of the Lines should marry at fifteen. Only that Nazareth must do so, and only because her circumstances are exceptional.”

“You would be exceptional, too, if you were under guard every moment of your life!”

“Once she’s married, there’ll be no need for night surveillance unless her husband is gone from home,” said Thomas. “And perhaps the need for daytime guards will be less as well. In time.”

“I have never understood the need for any of it,” Rachel declared.

“That’s very stupid of you.”

“Thomas, Belle-Anne has been in the mental hospital for months, and you know what she’s become. If she were released tomorrow — and that won’t happen — she has no mind left at all, she’s a husk! Nazareth has been in no danger since the day they took Belle-Anne away, and it is in no way stupid for me to realize that. What possible danger could there be?”

“I worry about the other females at Barren House,” said Thomas. “I’m not prepared to accept unequivocally the idea that only Belle-Anne was suffering from religious mania, for one thing. And for another, my dear, there are few things easier for a copycat criminal to fake than religious mania.”

“Thomas… it’s absurd.”

“Nazareth is valuable to this Household,” he told her stiffly. “Far beyond the ordinary, she is valuable. Her linguistic skills would make her a prize under any circumstances, and REM34 is one of the languages most essential to the welfare of this planet — which makes her even more valuable. Finally, her genetics are superb. I expect her to provide us with infants of equal caliber. And I am not willing to take even the slightest chance that she’ll be harmed, Rachel, not now, not ever. Your emotionalism is unbecoming in a woman who ought to know the value of her own child, and who claims to love her.”

Rachel firmed her lips, and looked at him steadily, considering. It was just possible that he was telling her the truth, that he’d fed the data into the computers and been advised that the chance of someone following Belle-Anne’s example was sufficiently great to require protection for Nazareth. It was possible. It was certainly true that Nazareth was uniquely valuable to the Line both genetically and economically. But she knew Thomas very well, and she knew that there were ordinarily many layers of motive behind the surface one that he presented with such plausibility.

For example, if he hadn’t assigned those two young men to keep watch over Nazareth… he would have had an unsolved problem. If he were to end the surveillance he would have that problem back again. Some sort of face-saving function had been needed, because those two were so completely unpromising as linguists that they were useless for anything more than the most trivial social situations. That happened sometimes… a linguist would acquire the languages chosen for him like any other child, but would turn out to be utterly lacking in any ability to carry out the essential functions of interpreting and translating. It had been very convenient for Thomas to be able to give out the tale that he’d released the two cousins from their important duties as linguists to fill the equally important role of guards for Nazareth; if he released them from that, he’d have to think of something else. It would be awkward… there was always the danger of damage to the public’s image of the linguists as infallible in all matters linguistic.

“Rachel,” Thomas said, “that expression on your face is more than usually unpleasant. Please do not scowl at me in that way… at least wait until I’ve had breakfast.”

“Thomas?”

“Yes, Rachel?” Oh, the overlay of weary tolerance in that voice, damn his soul!

“Thomas,” she said urgently, “I can’t approve of this. You managed to distract me very neatly with all the trivia about the necessity for the guards — twenty points to you, my dear. But I cannot be distracted indefinitely… let’s return to the subject of this obscene marriage that you are suggesting.”

“Rachel,” said Thomas, adding practical reason to the tolerance, “it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you approve or not. It would be pleasant if you did approve, of course. I make every effort to consider your personal wishes with regard to my children whenever I can. But when you refuse to be reasonable you leave me no choice but to ignore you. And Rachel, I am not ‘suggesting’ this marriage — I am ordering it.”

Rachel had been born a linguist, born a Shawnessey, and she had spent all her life surrounded by the men of the Lines. She did not misjudge Thomas. She knew him to be in many ways a good and kind and considerate man. She knew that his responsibilities were heavy, that his workload was brutal, and that at times he did things less than kindly only because he had no time to do them in any other way. As Head of the Lines, he had power; so far as she knew, he had never been tempted to abuse that power, and that was to his credit. She was willing to give him all the credit due him.

But she resented him; oh, how she resented him! And she resented him most at times like this one, when his total authority over her and over those she loved forced her to debase herself to him. She would choke on what she had to do now… but she had no other strategy available to her. She erased the anger from her face, erased the scowl to which he had objected, and let her eyes fill with the soft puzzled tearfulness that was considered appealing in women. And she sank to the floor beside Thomas’ chair and leaned her head against his knee, and for the sake of her daughter, she disciplined herself to beg.

“Please, my darling,” she said softly. “Please don’t do this dreadful thing.”

“Rachel, you are ridiculous,” he said. His body was rigid under her touch, and his voice was ice.

“Thomas, how often have I asked you for anything? How often, love, have I quarreled with your decisions or questioned your good judgment? How often have I done anything but agree that you were wise in what you were about to do? Please, Thomas… change your mind. Just this one time. Thomas, indulge me, just this once!”

He reached down abruptly and hauled her upright in front of him like a parcel, or a child in tantrum, and he sat there laughing at her, shaking his head in mock astonishment.

“Darling…” Rachel said, forcing the words.

“Darling!” He let go of one of her shoulders and he tapped her on the end of her nose with his index finger. “I am not your darling… or anyone’s. As you know perfectly well. I am a cruel and vindictive and heartless monster who cares for nothing but his own selfish and twisted goals.”

“Thomas, I never ask you for anything!” she pleaded.

“My sweet,” he said, still laughing, “that is what you always say when you disagree with me. Every single time. Year after weary year. You really should talk to one of the young girls and see if they can’t suggest a new routine you could use… you’ve worn that one out completely.”

Rachel’s eyes stung, and she knew that tears might help her now. She’d managed to make him laugh at her, which meant that he was more relaxed, less on his guard. Tears would be the wise next move, and she owed that move to Nazareth.

She knew that. And she knew also that she couldn’t do it. It was too much. Women of the Lines learned early not to give in to tears except by choice, because tears destroyed negotiations. A woman who is weeping is a woman who cannot talk, and a woman who cannot talk most surely cannot interpret. The voluntary control of tears was a skill mastered for business reasons, but it proved useful in many areas of life, and it would be useful to her now. She would not cry, not even for Nazareth.

She pulled away from him, stepped back and set her arms akimbo, her hands on her hips in a stance that she knew he detested, and in a voice that carried as much contempt as she could muster she said, “Chornyak — your daughter hates that man!”

His eyebrows rose, briefly, and he brushed at his trousers where she had leaned against them.

“So?”

“You don’t feel that’s relevant?”

“You know better, woman. It has no relevance at all. We linguists haven’t married for any reason other than the sum of politics and genetics since . . at least since Whissler was president. Nazareth’s opinions of Aaron Adiness are of no concern whatever.”

“There is an enormous difference between marrying someone you merely feel no love for, and marrying someone you hate.”

“Rachel,” Thomas said, sighing, “I’m trying very hard to be patient with you. But you’re doing everything you can to make that impossible. I will make just one more attempt — and we will leave Nazareth’s immature sentiments out of it. Aaron Adiness is superbly healthy, he comes of a Household with which we are anxious for closer ties at this time, he’s talented — ”

“He’s nothing of the kind!”

“What?”

“Everyone knows, Thomas, that he’s a mediocre linguist!”

“Oh, come now, Rachel… you women may ‘know’ something of that kind, but it has no more foundation in fact than any of the rest of your female mythology. Aaron is a native speaker of REM30-2-699, of Swahili, of English, and of Navajo; he has a respectable fluency in eleven other Terran languages and can get by socially in four dialects of Cantonese. His Ameslan is so exceptionally fluent and graceful that he has been hired to teach it to the deaf at several national institutes. And I have not even mentioned the dozens of languages that he can read with ease and translate with both skill and subtlety… the list goes on for half a page. Not talented! Rachel, when you go out of your way to be childish you lose all claim on courtesy from me.”

Rachel was ashamed now, deeply ashamed, and she knew that she had lost. There was no hope of salvaging this. She had succeeded in turning it into a fight, and one of their better fights at that. She went on only because she no longer had anything to lose.

“It’s an open secret, Thomas, that Aaron Adiness has a violent temper and an insurmountable conviction that the universe was created for his personal benefit! And that he allows both of those factors to interfere with the performance of his duties! You know it, I know it, everyone knows it… If he had fifty languages native and five hundred more fluent, it would not cancel out the fact that he cannot control his personal feelings even when he is on duty. If Nazareth hadn’t been the Jeelod interpreter when the negotiations for the Sigma-9 frontier colony leases were under way, there’d be no colonies on Sigma-9… she had to do everything but belly dance to salvage the messes Aaron made every time he fancied someone doubted his divinity. He is cruel, and stupid, and vindictive, and petty — he’s worse than any woman! And if you tie Nazareth to him for life, then you are worse than he is!”

Thomas had gone white; for some reason, although he could easily tolerate almost any sort of confrontation with others, having Rachel forget her place in this way always enraged him so that he had to fight for control… and she knew it, too, damn the bitch. He regretted now having even told her of his plans for Nazareth. He should have shipped her off somewhere and had the marriage performed in her absence, as Adam had suggested; for once, he agreed with Adam that he spoiled Rachel and that it was foolish of him to do so. Certainly he got nothing from her in return for his indulgence.

“Rachel,” he said, clenching his teeth to keep his voice from betraying that he was shaking with rage, “that’s a common pattern when youth is combined with genius. Aaron will outgrow both his temper and his arrogance, as does any man of that sort. And Nazareth will be well advised not to remind him of her alleged rescues of his diplomatic shipwrecks — I suggest that you tell her so. Because very soon he will make her, with all her spectacular scores on the linguistics tests, look like a chimp using Ameslan. The more primitive the organism, woman, the more swiftly it matures — of course Nazareth was a bit further along emotionally than Aaron during the Sigma-9 contracts! The advantage is a temporary one, milady, and she’d better remember it.”

“You’re determined then, Thomas? You want this show horse for the Line so badly that you’re willing to bind your own daughter to him for life when the very sight of him is repulsive to her? That’s your idea of fair return on the value she represents to your treasuries? What’s the problem, dear? Is somebody else after him?”

Thomas turned away in one swift movement, and Rachel knew she had him — he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been afraid she’d see that in his face. But body-parl betrays, always; his abrupt move, graceless and entirely unlike him, was as revealing as any statement could have been. And it was her turn to laugh.

“Ah,” she cried, “that is it, isn’t it? You’re about to lose him, a prize stallion with a spectacularly curly tail, to one of the other Lines! And that can’t be allowed to happen!”

“It certainly cannot,” he said, his back still turned to her.

“Well… if that’s all it is, why not one of the other girls? You’ve got a houseful of brood mares, Thomas… why not Philippa? God knows your brother would be delighted to get rid of her, he can’t stand any of his daughters, and she’s a strapping seventeen. Marry her off to Adiness!”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wish to see what the genetic combination of Nazareth’s and Aaron’s abilities will produce,” he said coldly. “Philippa is entirely run of the mill.” His brief moment without mastery of himself had passed, and he turned to face her easily, his voice heavy now only with the message that she turned his stomach.

“Get on with you,” he told her roughly. “You’ve wasted enough of my time. Tell Nazareth she’s to be ready for the wedding on her fifteenth birthday, and let me hear no more about it. No — not one word, woman! Get! And he left their room, not waiting to see her obey.

Alone, Rachel laid her fingers loosely across her mouth, and closed her eyes, and she rocked silently. She did not cry now, either, though she could safely have done so… she turned her stomach, too. She had gone about it all wrong. She had let him catch her off guard, and she had done everything about as badly as she could have done it. She should have manipulated Thomas. Should have pretended only casual interest, even approval, when he told her his intentions. Then this evening, over a bourbon, she could have begun a discussion of the subject. She should never have challenged him directly, never opposed him openly… her decision to play the helpless belle had come too late, had been too rapid a transition, and had collapsed the moment he taunted her with it.

She knew she was too old and too worn with the bearing of seven children to have any erotic weapons left to use against her husband. But he was still vulnerable to other techniques, and she knew him better than anyone alive; she had only to set her self-respect aside and toady to him convincingly. She had made the sort of stupid errors a bride makes… a bride such as Nazareth would be, poor little girl… but a bride is saved from the consequences of her ignorance by the novelty of her body. Rachel no longer had that advantage. She had sacrificed her daughter to her own ego, traded her off for a few minutes of triumph over Thomas, triumph for which Nazareth would be the one who had to pay. The only shred of comfort she had was that the girl would never have to know how badly her mother had failed her, or how cheaply she had sold her out.

At Barren House the women listened to her, of course; it was courteous to do so. They made her a pot of strong tea, and they sat her down to drink it while they heard her out. But they had no sympathy to offer her.

“What did you expect?” they asked her. “You had slim chances when you started that interaction, and what little you had you threw away immediately. What did you expect the man to do when you defied him like that?”

“Oh, I know,” said Rachel wearily. “I know.”

“Well, then.”

“Thomas is completely wrong,” she said. “Wrong.”

“He is a man. Being wrong has nothing to do with anything.”

“If you behave like this often, Rachel,” Caroline observed, “I’m surprised he hasn’t signed the papers to put you away long before now.”

“I wouldn’t care if he did.”

“Rachel! Think of Belle-Anne, what they’ve done to her, what she’s become… you’ve been to see her! That’s a death sentence, worse than death… rotting away in a state mental hospital!”

“Thomas would never put me in a state hospital,” said Rachel. “The wife of the Head of all the Heads of all the Lines, in a snakepit ward? Tssk… that would never do. No, he’d send me to one of those places with a name like a dog kennel. Cedar Hills. Willow Lake. Maple Acres. You know the sort of place. Where I can sit all day in my rocker in a row of little old ladies in rockers, all of us doped into catatonia, waiting to be led off to bed and knocked cold for the night. Just as a change from the catatonia.”

“And why hasn’t he done that?”

“Because he’s used to me, and he’s very busy. He likes the way I keep his files in order. He counts on me to keep him from forgetting things. I make a great deal of money for the Household, and if he’s right there he can be sure I don’t slack off. I was a prime piece of brood stock, and he’s used to thinking of me that way. He hasn’t got time to break in a new woman and teach her to do all the things I do for him — it’s less trouble to put up with me. After all, he doesn’t have to see me for days on end. I am a convenience, with certain annoying qualities that he is able to avoid most of the time.”

“A perfectly ordinary marriage,” said Susannah, and the others agreed. A clever woman saw to it that as she grew older she did become useful in the ways Rachel had listed; it was the only security she had, and all that stood between her and the rows of little old ladies on Thorazine.

“Poor little Nazareth,” breathed Rachel.

“A lot of good that does her now.”

“It does her no good at all,” Rachel agreed. “I say it all the same.”

“Well, say it here, and then keep it to yourself,” said Caroline. “The worst thing you could possibly do for her is sympathize with her. The quicker she toughens to what’s ahead of her, the less power it will have to hurt her. Don’t you dare go ‘poor littling’ her!”

“No. I’m not entirely a fool, though you couldn’t tell it by what I’ve done this day. I know better than that.”

“Go tell her, then, and do it properly. Before he does it.”

“Duty,” said Rachel. “Opportunity. Loyalty to the Lines. A woman’s place. The healing power of time. Fun and games. Fables and baubles.”

“Exactly. Get it over with, so that she can get used to the idea before she has to spread her legs for the Adiness stud.”

Rachel shuddered, and they poured her a last cup of tea. She took a long swallow, finished it, and then stood to go face her daughter… She wasn’t quite sure where Nazareth was, but her wrist computer would tell her.

“Nazareth will come here afterward,” she said. “You know she will.”

“I hope so. Where else could she go?”

“Don’t tell her I was here before her, wailing and moaning. Please.”

“Of course not. She’ll be far better off if she thinks this isn’t bothering you at all. We know that… we’ve all had a turn in Nazareth’s shoes.”

Rachel stared at them.

“No, you haven’t,” she said bitterly. “Not one of you has had to marry a man she hated.”

That silenced them, and they nodded. It was rare, because actual discord between husband and wife was not an efficient arrangement for communal living. There tended to be fewer children from such marriages, and it was hard for everyone in the Household where the couple was living. Thomas must have had genuinely compelling reasons for this match, to have gone against so much experience and tradition — or else he was counting on Nazareth’s youth and innocence to be overcome by Adiness’ magnificent face and body. Nazareth had not yet caught her dose of Romantic Love; he might well be counting on it overtaking her in Adiness’ arms. For Nazareth’s sake, they hoped that he was right and that it would take a good long time to wear off.

“We know a little something about it, then,” soothed Grace. “A little something; enough to be careful, Rachel. You go ahead now, and tell her. And we’ll be expecting her.”

“Oh… Rachel?” Caroline shoved her fingers deep into her hair and looked at the other woman. “Rachel, before you go… have you heard the rumors about Government Work?”

“Rumors…”

“Rachel, do think! I realize that Nazareth is the main thing on your mind now, and rightly so, but think just for a moment. Have you heard anything about experiments with test-tube babies?”

Rachel frowned, “I don’t think so,” she said. “What are they saying?”

“That they’re feeding the little things hallucinogens… and then Interfacing them with non-humanoids.”

“Dear God in heaven.” Even in her state of exhaustion and self-disgust, Rachel could appreciate what that meant.

“It may be only rumor,” said Susannah. “It’s usually rumor. It’s just the kind of thing the government would love to convince the Lines they had going.”

“It’s… unspeakable. If it’s true.”

“Yes, it is,” said Caroline. “Rachel, see if you can find out anything about it, will you? From Thomas? He may very well know.”

Rachel nodded, absently, her hand on the door. She could not mourn for test-tube babies this morning. She was too entirely used up with mourning for the daughter she’d failed so shamefully.

“I’ll try,” she said.

“If anyone can find out, it’s you,” said Caroline.

“Oh, yes. I’m so skilled in my… marital relations.”

“Rachel — just try.”

“Why? What could we do?”

“It would be good,” said Susannah, “to know that it was not true. It would be easier for us all to sleep at night, child.”

When Nazareth came to them later in the day, the women were ready. In a circle of small rockers, in the common room, each with her embroidery or a quilt block or one more intricate lacy shawl to be knitted or crocheted. And their hearts resolutely hardened against the temptation to do the coddling of Nazareth that they had forbidden to her mother. Even so, the girl’s despair and revulsion were hard to watch with the necessary appearance of tranquil unconcern.

She kept saying, “I can’t do this.”

And they kept saying, “You can, Nazareth. You will.”

“I can’t.”

“You have no choice.”

“I do” she said. “I do have a choice.”

“What choice?”

“I will kill myself,” she said. “Before I spend a lifetime with that disgusting parody of a man and his ego that is far bigger than he ever could be, I will kill myself. I will.”

Something in her voice, some narrow edge, caught their attention. It was an easy threat, easily made, very common and frequent in young girls suddenly confronted with the unpleasant decisions of the males who controlled them. But there was a note of resolution in her words they didn’t care for.

“How would you do that?” scoffed Nile, drawing up a length of emerald silk. “Perceive, Natha… there stand your two dear little guards, waiting for you on our doorstep. You can’t even go to the toilet without those two, standing outside the door and counting off the seconds.”

“They can’t follow me in,” said Nazareth. “They can go everywhere else, but they can’t follow me in there. And I know ways… oh, I know ways that will put an end to this long before they get tired of counting seconds.”

No doubt she did. Every woman did.

They looked at one another, and at the trembling girl, and the same thought was on all their faces: we can’t have this.

“Nazareth… dear child…” Susannah spoke carefully, making certain that there was time for the others to stop her if she was misjudging the situation, “there’s something you should know.”

“I’m not interested in your fairy tales!”

“Not a fairy tale. A truth.”

“I’m not interested — whatever it is, I do not care.”

“Nazareth Chornyak,” said Susannah sternly, “you hear me! Do you remember, long ago, telling Aquina about your Encodings notebook? Do you?”

Nazareth looked up at that, and her lips parted slightly; it had caught her interest after all.

“Why do you ask me that?”

“Because, child, Aquina came back and told us. And she did more than that. She found your hidingplace in the orchards, dearlove, and she’s been going there every month and copying your work out for us to use.”

The outrage was stamped plain and fierce on the girl’s face, and they were very glad to see it there. If she could be distracted by something like this, she was still safe.

“How dare you!” she hissed at them. “You sneaks… you contemptible old sneaks! My notebook — my private notebook…”

She was so angry she could not even go on talking, the sense of violation choking her. And they agreed with her with all due solemnity, and granted her that every single one of them would have felt just the same way. Exactly the same way.

“But what matters,” Susannah went on when the storm had calmed a little, “is that among those Encodings we have found seven valid ones. Seven, Nazareth Joanna. And every last one of them major.”

Susannah was aware of the stillness around her, the stillness of a collective breath being held. It was a terrible risk she was taking — did she have to take it twice? Had Nazareth even heard her, caught as she was in anger?

But when Nazareth finally spoke, she said none of the things they might have expected her to say. She said, “I don’t want to know.”

“What?”

“I do not want to know. I am not listening to you. I will not hear you. I will not be bed and brood for Aaron Adiness, who is only filth, do you perceive that, filth! I will not listen to you witches and your spells and your foolish incantations… I will not know!”

Ah. That was much better. That was ordinary young girl’s panic and anger. None of that deadly dull seriousness, but ordinary frantic babble. This, they could handle, and without endangering the Encoding Project any further. But when it is necessary to be cruel, you don’t drag it out; you are swift with the blow. It was over to Grace, whose laughter would hurt Nazareth far more because Grace was one of the tender ones; and Grace did not miss her cue. At the first flickers of Susannah’s signing fingers, seen from the corner of her eye, Grace’s clear laughter rang out and split the silence. And the others joined in.

Flinching, Nazareth cried out, “Don’t laugh at me! How can you!”

“But child,” said Caroline, struggling to speak over gales of mirth, “how can we not? When you’re so outrageously funny?”

Nazareth was moving her head. Back and forth from side to side. Over and over and over again. Caroline had seen an animal do that once, in a zoo; it was blind, and it moved its head like that, utterly lost. And she applied the lash of pedantry along with the ridicule, cutting deep and swift.

“Nazareth, you’re a linguist. One cannot not hear. One cannot ‘refuse’ to know, no matter how tempting it may be. You cannot ‘refuse to know’ that an angry skunk had just favored you with its perfume — and you cannot ‘refuse to know’ what we have just told you. You have given us seven Major Encodings; they were all valid. You now know that. Spare us your drivel, please.”

“Oh,” moaned the cornered girl, “may God curse you all…”

“Dear me,” said Susannah. “How you talk.”

“Such manners, Missy,” added Thyrsis. “Mercy.”

Tears had begun to pour down Nazareth’s face, and the women were delighted to see them; it was when a woman ought to weep and could not that there was cause for alarm. But they hurt for her all the same, as she tongue-lashed them.

“It wasn’t enough that you lied to me,” cried Nazareth, “and stole my things, and sneaked my notebook, and used my work without even asking me, and pretended all the time to be my friends! That wasn’t enough, was it? No, you hadn’t done enough, with just those things! That didn’t satisfy you, did it? It’s like the men say, you’ve got nothing to do, so you think up wicked plots… and now you are trying to blackmail me! And you laugh! You blackmail me, and you laugh! Oh, God curse you… God curse you…”

That was very good, they thought. It showed that she did understand. She had a scrap of knowledge here, a scrap there… enough to know that Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them, and from the women of the Barren Houses otherwise. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships — a fantasy world for those girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons — how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.

The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before. Major Encodings, the most precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. Minor Encodings, which always came in the wake of a Major one, because it would bring to mind related concepts that could be lexicalized on the same pattern, still valuable. “A woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”

They memorized the list, short because for so many years no one had dared to keep records written down, like the Begats of the Bible. “And Emily Jefferson Chornyak in her lifetime gave to us three Major Encodings and two Minor; and Marian Chornyak Shawnessey, that was sister to Fiona Chornyak Shawnessey, in her lifetime gave us one Major Encoding and nine Minor; and her sister Fiona Shawnessey, in her lifetime…” They learned it all, and they gave it the value women put into their voices and their eyes, and they guarded it. “Don’t tell your father, now, or any of the boys, or any of the men at all. They’ll only laugh. It’s a woman’s secret.” But of course the little girls were told that this secret was all a part of Langlish…

Nazareth looked as if she would faint, and they put her head down between her knees until the color came back to her face, and then moved her to the company couch in the parlor to lie down. The couch on which no Barren House woman ever sat, because when its coverings wore out they would have to petition the men for money to have it redone. It was the emergency couch.

“Do you feel better now, Natha?”

“I hate you,” was all she said.

Of course she did not hate them. They knew what she was thinking. If she used the motherwit of death she had learned along with the list of names, she did not destroy just her own self. Like every little girl, she had asked, “Why can’t we talk it, our language? In private, where the men won’t hear?” And had been told, “Because we do not have enough Encodings yet.” How many years would women wait for their own native tongue, just because she, Nazareth, did not have sufficient strength to cope with her life? It made no difference that she thought the tongue was Langlish, and that she did not even know that Láadan existed; the effect was the same. It was the soft net of guilt, that tightened at every move, that Nazareth hated.

She was a woman of the Lines. It might gnaw her heart hollow, but she would do her duty, because she understood — however dimly — what that duty meant. She lay there dulled, all the light in her put out by their merciless words. A prisoner hears, “You are sentenced to life”; Nazareth felt that now, more sharply than she had ever had to feel it before. But she would learn. Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely. She would have all the company she could ever need.

Later, lying restless in her bed and listening with half an ear in case one of the invalid women might want her, Caroline wished they could have dared tell her just a little more. That they could have given her some simple gift of knowledge. Told her that there was a language called Láadan; that women had chosen its eighteen sounds with tender care — they hadn’t wanted other women to have to struggle to pronounce it just because those whose lot it was to construct it happened to have English as their first Terran language. It would have pleased Nazareth to know that. It would have pleased her even more to know that Langlish, with its endlessly growing list of phonemes and the constant changes in its syntax, all the nonsensical phenomena, was only a charade. A decoy to keep the men from discovering the real language. It might have comforted her a little to know that the lengthy and solemn yearly meeting of the Encoding Project Central Caucus, at which all that had been done on Langlish in the preceding year was either undone or vastly complicated — by unanimous resolution — was the elaborate folly the men considered it to be, and just as hilarious as they considered it to be, and that it was so deliberately. Because the one thing the women could not risk was that some man should take the Project seriously. It would have been something to give Nazareth, to tell her any one of those things.

But they hadn’t dared do it. Who could know how much resistance Nazareth, not even fifteen yet, would have under stress? All of them feared the day when some woman, driven beyond her endurance, would fling in the face of a detested man, “You think you know so much! You don’t even know that the women have a real language of their own, one you men have never even suspected existed! You stupid fool, to believe that we women of the Lines would put together a deformity like Langlish and call it a language!”

Oh, yes. It would be so easy to do, and it was so tempting. Such a glory to see the man’s astonished face. Not one woman in Barren House who couldn’t tell a tale of the time she’d come within an inch of doing something like that. And not one who didn’t bless the wisdom that had kept her from learning anything dangerous to the Native Tongue until she had reached an age, and a serenity, when words no longer leaped from her mouth in spite of her best intentions — and when she was not obliged to live all day and all night among males.

It crossed Caroline’s mind, then that they might well have to tell Nazareth some complicated lies as it was, after today. If, for example, she asked to see her Encodings in the Langlish computer programs.

Caroline’s eyes opened wide in the darkness. Oh, Lord, yes! First thing tomorrow, women must be set to the task of entering Nazareth’s Encodings, with the Langlish word-shapes she had given them — corrected for the current grotesque status of the language, of course, as they would certainly have done — into the computers. They had to be there for Nazareth to see, and they had to be there fast.