Native Tongue

Chapter Fifteen

Nazareth waited in the government car, staring bleakly at the snarled traffic all around her; they would be late, and the others would be angry. She would have to ask the driver to go in with her and explain that the delay had not been avoidable… Happy nineteenth birthday, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness.

She didn’t feel nineteen. She felt old. Old and used up… The children of the Lines had little opportunity to be children, and that aged you. And having the children, first the boy born on her sixteenth birthday and then the twin girls two years later… that brought a certain maturity. But it wasn’t either of those things that made her feel like one of those ancient wrinkled crones cackling crazy imprecations from the back of a cave. It was living as the wife of Aaron Adiness, who was twenty-five on the outside and just barely three years old on the inside, that had done it.

Aaron was handsome, and virile — exhaustingly virile — and with most people he was charming. Nazareth knew that many women envied her her husband. His astonishing facility at acquiring languages and learning them had waned as he had become older, but before that happened he had run up an impressive total. She had no idea how many languages he could read and write with ease, but certainly it ran to nearly one hundred.

It was the sort of thing the media doted on, and they never tired of filling little holes in programming with a feature about “the man who speaks one hundred languages!” Which was absurd, of course — he spoke perhaps a dozen — but the story was better when it was distorted, and it fed the unhealthy fascination the public had for anything to do with the linguist monsters. It was not all that much of an accomplishment, really, not for the human languages. For someone to be fluent in tongues from five different language families was impressive; to know one hundred just demonstrates that you have had a lot of opportunity and that you look on language learning the way others might look on surfing or chess. Human languages are so much alike that by the time you’ve learned a dozen well you’ve seen everything that human languages will ever do, and adding others is almost trivial.

But people weren’t willing to believe that, and Aaron didn’t mind encouraging the misunderstanding. Him and his “hundred languages”… Let a two-line filler come on the screen with his name in it, never mind that it said the same thing it had said dozens of times before, Aaron would be there jabbing the key to guarantee him a hard copy for his scrapbook. Which Nazareth was obliged to keep up-to-date, of course.

Living with him, subject to his whims, she felt that she walked from morning to night on eggshells. His feelings were so easily hurt that she rarely knew what had bruised them; but he would say, “You know very well what’s wrong, you smug bitch!” and sulk for hours, until she had apologized not once but several times. And could be awarded his grudging forgiveness for a brief time.

If she didn’t apologize, she could count on humiliation, because he would make her the butt of his wit — and it was fearsome — on every occasion offered him, the more public the better. In private, he would not speak to her at all; in public, he kept everyone weak with laughter at his jokes about her faults and her weight and her one front tooth that was crooked and any tiny miscalculation that she might have made in the course of the day… or the course of the night. He would set her up to fall into his traps, and sit back beaming while they roared at her misery; and he would raise one elegant eyebrow and cluck his tongue at her as you do at a pettish child and say, “Poor sweet baby, you have no sense of humor at all, do you?” It was a blessed relief to go to work and escape from him. Always.

The other women laughed at his jokes as well as the men, and Nazareth knew why. If they didn’t, two things would happen to them. First, Aaron would include them in his war of ridicule. Second, their husbands would accuse them of being sullen and of being “wet blankets that spoil everybody’s fun” and of being too stupid to understand even the simplest funny line. The men, most of them, thought Aaron was the most entertaining person they’d ever had the pleasure to have around.

If Nazareth was sufficiently humble, she might gain a day or two of respite, but no more. Not only did things she said hurt his feelings, and looks on her face hurt his feelings, and things she did or failed to do hurt his feelings, he could not bear it if she did anything well. If someone complimented her, Aaron was enraged. If she received a routine note of commendation for a job well done, he was furious. If she had a contract in hand and he had none, he was angry with a foul dark anger. She did not dare beat him at chess or cards, or win a game of tennis from him, or swim a few laps more than he could, because he couldn’t handle any of those things.

And it was Nazareth who bore the brunt of it when Aaron was bested at something by another man. In public he was the good sport, there to shake the winner’s hand and admire his skill; back in their bedroom he would pace endlessly around the room, raving about the bad luck and the series of mysterious accidents that had kept him from being the winner.

In public, his children were the apples of his eye, always tucked under Daddy’s arm or bouncing on Daddy’s knee. In private he detested them. They were useful only as possessions, something he could show off as he showed off his collection of swords or his cursed languages; he had no other interest in them. And he made no pretense of having any interest in Nazareth except for her sexual convenience, the money she earned for his private accounts (and how bitterly he complained about the 40 percent of her fees that went into the community accounts when he knew nobody but her could hear him!) and her value as a foil for his wit. If the day came when she could no longer be useful in any of those roles, he would have no more use for her than for a stranger… probably less. At least a stranger would have offered him novelty.

She might have complained, but there was no one to complain to. The men loved Aaron, since he had too much guile ever to turn his petulance on them — he had outgrown that, as Thomas had predicted that he would. And complaining to another woman would have been like shouting down a well. “If you live with a man, it’s like that,” they’d say, if they bothered to say anything. She believed Aaron to be far worse than most men — she knew, for example, that although her father was often angry with her mother he was always courteous to her in public, and she had seen no other man who tormented his wife as Aaron tormented her. But the women who did not have her problem had their own problems. There was no end to the inventiveness of men when their goal was to prove their mastery.

It was ironic that she had accepted this life for the sake of the Encodings, for there had not been any since the day of her wedding. It was not only that she never had an instant alone when she could have sat down and worked at them, not only the problem of a hidingplace for the work; she felt as if some sort of deadness had crept into her mind and removed forever whatever had been the source of her efforts.

I am stupid, Nazareth thought. And I am not alone in that opinion. Aaron thought her stupid, certainly; he would teach her sons to think so. And the one and only time that she had slipped and tried to tell another woman what her life was like, that woman had called her stupid.

“Good Lord, Nazareth,” she had said. “You don’t have to tolerate that kind of thing — you manage him, you little ninny. How can you be so stupid?”

Manage him. How do you manage a man? What did it mean, to “manage” him?

“Mrs. Chornyak, I’d better go in with you and explain.”

Nazareth jumped… she hadn’t realized that the traffic had started moving again, much less that they’d arrived.

“Thank you, Mr. Dressleigh,” she murmured. “I’d be very grateful if you would do that.”

“Part of my job,” said the driver, carefully making the point that nothing else would have caused him to exert himself on behalf of a woman of the Lines. And then he was off, with Nazareth doing her best to keep up with him. He would explain, he would be gone, and this evening some equally reluctant hero would come to collect her. It made no difference to Nazareth; she had never had a driver who was friendly, or even very polite. Or who could be bothered to get her name right. She came from Chornyak Household, she wore a wedding ring — she would, therefore, be “Mrs. Chornyak,” and never mind the details.

But when the explanations and the formalities were over, and she was finally seated in the interpreter’s booth and arranging her dictionaries around her in preparation for beginning her work, she found that the universe had not forgotten her birthday after all. It had in fact prepared for her an absolutely splendid birthday gift, something she never could have conjured up for herself.

She had expected that this day would be more than usually tiresome, because the subject of the negotiation was an import tariff — never a fascinating item — and because she had no help whatsoever. Her nine-year-old backup was solidly locked into a negotiation in his own Interface language that could not be postponed; the six-year-old was down with one of the contagious childhood illnesses; and Aquina Noumarque was working in Memphis and could not come to help her either. That meant no support, either formal or informal; it was not an easy way to work.

Because her mind was taken up with the problems this would mean for her, she didn’t even realize anything was wrong until she began to hear whispers and to feel the sort of tension that is the product of body-parl shouting distress. It caught her attention at last, and she looked up from her materials to see what minor catastrophe had upset the negotiations… perhaps she was in luck and a government man had broken a leg? Not painfully, of course, and not seriously; she wasn’t a vindictive woman.

And there sat her Jeelods in their usual coveralls, staring at heaven knows what, with an expression of grim pleasure on their square faces, and Nazareth gasped aloud.

“Dear sweet suffering saints,” she said under her breath, not even stopping to be sure that the microphones hadn’t yet been activated, “those are females!”

They certainly were. Even in the loose garments that were prescribed by their state religion, even with their hair close-cropped in a way that no Terran woman would have ever chosen, it was clear that they were females. Either they were unusual specimens, or the Jeelod woman was typically large of breast; large of breast and distinctly pointed of breast.

Nazareth dropped her eyes swiftly to the smooth plastic surface in front of her and fought not to let her delight show on her face. It would never do for the bitch linguist to betray her pleasure in finding herself in this situation — there would be scathing complaints to her father about the undiplomatic manner in which she had approached this diplomatic crisis.

There was a soft tap on the back of the booth, which did not surprise her — after all, they couldn’t just all sit there frozen as if the sun had been brought to a standstill, someone had to do something — and she said “Yes?” without looking around, carefully bringing the expression on her face under control before she had to show it to whoever this might be.

“Mrs. Adiness… I hope I didn’t startle you.”

She turned, smiling politely, just as the man slipped into the booth and took the seat beside her. Not a government man, then… who was he? He was handsome, and he must have been twice her age, but he wore no uniform or insignia by which she could identify him.

“Mrs. Adiness, I’m going to speak very quickly here,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but you will understand the necessity for bypassing the amenities. My name is Jordan Shannontry, of Shannontry Household, and I was supposed to see if I could be of service here in some peripheral fashion… we had word that you were completely on your own today, and REM34-5-720 has been a kind of hobby of mine. Since I was free, and it was obvious that you would have your hands full, I came on over — but I wasn’t expecting this.”

“Neither were the government men,” said Nazareth in her most carefully noncommittal voice.

“How could they possibly not know better than this?” he asked her.

“They?”

“The Jeelods… surely they know the Terran culture better than this! They’ve been negotiating with us, trading with us, for nearly fifteen years.”

“Oh, they know better,” said Nazareth. “This is a deliberate tactic to stall negotiations… and to insult the American negotiators.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure, Mr. Shannontry.”

“Well, damn them, then!”

“As you say, sir.”

“The arrogance… not to mention the just plain bad manners…”

“Oh, yes. The Jeelods are not noted for their exquisite manners, Mr. Shannontry. And I thank you very much for wanting to lend a hand, by the way — I didn’t know there was anyone to call on.”

Shannontry shrugged carelessly. “I’m not much to call on, my dear,” he said. “I can say hello and good-bye and thank you, and very little more; and I say what little I can say with an accent that will have you in stitches. But I read the language easily enough, and the Department thought I could at least help with translations, look things up for you in the dictionaries, that sort of trivia.”

“It was kind of you to come,” said Nazareth.

“Well… it was my pleasure. I was looking forward to actually hearing the language in use, frankly. But I don’t know what we do now, Mrs. Adiness, and it’s very obvious that those men don’t know either.”

Nazareth permitted herself one smile, and said “Well, there is certainly nothing I can do, Mr. Shannontry.”

“No… under the circumstances, there certainly isn’t. Good God… now what?”

Nazareth looked bewildered and helpless, and waited. She was having a wonderful time. The government men could not possibly begin negotiations with female Jeelods; that was out of the question. No female, by definition, had adult legal rights, which would make any decisions vacuous in any case. Furthermore, it would set a precedent and lead to the potential for endless repetition of this tactic from other Alien peoples. There were quite a large number of extraterrestrial cultures which allowed the females of their species what appeared to be equal or roughly equal status with the males.

On the other hand, the government men had no way of knowing what precisely they could do, without causing an interplanetary diplomatic crisis. And the longer they just sat there, the worse it was going to get.

There went one of them now, scuttling for the door, to get some instructions from somebody higher up. Nazareth chuckled, hoping he’d run into somebody from the team that had so proudly announced a few years back that they had cracked one of the REM18 languages by use of a computer alone; it had been necessary to send a linguist to tell them, very gently, that the word they had translated as English “friend” in fact meant “one whom it is permissible to eat, provided the proper spices are used in preparation of the corpse.” Nothing like a government “expert” to liven up one’s already marvelous nineteenth birthday!

As the man left the room, the Jeelod negotiating team went at once into the posture of ritual absence, and Jordan Shannontry said, “Look at that, now — what does that mean?”

“They are insulted,” Nazareth told him. “When they perceive an insult they will always do that. It slows things down very effectively.”

“Lord help us all,” sighed Shannontry. “Is there anything at all that we can do?”

“I’m afraid it isn’t my place to propose a course of action,” said Nazareth, quite properly. She had not trained as a wife, but she knew her role as woman linguist as well as any woman in the Lines. Her place was to interpret and to translate, to respond as best she could to direct questions posed to her regarding the language and the culture of the Aliens involved in the negotiation, and otherwise to be silent. It most emphatically was not her place to suggest strategies or diplomatic policy to anyone present.

Shannontry studied her carefully, and she flushed slightly under his steady glance, and looked away.

“This is completely unfair to you,” he said emphatically. “You’re far too young to be put in such a position, and I resent it deeply… it’s unkind, and it’s inexcusable.”

Nazareth had no idea what to say, and she didn’t dare look at him. He sounded as though he were genuinely concerned about her, but she knew better than to rely on that — any moment, he might spring the trap he was constructing with the feigned gallant words, as Aaron did, and then she would be in trouble. She kept her silence, and waited, wary as any burnt child with an unfamiliar fire to contend with.

“Mrs. Adiness,” he said gently, no anger at all in his voice that she could spot, “this just won’t do. My dear, if you will tell me what to say, I will go over there and say it. Abominably, of course — but I will say it. Just write it down for me and model it for me a time or two, and I’ll take care of the matter.”

“Would you do that?”

“Of course.”

Nazareth was charmed. He really was going to help.

“We have plenty of time, then,” she said.

“We do?”

She explained about the absence rituals lasting eighteen minutes and eleven seconds, and he made an impatient noise.

“I suppose in this case it’s just as well,” he muttered.

“Probably.”

“Well… what shall I say to them?”

Nazareth thought a moment. First there would be the narrative frame that would shelter the direct sentence, and the triple particle that would disambiguate the three embeddings. Then the very simple message… WE WILL BE MOST HAPPY TO WAIT UNTIL YOUR MEN ARE ABLE TO COME TO THE NEGOTIATION. The other half of the narrative frame… some honorifics…

“It will be long,” she said dubiously.

“That’s all right,” he answered. “I’ll manage. And if my barbarous accent offends their ears, it’s their own damn fault. Just write it out.”

She did, and she said it for him.

“Again, please.”

She said it again.

“That first cluster…”

She repeated it slowly, tipping her chin so that he could see clearly the position of her tongue against her teeth.

“Oh, I perceive. Like that… All right, here we go. Listen to me, please — will they understand?”

Nazareth would have winced at the mangled stream of sound that represented Shannontry’s oral skill at REM34, but that would have been as bad manners as those the Jeelods were exhibiting. She bit her lip, instead, and he laughed.

“That bad? Here… brace yourself, Mrs. Adiness, and I’ll try it again.”

Better. Not much, but better.

“Yes,” she said. “They’ll understand that, even if they don’t like it very much. And it’s time, I think — yes, they’re turning around. Perhaps if you felt willing to go ahead before the man from the Department gets back…”

“Absolutely,” he said, apparently not offended by the hint of a suggestion of action. “I’ll be right back.”

Nazareth would never have dared leave the interpreter’s booth and march right over to the Alien delegation, and she doubted that many men would have, but Jordan Shannontry seemed as comfortable as if he’d been in his own Household. She watched, as delighted as if it had been an entertainment especially for her benefit, while he faced the Jeelod women, bowed first to the left and then to the right — which showed that he had studied the culture, for all his shortcomings with the pronunciation of the language — and just said it right out. Twice. Slowly. And then again, to be absolutely certain that they had heard and understood.

The American negotiators didn’t like it one little bit, and as Shannontry made his way back across the room they caught at his sleeve and made desperate “What’s going on?” faces at him, but he was magnificent. He shook them off as if they were tiny children, and he did not stoop to explain one thing to them. Marvelous, thought Nazareth, marvelous! To be so certain of yourself… to be so controlled! To dare to behave like that…

He was with her in half a minute, and he touched her wrist politely, not sitting down.

“I suggest we leave at once, Mrs. Adiness,” he said. “Before our federal friends can create any additional commotion. Come — I’ll get you out of here, and then I will come back and explain the situation.”

She was afraid to do that, but he was firm, overruling her objections and moving her briskly out of the booth and into the corridor, gathering up her work materials for her as they went so that she didn’t have to bother with them. Only when they were safely outside the conference room and she was seated in the cubicle reserved for the linguists’ use during breaks and delays did he say anything more.

“You’re not to worry,” he said. “Not at all. Whatever happens, I’ll explain that you behaved precisely as you should have behaved and that there is no reason for anyone to be annoyed with you in even the slightest degree. If they want to complain, let them complain about me — you did nothing but comply with my instructions, and if there was an error it was my error. Now you just relax, dear, and wait, while I go see what can be done about all this. I assume they will send a team of men?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. They are as anxious to get the tariff established — in their favor, naturally — as we are to have it firmly established in ours. This was just a — a tactic.”

“Worked very well, too, didn’t it?”

Nazareth ducked her head to hide her face, and agreed that it surely had.

“Well… we’ll get it settled. And a decent Jeelod team at the table. And then, my dear, I will send someone to bring you back to the booth, and not until.”

And he was gone, leaving her entirely bemused. She was not only impressed, she was astonished… she tried to imagine Aaron, in such a situation, and she laughed aloud. He would not have been there in the first place, not Aaron. He would work if a woman were there acting as his backup. He would even condescend to work on a multilingual negotiation with a woman serving as interpreter for one of the other languages. But act as backup for a woman himself? He would have gone to any lengths, made up any excuse, before he would have done such a thing.

It crossed her mind then, oddly, that it must be miserable to be Aaron Adiness and have to live in constant terror of your own ego. It had never before occurred to her.

Poor Aaron. That was a new thought. Poor Aaron.