Native Tongue

Chapter Twenty-two

Time passed, in the ordinary way of time passing, in the cycle of the seasons and the less predictable but equally endless cycle of the government negotiations for conquest and expansion of territory. Languages were acquired, and infants born and Interfaced, and yet more languages acquired. Sophie Ann died, peacefully, in her sleep; and Deborah was gone now, too, with the little girls tending her to the last. Susannah’s arthritis kept her in a wheelchair now, but did not keep her from baking her spice bread. Nazareth remained thin, Caroline abrupt, Aquina excessive. They tried not to think of what Belle-Anne had become, because there was nothing they could do about that; and when Aquina could not keep from thinking about it they soothed her through the horrors and kept careful watch on the herb cupboards until the spasm of memory had eased. Time went by, no different from any other time.

And Nazareth had been right. Every tiny girl in Chornyak Household knew Láadan now, and used it easily. It wasn’t going as rapidly at the other Barren Houses, but the reports coming in from them were not displeasing. A few of the older girlchildren, already out of infancy when the teaching of Láadan began but still too young to be much involved in government contracts, had begun to pick up the language on their own… haltingly, of course. But then, the women were even more halting, and they managed. “Latining by,” they called it, remembering Nazareth’s comment about what the “international” Latin must have been like. They managed. And the men had noticed nothing.

One of the first things that Nazareth had done as the Project was put into effect was to prepare a manual alphabet for Láadan. Like the fingerspelling alphabet of Ameslan in concept, but very different in form, because it had to be something that only the trained and seeking eye could see. The tiniest movements, and made by fingers lying still and unseen in laps — that was all it could be. It was splendid training for the little ones, and for all of them; if you could learn to follow those miniature motions and understand them, all the while behaving as if you weren’t doing so, following ordinary body-parl was absurdly simple by comparison.

The children loved it… there’s never been a child who didn’t love a “secret language” and this one was wondrously secret. It let them sit in Homeroom, for example, demure and seemingly attentive while the teachers droned away in their twentieth century rituals; the eyes of the little girls gave away nothing, but their fingers were busy. “STUPID poem! Will he never stop? How long is it till the bell? He’s an old fool!” And much worse, of course. It was exciting, it was just dangerous enough, and it was theirs alone. There was no need to worry about them forgetting that they must keep it a secret. You couldn’t have gotten them to betray Láadan short of using thumbscrews and the rack, because it was theirs, and it was theirs together — nothing else met that description.

It was happening just as Nazareth had told them it would happen, and they willingly granted her that. But there were some things that were surprising, nevertheless. For instance, there was the speed of it.

“It’s happening so fast!” Thyrsis said, and yelped; she had stabbed her finger with her embroidery needle. She put the finger to her mouth, to catch the drop of blood before it spotted her work, and said, “How can it be so fast?”

“Nazareth, you said it would take a long time,” agreed one of the others. “Generations, you said… I remember very well.”

“And it will be generations,” Nazareth said, “before it is anything more than an auxiliary language. That’s unavoidable. I don’t see any change in that constraint.”

“But they use it constantly, and they love it so. And they do strange things.”

“For example?”

Susannah chuckled. “For example… when I thought I’d introduce a new word yesterday, for that new way of dancing that we saw on the threedies. You remember, Grace? The one that looks as if the youngsters are all trying to dislocate their shoulders?”

“I remember,” Grace said. “I would swear it had to be painful.”

“Well! I thought I had a decent proposal for a word, and I suggested it. And one of the littlebits corrected me, I’ll have you know!”

“Corrected you? How could that be — did you make an error in the morphology? At your age?”

“Of course not, it was a perfectly good Láadan word, formed in accordance with every rule. But she did. She said, ‘Aunt Susannah, it could not be that way. I’m very sorry, but it would have to be this way.’”

“And she was right?”

“Goodness, how would I know that? I don’t have native intuitions about Láadan, you know!”

“Nor do the children.”

“Ah, but they seem to think they do. Already.”

“It’s not possible.”

“No… but she said ‘This way, my mouth knows that it’s right.’”

They all shook their heads, admitting bewilderment. And Nazareth said, “I admit it’s happening far more quickly than linguistic theory would allow. But I think I know why, really. I think we just hadn’t realized how much fun it would be for the children. They have so little fun, we ought to have realized… but I never thought of it.”

“Do you notice,” Caroline asked, “do you notice how close they are, to one another?”

“The little girls?”

“Of course, the little girls! Even the older ones, who are just able to use Láadan enough to make the tiny ones laugh at them… they are…”

She stopped, because there was no word for it in any language she knew, and she wanted to use the right word.

“Oh,” she said. “I know… They are héenahal.” And she sighed. “Such a relief, to have a language with the right words in it!”

“Well, no wonder they are so knit together, then,” Nazareth observed. “Remember that some of them have had that blissful resource from the day they were born.”

“I cannot imagine it,” Grace said emphatically. “I try, but I can’t. What that must be like. Not to be always groping, because there aren’t any words — while the person you want so desperately to talk to gets tired of waiting and begins talking of something else. To have a language that works, that says what you want to say easily and efficiently, and to have always had that? No, loves, I cannot imagine it. I am too old.”

“It’s working, then,” Thyrsis said. “We can truly say that it’s working.”

“Oh my, yes,” Nazareth answered. “You surely could not, for even one instant, believe that this reality is the one that you and I were born to deal with? Yes, it is working, and very very quickly.”

“And,” Aquina pointed out, “we are no more ready to deal with the new one than we were the day Nazareth told us to get off our butts!”

“Aquina, don’t start!”

“Well, we aren’t.”

“There’s no hurry, Aquina.”

“No hurry? God almighty, the men are slow, but they are not deaf and blind! How long do you think this can go on, before they notice?”

“A very long time,” Caroline said confidently. “They think we are all fools. They believe that our entire attention is devoted to setting up descriptive matrices for the eighty-four separate phonemes of Langlish at the moment, for instance.”

“Eighty-five.”

“Eighty-five now? Dear heaven… you perceive? Nothing is so outrageous that it doesn’t just reinforce them in their conviction that we have vanilla pudding for brains. And when they are that secure in their perceptions, we are quite safe.”

“Still,” Aquina fretted, “still! They aren’t ordinary men, they are linguists. Trained to observe. They’re sure to notice, and we aren’t ready.”

“Aquina,” Thyrsis protested, “must you? When we are so happy?”

“Yes. I must. Somebody has to.”

Nobody answered her, and their fingers flew at their work in a determined WE-ARE-IGNORING-YOU unanimity, but that didn’t stop her.

“What we really need,” she said solemnly, “what would really solve the problem once and for all, is a colony of our own. A colony just for women. Somewhere so far away, and so lacking in anything worth money, that men would never be interested in taking it away from us.”

Nazareth threw up her hands, embroidery and all.

“Aquina,” she cried, “you are outrageous! A colony! We cannot even buy a piece of fruit without a man’s written permission, and you want us to buy tickets on the spaceliners… We can’t travel beyond the city limits without a male escort and a man’s written permission, but you want us to take off for the stars and set up a colony…” She broke down, helpless with laughter, but managed to use both hands to smooth Aquina’s white hair, to show there was no malice in the laughter.

“Oh, I know,” grumbled Aquina, “I know. But it would be so wonderful.”

“We’d take vacuum bottles of frozen sperm along,” chuckled one of the others. “For the little girls we’d be kidnapping. Wouldn’t we, Aquina? And we’d sneak them through customs as… what… shampoo?”

“I know,” said Aquina again, “I’m an old fool.”

“Well then… don’t be a tiresome old fool, Aquina.”

“But the men will notice,” she insisted. “Never mind my fantasies, you know they will notice. And we aren’t certain what to do.”

“My dear,” chided Nazareth, “that’s not so. You have a list. Eleven possible male reactions. Eleven logical moves in response, one for each hypothesis. We did that five years ago.”

“Oh, we made lists! But we haven’t done anything to get ready to carry them out! We have other lists for that! The pre-lists, to get started preparing for the real lists… It’s stupid. It’s bizarre. It’s inexcusable! We should already have begun, long ago.”

“Oh, dear…”

It was an argument that went round and round like a canon, and it would go on as long as there was privacy and leisure enough to sustain it, because it had no answer. If Aquina was right, then they were indeed seriously behind. But they were so busy! The only ones who had the free hours that might have gone into actually setting one of the plans in motion were those too ill or too old or otherwise unable to do any of the tasks involved. And there was no way out.

The governments of Earth had no limit in their greed; every new Alien people contacted meant new Alien treasures to be sought after, and a new market for the products of Earth, and that meant a new Alien language to be acquired. There were never enough infants, never enough Interfaces… again this year a resolution had come up in the United Nations, proposing that the linguists should be compelled by law to establish one of the Households in the Central American Federation, one in Australia, one somewhere else — it was not fair, the delegates thundered, that all the Households should be located in the United States and in United Europe and in Africa, when everyone needed them equally! And then of course the delegations from the African confederations and from United Europe had leaped up to protest that they could hardly be included in the accusations of linguistic imperialism, since it was the United States that hoarded ten of the thirteen Lines.

It kept happening. As though they were a public utility, or a military unit, and not private citizens and human beings at all. It made no difference, because there was no way that the Lines could be compelled to spread themselves “equitably” around the world at the pleasure of its populations. But the constant pressure to do more, to be more, never let up. Why, the governments wanted to know, couldn’t each linguist child be required to master at minimum two Alien languages instead of one, thus doubling their usefulness? Why couldn’t the women of the Lines be required to use the fertility drugs that would guarantee multiple births? Why couldn’t the time each infant spent Interfacing be increased to six hours a day instead of three? Why… there was no end to their whys, and nothing but the stern grip of the Judaeo-Christian paradigm kept them from adding a question about why the men of the Lines couldn’t take a dozen wives apiece rather than one.

As there was no end to their demands, there was no end to their prying. The linguists had spotted the men from the various intelligence services within days of their being planted in the Households, and had been much amused. They might have been fine secret agents, but they were rotten plumbers and carpenters and gardeners. And the ones assigned to so enflame the passions of the women that they would manage to marry into the Lines had been hilariously obvious.

The women of the Barren Houses had no time, in such an atmosphere, to set contingency plans in operation. Every day there was less time. Even these brief gatherings in the parlor, armed with the needlework for excuse, just to discuss what there was not time to do and to fret about it, were becoming more and more rare. And more brief, with everyone but the very oldest obliged to meet multiple deadlines.

As they were obliged now, all of them leaving in a rush except Susannah, who no longer went out to work on negotiations, though she still put in long hours as a translator and at the computers storing data. Aquina had to leave, for all her determination to do something; and Susannah was left alone with Nazareth and the usual flurry of everything being up in the air.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Surely you aren’t on holiday, Natha? Aren’t there at least six places you’re supposed to be, at the same time, fifteen minutes ago?”

“Yes,” laughed Nazareth. “And I’m late for all of them.”

“And still sitting here?”

“I’m trying to make up my mind which of the six to be late to first, dear Susannah.”

“Mmmm… I perceive. And I perceive something else, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness.”

“What else do you perceive, with those wise old eyes?”

“That you are not worried,” Susannah pronounced.

“Ah! What very sharp eyes you have, grandmother!”

“But you aren’t. Are you?”

“No. I’m not worried.”

“Everyone else is, my dear. Not just Aquina. If it were only Aquina it wouldn’t matter. But everyone else.”

“I know.”

“They try to keep from thinking about it, but they are upset.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then — why are you so serene. Nazareth? What aren’t you saying? Why are you unconcerned?”

“I don’t know.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“Nazareth?”

“Yes, Susannah?”

“Do you know something we don’t know? Again? As you knew that it was time to begin teaching Láadan, and we didn’t know? As you knew that it would work, that teaching, and we didn’t know?”

Nazareth gave the question serious consideration, while Susannah sat looking at her steadily.

Finally, she answered, “Susannah,” she said slowly, “I am so sorry. But there’s no way to explain. I’m not able to explain.”

“Perhaps you ought to try, nevertheless.”

“If I could, Susannah, I would. And when I can, I will.”

“And how long will that be? Before you feel that you might be able to begin to attempt to try?”

“Nazareth began folding her work away, smiling.

“My crystal ball is broken. Susannahlove,” she teased. “And I must go, or it won’t be just six places I need to be at once, it will be a dozen. I have to clear some of them away.”