Native Tongue

Chapter Two

Aquina Chornyak was bored. It was a boring negotiation, on a boring contract, for a boring treaty amendment, with a set of almost stupefyingly boring Aliens-in-Transit. You never expected an A.I.T. to be exactly stimulating company — that wasn’t what they were on Earth for, in the first place, and there was no reason to anticipate that what a Terran found stimulating would be anything they found stimulating, or vice versa, in the second place — but sometimes there were a few glimmers of interest in the waste of bureaucratic drivel.

Not this time. The Jeelods were so nearly Terran in physical appearance that it was hard to remember they were A.I.T.s… no amusing tentacles or tails, no pointy ears, no twin noses. Not even an exotic mode of dress to provide diversion. They were short and they were stocky, a bit more square than was typical with Earth humanoids, and they had long beards. And that was it. In their baggy coveralls they looked like a trio of… oh, maybe plumbers. Something of the kind. It was boring. And who cared (except the Jeelods, of course, since if they hadn’t cared they wouldn’t have demanded the negotiation), who cared if the containers Terra shipped them weapons in were blue or not?

They cared. They’d made that clear. Blue, they had said, was a color shocking to every Jeelod, an insult to the honor of every Jeelod; it was a twx’twxqtldx matter. Aquina could not begin to pronounce that, but she hadn’t had to; she was here only as backup and social translator for Nazareth, who was the native speaker of REM34-5-720 for Earth. Nazareth could say it, as easily as she might have said “twaddle.” And Nazareth had tried patiently to explain what the word meant.

If Aquina understood it correctly herself, making those shipping containers blue was about equivalent to the Jeelods having shipped freight to Earth in containers smeared with human feces… curious how the same idiot taboos turned up in so many humanoids from all over the universe. But the Jeelods weren’t going to participate in handling the matter the way two Earth cultures would have done it, in a similar situation.

“You mean making the containers blue is like smearing shit all over them?”

“Damn right!”

“Jeez, we didn’t know. Our apologies, okay? What’s a color that’s okay with you guys?”

“Make ’em red.”

“You’ve got it.”

And the meeting would be over. No… there was clearly something else going on here, and it couldn’t be done that way. (And to be honest, there were Earth cultures that couldn’t have done it that way either.)

Every time Nazareth tried to explain it, speaking first in flawless REM34-5-720 to the Jeelods, and then in flawless English to the representatives of the U.S. Government, the same thing happened. The Jeelods went pale, turned their backs, sat down on the floor, and covered their heads with their hands — a position, Nazareth said, indicating that they were not present in any legal sense of the word. These periods of legal absence lasted, per Jeelod cultural imperatives, exactly eighteen minutes and eleven seconds. After which they would seat themselves at the conference table again and Nazareth would give it another try. Poor kidling.

If she was bored, Aquina thought, at her age, Nazareth must be at the end of her tether completely. Eleven is not a patient age, even for a child of the Lines. And unlike the men from the State Department, who had started going out for coffee for exactly eighteen minutes and three seconds every time it happened, Nazareth had to stay there in the room. No telling what the A.I.T.’s would have offered up as reaction if their interpreter had left the room during their ritual of insult.

They were fifteen minutes and a bit into the latest episode, and Aquina sighed and considered going for coffee herself; as mere backup, she could presumably be spared. But it would be complicated, since she’d have to find an agreeable male to escort her. And it wouldn’t be kind… She was fond of Nazareth, who was something pretty special in eleven-year-old girls. Aquina glanced at her fondly, wishing she could tell her a joke or something to ease the tedium, and saw that the child had her head bent in total concentration over a small pad of paper. Scribbling something on it, with the tip of her tongue sticking out between firmly clamped lips. Aquina touched her gently to get her attention, and then she signed a question at her; with their backs turned, the Jeelods would never know that the Terrans were using sign language.

“You drawing, sweetlove? Can I see?” she signed.

The child looked uneasy, and her shoulders curled protectively toward whatever it was.

“It doesn’t matter,” Aquina signed. “Never mind — I didn’t mean to pry.”

But Nazareth smiled at her and shrugged, signing. “That’s okay,” and passed her the little tablet to look at.

Now that she had it, Aquina didn’t know what she had; it wasn’t drawings, certainly. It appeared to be words, but no words she’d ever seen before. Nazareth would be far ahead of her in REM34-5-720, because it was her responsibility to be far ahead — it was her native language, as much as English and Ameslan were. But these words couldn’t be REM34-5-720. Aquina knew the rules for word-formation in the language… these were something else.

“They’re Encodings,” signed Nazareth, seeing her puzzlement.

“What?”

“Encodings,” Nazareth fingerspelled it, to be sure of it, and Aquina stared at her open-mouthed.

Encodings! What on earth —

Before she could ask, she heard the swift hiss of clingsoles behind her, the State Department men were coming back. Nazareth sat up straight in the interpreter’s booth, where she and Aquina were sufficiently hidden from view to spare the delicate egos of the males the humiliation of really seeing the women… on whose services they were completely dependent in this interplanetary transaction. Nazareth’s whole attention was on the Jeelods and their Terran counterparts, and she left the little tablet in Aquina’s hands. Nazareth knew her obligations, and she fulfilled them. Aquina heard her speaking, easily producing the impossible consonant clusters with their impossible modifications of clicks and glottalizations and squeaks, trying to find a way of expressing their objections that would not force them to be “absent” from the negotiations again.

Which left Aquina free to study the tablet, casually at first, and then with a steadily increasing excitement. Encodings, the child had said! New language shapes, for concepts not yet lexicalized in any known language… Encodings, Capital-E, was that?

She stared at the neat symbols; children of the Lines, trained to do phonetic transcription by the age of six, did not produce anything but tidy symbols. The words themselves she recognized now — they were Nazareth’s attempts at Langlish, and they were pathetic. Given the resources that Langlish offered to a coiner of words, they were bound to be pathetic; and given the very very little that Nazareth could know about Langlish, they weren’t even top quality pathetic. But she was excited nevertheless.

It was the concepts themselves, the semantics of the forms that Nazareth was trying to make speakable; they made her heart race. They might well exist in some language she did hot know about, sure, and that would have to be checked; but then again they might not. And if they didn’t, well — if they didn’t, they were like finding a carteblanche disc on the slidewalk, with nobody around to see you pick it up. It would be easy enough, now that Nazareth had written down the semantics, to put the proper shapes to them, to make them words…

There was a fine dampness on her forehead and on her palms; she looked at the child beside her as she would have looked at a truly interesting Alien. And saw that Nazareth was exasperated, and not with the Jeelods — Aquina must have been missing cues, and being about as much use as a no backup at all. The tablet would have to wait, and Aquina signed a hasty “Sorry, Natha!” and turned her attention to her work. Nazareth had more than enough to do just trying to solve this tangle of language and custom, without having to take the notes on it and look up forms in the lexicons and make nice at the government flunkies when they got agitated. Aquina put the tablet firmly out of her mind, and bent to her work.

It was nearly midnight before she got back to Chornyak Barren House and could finally talk the whole thing over with someone. First there had been the interminable series of “absences.” By her count, twenty-nine of them, before Nazareth had at last found a pair of equivalent utterances in the two languages that would serve the purpose and offend neither group of negotiators. Then there’d been the long wrangle over what color the containers should be in the future… there was no point, Nazareth had advised them, in choosing another color and then finding out that it was also taboo, with all of this to be gone through again.

Aquina had been just barely able to follow what the child was doing, and she hadn’t known half the words. (That was the problem of having only an informal backup, instead of another native speaker, of course — but when the only other native speaker wasn’t walking yet, you did the best you could.) Nazareth had told the Jeelods a story, the way you’d tell any story; and all through it she had salted in, one by one, the Jeelod color terms — all eleven basic ones, and a few additional common ones for good measure. She knew what she was doing, that was obvious; presumably this was the Jeelod equivalent of beating around the bush until a safe point was reached. As each color term was introduced into the story, there’d be a certain twitch of Nazareth’s shoulders, a certain flicker of her tongue, a certain sniffing noise… surely a body-language unit of Jeelod, by the patterning, although Aquina didn’t know its significance. And the child had watched with an impressive intensity as she spoke, looking for something from them, some scrap of body-part that would give her the clue she needed. While the government men fidgeted. They had no patience at all, as usual; Aquina had wondered what rock the government found them under. Also as usual.

Finally, finally, there’d been the proper color, and no unpleasant reaction to contend with from the Aliens. Then there was the matter of drawing up the new treaty clause to specify that color… and that had not been easy, for reasons that were no doubt clear to Nazareth Chornyak but that she had been too exhausted by then to bother trying to make clear to the rest of them.

And when it was all over, negotiation successfully concluded, Jeelods homeworld bound and happy, contract all signed and sealed and delivered, Aquina and Nazareth had been kept waiting while the government morons complained at length to the Chornyak man who’d come to retrieve them and take them home. Nazareth was incompetent, etc., etc. Aquina was no help, etc., etc. Disgraceful waste of time and money, etc., etc. If this was the best that the linguists could do, the government could only say et cetera et cetera.

Their driver had listened gravely, nodding once in a while to keep the stream of plaintive piddle flowing and get it over with; and eventually the flunkies had run out of anything to complain about. At which point he’d suggested that if they were truly dissatisfied with Nazareth and Aquina they should feel absolutely free to hire a different interpreter/translator team for their next contact with the Jeelods.

There was no other team, of course, since Nazareth Joanna Chornyak was the only living Terran who could speak the Jeelod’s language with even minimal fluency. There were two Chornyak infants learning it from her, of course, so there’d be someone to step into her shoes at a later date and to serve as formal backup. One of them was nine months old, and the other was going on two… there wasn’t much you could expect of them in the way of negotiating skills for quite some time to come. The flunkies knew that, and the linguists knew they knew that, and it was all just as silly as the Jeelods and their absence rituals. And seemed to take just as long.

“Eighteen minutes eleven seconds,” Aquina had muttered to the weary girl beside her, while they waited for it to be over; and Nazareth had giggled, and then said something genuinely gross in gutter French. All taken, they weren’t in the van until nearly eleven, and even at that hour the Washington traffic was so heavy that it was another twenty minutes before they boarded the flyer… and Nazareth would have to be up at five-thirty for the next day’s routine, as always, and in another interpreting booth by eight o’clock sharp. Such fun, being a child of the Lines!

And fun being a woman of the Lines, too, of course. There were plenty of women still awake at Barren House at midnight, and they were busy enough — and tired enough — to welcome an excuse for a break and listen to what Aquina had to tell them. She started with a small and dubious audience; just herself and Nile and Susannah and a new resident named Thyrsis that she didn’t really know well — who’d decided for some as yet unexplained reason that she preferred being here to living at Shawnessey Barren House. No doubt she’d tell them about it, in her own good time. Aquina began with those four, and then as she talked her audience grew steadily.

“I don’t think I understand,” put in Thyrsis Shawnessey the first time Aquina paused. “In fact, I’m sure I don’t.”

“That’s because Aquina’s so excited. She never can talk straight when she’s excited… fortunately, she’s always bored at negotiations, or lord knows what kind of things she’d have brought upon us by now.”

“How can you be excited, Aquina, at this hour of the night?”

“Because it is exciting,” Aquina insisted.

“Tell us again.”

Aquina told them, trying not to get ahead of herself, and they listened, nodding, and Susannah got up and made three pots of tea and poured it all round.

When she was satisified that everyone was settled with the steaming cups, she called Aquina to a halt, saying, “Now let me just find out if I have this straight, without all the exotic touches. What you’re telling us is that that child, all on her own, has been writing down Encodings and making up words to fit them in Langlish. Without any help or instruction from anyone. And nothing in the way of information about Langlish, really, except the scraps the little girls pick up running back and forth between here and the main house… the bits and pieces they see us fooling with at the computers, and such. Have I got it right, Aquina?”

“Well, it was pissy Langlish, Susannah — you’d expect that.”

“I surely would.”

“But you have it right. Considering what she has to work with, she’d done very well. You could tell the forms were supposed to be Langlish, at least. And that’s not what matters anyway; it’s the semantics that matters, damn it. And I had a chance to ask her a thing or two while we were waiting for the men to wind up their dominance displays and let us come home — she’s been doing it a long time, she says.”

“That would mean a month or two, at her age.”

“Maybe so; maybe not. She says she has lots more pages at home. She’s keeping a notebook, like I kept a diary. What wouldn’t I give to get a look at that notebook!”

“You really think this is important, don’t you, Aquina? Not just a little girl playing, but really important.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Aquina, we weren’t there — we didn’t see what she had written. And you can’t remember very well. How can we judge, with so little data?”

“I copied one of them.”

“Without asking her.”

“Yes. Without asking her.” Aquina was used to being in trouble with her housemates, and used to being on the wrong side of their ethical lines; she didn’t bother being defiant. “I thought it mattered, and I still think so. Here… please, look at this.” And she showed them a sample of what had been on Nazareth’s tablet.

To refrain from asking, with evil intentions; especially when it’s clear that someone badly wants you to ask — for example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it.

“Well?” she demanded after they’d looked at it long enough to understand it. “Say something!”

“And she gave this a lexicalization as a Langlish word?”

“Well, hellfire and heavengates, woman, Nazareth doesn’t know that there’s any other woman-language but Langlish! Naturally that’s what she tried to do. But can’t you see? If she can formulate semantic concepts like these, we know what to do with them!”

“Oh, but Aquina,” Susannah objected, “then the child would expect to see them turn up on the computers in the Langlish program. And that would mean the men would have access to them. We can’t have that, and you know it.”

There was a chorus of agreement, and Aquina shook her head fiercely and shouted, “I NEVER SAID — ” and then abruptly lowered her voice and started over. She was too tired to yell, even if it had been appropriate.

“I never said that we would tell Nazareth we were using them; lord, I’m not completely stupid!”

“But then how would we get them?”

“I’ll get them,” said Aquina. “I’m Nazareth’s informal backup for all the Jeelod negotiations, and they’re back with some fool complaint about every two weeks. I’ll have plenty of boredom time with her to find out where she keeps that notebook. Not in the girldorm, that’s for sure… I never would have. But she never has any opportunity to take it far from either this house or the big house — it’s in a tree, or down a hole, or something. And she’ll tell me.”

“And then?”

“And then I will — very carefully, so she’ll never know — go every week or so and copy off whatever she’s added.”

There. Now they were shocked. They knew all about breaking eggs to make omelettes, but it didn’t help them any; they had about as much political sense as Nazareth, even when you put the whole bunch of them together.

“You can’t do that,” said Nile flatly, pulling her shawl tighter around her as a sudden lash of sleet rattled the window beside them.

“Why can’t I?”

“How would you have felt if somebody had done that with your diary, when you were little?”

“There’s a difference.”

“Such as?”

“My diary was only important to me. Nazareth’s secret notebook is important to every woman on this planet, and every woman beyond, and all women to come. The two things are not the same at all.”

Susannah reached over then and laid her hand, gnarled with arthritis and swollen with blue veins, but sure and strong and kind, over Aquina’s hand.

“My dear,” she said gently, “we understand you. But please do think! Living as we do, all of us in communal households from the day we’re brought home from the hospital — and on the public wards before that, lord knows! — and no instant away from the Household except the time we spend shut up with one another in interpreting booths… Aquina, we have so little privacy! It’s so precious. You can’t violate Nazareth’s privacy by sneaking her notebook from where she’s hidden it away, just because she’s a child and won’t suspect you — that’s despicable. I don’t believe you mean it.”

“Oh, she means it!” said Caroline, joining them with a mug of black coffee. Caroline didn’t care for tea, and wouldn’t drink it to be polite. “You can be sure she means it!”

“Indeed I do,” said Aquina.

Susannah clucked her tongue, and took her hand away; and Aquina wished for her own shawl, but against the chill inside this house, not the chill of the weather. She could not understand why it never stopped hurting, having all the other women set against her. She’d be fifty-five years old tomorrow, more than half a century, and she’d lived here in Barren House so many years… and still it hurt. She was ashamed, to be so soft. And sorry she’d told them, but it was too late for that.

“I will find out where she keeps the notebook,” she said between her teeth, “and I will check it every week or two to copy what’s been added there, and I will bring that data back here for us to work on.”

“You’ll work on it all by yourself if you do.”

“I’m used to that,” said Aquina bitterly.

“I suppose you must be.”

“And because Nazareth will never know about it, she won’t be looking for those words in the Langlish computer displays — and they’ll be safe. But we will have the good of them.”

“Shame on you.”

“I’m not ashamed,” she said.

“Takes eggs to make an omelette?”

Aquina firmed her mouth and said nothing; she hadn’t learned not to be hurt, but she’d learned not to let them bait her.

And then, because she was so tired and she felt so alone, she started to tell them what she thought of their damnfool ethics, but Susannah cut her off instantly. And Belle-Anne, drawn from her bed by the subdued racket of their arguing, rosy as an angel, and her yellow hair loose down her back, came in to help. She rubbed Aquina’s taut shoulders, and poured her a fresh cup of tea, and there-thered her generally until she was soothed and Susannah had the subject well changed and onto neutral ground.

What was a real shame, they were saying, was that it would be so long before they could have Nazareth with them. With them and working on the woman-language in all her spare moments, with full knowledge of what she was doing.

“Do you know,” asked Nile, “that Nazareth’s mother told me the child’s language-facility scores are the highest ever seen since we’ve been keeping records? Clear off the scale! They’re expecting tremendous things of her… and such luck that it was her they gave that awful Jeelod language to; she has no trouble with it, apparently.”

“She won’t be any use to us for… oh, what, forty years?” Aquina hazarded, her voice thick with resentment even under Belle-Anne’s stroking and soothing. “She’s eleven now… she’ll marry, perhaps marry into another Household, and she’ll have the obligatory dozen children to give birth to — ”

“Aquina! Don’t make it worse than it is! Thomas Blair Chornyak will never let her get out of his sight — you can count on that. And it’s not a dozen children she’ll have to produce, that’s absurd!”

“All right, half a dozen, then. Six children, seven children, whatever you like — lots of children. And every instant given over to working on the government contracts, hardly time to get up out of childbed before she’s back in the interpreting booths again… until she’s worn out at last, and the menopause comes to bless her.”

“Even then,” Caroline put in, “she may not come to us. Not if her husband wants her to stay with him — not if she wears well. Or if she’s lucky and the man’s fond of her beyond just her body.”

“Or if she’s useful to him somehow,” said Thyrsis, with a sharp note to her voice that caught their attention. So that was it… she’d come to Chornyak Barren House against her husband’s wishes, because she was useful to him in some way, clever at something he liked having her do. And if she’d tried to go to Shawnessey Barren House he’d have been close by to be forever pressuring her to come back to the main house. They would be interested in knowing how she’d managed to get around his authority, come the time she felt free to tell them more.

“Damn and damn and damn,” mourned Aquina. “That’s forty years or more wasted. Don’t you understand that? Don’t any of you understand that?”

“Aquina, it’s not as though the whole Encoding Project was dependent on Nazareth — we are all working on it. And women at the other Barren Houses are working on it, Be reasonable.”

They soothed her, all of them. Soothed and coaxed, anxious to restore her perspective on this in spite of her distress. She was overtired, she would feel better about it in the morning, she would see that it was just that she’d been under such a strain. On and on…

Aquina let them talk, and she kept her own counsel. Tomorrow, first thing, what she would do was go looking for Nazareth and begin trying to find out where that notebook was hidden. Her own priorities, thank god, were properly ordered.