Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “But why …” Sarajane leaned forward, frowning, and the ball of blue yarn in her lap fell and rolled away across the floor, ending up under Brandwynne’s rocker. “Why has something so obvious not been discovered long long ago?”

  “It has!” Delina said. “It was! I told you … I meant to tell you!”

  “You did tell them, darlin’,” said Willow, at her side. “I heard you, if nobody else did.”

  “Holybook after holybook, Sarajane, there’s a section that tells all about it. Not usually in a way that’s easy to understand, holy-books being as they are, but it’s in there. And from the beginning of history the holy persons have said to us, in so many words: live like we do and you won’t need much to eat.”

  “Gregorian chant!” Brandwynne said, raising a knitting needle high. “Yogis … buried for weeks at a time, and so on … they don’t listen to Gregorian chant.”

  “Want me to take that one on, Delina?” Willow offered.

  “No. Thank you, but no.” Delina shook her head and tackled it herself. “Brandwynne,” she said, “there are two important points. First: because Gregorian chant comes out of my own culture I assumed it would be the form of chant my brain could use most readily. That was an obvious strategy. Second: the yogis are doing something different. They’re shutting their metabolisms down to coma level or below so that they won’t need much of anything to sustain life. I wasn’t interested in that; I’m still not interested. And I’m sure it’s irrelevant to this discussion.”

  Brandwynne nodded, conceding the point. “You’re right, Delina,” she said. “You’re quite right. My apologies.”

  The lights flickered, went out, and came back on again as the solar generators took over. Sarajane clucked her tongue, and she spoke for all of them when she said, “How nice not to have to be out in that!” The government had always tried to schedule the storms, storms that Earth needed, at times that would not inconvenience most of its population. But they’d rarely been able to extend that courtesy to the linguists, whose presence in the interpreting booths had often been required around the clock. Every woman in the room had memories of terrifying trips in the flyers and vans through storms no one else would have dreamed of venturing out in; it was nice not to have that to deal with, even temporarily.

  “Delina?” It was Brandwynne again. “What do you want to do now? What do you want us to do now? Assuming we accept the idea that you’re correct about this process … this audiosynthesis … and I think that we all agree we must do that, unless we can prove you wrong … what should happen next? How do you suggest that we proceed?”

  “More testing,” Delina told them, not meeting their eyes, frowning down at the blanket corner she was turning with her crochet hook. “More testing, right away. We need the answers to a long list of questions.”

  “For example?”

  “For example,” said Delina, “I can do audiosynthesis, but can everybody? For example, is it something only adults can do? Or only adult women can do? Neither is likely, but we have to find out. For another example, does the sound source have to be chant?”

  “I thought you were sure it did!” Glenellen protested.

  “No, I’m not sure at all.” Delina shook her head. “The only actual experiment, the only account I could find that came from documented historical materials in the libraries instead of from some sort of oral tradition, was the incident with the monks of Bec-Hellouin. They used chant. To keep the variables as few as possible, so did I. To say the sounds must be chant on that basis alone is leaping to conclusions. Maybe it’s true, maybe not; we need to know. Consider: in the late twentieth century this country had what the medsammys called an ‘epidemic of overweight’ in the population. In spite of extraordinary interest in careful eating and fanatic exercise regimes. Remember? And consider: it was in the late twentieth century that a constant supply of music was available even for very poor people.”

  “Because for the first time,” Willow said, “the machines for that purpose were available for almost no money … so that everybody could afford them.”

  “That may be only coincidence,” Delina noted. “Maybe the two things are unrelated. But we have to check, because that music was, ninety-nine percent of it, not chant.”

  Glenellen’s voice was filled with frank awe. “Do you mean,” she demanded, “that all those people who spent half their lives dieting were canceling the diets’ effects by listening to music? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “That was the time of Muzak!” Brandwynne pointed out. “Why didn’t everyone working where that dreadful canned stuff played incessantly gain weight, too?”

  “I think you have to participate,” said Delina carefully.

  “Participate? What does that mean, Delina? Please, Delina, look up—you could crochet blindfolded, you don’t need to watch your hook, and you know it! What does it mean, you have to participate?”

  “You can’t just hear the sound. You have to listen; really listen. Or make the sound yourself the way the choirs in monasteries do. It can’t just go on around you; you have to pay attention to it.”

  And then she added hastily, “I think! You understand … this is why I say, more testing. We need to know: what kind of sound must it be? How often? For how long? What is the formula for converting units of sound into calories … is it the same for everybody, for example? Is it a straight measure—so many minutes of the right music equals so many calories—or does it vary according to circumstances?”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t want to make another speech. Please … no.”

  “What else, Delina?”

  “For example, what if the diet is mixed: part music, part mouthfood? Will that work? Can it be done? And what about such things, such critically important things, as vitamins and minerals? Can you get them from sound or must they come from another source? We know it’s all right for thirty days, because Willow and I checked my blood levels at the beginning and at the end, but does that hold up long term? We don’t know these things—we have to find out.”

  She dropped her needlework and put both hands to her face. “You perceive!” she said, looking around the circle from one woman to another, feeling that if she could not convince them she would die of frustration, furious with Nazareth for doing nothing to make it easier, “I need help from you! I don’t know the things we have to know, and I can’t find out by myself! Please—I really do believe we must get started on this. Please, dearloves.” She let her hands fall and looked at them, baffled. What else could she say? What else was there to say? “Please,” she said again, pleading with them, and so tired, “it’s not trivial.”

  “Well, of course it’s not trivial!” said Willow crossly. “They know that, Delina! The fussing isn’t because they think it’s trivial.”

  Delina bit her lip, not caring that she’d already bitten it raw, and took a deep breath. I have a good mind, she thought. I am articulate; I think before I speak, and I speak the truth. Why am I so bad at making myself understood? It was an old question, and one she had no answer for; she suspected that if she’d had to rely on English rather than Láadan she would have been a woman with one of those labels attached. Borderline personality disorder. Hysteria. She put it out of her mind. She had to finish this. She had to do it properly and completely; she had to get it over with. She had begun seeing double, and she could feel the muscle spasms building in her face and neck; if this went on much longer the others would see them, too. She wasn’t willing to let that happen.

  “Some of the questions,” she told them, “we won’t be able to answer. Not yet. We can’t find out whether audiosynthesis is something only adult women can do, because we have no way to test it with a man or a child. But we can assume the most economical result because it makes no sense not to; we can assume that every human being past needing breast milk has the ability, and proceed on that assumption until there’s evidence to the contrary. It will be a long time before we can know the specifics fo
r certain … like how much music equals how many calories, that kind of thing. But we can do the basic testing right now. We can begin, and establish a foundation to go on from. We can each take one of the variables, you perceive, and test systematically for that single item.”

  The women murmured their agreement all round the circle of chairs. The procedure was the same one they used in the investigation of languages; they understood what she was proposing and knew how to proceed.

  “And there’s one more question,” Delina added, stammering, the words tumbling over one another in her haste to get it all said and escape from the room. “That is … there will be lots more … but there is this crucial one: After we do the testing, after we have the information, who do we tell?”

  Who do we tell?

  Willow reached for Delina’s hand and held it tightly; she had seen the tightening muscles, and seen her sister go white. But she spoke to the others. “I haven’t bothered her about it,” she said. “I saw no reason to.”

  “Haven’t bothered me about it? About what?” Delina was bewildered, and she stared at Willow in dismay. “What are you talking about?”

  “Delina, sweet child,” said Sarajane gently (and from her vantage point no doubt a woman in her thirties could still be called a child), “that’s a question you needn’t ask. You didn’t really think, surely—”

  Willow interrupted her; it was a measure of her distress that she could be that rude. “I’m sorry, Sarajane,” she said first; but she interrupted all the same. “She really did. She really did think that we could do the pilot testing, combine our results, write it up on a chiplet, and send it off to … oh, say, the United States Department of Agriculture.”

  “Wait!” Delina objected. “Wait a minute!” She was outraged. Why did they insist on talking about her as if she weren’t there at all? They were forever doing that. “I hadn’t decided it just like that, Willow,” she said. “I wasn’t sure. I suspect that we’d best tell one of the senior men, and have him take the information to the government, to save time. If we do it ourselves, they’ll only call in the men to explain it anyway. The question is, which one of the men? Which one is the most likely to—”

  She stopped, sensing something in the quiet room where the only sound was the hissing of sleet on glass and tiles, and she saw that they were all looking at her with an expression she knew too well. That expression that said: You poor silly baby with your poor silly baby brain; fortunately for you, we grownups love you. She had been facing that expression as long as she could remember.

  It had been there when she’d had to explain what she was doing with Ouija boards and Tarot decks and runestones; it had been there when she’d pleaded for them to cover for her while she went to the PICOTA for help. It had always been there, whenever she spoke her mind, so that sometimes she thought she should just keep silent … except that if she did, how could she be sure things would get done? It gave her a sick feeling, thinking how it would have been, a number of times, if she hadn’t spoken up and faced that look.

  When she was a child, her father and her uncles had given her the solemn charge of making certain that Willow understood the basic concepts of linguistics. For a while she’d been fooled, because at first they’d taken the trouble to deceive her; but then they’d stopped bothering and she’d realized from their bodyparl that the task was a fake. Twice each month she’d been called on to report on Willow’s progress; twice each month, she’d done it dutifully. And that poorsillybaby look had always been on their faces as they let her go through the routine. And now here it was again.

  “What is it?” she asked fiercely, sorrowfully, wishing she could get things right once in a while, wishing she could go talk to Nazareth about it, wishing she felt like someone who belonged in this world. “What am I doing wrong?”

  They looked at Willow, and Willow looked stonily back, furious with them. She saw no reason for that expression. Many times what Delina said was what everyone was thinking, it was just that only Delina had the courage to admit it. And many times, even when what Delina said struck all of them as absurd, she turned out to be right. Why didn’t they learn? It was worse than the standard ridicule from the men, which could be ignored. Because it came from other women, it hurt Delina badly; knowing they loved her only made it hurt worse. Willow had no intention of helping them. She watched while they tried to figure out who should say it, and she welcomed their discomfort; every one of them was dear to her, but she saw no excuse for the way they treated Delina.

  She had said that once to one of the oldest women at Chornyak Barren House, a woman gone now nearly ten years, and the answer had come straight back in the frail thin voice: “Willow Joanna, they treat your sister exactly as they have always treated Nazareth.” And she had realized, amazed, that it was true, and that if it continued to be true, and if she lived to a sufficiently old age, the day would come when Delina would finally be treated with a kind of terrified respect. Exactly as they had treated Nazareth.

  Except that unlike Nazareth, Delina was barren, and that meant she had not had to face a marriage to a man she neither loved nor respected, chosen for her by some other man, with all the problems that were guaranteed to follow. Nazareth had not been that lucky. And Willow was glad of it, because if Nazareth hadn’t had children, Willow and Delina would not have existed.

  Brandwynne did the honors, eventually. “Delina,” she said, “let’s go on supposing that you’re right, and that we can determine the answers to many of your questions. Well enough to serve, as you say, as a foundation to build further investigations on. Dearlove, when we have that information, we will have to hide it. You must understand; we can’t tell anyone.”

  Delina was shocked; she did not mince words. “What wickedness!” she said. “What evil!”

  “Come now, Delina!”

  “To know that adult human beings can thrive without any nourishment but music, and not to tell? That’s not even decent! Explain yourself!”

  “Delina Meloren …” Brandwynne was faltering now, and she looked at Willow pleadingly; but Willow ignored her, and she had to go on, like it or not.

  “Delina, if you are right—and if we tell—the men will find a way to stop it.”

  Willow was delighted. It sounded even stupider said aloud than it had sounded inside her head. Never mind that it was entirely true. Like every truth that can be handily labeled “a conspiracy theory,” it sounded stupid all the same. So stupid that Delina stared at Brandwynne absolutely speechless.

  “Delina,” said Willow, willing to help now that Brandwynne had had a chance to feel what it was like to be embarrassed by a truth, “they would, you know. The men … the government … the scientists. My dear, they would find a way to regulate it. To keep it for just a privileged few. To make it cost money. To tax it. It’s obscene, and they would have a hundred elaborate rationalizations about how what they were doing wasn’t really what it appeared to be at all, but they would stop it.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It’s information, nothing more,” Delina objected. “It’s not like a … a strike, or a revolt. There’s no way they could stop it.”

  Willow let go her sister’s hand then with a last affectionate pat, and picked up her needlework. “Delina,” she said, keeping her eyes on her knitting, “think.”

  “I am thinking. I have been thinking! I have thought till my brain aches in my head! And you cannot tell me that anyone is going to stand over people with guns and force them to eat food!”

  “Well, you haven’t thought some of the things you should have been thinking,” Willow told her. “Nobody is suggesting that people would be forced to eat at the point of a gun; when did our men ever have to resort to anything as crude as that to accomplish their goals?”

  Delina said nothing, and Willow went on. “Think, for example, what happened with medical care. It wasn’t because people couldn’t learn to do it themselves that men made it a crime to practice medicine �
��without a license,’ and set the cost of the license so high that most people couldn’t even dream about getting one. And made it impossible to order medicines without a medsammy’s permission. And sent women to prison for tending other women in childbed. And set up a system with the greed so tightly locked into it that it was like fouled pond water in August … hopelessly polluted.”

  Tears were pouring down Delina’s face now. Partly because she was humiliated to have been naive again, to have failed again to see what was so obvious. Partly because she was humiliated to belong to a species capable of such meanness. Partly because she was just so worn out, and because she hurt.

  I cannot bear it, she thought. I cannot, cannot bear it. But of course she knew that she could, and that she would. She knew her mind and her spirit; they would fail her, as they had failed her all her life. Other people, facing trouble, could count on succumbing gracefully to nervous collapses and convenient amnesia; not Delina. Her mind and spirit would not break and release her into some peaceful insane serenity. She would go right on knowing, right on remembering, and right on being responsible for her share of the load.

  “All right!” she wailed, beating with one fist on her thigh. “All right, Willow, and all the rest of you, you can stop smirking at me now! Of course that’s how it is; you’re right. I am stupid not to have perceived it from the very beginning! I’ll grant you all of that and whatever else you want to add! But tell me, then: whatever in all the world are we going to do?”

  She stared at them in the silence, waiting; the wind had fallen back to gather itself for a fiercer rush, and the silence was a new sound.