And then as the silence went on and on, she said, puzzled, “Delina? Delina—did you hear me?”
It was as if all the breath had been knocked out of her body, or all the blood drained away; Delina was suddenly so weak that she literally could not stand. She let herself slide down the wall, slowly, cautiously, a boneless thing making do with gristle and the memory of bones, and sat on the floor, bracing herself with both hands, while Sarajane stared at her in amazement.
“Delina Meloren, for the sake of all the suffering saints, what is the matter?” she cried. “Are you sick, child?”
Delina answered her in a voice that was almost a moan: “Oh, Sarajane, she’s done it again!”
“Who? Done what?” Sarajane smacked the bed with her hand and sat bolt upright, losing her sheet in the process. “You will explain yourself this minute, Delina Chornyak!”
“I’m sorry.”
“And you should be sorry!” Sarajane grabbed the sheet and wound it round her more tightly, tucking in the last corner and edge so that it would stay put. “I will be sick, if you go on like that!”
Delina drew a long deep breath and swallowed hard. “I should have known,” she said wonderingly. “It shouldn’t have been possible. But, Sarajane, my greatgrandmother has suckered me again!” She saw the exasperation on the other woman’s face, saw her start to speak, and raised a hand to stop her. “No,” she said. “Please. Wait, please—I am going to make this clear. Just give me a minute to catch my breath.”
“One minute,” said Sarajane grimly. “One. Not a second more!”
“Consider, Sarajane, what Nazareth always told us. That to make a plan succeed you must hide it, inside a plan that is itself hidden inside a plan, and the more layers, the better. That the way to bring about change is not to lift people over the fence but to take the fence down and let them notice that there’s no longer anything stopping them from going forward. That—”
“Delina,” Sarajane said, her voice now genuinely angry, “you cannot imagine how little interest I have in a catalog of Nazareth Chornyak’s pithy sayings!”
Delina paused, and raised her eyebrows. “Are you saying that I must stop going on and on and on about it, and get to the point?”
“You know I am saying nothing of the kind,” Sarajane answered her, gently. “Of course not. I am speaking the simple truth, child. Nazareth’s … admonishments … cannot be the reason you turned white and very nearly passed out on me a minute ago. Forgive me for sounding harsh; it’s because I’m concerned. And,” she added, “because I’m too addled to know I’m not hungry.”
Delina got up, moving as if it hurt her, trembling. She went and sat down beside Sarajane on the bed and said, “Would you hold me just for a minute? Would you? Please?”
Sarajane gathered her close without a word, and sat stroking her hair and murmuring soft comforting nonsense, until Delina sighed and said, “Thank you. I think I’m put back together now.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. You can let me go; I’m prepared to talk sense.”
“Good! I’m prepared to listen.” Sarajane sat up straight, settled her pillows behind her at the head of the bed, folded her hands, and gave Delina her full attention.
“I was just so angry, you perceive,” Delina began. “Every single time, all my life long, I’ve thought: After this time, Nazareth will never be able to trick me again. You know? She never lied; it’s not that. But the truth she tells isn’t the real truth! There’s always another truth behind it, or tangled in it, one that’s more important. I always think, Next time, I’ll spot that truth first.”
“Delina, dear child … Nazareth is dead,” said Sarajane softly. “You’ve got the wrong tense.”
“For sure. And all the more humiliating, therefore. Bad enough that I never got the hang of it while she was alive … this is worse!”
Sarajane made one of the sounds that means, “I am listening,” and nodded encouragingly, trying for patience.
“When Nazareth told me—or, if you prefer, when I had the hallucination that she was telling me—that the key to ending violence was to end hunger, I didn’t understand. I told you all, when I was talking about it at the meeting—it seemed to me that there were many other things we could have done that would have been more obvious and speedy remedies. I understood how wonderful it would be if people no longer had to face hunger. I understood that it would perhaps mean more leisure, perhaps less greed. But human beings have fought bloody wars over many things of far less importance than food! I didn’t see how ending hunger was the answer to my question. I just took it on faith, Sarajane; I didn’t argue, and I didn’t demand an explanation. Greatgrandmother has … had … that skill—of convincing people that she spoke the truth.”
“Yes. She did. And very useful it was, too, over the years.”
“Sarajane, it wasn’t until you asked that question—What will people be like, after this?—that I suddenly saw it. And I was so angry to have been fooled again. It was like something had hit in the pit of my stomach, with no warning! It … it just knocked me over!”
“I saw that. But I don’t follow you yet, child.”
“I don’t know how to say it. I don’t have the right words.”
“Try, please, Delina. I’ve been an interpreter for eight decades and more … I will follow you.”
“Well …” Delina reached over and took Sarajane’s hands. “The problem, the terrible problem that human beings have always faced, is that it seemed as if violence were somehow part of the definition of being human. Getting rid of it … it’s like getting rid of lungs, somehow.”
“Go on.”
“So … remember how, after we women began speaking Láadan, and after our little girls began growing up speaking it, how we changed? It wasn’t that we were the same women with a different language added on, Sarajane: we were different. So different that the men could no longer bear to have us with them for more than half an hour at a time … so different that they built the Womanhouses for us, to keep us separate. Remember?”
Sarajane smiled at her. “There are concepts that cannot be expressed in a language because it would self-destruct; there are languages that cannot be used in a culture … because it would self-destruct.”
“Now who’s reciting the pithy sayings of my greatgrandmother?”
Sarajane laughed. “I am. It’s so handy, you perceive … you have to wonder, did she stay up all night polishing them? But go on, please; I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”
“The point,” said Delina, “is that the creatures we are … and perhaps most especially the male creatures … seem unable to set violence aside. But human beings who have never eaten mouthfood … who have never had to say to themselves, ‘This substance in my mouth was once a living creature like me, until it was caught and killed and cooked for me to eat’ … Sarajane, they won’t just be the same creatures eating a different diet.”
Sarajane stared at her, eyes wide, understanding dawning on her face.
“Exactly!” Delina was jubilant, running over with delight, her annoyance completely forgotten. “Exactly! When the fish crawled up onto the land, dearlove, think what they gave up … what they left behind. How dear the sea must have been to them. How bizarre the idea of air, instead. But they stayed, Sarajane. Little by little, they learned. And then they were no longer fish! They were something else that could not have been foreseen. Something new, Sarajane. Not modified fish, but something quite new.”
“You are saying … evolution.”
“Yes! Evolution. Exactly. It wouldn’t have had to be audiosynthesis, Sarajane—any change of sufficient scope would have done it. Nazareth might have suggested any number of things.”
“For instance?”
“She might have said, ‘Delina Meloren, find a way to make all human beings three-legged.’ Right? That would have been a change of the right kind, of the right scope. But this one was something we could manage!”
“H
ow did she ever think of it?” Sarajane marveled, and then caught herself hastily. “Job’s beard,” she said, “I’ll be the one who’s being suckered here, if I’m not careful! I mean: how did you ever bring that idea up out of your innermost mind, Delina Meloren, and put just that idea into your hallucination? How?”
Delina looked away from her and spoke carefully to the wall. “Don’t you think it’s odd, Sarajane, given that it was my own idea, that I didn’t understand what I was telling myself?”
Delina’s first trip to the PICOTA domes had been delayed by her need for a travel pass validated by a Chornyak male. Although everything in the known universe had already shifted toward wild disorder, the system had still been running, the way the male praying mantis keeps right on thrusting at the female even though she has already bitten off his head. On that day Delina had still been inconvenienced by the fact that she might at any time be stopped by the Women’s Security Unit and ordered to show her pass, and that if she didn’t have one she could be held in a prizpod at the police station until an irritated Chornyak male came to pay her fine and take her home.
This time, the system had come to realize that its head had been bitten off. This time, the delay was caused only by the heaviness of her heart. Things were different; she just walked out the door of Chornyak Womanhouse and went.
Delina appreciated the new freedom as much as she had always resented having to carry the pass, but it was hard to be natural about it; she felt naked. She caught the first Green-16 robobus, pleased to find that, unlike the weather and many other things, the buses were still working; if they hadn’t been, she’d been prepared to walk the whole way. And when the two sorters at the domes asked her for her pass she said simply, “I don’t have one,” and waited. They looked at her and at each other, shrugged, and took her once again to Will Bluecrane.
Who looked at her fiercely and said, “Do not tell me you are back again, Delina Chornyak!”
“I am back again, Grandfather,” she said.
“Do not call me Grandfather.”
“Yes, Chief Bluecrane.”
Will sent the sorters away and motioned to Delina to sit down, remarking that she seemed to him to have improved not at all since her last visit, except for being drier.
“I’m sure I haven’t improved,” she agreed. “I rather expect I’ve gotten worse. Everything else has.”
He nodded his head. “It’s going to be worse still, you know.”
“I know.”
“And there is nothing we can do. Unfortunately. We can only hold on and try not to make matters worse.”
Delina said nothing; you do not argue with old people.
“Why have you come back to trouble me again, Delina?” he asked her.
She dropped her eyes, staring at the back of her hands where they lay useless in her lap, wishing she dared take her crocheting out of her pack.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” she told him.
“Mmhmmm. Delina, do you plan on trying to convince me that we should see you through another vision quest? Because if you are, I tell you now: you can sit outside my door and die of hunger and thirst if you wish, you can fry in the sun and melt away entirely in the rain, but we will not give in to you on that one again.”
“Of course not,” said Delina. “Neither would I, in your place.”
“That’s not why you’re here?”
“No, sir. It’s not.”
“Well, then! Are you in trouble? Have you kidnapped someone? Blown something up? Overthrown a government?”
When she didn’t answer, he cleared his throat and said, “Perhaps I should send for my wife and have her come talk to you.”
Delina looked up, then, and smiled at him. “No,” she said, “I can talk to you—I came here to talk to you. I’m just not sure exactly how to start.”
“Try the simplest method,” he said. “The ancient one. Where you begin at the beginning, go on till you’re through—within the boundaries of reason—and then stop. I will listen, whatever it is that’s brought you back to the PICOTA. I am even happy to see you; I won’t deny it, though I have no excuse for it at all.”
Delina stood up, and he started to get up, too, looking puzzled, but she raised her hand to stop him. “No,” she said. “Please don’t get up; I’m all right. I just think I could do this much better if I went over there by the wall and looked at that holoprairie of yours
while I talked.”
“With your back to me.”
“Yes.”
“Coward!”
“Yes.”
She crossed the room and stood in front of the holoprairie with its gently waving grains and flowers stretching away from her into the virtual distance, clasped her hands behind her, swallowed hard, and said, “Chief Bluecrane, I have come here to get a husband.”
After a while, as the silence went on and on, she spoke again, and although her voice trembled, there was determination in it. “It’s not such a bad bargain as all that,” she said. “I have many useful skills. I’m not pretty, but I’m pleasant-looking enough not to hurt anyone’s eyes; if I owned a decent dress I’d look just like any other woman. My back is crooked, but I’m healthy. I know how to carry on an interesting conversation … in a dozen different languages, if that matters to the PICOTA. And my wants are modest. I am a very hard worker, and there’s no work I’m afraid of. A man could do worse.”
“Stay there,” Bluecrane said, behind her. “Stay right where you are.”
He pressed the comstud on the edge of his desk and told the computer that answered to find his wife and send her to his office at once. “Wait, please,” he said to Delina’s back, “until Anne Walks Tall Bluecrane joins us.”
Delina did as she was told, standing quietly in the holoprairie wind, until she heard the door open and the other woman said, “Will? You wanted me for something?” Then she turned to face them as the chief of the PICOTA told his wife, “This Chornyak female, who seems determined to plague us with her eccentricities, tells me that she’s here looking for a husband. And she has followed up that declaration with a list of her alleged qualifications for the position of someone’s—some Native American someone’s—wife.”
Anne looked at Delina, and back again at Will, obviously surprised. “She’s not married, then?” she asked. “At her age?”
“I thought she was married, too,” said Will. “It was one of the things that amazed me when she was here before … that her husband would let her take off like that. People have always called every woman from Chornyak Household ‘Mrs. Chornyak,’ married or not—I took it for granted that she was married.”
“Now you’re doing it!” Delina said in exasperation, before she thought.
“We are? What are we doing?”
“Talking about me as if I weren’t here, or as if I were unconscious,” she answered. And added, “I do wish I were unconscious.”
“We shouldn’t have been doing that,” said Anne. “It’s bad manners and we both know better. I apologize. But we were surprised.”
“That I should want a husband? Or have the gall to ask for one?”
Delina was bluffing, but it seemed to her that she could hardly make things worse; she might just as well pretend she hadn’t done anything outrageous.
“No, child,” said Anne. “It was because we both are aware that no woman of the Lines is allowed to stay single—not once she’s old enough to bear them children.”
Delina looked past them toward the spot where the wall across from her began to curve upward and become the ceiling, and answered, “I’m single because I am barren. You see this spine of mine …” She traced its double curve in the air before her with one hand. “I carry the gene that causes it; I was sterilized at birth. And that’s another advantage I can offer a husband, you perceive. No need to worry about my wanting to bring children into this poor flabbergasted world.”
Anne Bluecrane went over to her, moving fast, and took her hands gently between her own. “De
lina,” she said, “do you mean to say that the linguists sterilize their children … their infants … if they’re not perfect? Am I understanding you correctly?”
As if we were a Government Work project raising babies in test tubes for scientific experiments! she thought wearily; it got tiresome sometimes, dealing with all the myths that same government had so determinedly created. Aloud, she said, “No, not just if they’re not perfect; we’re allowed to be imperfect. Only if they are carrying a gene for something both unpleasant and incurable. Like this curvature of the spine … this scoliosis. In a case like that only. One injection, you perceive, and it puts an end to the prospect of passing the problem along to another generation. I understand that; I have always understood it, and approved. But that is why I have no husband … yet.”
It was so still that she could hear Will Bluecrane breathing. She knew what they were thinking—that if she had been a boychild, the sterilization would still have been done, but the spine would have been repaired. The infamous wicked Lingoes, with their well-known brutal abuse of their women and children. She could not let that pass.
“No,” she said gently, “that’s not how it was, nor how it is. The spinal reconstruction can’t be done until the person is fully grown. When I reached that point I told them I didn’t want it done, and they didn’t force me. They would have done it, if I had not refused.”
Anne Bluecrane caught her breath, and asked with honest bewilderment, “Why on earth?”
Delina remembered how she had felt in those days—mercifully brief days—full of turmoil. She had been fierce. Wild. Running over with rage. Smoldering so inside that it had seemed to her she ought to die of the heat. Like anyone her age, she’d been convinced that she was the eternal center of everyone’s focused attention, that she was awkward and ugly, that she did not and could not ever measure up to the standards coming at her, that the world revolved around a sinister plot to ruin her life, that none of these problems had ever existed for anyone but herself … all the usual things. But she’d had a very severe case of malignant adolescence, and she had been willing to suffer tremendously for the sake of punishing others. She had thought: They don’t like to look at me, twisted like this … well, damn them, they will just have to look at me whether they like it or not, the bigots! And the worse they hate it, the better for their character!
Earthsong Page 9
