Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “My dear Sister Kathra,” said Mother Drussa, and she reached over and touched the younger nun on her knee, apparently oblivious to the offended jerking away that resulted, “your Order, like any other, is entirely at liberty to set up music schools of your own. At any time. I don’t understand the problem.”

  “Forgive me, Mother Drussa—you do understand! You know very well that no one will send their children to music schools unless the MGT has been trained by a StarTangle teacher!”

  “Then you Carmelites must try, don’t you think, to develop a system of your own and build for it a reputation that is equal to ours?”

  “But why?” Sister Kathra was genuinely annoyed, and having trouble hiding it. “The system you have … and have had for so many, many years … is superb. It accomplishes wonders, just as it is. Why should anyone need to devise a new music grammar curriculum from scratch?”

  “It might be very valuable,” observed Septembra thoughtfully. “Perhaps the women of the Lines have overlooked some major component … neglected some crucial element. Variety is healthy, after all. Your Order might add new breadth to the subject, Sister Kathra.”

  Sister Kathra closed her eyes for a moment before she spoke again, and said a swift prayer for patience and for tact. She wasn’t getting anywhere, but then she hadn’t really expected to; many had tried before her, over the years, with no better results.

  “I do not understand,” she said bitterly, “why those women must be given all the music teacher posts. It’s not fair … there are so few careers for women, and so much teaching is terribly dreary stuff. Music is such fun. They’re selfish, those women, keeping it all for themselves; they shouldn’t be encouraged. We Carmelites could provide you with excellent MGTs, if you’d only give us an opportunity.” And she said again, “It’s not fair.”

  Mother Drussa sighed, and leaned her head toward Sister Kathra over steepled hands. “You know, my dear,” she said, “you have a point. But the poor women of the Lines … if we took the music instruction away from them, what would they do? They have no training for anything else. Their men won’t allow them to learn nursing, or any other sort of teaching except music grammar. They aren’t permitted any social life. I’m sure you will agree with me that it would be dreadfully unkind to take away their only chance to get out of those underground buildings and see the outside world.”

  “We will petition your Motherhouse,” Sister Kathra said grimly.

  “Again?”

  “Again. This year, and every year, until a more fair arrangement is negotiated.”

  “Well,” said Mother Drussa, beaming at her, “we wish you the very best of luck in your efforts. As always.” And she added, “We are more than willing to cooperate.”

  When Sister Kathra spoke again, her voice was strained. “I had forgotten,” she said, her voice was rigid now as her back and shoulders, “that every nun of your Order is also a woman of the linguist Lines. I do apologize.”

  They assured her that it was perfectly all right, that they had taken no offense, that it was a mistake made every day, since no other religious Order had a family origin in the way that Our Lady of the StarTangle had. They were sure, they told her, that it would not always be that way, that the time would come when any girlchild with a vocation would be welcome.

  And they insisted on getting her a footstool to put her feet up on, embroidered with blackberries and wild roses and Queen Anne’s lace, and on her joining them over a pot of steaming tea and a plate of spicebread fresh from the oven.

  Outside, the music of the children went on, abundant and splendid as the morning light.

  In the orbiting offices of the US Department of Agriculture’s Planetary Food Supply Division the statistics were feeding steadily into the databanks. This was as it should be; it went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But this morning an odd pattern was beginning to show up on the monitors. The comclerk who answered the alarm called her supervisor … the one with the funny name … to come check it out.

  “Look at that, Miss Walks Tall!” she said. “What do you suppose it means?”

  Lorena Walks Tall watched for a minute, and clucked her tongue. “It means,” she said flatly, “that they’ve been sending up pasta again.”

  “But, ma’am …” The comclerk looked respectful, as she was paid to do, but she took the liberty of saying that personally, she could see no connection between pasta and the strange numbers on the monitor. Numbers that appeared to show a sudden unexplained increase in the planet’s food supply.

  “That’s because there are a lot of things you don’t pay attention to, Miss Barrett!” snapped the supervisor. “You must pay attention! Every time they serve us that GI pasta it sheds cheap flour dust, and every time they do that it gets in the circulating system—and every time that happens we get blips like this on the monitors! It’s happened three times in the past six months. Pay attention!”

  “Oh,” said Miss Barrett, through the anesthetic fog that she determinedly kept set up between herself and the misery that went with full awareness. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Laura Walks Tall. “How could you know? You’re not qualified to know such things, Miss Barrett; you are trained only to do data input.”

  And you are trained only to be a flaming bitch! thought the comclerk. You make no sense; first you tell me pay attention, then you tell me I’m not supposed to know anything! No wonder they can’t keep anybody in this job for more than a couple of years! Aloud, she said only, “It shows too much food, Miss Walks Tall. What should I do?”

  “Do nothing at all, Miss Barrett. Leave it to me; I’ve dealt with it before. Just put it out of your mind.”

  Jeanne Barrett sat patiently, waiting, while the supervisor went back into her desk. And sure enough … the figures on the screens flickered once as the adjustments were made, and returned to normal.

  Miss Barrett nodded, satisfied, and went back to inputting data. She appreciated it very much that she could count on her supervisor to take care of things like this, so that she didn’t have to try. She hated computers, and everything to do with computers. She hated the Department of Agriculture; she hated being in orbit. Next month, when she got married, just as soon as she finished training her replacement, she would say goodbye to all this with heartfelt joy. And it was her firm intention never to go near anything more complicated than her own comset and palmer again as long as she lived. She understood why it was always women who did this kind of work … it was so boring, no man would put up with it. But she didn’t approve.

  “A woman’s place is in the home,” she told the roomful of monitors. She wondered where Lorena Walks Tall lived; she wondered how anybody could bear to live with such a person. “In the home,” she said again, forcefully. And none of them contradicted her.

  What is called “resonance medicine” by the women of the Lines is, of course, not medicine at all. When it works, it works only as a placebo, like “faith healing.” But you need to be familiar with it in a rough way, because many of your patients will have gone to school to the music grammar teachers, and will have a sort of predisposition to believe anything a woman of the Lines tells them. Those women are trained in science and in rhetoric; they know how to wrap their nonsense in a scientific wrapper. They talk of “entrainment”—and it’s true, the brain waves of a truly attentive listener do match themselves to the brain waves of a compelling speaker. That is: entrainment does in fact exist. Resonance exists; entrainment is one of its primary manifestations. When the women use those terms, they have science behind them. But their claim that the resonance healer can, by entrainment, cause the patient’s brain to stop issuing destructive messages to the cells and replace them with the healthy messages that the healer’s brain is issuing … now that, of course, is total nonsense. Fairy tales. Superstitious gibberish. And you can prove it to your patients easily. Just show them what passes for a medical text among the so-called resonance healers! No
t one proper text exists, my friends—it’s all poems and cute little stories. One quick look will disabuse any educated patient, I promise you.

  (J. T. R. Phillip, MD, in “Current Frauds and Quackeries

  in American Medicine,” a paper delivered

  at the annual meeting of the Virginia Medical Society)

  Sister Naomi was a tall and bulky woman who ought to have cut her hair short; it took fourteen pins to fasten the heavy dark brown braids into a tidy crown around her head every morning so that she would take up no more than her allotted chunk of room aboard the sky chapel. She was well aware that the braids annoyed people; that was what made them worth her trouble and her time.

  Skychapel Six had been giving her trouble of considerably greater significance this past week, and she was seriously considering cutting a few stops off her route and taking it back to Earth for repairs and refurbishing. Her crew was in disagreement about that, and they had had a more than lively discussion on the subject, spoiling an otherwise pleasant breakfast of basic Bach.

  Sister Lauren had first called Naomi a coward to her face, and then spent ten minutes chastising herself for what she’d said. Naomi had declared that she would recover from the insult, and had gathered Lauren close and rubbed her back to demonstrate that there were no hard feelings. It had been a hard trip, and Lauren was so weary that Naomi was prepared to excuse almost anything she might say.

  Sister Quilla, on the other hand, had made her usual calm and considered contribution. “Skychapels don’t break down,” she had said. “No skychapel ever has. Not one. They don’t have parts enough, and they’re not complicated enough. The problem is not danger but discomfort.” And she had looked carefully past the other two women, pretending to be occupied with fastening back her skycoif, as she added that she didn’t concern herself much about discomfort.

  Sister Quilla had grown up in an inflatable plasticpod on the back streets of a tourist asteroid—named, absurdly, Fruited Plain—that specialized in rowdy parties and big drunken brawls; it had been established to preserve the peace of communities once plagued by such activities. The government of Fruited Plain saved money by shutting down services whenever the tourists were too far gone to care, without regard for what that might mean for its few hundred citizens in residence. This was deliberate policy, intended to keep the population to a few hundred; if it had been given any encouragement to grow, there wouldn’t have been the necessary brawling and partying room. In the way of all governments, it found it necessary to maintain lights and water and toilets and so on in its official buildings and state residences; in the way of all governments, it didn’t give one damn how ordinary people managed.

  Sister Quilla had of necessity learned to get by with very little in the way of creature comforts, and she had breezed through training. It wasn’t unusual for a novice of the Church of Our Lady of the StarTangle to need six months or more before she could break the habit of eating food; there had been novices who needed as long as a year. And there were many who failed, once they left the privacy of the cloister and had no choice but to eat mouthfood from time to time in public situations. Not Sister Quilla. “They thought it might be harder for me,” she had told Naomi. “Sometimes it’s like that, they said—people who’ve grown up on very short rations are truly obsessed with mouthfood. But my father had taught me not to care about it; for me, it was easy.”

  Sister Quilla’s father had been born in a linguist Household; he understood what training meant. Like most men of the Lines, he had found the idea of a lifetime spent as an administrator for the women’s string of music schools intolerable. Serving as an instructor of linguistics or foreign languages, either in government or in the private sector, hadn’t appealed to him. Nor had he been willing to spend his life pretending that he was looking after one of the fortunes of the Lines, which had long ceased to need any direction other than that supplied by computers. He had drifted from world to world for years before settling down on Fruited Plain, where he could convince himself that he was only at a lengthy party … that pretty soon he’d be going back home to Earth again to be somebody.

  Like Naomi, Sister Quilla never seemed to get tired, and that was one reason why Sister Lauren was so worn out right now—she insisted on trying to keep up with the other two women. She would outgrow that eventually, and Naomi would be greatly relieved when she did. It was far more trouble rescuing Sister Lauren from the messes she made when she went on working beyond the limits of her strength than it would have been just to do the work for her. It was even more trouble keeping her from realizing what was happening until after she was secure enough to laugh about it. But it was worth it, and it would be done. A skychapel crewmember who lacked the self-confidence to make decisions was dangerous.

  Naomi was rubbing fretfully at her chin, wishing she could make up her mind, when the decision was taken out of her hands. The tiny comset screen on the panel before her lit up with the garish red of a distress call. Before she could ask, Quilla had the data for her; it was coming from a fieldchapel on Savannah, a planet too heavily populated to be on a skychapel route, but close enough to reach easily.

  “You know anything about the place, Quilla?” Naomi asked.

  “Only what the computer says … ‘An unremarkable world of limited resources, settled by one hundred African American families of Earth origin; major industry, eucalyptus. One fieldchapel, staffed by Sister Cecily Mara Jefferson. No known plagues; no known predators not under full control. Government benign.’”

  “Eucalyptus?”

  “That’s what it says. Shall I call up a bigger file?”

  “No. Let’s find out what Sister Cecily wants first.”

  She touched the comspot and waited for it to respond, sighed and touched it again when it ignored her, and then gave it the sharp blow with the heel of her hand that could ordinarily be relied on to get its attention.

  “This is Skychapel Six,” she said in Panglish, leaning over the mechanism to give its pickups every possible advantage. “We’ve seen your call and are near enough to reach you quickly. What’s the problem?”

  Nothing happened, and Naomi whacked the comspot again, hoping her message had been sent. It was no surprise to her, or to anyone, that the ancient machines were beginning to be unreliable; what was surprising was that no one had yet figured out how to repair them. Quilla was right that skychapels had very few parts, but wrong that it necessarily meant they weren’t complicated; if there’d been more parts, human beings might have been able to figure out how they worked. On the other hand, if these small craft with their raindrop shape and bare-minimum fittings had been well understood, Motherchurch would never have been able to buy them from Pentagon surplus so cheaply, so there you were. Silver linings.

  She had once heard a woman … a Noumarque Household woman, if she remembered correctly … say with apparent seriousness, “I think the chapels fly by faith alone.” And nobody in the room had laughed.

  Words were beginning to move across the small screen now, and she watched them closely, in case they were interrupted or began scrambling themselves. They were Láadan words: “Wil sha,” the screen said. Let there be harmony. That meant the call was from Sister Cecily, which was a good sign. And then, “We have a man here who urgently needs surgery, and all our healthies stopped working weeks ago. I’ve ordered replacements, but they haven’t arrived, and Motherhouse says ice is blocking takeoffs. Can you help?”

  “As you know,” Naomi said, in case the woman didn’t know, “we don’t carry healthies. But we can do simple surgery. If it’s not simple, we can probably stabilize him enough to take him to a hospital. Turn on your landing beacon, Sister, and we’ll join you … Give us maybe forty minutes. All right?”

  “Very much so! And here goes the beacon, you perceive.”

  Either Sister Cecily was very economical with words or the comset was glitching again; it mattered only if she had been about ready to warn Naomi of some hazard on the landing pad. Naomi lock
ed on to the beacon and headed the chapel toward Savannah; when she was close enough to tax the comset’s power less, she’d check again. Just in case.

  It was indeed simple surgery: a straightforward and simple cancer of the stomach. Naomi was able to handle it without calling on either Lauren or Quilla, even hampered by the primitive strings of tiny blinking lights that were the only medical instruments Sister Cecily had available for the purpose. And thirty-three minutes after landing, with the man turned over to the care of his obviously devoted family, she was able to join the other three women over their pot of tea and her own pot of coffee. “All done,” she said, “and no problems.” Sister Cecily smiled her thanks. “I know he’s very grateful,” she said. “I’d dealt with the pain, but there was nothing I could do about the fact that he knew what happens with a stomach cancer if you don’t get rid of it. He was terrified.”

  “As anyone rational would have been,” Naomi said.

  “Thank you for seeing to it, Sister,” said Cecily.

  “Why on earth did he let it go so long?” Naomi asked. And why did you let it go so long?

  “He didn’t tell anybody.”

  “With cancer of the stomach?”

  “Well … he didn’t know that’s what it was, of course. He’s a potter, Naomi, and a very good one—a very famous one, and greatly loved. First there was a blue glaze he had in mind, and he couldn’t get the shade exactly right. Then he got a commission for thirteen ceremonial bowls, one for each month of the year, and he wanted to finish that. And then … there was always something, you perceive. And when the time came that it could not be put off any longer, it had become an emergency.”

  Regulations required Naomi to ask Sister Cecily why she hadn’t done the surgery herself; she intended to do it as soon as she could call her aside and ask her in privacy. But the obvious question hung unasked in the air, and she was glad when the woman volunteered the information without having to be asked.