Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  On board the Delta Princess, Charlotte Elizabeth Buckley Cantrell is thoroughly annoyed by the way her children are behaving, and she does not scruple to tell them so. “Law!” she says. “I declare, I am tempted to throw youall over the side and let you drift off forever and ever more!”

  “Now, Mama!” chides her oldest daughter, who makes a commendable effort to look after the rest of the brood. She smiles at Charlotte Elizabeth from behind a small white fan trimmed with pink rosebuds and a blue satin pleated ribbon. “It’s not so bad as all that.”

  “It is as bad as all that!” Charlotte Elizabeth insists. “You’ve been at that maddening game of tag for half an hour now, and I can abide it no longer—I feel like I’m locked up with a pack of monkeys and hyenas! Surely you can find something more genteel to do?”

  There are five of the children, four girls and one boy, as is customary. (If the number of pirates keeps growing, there will have to be more boys, but not for the Cantrells; they have completed their obligations.) They stand there looking at her and at each other, back and forth, shrugging their shoulders and sighing elaborate sighs. Truth be told, they haven’t been enjoying their game either; they are still small, but they’re too old to find pleasure for very long in chasing each other around the furniture and in and out the doors of the saloon. The idea is that if they keep it up long enough it will provoke their mother out of her morning routine and entice her to spend a little time amusing them. One and all, they adore their mother. They love their father, too, when he is around, but that’s not often and never for long; a fortune the size of the Cantrells’ requires great and constant effort not only to create but to maintain.

  Charlotte Elizabeth is fussing at them again, reminding them that they know very well she has household accounts to deal with that morning. Must they pester her? Can they not find something to amuse themselves with? Just because they have no lessons to do today, must they inflict themselves on her like five persistent rashes? She stands up and shakes her finger at them, setting her crinolines swishing against the polished wooden floor, setting the long ringlets of her red hair swinging. “Mercy!” she says. “Where did I go wrong?”

  They push the littlest girl forward, knowing their mother has a hard time resisting her, and Cassie Jennifer Cantrell pulls her thumb out of her mouth long enough to look up at her mother and say, “Mama, tell us a story! Please?”

  “A story! On a Saturday morning, with all I have to do?” Charlotte Elizabeth shakes her head in astonishment, asking, “Whatever are you thinking of, child?” She is pretending, but it is in many ways true; managing a spacegypsy household the size of hers is no small task, even with the dozen new houserobots Jason Cantrell has added to her staff this past year.

  But the child is not impressed. “Please, Mama, darlin’!” she pleads, and she lays her little face, surrounded by coppery curls gathered high at the back of her head just as her mother’s are, against Charlotte Elizabeth’s ample skirts. “Pretty please?”

  “What story did you have in mind, sweetness?” asks Charlotte Elizabeth tenderly; she is weakening. She always does, and the children know that.

  “About the Ozarques!” says Cassie Jennifer. “The Ozarques, Mama, and the little Quindaws! Please, Mama.”

  “The Quindaw, Cassie Jennifer. One Quindaw, two Quindaw, many Quindaw—however many.”

  “Yes, Mama,” the child says, looking up at her. “About the Ozarques, Mama, and the little Quindaw that live on persimmons! Oh, please.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather watch the comset, littlest?” the woman asks, and she looks at the others as well. “Are you sure youall really want to just listen to me talk? You could be watching that show you like so much, the one about the two-headed whateveritis with the silver tentacles … wouldn’t you far rather do that?”

  They shake their heads, grinning at her, and she sighs and surrenders; the sooner she gets it over with, the sooner she can get back to the matter of the disgraceful sums they’ve been spending on groceries since she replaced the cook last month. She has just told the children to sit down around her on the floor by her chair, when Jason Cantrell appears in the saloon door.

  “Madam?” he says, and Charlotte Elizabeth draws herself up, dignity dropping over her like a shawl, to answer him.

  “Good morning, Jason,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to see you; we thought you were still on the Gallant Belle, my dear.”

  Jason grimaces just for an instant, and then his handsome face clears; no one who wasn’t paying close attention would have seen the brief expression that signals his courteous distaste for the Cloverhasty family and their ostentatious Gallant Belle. “I’m not staying,” he tells them, “I’ve got to go make another attempt to get some sense into their heads over there. I just stopped to speak to the pilot, and I thought I’d bid youall good morning before I left.”

  “Good morning, Papa!” all the children say together like a chorus, and he goodmornings them back.

  Young Edward, encumbered by two sisters younger and two older, but still the boy among them, with the privileges that go with being the boy, steps toward his father. “Mama was just about to tell us a story about the Ozarques and the Quindaw, Papa,” he says. “But I would surely rather go along with you instead, sir, if you’ll have me.”

  “Hmmmmmmm.” The man frowns, careful to look as if he is really thinking it over, and then he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “Not this time.” That is what he almost always says, and almost always will say. Until Edward is twelve years old and can begin to learn how a man of the spacegypsies orders his life and looks after his family. The boy nods; he was expecting it, but it’s always worth asking. Just on the off chance.

  “Well, don’t let me keep you,” Jason says fondly, putting the broad-brimmed hat he has been holding in his hand back on his head, touching the sword at his hip to be sure it’s properly placed. “Children!” he says. “Madam.” And he touches the brim of the hat and strides away down the deck, shouting for the dinghy to be brought to the side for him.

  In the saloon, Charlotte Elizabeth settles the children around her and says, cautioning them, “Just one story, mind—I must get those accounts done this morning!” And then she begins.

  “Once upon a time, long long ago, on the Planet Earth, long before it turned to mostly ice and then—praise be!—warmed up again, there was an Ozarque who lived in a limestone cave scrubbed clean as a whistle just outside a town named Meander, Arkansas. Outside the cave there was a thicket of persimmon trees, and under the persimmons there lived so many Quindaw that the Ozarque had stopped trying to count them. But on this day …”

  HOW CAN PEOPLE WATCH SUCH STUFF???!!

  TURN IT OFF!

  There was no real need for the two agents to actually visit Cleo St. Andrews in the prizpod. The entire preliminary interrogation could have been done—and would, ordinarily, have been done—by comset. But the President of the United States had insisted.

  “I want you there,” he had said, rubbing his fingertips together in the nervous habit he had acquired since the day of the murder. “I want you both there with her, physically. So that you can see every smallest twitch of her face and body. Hear every tiniest nuance of her voice. I want you in the best possible situation … I don’t want you to miss anything.”

  They had tried explaining that it had been at least a hundred years since computer observation had been in any way less efficient and effective than in-presence observation, but their words had no effect on the Chief Executive.

  “I don’t believe it,” the President said flatly. “In fact, I know it to be false.”

  “Mr. President—”

  “I know it to be false, I tell you! Why do you think I bother doing any of my work face-to-face? It’s not because I don’t have infinite access to the best technology! It’s because again and again the most important things I learn don’t come from any of the senses that computers—even the very newest and fanciest computers—have. The
y come from a feeling I get, a feeling I get only when I am in the same room with somebody. Computers don’t get feelings, gentlemen. You go to Miss St. Andrews’s apartment, you go into the prizpod, you sit down there with her, and you talk to her. Face-to-face—in the old-fashioned way.”

  Zlerigeau said nothing at all, wearing a face that said he was courteously thinking it over; and when he thought time enough had gone by he nodded his head slowly, as if he had come to a conclusion after careful consideration. “You may be right,” he admitted. “I don’t like to say that, Mr. President, because our justice system would collapse if we had to deal with all prisoners in-presence. But there’s something to what you’re saying.”

  And we’re working on it, he thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. It was better for the President not to know what was going on in the Cetacean Project in El Centro … until they were certain. Certain that computers modified to be more like the brain of a whale than the brain of a human being (in some sense he understood not at all, but clearly it was not anatomical) would, as the President had said, “get feelings.” It would be a while before the prototype could be properly tested; no point raising premature hopes and then being obliged to frustrate them.

  “We’ll go right now,” he had said, standing up, signaling with his eyes to Benny Mondorro that the meeting was over unless the President brought up something else to talk about.

  “And report back. Immediately!”

  “Yes, sir. By sometime this afternoon, if you’ve got a free spot in your schedule.”

  “I’ll find one,” said Tobias Dellwilder, his voice weary and grim and determined. “I’ll cancel something, if necessary. Call it 4:30 p.m.?”

  “We’ll be here.”

  “And one more thing.”

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Keep one more thing in mind. Don’t ever forget it for a second. Remember, gentlemen, that Cleo St. Andrews was born a woman of the linguist Lines.”

  Gently, because it was wisest, Zlerigeau said, “Sir, that doesn’t make any difference.”

  “The hell it doesn’t! Those women are witches … magicians … whatever. They can do uncanny things … they know things.”

  The Vice President, sitting by the window, was nodding solemnly, and he put in his penny-and-a-half’s worth. “That’s what people say,” he announced. His face took on his Grave Matter expression. (It was one-third of his entire facial inventory: Grave Matter, I-LIKE-That!, and Vacant.) “I’ve heard that all my life.”

  Zlerigeau shrugged. “Once upon a time, perhaps,” he said, “it may have had some truth to it. Long, long ago. Today those women are like any other women. I’ve dealt with them all my life, and I assure you, they’re a little better educated than the average person, but otherwise just your typical middle-class woman. Nevertheless, since you’ve specified it, we will keep that fact especially in mind. You can count on us to make sure that—”

  “Jay,” the Vice President interrupted, “why do they teach music theory?”

  “What?”

  “Why do the women of the Lines teach music theory?”

  The President made an irritated noise deep in his throat and turned his head to glare at Aron Strabida; he had abandoned some of the attitude of public deference toward the Vice President that had been his habit in the past. But Zlerigeau answered the question.

  “They’re used to working,” he said. “The Lingoe women have always worked; they apparently aren’t happy staying home. And music theory is closer to linguistic theory than … oh, say, geography would be. It makes perfectly good sense.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said the Vice President, shifting from Grave Matter Face to Vacant Face. He had no interest in either music theory or linguistic theory. He had less than no interest in geography. So many planets … so many asteroids. So many names.

  In the prizpod that had been inflated to fill her livingroom and bathroom, the two agents watched Cleo warily, through narrowed eyes. They had taken the time to review the threedy of her booking interrogation, done first by computer and then by allegedly skilled lawpers. They had watched and listened with amazement as she first sent the computers into nonsense loops—a baby trick, but not one the average criminal suspect had on tap—and then led the hastily substituted human questioners down one garden path after another. So that instead of skilled personnel finding out what the hell she was up to, the threedies had recorded blissed-out interrogators telling the woman long rambling stories about their childhoods. While she murmured at them about how fascinating it all was.

  Jay Zlerigeau had reluctantly decided that the President might have been justified in his warning for this one particular woman of the Lines, and he had set up his plans to take that into account. He was sure this first meeting was going to be just a walkthrough; he had told the interrodoctor to stand by for a call. He opened by stating the facts. Just the facts. Ma’am.

  “We’ve watched your earlier interrogation sessions, Miss St. Andrews,” he said, “and we’re grateful to you for bringing to our attention a gap in our training that we didn’t know existed. I promise you: our next generation of lawpers will know how to deal with the strategy you used. And I promise you also: it won’t work on me, or on my associate.”

  She cocked her head, smiled a charming smile, and told them how admirable that was; even in the shapeless beige prisonshift, even with her hair clipped almost to the scalp, she had elegance and style. Jay had assumed she would waste time insisting that she didn’t know what they were talking about; he was relieved when she gave that option a pass, but he didn’t like the fact that he’d made the wrong prediction. The new curriculum module for dealing with people like her, should they have the misfortune to have to do it again sometime, had been named “Southern Lady Unit.”

  “What we want to know,” he said, settling in, doing his best to ignore the constant high nasal whine of the mechanism that kept them from suffocating inside the thick gray plastic, “is just this one thing. We want to know why you did what you did.” He was careful. Not “why you killed Miss Brown.” Not “why you are pretending that you killed Miss Brown.” Just “why you did what you did.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” she answered—and he realized that she was truly lovely, and set the observation firmly aside—“I did it because I had no choice.”

  “More, please.”

  She looked them right in the eye, something he disliked in any woman not presenting him with an open sexual invitation. Her expression was as serene and open as if she’d been entertaining them in a drawing room instead of a prizpod that should have brought her down a peg or two. And she said something she had not said before to any of her questioners, mechanical or human.

  “When Marthajean Brown seduced Tobias Dellwilder,” she said, “when she put herself in the position of being someone who is able to blackmail the President of the United States of Earth, she betrayed us. She put our cause at risk. Intolerable risk! We are opposed to violence, Mr. Zlerigau, but in a situation like this one there was no choice at all. We had to remove her.”

  Zlerigau sat up straighter in the sitniche, and he sensed his partner tensing beside him. The President would have been feeling smug if he’d been there; they were definitely getting a feeling.

  “‘We’?” It hung in the canned air. The infuriating whine grew louder, and one of the prizpod mechanisms set up a series of thumps and clicks; it sounded like someone old and weak and sick with a disgusting disease, coughing. “We?” he said again. “Us? Our cause?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Yes indeed.”

  “Miss St. Andrews,” said Benny; “who is this ‘we’? This ‘us’?”

  She clucked her tongue … Tsk! … and smiled at him. “Now, you know I won’t tell you that!” she said. “Why do you ask? Why do you ask that, really? On what basis …” She leaned toward them, her long slender fingers slowly stroking the sides of her throat, her eyes growing wide and bright, the pupils of her eyes growing larger. “On what basis does an inv
estigator decide that it’s useful to ask a question when he knows in advance that the prisoner won’t answer it? Do you learn that as a strategy? Has it proved to be something worth doing? I would have thought—”

  Jay nudged Benny sharply with his knee, cutting off the words that were about to be spoken and shame them both, and then cut off her words, too, as sharply as he knew how. “Miss St. Andrews! Don’t try that with us. Drop it. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, almost sadly. Letting her hands fall to her chest, where they lay crossed, with the long delicate fingers (that he could well imagine on the fingerboard of the classical guitar) spread wide. Letting her head drop toward the crossed hands, turned away, her eyes downcast, her lower lip trembling.

  That would be Injured Innocence, Jay thought, and perhaps a little touch of Guiltstricken Maiden Regretting Her Errors. It was all so obvious! How could his own lawpers, trained by him personally, have fallen for her crude tricks, telegraphed every step of the way? It was such an unimpressive and amateurish and pathetic performance that he almost felt sorry for her; she’d be fluttering her eyelashes at them next, and wiping away a tiny tear.

  “I am so sorry,” she went on, looking first at Jay and then at Benny. “I’m sure you both know that I have only one intention, and that it is to cooperate fully with the police. After all, gentlemen—I came into your station of my own free will. I confessed, without even being asked. Why would a woman do that, with all the terrible consequences it entails, if she didn’t want to cooperate?”

  “That’s easy! She would do it because—”

  Zlerigau stopped short. She had him! She’d done it. In spite of the hour spent studying the threedy, analyzing her techniques, he had opened his fool mouth and been ready to launch into one of the monologues he’d watched the lawpers deliver. He consoled himself with the fact that he’d noticed what was happening immediately, and stopped. The study hadn’t been wasted.